I've been studying a lot of finance lately, and it strikes me that it's a field that requires a very high degree of rationality and ability to cut through the noise to get to correct arguments.

What's nice about investing especially, though, is that it has a very similar utility curve for all players. People have slightly different goals in terms of finance and investing, but generally speaking, people are measuring utility in terms of financial return. There's some differences between time preferences and risk tolerance, but generally speaking, we can sort the winning strategies from the losing ones over time. There's a fairly clear and objective standard for what worked and what didn't, which could make it a very helpful field for the aspiring rationalist to study and learn from.

I originally wrote this post, "Convincing Arguments Aren’t Necessarily Correct – They’re Merely Convincing" for my blog, so the tone is more colloquial than you'd normally see on LessWrong, and the audience is slightly different. A friend of mine suggested I post it up here too as it might be interesting to the LW crowd, so here we go -