Rational Groups Kick Ass
Reply to: Extreme Rationality: It's Not That Great Belaboring of: Rational Me Or We? Related to: A Sense That More Is Possible The success of Yvain's post threw me off completely. My experience has been opposite to what he describes: x-rationality, which I've been working on since the mid-to-late nineties, has been centrally important to successses I've had in business and family life. Yet the LessWrong community, which I greatly respect, broadly endorsed Yvain's argument that: > There seems to me to be approximately zero empirical evidence that x-rationality has a large effect on your practical success, and some anecdotal empirical evidence against it. So that left me pondering what's different in my experience. I've been working on these things longer than most, and am more skilled than many, but that seemed unlikely to be the key. The difference, I now think, is that I've been lucky enough to spend huge amounts of time in deeply rationalist organizations and groups--the companies I've worked at, my marriage, my circle of friends. And rational groups kick ass. An individual can unpack free will or figure out that the Copenhagen interpretation is nonsense. But I agree with Yvain that in a lonely rationalist's individual life, the extra oomph of x-rationality may well be drowned in the noise of all the other factors of success and failure. But groups! Groups magnify the importance of rational thinking tremendously: * Whereas a rational individual is still limited by her individual intelligence, creativity, and charisma, a rational group can promote the single best idea, leader, or method out of hundreds or thousands or millions. * Groups have powerful feedback loops; small dysfunctions can grow into disaster by repeated reflection, and small positives can cascade into massive success. * In a particularly powerful feedback process, groups can select for and promote exceptional members. * Groups can establish rules/norms/patterns that 1) directly imp
I do not think your claim is what you think it is.
I think your claim is that some people mistake the model for the reality, the map for the territory. Of course models are simpler than reality! That's why they're called "models."
Physics seems to have gotten wiser about this. The Newtonians, and later the Copenhagenites, did fall quite hard for this trap (though the Newtonians can be forgiven to some degree!). More recently, however, the undisputed champion physical model, whose predictions hold to 987 digits of accuracy (not really), has the humble name "The Standard Model," and it's clear that no one thinks it's the ultimate true nature of reality.
Can you give specific examples of people making big mistakes from map/territory confusion? The closest thing I can think of offhand is the Stern Report, which tries to make economic calculations a century from now based on our current best climate+social+political+economic models.