This implies that everyone else left a $100 bill on the ground for the past 4000 years.
I don’t think that’s right. A lot of rationalist self-help is based on discoveries or advancements of only the past few hundred years. These include things like heuristics and biases, computer science and economics models (optimal stopping, game theory, the kelly criterion, explore vs. exploit tradeoffs, probability theory).
Furthermore, a lot of the specific weird hacks that rationality recommends have also only been invented in, or tested seriously, in the past 100 years: cryonics, implementation intentions, gratitude journaling, etc.
I don’t think that’s right. A lot of rationalist self-help is based on discoveries or advancements of only the past few hundred years. These include things like heuristics and biases, computer science and economics models (optimal stopping, game theory, the kelly criterion, explore vs. exploit tradeoffs, probability theory).
Furthermore, a lot of the specific weird hacks that rationality recommends have also only been invented in, or tested seriously, in the past 100 years: cryonics, implementation intentions, gratitude journaling, etc.