Winning at life means achieving your goals — that is, satisfying your desires. As such, it will help to understand how our desires work and how to satisfy them.
That sounds like the wirehead fallacy to me. You can’t satisfy your desires to a greater degree just by causing yourself to feel like your desires have been satisfied to a greater degree, unless your desire happens to be a desire for your own feeling of desire satisfaction, which is not a given.
(Consider not just the example of someone who is explicitly an altruist, but also the example of someone who is explicitly an egoist because he only wants to do what is in some sense the right thing and mistakenly believes egoism rather than altruism to be in that sense the right thing.)
“Winning” has technical and everyday senses that often don’t come apart but sometimes do; the simplest justification for the saying that “rationalists win” uses the technical sense, so it’s worth being careful (more so than LW has been) when interpreting the saying in the everyday sense.
This paragraph jumped out at me as well. While neuroscience might refer to knowledge useful for figuring out the content of our goals, it’s not at all clear in what way it can inform us. The simple “achieving your goals—that is, satisfying your desires” doesn’t help, and is outright wrong in the context where “desires” refers to the technical sense from neuroscience.
“Winning” has technical and everyday senses that often don’t come apart but sometimes do; the simplest justification for the saying that “rationalists win” uses the technical sense
One way I can see to go wrong even with the technical sense of “winning” is if you’re comparing a rational agent to an irrational agent who happens to start out with other, more important advantages. The right comparison is between rational and irrational versions of the same agent.
That sounds like the wirehead fallacy to me. You can’t satisfy your desires to a greater degree just by causing yourself to feel like your desires have been satisfied to a greater degree, unless your desire happens to be a desire for your own feeling of desire satisfaction, which is not a given.
(Consider not just the example of someone who is explicitly an altruist, but also the example of someone who is explicitly an egoist because he only wants to do what is in some sense the right thing and mistakenly believes egoism rather than altruism to be in that sense the right thing.)
“Winning” has technical and everyday senses that often don’t come apart but sometimes do; the simplest justification for the saying that “rationalists win” uses the technical sense, so it’s worth being careful (more so than LW has been) when interpreting the saying in the everyday sense.
This paragraph jumped out at me as well. While neuroscience might refer to knowledge useful for figuring out the content of our goals, it’s not at all clear in what way it can inform us. The simple “achieving your goals—that is, satisfying your desires” doesn’t help, and is outright wrong in the context where “desires” refers to the technical sense from neuroscience.
(And is technically wrong even then.)
How so?
One way I can see to go wrong even with the technical sense of “winning” is if you’re comparing a rational agent to an irrational agent who happens to start out with other, more important advantages. The right comparison is between rational and irrational versions of the same agent.