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Lumifer comments on Open thread, Mar. 14 - Mar. 20, 2016 - Less Wrong Discussion

3 Post author: MrMind 14 March 2016 08:02AM

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Comment author: Daniel_Burfoot 14 March 2016 10:43:07AM *  8 points [-]

Simple hypothesis relating to Why Don't Rationalists Win:

Everyone has some collection of skills and abilities, including things like charisma, luck, rationality, determination, networking ability, etc. Each person's success is limited by constraints related to these abilities, in the same way that an application's performance is limited by the CPU speed, RAM, disk speed, networking speed, etc of the machine(s) it runs on. But just as for many applications the performance bottleneck isn't CPU speed, for most people the success bottleneck isn't rationality.

Comment author: Lumifer 14 March 2016 03:04:12PM *  0 points [-]

for most people the success bottleneck isn't rationality.

Instrumental rationality is more or less defined as "doing whatever you need to in order to succeed". If success requires e.g. networking, instrumental rationality would tell you to improve your networking ability.

For epistemic rationality I agree, it's not a common bottleneck.

The question whether luck is a skill is an interesting question :-)