Whether rationality is or isn't the best way to get things done depends very much on what those things are. Talk of generic success is either meaningless or a covert importation of cultural baggage.
Linguistic qualms aside, if you're cautioning people against expecting rationality to be an quick road to material wealth and power then I completely agree.
On an individual level, the most powerful ability is to leverage yourself by getting others to work for you, by whatever means cost you least time and effort (for example, defrauding or deluding them, paying them if you've the means, coercing them if you have a gang or an army). An individual's time and physical abilities are extremely limited, no matter how smart or rational a person is, he can only work so long and can only be in one place at a time. Until intelligent agents come along, using people is the only way to significant power, the more people the better.
Plenty of people achieve many of their goals despite being completely nuts.
I haven't yet read the whole discussion, but it seems to me that it is overlooking an important component of goal-reaching ability: not being nice. It applies to at least two major examples of 'winning' discussed here, namely Hitler (wasn't nice to conquered nations, Jews etc.) and Western Europe (to native Americans etc.)
It is obvious that an agent not constrained by ethics can plan shorter / less expensive paths through reality to its desired state than an ethically-constrained agent, and it may well be that the absence of ethical constraints can compensate for agent's irrationality.
We know, as a matter of historical fact, that Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party, despite being generally incompetent, unintelligent, irrational, superstitious and just plain insane, managed to take over a country of tens of millions of people from nothing, in the span of fifteen years.
A good case could be made that "incompetent, unintelligent, irrational, superstitious and just plain insane" applies as well to us modern-day westerners - at least, I can imagine a parallel 2009 where Nazis won World War 2 and marvel at the successes of democratic nations in the early 20th century despite them being "incompetent, unintelligent, irrational, superstitious and jew-ridden". Insanity can be hard to distinguish from up close.
You got facts entirely wrong.
Western Europe did not come to dominate the world thanks to science and rationality, but thanks to disease which wiped out the natives, effective use of organized violence, and successful use of divide-and-rule politics. Expansion happened long before scientific revolution had any success.
Key events in Western domination happened in final decades of the Late Middle Ages (the first few decades of 16th century still count as "Late Middle Ages" as far as I'm concerned) - like establishment of naval domination over Arabs ...
"Western Europe did not come to dominate the world thanks to science and rationality, but thanks to disease which wiped out the natives, effective use of organized violence, and successful use of divide-and-rule politics."
Disease was a major ally in conquering the native Americans, of course, but in Asia it was neutral, and in Africa disease was a major factor on the side of the natives. The Europeans still conquered most of it eventually.
The Europeans were generally adept politicians, but they did not rely primarily on their political skill; they relied primarily on their military power, which by 1900 allowed them to defeat native forces with a casualty ratio of more than 100:1.
"Expansion happened long before scientific revolution had any success."
Exploration did, but during the fifteenth century, except for the Americas (where the Europeans had a disease advantage, as noted above), they were not generally superior to the people they were trying to conquer, and were frequently defeated and killed (eg. Magellan). It was only later on that they established an overwhelming military advantage.
"Nazis were quite sane, command of German armed forces was very clev...
It seems to me that many of the objections here miss the point of the post — at least, it certainly isn't about rational argument not working on non-rationalists. (Though at least the last paragraph here seems correct and germane.) Tom, would this be a fair summary?
From e.g. the Nazis, we see that rationality is not necessary to win (in some important sense) when you have the right narrow skills and/or luck; and since (at least stereotypically) many of these skills are hard to develop or substitute for using rationality, it's not sufficient either. We shou...
This discussion is difficult to jump into (and make any progress with) because the questions are so complex. Is there some way to back up and formalize what we're discussing? What is the main question? I suppose it's whether "success" and "rationality" correlate historically, among humans.
How would we define success? If success means 'achieving goals', then we can notice that we don't mean rationality as 'achieving goals' but as something more focused, like rationality as good reality mapping.
And then I will say that my experience is t...
In term of impact, I'd say Ben Franklin beat Hitler. Rationality + energy vs. charisma + energy. Energy seems like the key unifier, shared by almost all highly successful people. Einstein was an exception to that, but I think he's uncommon. All of the above however, took major risks in life and show a survivorship bias. I think that energy is less critical for more mundane success.
Of course, energy can come in pills but those pills tend to sap one's rationality if it wasn't extremely high to begin with (and one's physical robustness). Erdos comes to...
Hitler seems to have failed in all of his goals except for harming Jews and Slavs, and to have had far from total success in those two goals.
The US still exists, while the Third Reich is long gone.
Franklin seems to have succeeded at being rich, amusing himself, having lots of children who retained a high level of socio-economic status and probably lots of unknown children. Living two or three times the contemporary life expectancy and having what most people would see as an extremely successful family life, scientific career, business life, literary career, non-family Romantic life, and a maximally successful political career seems to me to meet a best guess for the content of "winning" regardless of what his goals may have been.
Nitpick:
the fact that many former top predators are now extinct
Mammoths, predators? My initial intuitive reaction was that that couldn't possibly be right - they're way too massive for that. It's a bit tricky to find definite statements on this on the web, but the relevant WP article does say that "Their teeth were also adapted to their diet of coarse tundra grasses". Also note that their closest surviving relatives are herbivores. I'm 0.9 sure mammoths weren't predators. Do you have evidence for your claim?
one of the key ingredients in the birth of the modern era was the discovery of science, and its counterpart, the discovery of the art of Traditional Rationality. Armed with these, the nations of Western Europe managed to dominate the entire rest of the world,
You'll actually find it pretty hard to find evidence to support this view, unless you interpret "science" so broadly as to make the claim uninteresting.
Science has mostly trailed technology until very recently. Thermodynamics, for example, developed largely from observing and explaining the already invented and fairly highly developed steam engines. Once the theory was developed it helped suggest improvements, but its original development relied on the already existing technology. Many other examples exist, partly I think because technologies are easier to see clear relationships in and explanations for, than the messy, complicated real world.
First, the Nazis were not stupid or incompetent. They didn't just yell at people, they persuaded. They formed a large and efficient media organization to push their program. In retrospect, much of what they advocated now seems obvious nonsense, but that's in retrospect: it was a lot more plausible at the time. The final success of the Nazis also occurred in the context of economic disaster. 25% unemployment tends to discredit orthodox, established doctrines. Did the Nazis screw up? Massively, in the end. But they would not have gotten in the position to ma...
Roughly on the same topic, a few years ago I read Intelligence in War by John Keegan. I was expecting a glorification of that attribute which I believed to be so important; to read story after story of how proper intelligence made the critical difference during military battles.
Much to my surprise, Keegan spends the whole book basically shooting down that theory. Instead, he has example after example where one side clearly had a dominant intelligence advantage (admittedly, here we're talking about "information", not strictly "rationality&q...
Michael Vassar hit upon something which I think is probably more key than rationality: Charisma.
Hitler had goals, and by the means he had at his disposal, he was highly rational in achieving those goals (this does not mean that he was rational in the sense of being sane). I also recall from hearing my Great-Great Uncle talk about meeting Hitler once, that he said the man could talk a person into anything (he also related how devastated he was when he learned of how evil the man was. Of course, just not liking Jews was not considered to be exactly evil in m...
A perfect rationalist can mimic any kind of irrational behavior like Hitler's, for example.
Therefore we can expect, that the SAI may act weird just to utilize our irrationality.
My other comments in this thread seem to have misread Tom's intention, so let me try again. I'll summarize what I think the point is, so if I'm off, it'll be obvious.
The point is that, while rationality has been important and effective on the level of Western civilization, it isn't really a super power when it comes down to individual behaviour. Thus, claims about rationality being all-important are dramatically overstated; there are much more important criteria for success.
My criticism of this, and the reason that I think it's generating debate the way it...
Your argument seems to conclude that:
It is impossible to reason with unreasonable people
Agreed. Now what?
Ostensibly your post is about how to swing the ethos of a large group of people towards behaving differently. I would argue that has never been necessary and still is not.
A good hard look at any large political or social movement reveals a small group of very dedicated and motivated people, and a very large group of passive marginally interested people who agree with whatever sounds like it is in their best interest without them really doing too muc...
For instance, until the discovery of nuclear weapons, armed conflict was often a primary means of settling disputes between nation-states. However, if you tried to settle your dispute with your neighbor, or your company's dispute with its competitor, using armed force, it would achieve nothing except getting you thrown in prison.
This is really, really false. People use armed force all the time with their neighbors. Just like at the national level, armed force is very effective as long as no one bigger and badder will smack you down for using it, as they...
Do average Americans have the kind of bias in historical education that Dan suggests?
Hell yes. One example: I remember being shocked as a teenager when, going to school outside the US for the first time, I learned that it took the US 100 years longer to free their slaves than Britain. My US education had made it out to be such a big deal that they'd been freed at all, that they neglected to mention that little detail.
You seem to be indicating that rationality may not be the best way for an individual to achieve her goals. From the wiki:
The rational algorithm is to do what works, to get the actual answer—in short, to > win, whatever the method, whatever the means.
If you aren't achieving your goals in the best possible way you aren't practicing the rational way. If you are losing it should not be for your using rationality, but due to you poorly approximating an ideal rational agent.
However, neither of these imply that intelligence, science, and rationality, as a practical matter, are the best way to get things done by individual people operating in the year 2009.
I am not sure science belongs in that sentence. The application of science is an assumed part of my everyday life in the form of technology. Sure, I am not whipping up new chemicals to help me get through today, but I use computers, pens, clothing, dishwashers...
Intelligence certainly has a practical threshold. If you have no intelligence at all you cannot thrive in a w...
I don't think I would assert that intelligence, science or rationality is the Ultimate Power on the individual level. But your argument to that point doesn't work at all, afaict.
We know, as a matter of historical fact, that Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party, despite being generally incompetent, unintelligent, irrational, superstitious and just plain insane, managed to take over a country of tens of millions of people from nothing, in the span of fifteen years.
What evidence is there that they were generally incompetent, unintelligent or irrational? They c...
There is the argument that rationality should be seen as a meta-algorithm: you look at the particular situation, work out what specific algorithm will win, and then use that.
Having the meta-algorithm will work better (on average) than any particular algorithm, though in certain cases the time lag and limited foresight of rational methods will mean that there will usually be some specific algorithm that will beat rationality in a given context.
So far as I am aware, no group of people has managed to achieve anything even remotely similar
I doubt that the NSDAP of 1930 had any particular "secret sauce" for goal achievement; right place, right time, luck, populism and ambition seems to explain them. Also, as a matter of fact, they lost so badly and in such a horrific way that the agenda of white/aryan power has been badly damaged; they managed to actually anti-optimize their goal!
The real, human world seems to demand a time/context-varying skillset for goal achievement, and the context of 2010 MEDCs is the one of most interest.
I agree with the overall point, though.
Maybe the terminology is a little sloppy. To "get things done", the "things that work on a species level", people who "achieve many of their goals" etc. these are vague references, vagueness on which the text relies. In addition, it's not at all clear to me what being "generally incompetent" actually means (as opposed to "totally incompetent"?).
Be that as it may, the move from "all nazis are incompetent" and "they managed to take over x and do y" to "using something which we will t...
Yes, improving your individual rationality won't necessarily allow you to duplicate the success of the luckiest individuals selected from a pool of billions of irrational people, but I don't see how this fact implies that individual rationality is useless.
As Eliezer and many others on Less Wrong have said, the way the human species rose to dominate the Earth was through our intelligence- and not through our muscle power, biochemical weapons, or superior resistance to environmental hazards. Given our overwhelming power over other species, and the fact that many former top predators are now extinct or endangered, we should readily accept that general intelligence is a game-changing power on the species level.
Similarly, one of the key ingredients in the birth of the modern era was the discovery of science, and its counterpart, the discovery of the art of Traditional Rationality. Armed with these, the nations of Western Europe managed to dominate the entire rest of the world, even though, when they began their explorations in the 15th century, the Chinese were more advanced in many respects. Given how Western Europe, and the cultures derived from it, has so completely surpassed the rest of the world in terms of wealth and military might, we should readily accept that science and rationality is a game-changing power on the civilization level.
However, neither of these imply that intelligence, science, and rationality, as a practical matter, are the best way to get things done by individual people operating in the year 2009. We can easily see that many things which work on the species level, or the civilization level, do not work for individuals and small groups. For instance, until the discovery of nuclear weapons, armed conflict was often a primary means of settling disputes between nation-states. However, if you tried to settle your dispute with your neighbor, or your company's dispute with its competitor, using armed force, it would achieve nothing except getting you thrown in prison.
People are crazy and the world is mad, but it does not necessarily follow that we should try to solve our own problems primarily by becoming more sane. Plenty of people achieve many of their goals despite being completely nuts. Adolf Hitler, for example, achieved a large fraction of his (extremely ambitious!) goals, despite having numerous beliefs that most of us would recognize as making no sense whatsoever.
We know, as a matter of historical fact, that Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party, despite being generally incompetent, unintelligent, irrational, superstitious and just plain insane, managed to take over a country of tens of millions of people from nothing, in the span of fifteen years. So far as I am aware, no group of people has managed to achieve anything even remotely similar using, not only rationality, but any skill involving deliberative thought, as opposed to skills such as yelling at huge crowds of people. However, it is a corollary to the statement that no one knows what science doesn't know that no one knows what history doesn't know, so it is entirely possible, perhaps likely, that there is something I am overlooking. To anyone who would assert that intelligence, science or rationality is the Ultimate Power, not just on the level of a species or civilization, but on the level of an individual or small group, let them show that their belief is based in reality.