and is not regularly the guiding principle of not hugely successful people?
Why the dichotomy? A principle can be used by different people with different abilities, leading to different levels of success, but still remain fundamentally flawed, leading to suboptimal achievement for both gifted and non-gifted people.
Why the dichotomy?
If a test regularly returns 'you have cancer' when I have cancer, and regularly returns 'you have cancer' when I don't have cancer, it's not a good test.
Similarly, if a principles guides people to be successful, and it guides people to be unsuccessful, it is not a good principle.
For example: it could be said that "eat food at least daily, drink water at least daily, and sleep daily or close to it" is a principle that hugely successful people follow. It is also a principle that not hugely successful people follow. Following t...
I am passionately fond of the idea of creating an “Art of Rationality” sensibility/school as described in the [A Sense That More is Possible](http://lesswrong.com/lw/2c/a_sense_that_more_is_possible/) article.
The obstacle I see as most formidable in such an undertaking is the fact that, no matter how much “rational software” our brains absorb, we cannot escape the fact that we exist within the construct of “irrational hardware”.
My physical body binds me to countless irrational motivations. Just to name a few: 1) Sex. In an overpopulated world, what is the benefit of yearning for sexual contact on a daily basis? How often does the desire for sex influence rational thought? Is “being rational” sexy? If not, it is in direct conflict with my body’s desire and therefore, undesirable (whereas being able to “kick someone’s ass” is definitely sexy in cultural terms) 2) Mortality. Given an expiration date, it becomes fairly easy to justify immediate/individually beneficial behavior above long term/expansively beneficial behavior that I will not be around long enough to enjoy. 3) Food, water, shelter. My body needs a bare minimum in order to survive. If being rational conflicts with my ability to provide my body with its basic needs (because I exist within an irrational construct)… what are the odds that rationality will be tossed out in favor of irrational compliance that assures my basic physical needs will be met?
As far as I can tell, being purely rational is in direct opposition to being human. In essence, our hardware is in conflict with rationality.
The reason there is not a “School of Super Bad Ass Black Belt Rationality” could be as simple as…. It doesn't make people want to mate with you. It’s just not sexy in human terms.
I’m not sure being rational will be possible until we transcend our flesh and blood bodies, at which point creating “human friendly” AI would be rather irrelevant. If AI materializes before we transcend our flesh and blood bodies, it seems more likely that human beings will cause a conflict than the purely rational AI, so shouldn't the focus be toward human transcendence rather than FAI?