I'd particularly expect many people to have good tacit rationality without having good explicit rationality in domains where success is strongly determined by "people skills." This is the kind of thing I expect LWers to be particularly bad at (being neurotypical helps immensely here) and is not the kind of thing that most people can explain how they do (I think it takes place almost entirely in System 1).
When evaluating the relationship between success and rationality it seems worth keeping in mind survivorship bias. For example, a small number of people can be wildly successful in finance through sheer luck due to the large number of people in finance and the randomness of finance. Those people don't necessarily have any rationality, explicit or otherwise, but you're more likely to have heard of them than a random person in finance. But I don't know enough about Oprah to say anything about how much of her being promoted to our collective attention constitutes survivorship bias and how much is genuine evidence of her competence.
One setting where explicit rationality seems instrumentally more useful than tight feedback loops is in determining which tight feedback loop
When evaluating the relationship between success and rationality it seems worth keeping in mind survivorship bias.
An interesting case is that Will Smith seems likely to be explicitly rational in a way that other people in entertainment don't talk about -- he'll plan and reflect on various movie-related strategies so that he can get progressively better roles and box office receipts.
For instance, before he started acting in movies, he and his agent thought about what top-grossing movies all had in common, and then he focused on getting roles in those kinds of movies.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1689234,00.html
An interesting case is that Will Smith seems likely to be explicitly rational in a way that other people in entertainment don't talk about
In the same venue, I've been impressed by Greene's account of 50 Cent he made in the book "The 50th law". If that's really 50's way of thinking, it's brutally rational and impressively strategical.
Do you want to get more specific about what you mean by "tight feedback loops"? I spent a few years focusing on startup things, and I don't think "tight feedback loops" are a good characterization. It can take a lot of work to figure out whether a startup idea is viable. That's why it's so valuable to gather advance data when possible (hence the lean startup movement). If you want "tight feedback loops", it seems like trying to master some flash game would offer a much better opportunity.
As far as I can tell, what actual entrepreneurs have that wannabee entrepreneurs don't is the ability to translate their ideas in to action. They're bold enough to punch through unendorsed aversions, they're not afraid to make fools of themselves, they don't procrastinate, they actually try stuff out, and they push on without getting easily discouraged. You could think of these skills as being multipliers on rationality... if your ability to act on your ideas is 0, it doesn't matter how good your ideas are and you should focus on improving your ability to act, not improving your ideas. It might help to start distrusting yourself whenever you say "I'll do X&...
What's the evidence that rationality leads to winning? I don't think that claim has been demonstrated.
This whole post seems very circular to me. You believe that rationality leads to winning, in fact you seem to believe that rationality is a necessary condition for winning, so when you see someone win, you conclude that therefore they are rational. And by extension whatever they are doing is rational. And if what the winners do doesn't look rational to us at first glance, we look deeper and rationalize as necessary until we can claim they are rational.
This reminds me not a little of classical economists who believe that people are rational consumers, and therefore treat anything consumers do, no matter how ridiculous, as expressing hidden preferences. I.e. they believe that rational consumers maximize their utility, so they contort utility functions such that they are maximized by whatever consumers choose, rather than recognizing the fact that consumers are often irrational. For instance, if consumers are willing to pay $50 for a bottle of bourbon they won't pay $10 for, they assert that consumers are buying a status symbol rather than a bottle of bourbon. You're proposing an e...
Also, we should not neglect the base rates. If more than 99% of people on this planet are irrational by LW standards, then we should not be surprised by seeing irrational people among the most successful ones, even if rationality increases the probability of success.
In other words, if you would find that (pulling the numbers out of hat) 99% of all people are irrational, but "only" 90% of millionaires are irrational, that would be an evidence that rationality does lead to (increased probability of) winning.
Also, in real humans, rationality isn't all-or-nothing. Compare Oprah with an average person from her reference group (before she became famous). Is she really less rational? I doubt it.
I'd love to hear a story (or maybe stories) of someone becoming an LW regular, improving their "rationality skills" and going on to "win" (define and achieve their personal goals), thanks to those skills.
Here I explicitly exclude LW-related goals, such as understanding the sequences, attending a CFAR workshop or being hired by CFAR, signing up for cryonics or figuring out how to donate more to GiveWell. Instead, I'd love to hear how people applied what they learned on this site to start a business, make money, improve their love life (hooking up with an LW poly does not count for this purpose), or maybe to take over the world.
Hopefully some of the stories have already been posted here, so links would be appreciated.
When I found LW, I was confused and nonambitious; my goal was to survive on as little money as possible (to ironically humiliate the people who say $17/hr is the minimum living wage), and maybe make a few video games or something, and I spent most of my free time on 4chan and arguing about radial politics on the internet.
Since coming to LW, I've used LW-far-epistemic rationality to figure out a great deal of philosophical confusions and understand a great deal more about those big questions. (this doesn't count, but it should be mentioned)
More specifically and interestingly: it took explicit LW rationality for me to:
Think rationally about balancing my resources (time, money) and marginal utility, to great productivity benefit.
Step up to run the vancouver LW meetup.
Make and maintain a few really valuable friends (mostly through the meetup).
Respond positively to criticism at work, so that I've become much more valuable than I was 6 months ago, in a way that has been recognized and pointed out.
Achieve lightness and other rationality virtues in exploring design concepts at work, taking design criticism, not getting caught in dead ends. I explicitly apply much of what I've lea
If Rationality is Winning, or perhaps more explicitly Making The Decisions That Best Accomplish Whatever Your Goals Happen to Be, then Rationality is so large that it swallows everything. Like anything else, spergy LW-style rationality is a small part of this, but it seems to me that anything which one can meaningfully discuss is going to be one such small portion. One could of course discuss Winning In General at a sufficiently high level of abstraction, but then you'd be discussing spergy LW stuff by definition - decision theory, utility, and so on.
If bu...
You say that, "I know plenty of business managers and entrepreneurs who have a steady track record of good decisions and wise judgments, and yet they are religious, or they commit basic errors in logic and probability when they talk about non-business subjects."
You must know different business managers and entrepreneurs than I do. I can think of few if any business managers and entrepreneurs who have a steady track record of good decisions and wise judgments. There are some common positive characteristics I see in the business managers I know, an...
In short, she had to be fairly rational, at least in some domains of her life.
Not a comment about Oprah. Repeat, not a comment about Oprah. Once more: not a comment about Oprah.
But a comment about the idea that rationality leads to success. Deception and violence also lead to success. These problem solvers are systemized winning: IF (application of fraud) THEN (goal met) ELSE (blame others). "Violence isn’t the only answer, but it is the final answer." - Jack Donovan. Violence and deception are social skills. When talking rationality co...
Which of these three options do you think will train rationality (i.e. systematized winning, or "winning-rationality") most effectively?
One of these things is not like the others. I can read the Sequences for free, and I can attend a workshop relatively cheaply, but the time and money investments into a startup are quite significant. Most people cannot afford them. Eating cake is not an option for them; they can barely afford bread.
One simplification I think you're making that raises some problems is money. Why Oprah? Why not Charles Wuorinen, who makes excellent musical decisions and has many learned skills? Who has access to tight feedback loops as soon as someone else listens to what he writes? Who is really good at what he does? Because Oprah's skills are better for collecting slips of green paper.
Now, one can collect quite a few slips of green paper and still, say, suffer from depression, or just generally be unhappy. Perhaps we could even claim that Wuorinen is happier than...
Explicit rationality can help you realize that you should force tight feedback loops into whichever domains you want to succeed in, so that you can have develop good intuitions about how to succeed in those domains.
A realization:
PUA, or at least what seems to me to be the core concept of some schools of PUA, makes a ton of sense when viewed in this light. Trying to pick up a stranger in a bar is probably the tightest feedback loop possible for social skills, and like the OP says, social skills are massively important for success and happiness. Therefore...
Another interesting example of the utility of tight feedback loops, this time as applied to education, is extreme apprenticeship. I've been taking one math class built around the XA method, and it has felt considerably more useful and rewarding than ordinary math classes.
Among other things, XA employs bidirectional feedback loops - student-to-teacher and teacher-to-student. Students are given a lot of exercises to do from day one, but the exercises are broken into small chunks so that the students can get a constant sense of making progress, and so that th...
Hypothesis for what tacit rationality might be: glomming onto accurate premises about what actions are likely to achieve one's goals without having a conscious process for how one chooses premises.
I think it would probably be worth going into a bit more about what delineates tacit rationality from tacit knowledge. Rationality seems to me to apply to things that you can reflect about, and so the concept of things that you can reflect about but can't necessarily articulate seems weird.
For instance, at first it wasn't clear to me that working at a startup would give you any rationality-related skills except insofar as it gives you instrumental rationality skills, which could possibly just be explained as better tacit knowledge -- you know a bajillion m...
I take objection on Mark Zuckerberg and Oprah:
I would ascribe Oprah's success more to her being a charismatic personality/communicator and Zuckerberg didn't even make FB, he paid some guys to make it, the idea of fb wasn't new(there was Orkut, Myspace) it's just the one that ended up taking off. And the latter was due to the good implementation, fb was always simple, fast and snappy. I don't know if Zuckerberg was the one that drove this point or if he had just good guys on the technical side who understood what matters. The same can be said for Google, it...
Like Eliezer, I "do my best thinking into a keyboard." It starts with a burning itch to figure something out. I collect ideas and arguments and evidence and sources. I arrange them, tweak them, criticize them. I explain it all in my own words so I can understand it better. By then it is nearly something that others would want to read, so I clean it up and publish, say, How to Beat Procrastination. I write essays in the original sense of the word: "attempts."
This time, I'm trying to figure out something we might call "tacit rationality" (c.f. tacit knowledge).
I tried and failed to write a good post about tacit rationality, so I wrote a bad post instead — one that is basically a patchwork of somewhat-related musings on explicit and tacit rationality. Therefore I'm posting this article to LW Discussion. I hope the ensuing discussion ends up leading somewhere with more clarity and usefulness.
Which of these three options do you think will train rationality (i.e. systematized winning, or "winning-rationality") most effectively?
Option 1 seems to be pretty effective at training people to talk intelligently about rationality (let's call that "talking-rationality"), and it seems to inoculate people against some common philosophical mistakes.
We don't yet have any examples of someone doing Option 2 (the first CFAR workshop was May 2012), but I'd expect Option 2 — if actually executed — to result in more winning-rationality than Option 1, and also a modicum of talking-rationality.
What about Option 3? Unlike Option 2 or especially Option 1, I'd expect it to train almost no ability to talk intelligently about rationality. But I would expect it to result in relatively good winning-rationality, due to its tight feedback loops.
I've come to believe... that the best way to succeed is to discover what you love and then find a way to offer it to others in the form of service, working hard, and also allowing the energy of the universe to lead you.
Oprah isn't known for being a rational thinker. She is a known peddler of pseudoscience, and she attributes her success (in part) to allowing "the energy of the universe" to lead her.
Yet she must be doing something right. Oprah is a true rags-to-riches story. Born in Mississippi to an unwed teenage housemaid, she was so poor she wore dresses made of potato sacks. She was molested by a cousin, an uncle, and a family friend. She became pregnant at age 14.
But in high school she became an honors student, won oratory contests and a beauty pageant, and was hired by a local radio station to report the news. She became the youngest-ever news anchor at Nashville's WLAC-TV, then hosted several shows in Baltimore, then moved to Chicago and within months her own talk show shot from last place to first place in the ratings there. Shortly afterward her show went national. She also produced and starred in several TV shows, was nominated for an Oscar for her role in a Steven Spielberg movie, launched her own TV cable network and her own magazine (the "most successful startup ever in the [magazine] industry" according to Fortune), and became the world's first female black billionaire.
I'd like to suggest that Oprah's climb probably didn't come merely through inborn talent, hard work, and luck. To get from potato sack dresses to the Forbes billionaire list, Oprah had to make thousands of pretty good decisions. She had to make pretty accurate guesses about the likely consequences of various actions she could take. When she was wrong, she had to correct course fairly quickly. In short, she had to be fairly rational, at least in some domains of her life.
Similarly, I know plenty of business managers and entrepreneurs who have a steady track record of good decisions and wise judgments, and yet they are religious, or they commit basic errors in logic and probability when they talk about non-business subjects.
What's going on here? My guess is that successful entrepreneurs and business managers and other people must have pretty good tacit rationality, even if they aren't very proficient with the "rationality" concepts that Less Wrongers tend to discuss on a daily basis. Stated another way, successful businesspeople make fairly rational decisions and judgments, even though they may confabulate rather silly explanations for their success, and even though they don't understand the math or science of rationality well.
LWers can probably outperform Mark Zuckerberg on the CRT and the Berlin Numeracy Test, but Zuckerberg is laughing at them from atop a huge pile of utility.
Patri Friedman, in Self-Improvement or Shiny Distraction: Why Less Wrong is anti-Instrumental Rationality, reminded us that skill acquisition comes from deliberate practice, and reading LW is a "shiny distraction," not deliberate practice. He said a real rationality practice would look more like... well, what Patri describes is basically CFAR, though CFAR didn't exist at the time.
In response, and again long before CFAR existed, Anna Salamon wrote Goals for which Less Wrong does (and doesn't) help. Summary: Some domains provide rich, cheap feedback, so you don't need much LW-style rationality to become successful in those domains. But many of us have goals in domains that don't offer rapid feedback: e.g. whether to buy cryonics, which 40-year investments are safe, which metaethics to endorse. For this kind of thing you need LW-style rationality. (We could also state this as "Domains with rapid feedback train tacit rationality with respect to those domains, but for domains without rapid feedback you've got to do the best you can with LW-style "explicit rationality".)
The good news is that you should be able to combine explicit and tacit rationality. Explicit rationality can help you realize that you should force tight feedback loops into whichever domains you want to succeed in, so that you can have develop good intuitions about how to succeed in those domains. (See also: Lean Startup or Lean Nonprofit methods.)
Explicit rationality could also help you realize that the cognitive biases most-discussed in the literature aren't necessarily the ones you should focus on ameliorating, as Aaron Swartz wrote:
Cognitive biases cause people to make choices that are most obviously irrational, but not most importantly irrational... Since cognitive biases are the primary focus of research into rationality, rationality tests mostly measure how good you are at avoiding them... LW readers tend to be fairly good at avoiding cognitive biases... But there a whole series of much more important irrationalities that LWers suffer from. (Let's call them "practical biases" as opposed to "cognitive biases," even though both are ultimately practical and cognitive.)
...Rationality, properly understood, is in fact a predictor of success. Perhaps if LWers used success as their metric (as opposed to getting better at avoiding obvious mistakes), they might focus on their most important irrationalities (instead of their most obvious ones), which would lead them to be more rational and more successful.