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Metus comments on Open thread, September 9-15, 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (126)
What can the average person learn from entities that have motivation to behave as or actually behave like rational actors, such as psychopaths or major companies?
Psychopaths quite often end up in prison or dead.
Corporations go bankrupt ALL THE TIME. The survival rate is dreadful.
The motivation for both entities to act like rational actors is exactly like it is for the rest of us: Not strong enough to overpower other issues.
That said: From corporations, Do the Math and Think Big: Pay attention to which of your decisions are going to be iterated millions of times and take the effort to optimize them.
From Psychopaths: People respond to fake emotion with real emotion. If you care about someone but don't necessarily feel what they want you to feel, you can sometimes fake it to make everyone happier.
Sure, but there are more psychopaths in the general population than there are psychopaths in jail. According to that book, 2-4% of the American population are psychopaths, whereas 1% of the American population are in jail; and not everyone in jail is a psychopath.
Your examples suggest that you think rational actors will not have any other-regarding terms in their utility function. That isn't the notion of rationality generally employed on this site, I think. If your conception of rationality requires me to rejigger my utility function so that I care only about my own outcomes, then I'm not all that interested in becoming rational-sub-Metus.