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StartAtTheEnd

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By a duality principle, you can learn a lot from losers.

If somebody has made it to a high position of power despite having glaring flaws (you can think of Tate I guess), I recommend you pay attention. They must have something which balances their flaws out, something which made them succeed despite being at a disadvantage. You can figure out what it is and take it for yourself.

If an ugly person, stupid person, or socially awkward person becomes more successful than what makes sense to you, then your map is incomplete, and the advantage of the person might even be a low-hanging fruit (if a stupid person has an advantage, chances are you can emulate it). In fact, anything which has a stupid design, but which darwinism hasn't yet removed from existence despite many years passing, likely has some trait which gives it a lot of fitness (this might even be true necessarily). The Ocean Sunfish, arguably one of natures failures, apparently lays up to 300 million eggs at a time. This is not really useful despite noticing that for X to exist, X merely has to have a combined quality and quantity above some threshold. This insight is mostly valuable in human beings, like stupid people who have a lot of money, or low EQ people with social success.

I think this insight is valuable enough to share, since it seemingly finds value in what most people regard as worthless, which is much more impressive to me than finding value in what's valuable. Of course, this is closer to stat-point allocation. 100 traits in a person might sum to "success", and you're only aware of 80 of their traits, and none of them impress you. Well, the last 20 traits should sum to a high value, and some of these values are likely higher than your own values (since your own values are likely higher in the other 80 dimensions). So the sum of traits is of some value, and you can take the extremes and raise your own respective dimensions by emulating/stealing/seeking inspiration from the person in question.

It would be quite easy to formalize this mathematically and likely even to prove it, though a few dimensions might have to be "luck" and "advantage at birth" (nepotism).

3localdeity2y

Some related scenarios are discussed in my post here, e.g. when popularity ≈ beauty + substance, and if popularity and beauty are readily apparent then you can estimate substance.

That's basically the exact same idea I came up with!

Your link says popularity ≈ beauty + substance, that's no different than my example of "success of a species = quality of offspring + quantity of offspring". I just generalized to a higher number of dimensions, such that for a space of N dimensions, the success of a person is the area spanned. So it's like these stat circles but n-dimensional where n is the number of traits of the person in question. I don't know if traits are best judged when multiplied or added together, but one could play around with e... (read more)

1StartAtTheEnd2y

I think the ideas are independently useful, but to get the best out of both, I'd probably have to submit a big post (rather than these shortform comments) and write some more related insights (I only shared this one because I thought it might be useful to you). Actually, I know that I'm likely too lazy and unconscientious to ever make such a post, and I invite people to plagiarize, refine and formalize my ideas. I've probably had a thousand insights like this, and after writing them out, they stop being interesting to me, and I go on thinking about the next thing. I hope my comment was useful to you, though! You can start applying the concept to areas outside of morality. Of feel how postive experiences have the same effect (I have made many good memories on sunny days, so everything connected to brightness and summer is perceived more positively by me). There's no need to "fix" good associations blending together, I personally don't, but I also don't identify as a rationalist. I'm more of a meta-gamer/power-gamer, like a videogame speedrunner looking for new glitches to exploit (because it's fun, not because I'm ambitious).