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Romashka comments on Why Don't Rationalists Win? - LessWrong
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You know, it's hard for me to simultaneously think of someone as winning and not a rationalist, not to mention always correcting the result by 'my definition'. I could say that the confirmation bias is at fault, but really... Shouldn't we just dissolve the questions?:) I mean, suppose I do know a person who has trouble letting sunk causes go, and has probably firmly forgotten about the Bayes theorem, and uses arguments as soldiers on occasion... But she is far more active than me, she keeps trying out new things, seeking out jobs even beyond her experiences etc. Should I consider her rational? I don't know. Brave, yes. Rather smart, yes. Winning, often. But rational?
Winning a lottery? (Generalize it to include genetic lottery etc.)
Many stories I've seen of lottery winners lost the money quickly through bad investments and/or developed major life issues (divorce, drug addiction).
I think there's an element of rubbernecking there. The general feeling of the mob is that lottery = tax on stupidity. We are smart to not play the lottery. Story of a winner challenges general feeling, mob feels dumb for not buying winning ticket. Unmet need exists for story to make mob happy again.
General form of story is that lottery money is evil money. Lottery winners, far from being better than you, dear reader, are actually worse! They get divorced, they squander the money! Lawsuits!!
No one wants to read about the guy who retires and pays off his credit cards. No story there. But there are a lot of lotteries, so there will be an idiot somewhere you can use to reassure your viewers that they are double smart for not being rich.
The entire world is a tax on stupidity.
Winning = rational, rational = winning. If you define rational as something other than "the intellectual means of winning", there's no point other than a religious fetish for a theorem that's difficult to compute with.
Then how does one understand 'rationalists don't win'? 'Rationalists expect to win and fail, just like, for example, XYZ-ists do, only rationalists have trained themselves to recognize failure and in this way can still salvage more and so don't lose as completely (though we have no actual measure, because XYZ-ists will still think they have won)?:)
No, I'd understand it as more like, "Calling oneself a 'rationalist' or 'aspiring rationalist' isn't correlated with object-level winning".
The point of the "rationalists win" thing was to define rationality as winning. Which, among other things, makes it very unclear why the word "intelligence" is different. Everyone seems to insist it is in fact different when I ask, but nobody can explain why, and the inductive examples they give me collapse under scrutiny. what?
Pretty sure inductive examples of intelligence fail because we really are pointing at different things when we say it.
Some mean "shows a statistically higher base rate for acquiring mental constructs (ideas, knowledge, skills)" when they say it. This usage tends to show up in people who think that model-building and explicit reasoning are the key to winning. They may try to tack this consideration onto their definition of intelligence in some way.
Some try to point at the specific differences in mental architecture they think cause people to use more or fewer mental constructs, like working memory or ability to abstract. This usage tends to show up in people who are trying to effect useful changes in how they or others think. They may notice that there's a lot of variation in which kind of mental constructs are used, and try to single out the combination that is most important to winning.
There's also the social stereotype of who has a preference for "doing" and experiencing vs. who is drawn to "thinking" and planning. People who think "doing" or having a well-integrated System 1 is the key to winning may favor this definition, since it neatly sidesteps away from the stupid argument over definitions the thinkers are having. I like to use it in conversations because it's loose enough to kinda encapsulate the other definitions — which role you think you fit is going to correlate with which you use more, which itself correlates with what your natural abilities lend themselves to. I'm less likely to talk past people that way..
But it's also because of this last interpretation that I point blank refuse to use intelligence as a synonym for rationality. The word 'rational' comes with just as many shades of denying emotion and trusting models over intuition, but they're at least framed as ignoring extraneous factors in the course of doing what you must.
I want to talk about the group (well, cluster of people) that calls itself "rationalists". What should I call it if not that?
CFAR community, or LW community, depending on which kind of person you mean.
In my conversations with LW and CFAR community folks, they seem to consider "rationality" to be strictly equal to "winning" - unless I ask them directly if that's true. I think they really could benefit from clearer and simpler words, rather than naming fucking everything after their favorite words.
Does "rational" have to have meaning? Is that not a way of dissolving the question.