Obvious example: selling cigarettes.

The cigarette is the deadliest artefact in the history of human civilisation. [...] Cigarettes cause about one death per million smoked³⁵ with a latency of about 25 years, which is why the 6 trillion smoked in 1990 will cause about 6 million deaths in 2015. [...] One-third or one-quarter of those deaths will be from lung cancer; about one every 15 or 20 s. [...] Cigarette companies make about a penny in profit for every cigarette sold, or about US$10 000 for every million cigarettes purchased. Since there is one death for every million cigarettes sold (or smoked), a tobacco manufacturer will make about US$10 000 for every death caused by their products.

Presumably there are even worse legal ways to make a profit, but this sets a nicely unambiguous lower bound, I think.

ETA: Note that I work for App Academy. So take all I say with a grain of salt. I'd love it if one of my classmates would confirm this for me.

Further edit: I retract the claim that this is strong evidence of rationalists winning. So it doesn't count as an example of this.

I just finished App Academy. App Academy is a 9 week intensive course in web development. Almost everyone who goes through the program gets a job, with an average salary above $90k. You only pay if you get a job. As such, it seems to be a fantastic opportunity with very little risk, apart from the nine weeks of your life. (EDIT: They let you live at the office on an air mattress if you want, so living expenses aren't much of an issue.)

There are a bunch of bad reasons to not do the program. To start with, there's the sunk cost fallacy: many people here have philosophy degrees or whatever, and won't get any advantage from that. More importantly, it's a pretty unusual life move at this point to move to San Francisco and learn programming from a non-university institution.

LWers are massively overrepresented at AA. There were 4/40 at my session, and two of those had higher karma than me. I know other LWers from other sessions of AA.

This seems like a decent example of rationalists winning.

EDIT:

My particular point is that for a lot of people, this seems like a really good idea: if there's a 50% chance of it being a scam, and you're making $50k doing whatever else you were doing with your life, then if job search takes 3 months, you're almost better off in expectation over the course of one year.

And most of the people I know who disparaged this kind of course didn't do so because they disagreed with my calculation, but because it "didn't offer real accreditation" or whatever. So I feel that this was a good gamble, which seemed weird, which rationalists were more likely to take.

"Too much Patriarchy bullshit in the data to tell".

There are very strong indicators that discrimination is going to hurt your career prospects in the sciences quite badly if you happen to be in possession of two X chromosomes. Number of widely cited papers needed in order to be awarded tenure, pay at a given level of qualifications, ect.. And even if you have not read those studies, the fact that this happens is blatantly obvious to anyone that is not both male and fairly oblivious.

This is quite sufficient to explain the disparity all on its own. Any underlying "biology" is utterly swamped in significance by this.

Also, the balance of probability is that any given woman you encounter in the sciences is at least one out of smarter, more stubborn or just flat out much harder working than her stature in the field would indicate. Often all 3. Getting anywhere against the weight of discrimination and discouragement requires you to be an outlier to start with.

Is room and board included? Alternatively, how expensive is it to house yourself while attending one of these events?

Now would be a good time to re-read Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism in its entirety.

I did. It was about how community should allow moderator to make decisions the moderator considers necessary to protect the community.

It wasn't about how one faction should use external criticism to create a new rule to exile an opposing faction. That would be more similar to Evaporative Cooling of Group Beliefs.

A few years back, I was on a transhumanist mailing list where a small group espousing "social democratic transhumanism" vitriolically insulted every libertarian on the list. Most libertarians left the mailing list, most of the others gave up on posting. As a result, the remaining group shifted substantially to the left. Was this deliberate? Probably not, because I don't think the perpetrators knew that much psychology. (For that matter, I can't recall seeing the evaporative cooling analogy elsewhere, though that doesn't mean it hasn't been noted before.) At most, they might have thought to make themselves "bigger fish in a smaller pond".

This is one reason why it's important to be prejudiced in favor of tolerating dissent. Wait until substantially after it seems to you justified in ejecting a member from the group, before actually ejecting. If you get rid of the old outliers, the group position will shift, and someone else will become the oddball. If you eject them too, you're well on the way to becoming a Bose-Einstein condensate and, er, exploding.

It's possible Taubes is right about saturated fat, but he's sufficiently unreliable on other issues that I wouldn't trust a word he says about saturated fat.

And yes, this matters, because prior to this series Taubes was who everyone was citing for the "look how horribly wrong mainstream nutrition science is" claim.

I think Chris is slightly mistating the problem, at least on Lesswrong. It would be sort of shocking if various genetically distinguishable population cohorts all happened to be exactly equal in average intelligence. But that's not what's so off-putting about the reactionaries. The problem comes with their reliance on extremely lazy statistical discrimination in individual cases. They have made quite clear that if they encounter a woman or an individual of African descent who has tested very high on an IQ test, they would still discriminate against that individual for jobs or educational slots, arguing that racial/gender averages swamp the evidence from the test, which might just regress to the mean.

To me, the individual IQ test is much stronger evidence and should swamp the cohort averages.

Most of the problems described in this post seem to be things that are not really practical to do anything about, but this caught my eye:

tl;dr: If you just typed in all honesty “I like eugenics”, even if I enjoy your posts about economics, congratulations, you freak me out and I really, really don’t know why I’m still reading your blog.

Really we need to stop using the word "eugenics." In the real world it really isn't smart to keep insisting on the "official" definition of a word decades after it acquired negative connotations for actually pretty good reasons.

I'm curious what your confidence level about the counterfactual is here. I both would answer that question no, and would honestly expect most other men to genuinely refuse this offer if actually presented with it.

Possibly I'm hitting myself with the typical mind fallacy here (I test as purely-straight when taking analyses of sexual preference, so maybe men who test as mostly-straight would behave differently; I'm also much less materialistic than most people -- I could have chosen more lucrative careers but preferred to do something I enjoy.)

Is there really any experimental evidence for your assertion?

I wonder how much of this idiocy is just because of 'saturated fat' sounding like fat with extra fat in it, and 'polyunsaturated fat' not being called 'poly-unstable reactive fat'.

That you would say this tells me your picture of how mainstream science works is even more distorted than I realized.

Studies have linked saturated fat to cholesterol levels and through cholesterol levels to heart disease. You said in the other thread that your nutritionist recommended you eat less saturated fat as a weight loss thing, which is wrong, because the real issue is cholesterol. But you shouldn't be dismissing worries about saturated fat as "idiocy."

Now, recently there have also been studies finding no link between saturated fat and heart disease. I haven't looked into the issue closely enough to tell what's going on, but it's possible nutrition science is in the process of realizing they made a mistake about saturated fat. Or maybe the experts have reasons I don't know about for discounting those studies, I'm not sure, which is why I've left the issue alone.