Sure, agency and power are good. If you think there is a low-hanging fruit we should pick, please explain more specifically.
I cannot be more specific about winning rationality because I don’t know how to do it.
One would first have to set out to create the art, go out there, win and report back.
Agency, we have discussed a lot already (1, 2, 3),
Power is a zero-sum game
Then again I might read more of what people have published on LW and find that it’s already as good as it gets, who knows.
I cannot be more specific about winning rationality because I don’t know how to do it. One would first have to set out to create the art, go out there, win and report back.
Yes. My experience with “winning” suggests that there are three basic categories of interventions:
stop doing something harmful or wasteful
exploit an idiosyncratic opportunity
do the correct things and experience a slow and steady growth
The first category includes things like: stop taking drugs, leave your abusive partner, quit your bad job, find new friends who are not losers, stop doomscrolling, quit social networks, etc. If you are making any of these mistakes, it may dramatically improve your life when you stop doing them. But it will be unimpressive for observers, because they will be like “why were they even doing this stupid thing?”. Also, it moves you from negative to neutral, which is great, but it doesn’t move you from neutral to positive. It will make you good, but not great. And once you stop doing the obviously bad stuff, there is little progress to be gained in this category.
The second category is great and impressive, but the advice only applies to a specific kind of person in a specific situation, so most likely it is useless for you. An example would be Scott Alexander quitting his job and starting to make money on his Substack blog: it seems to have made him rich (and more importantly, financially secure, so he no longer has to worry about doxing, and can fully focus on doing the things that he wants to do); but from our perspective, the disadvantage of this strategy is that you need to be Scott Alexander first. Similarly, I met a guy in real life, who was a successful entrepreneur, but he started to hate his business, and didn’t know what else to do; we crunched some numbers and figured out that if he sells his business, he can retire early; he did that and he seems quite happy (later he started another business, but of a different kind, and most importantly, he does not depend on it: he can simply sell it the very moment it stops being fun). Again, a great solution for him, but if you don’t already have a successful company to sell, it won’t work for you. Maybe there is something approximately in this category for me, and I am just too blind to see it; but you would need to know my specific situation, and my specific strengths and weaknesses to find it; there is no general advice. There is also no guarantee that such thing exists.
The third category is completely boring for the outside observer: get enough sleep, learn new stuff, get a good job, eat healthy food, exercise regularly, put your savings in passively managed index funds, follow dozen more pieces of wisdom like this… and unless some misfortune happens, 10 years later you will be healthy and fit; 20-30 years later you will be healthy, fit, and rich; 30-50 years later you will be healthy, fit, rich, and famous if you care about that. (This works better if you start following this strategy while you still have many years of life ahead of you.) The disadvantage is that it takes a lot of time for the benefits to appear; the first few years may be completely unimpressive, and it may require a lot of willpower to stay on the right track regardless. Notice that the entire rationality community exists only slightly longer than ten years, so even in the hypothetical case if we all followed this advice religiously (which is definitely not the case) there still wouldn’t be sufficiently dramatic evidence to convince a skeptical outsider.
Some people believe that there is also a fourth category—an intervention that works perfectly for anyone, and delivers amazing results quickly. All you need is typically to give a lot of money to the guru who will teach you the secrets, or quit your job and join the pyramid / multi-level business / binary system / whatever people call it these days while it is still growing. In my experience, this usually does not work well. -- A more innocent version of this is taking an example from the “idiosyncratic opportunity” category and trying to apply it to everyone: “Hey, did you know that Scott Alexander is successful on Substack? Why don’t you start your own blog?” and it turns out that unfortunately, you are not Scott, you don’t have the stamina to write so many so good articles, and after a few years you only have dozen articles, three followers, and zero dollars.
I think it would be useful to collect success stories in the three categories above. (Of course, there is a risk of selection bias: you won’t get the stories of people who tried to do the same, and failed.) But I suspect that the general outline would be: first you get some quick boost from abandoning the harmful things, from that point on it is mostly a lot of work that produces slow progress (which looks amazing in hindsight, but boring when observed on a daily basis), with an occasional quick jump by exploring a unique opportunity. It may help a lot if you are surrounded by smart and friendly people who support you at doing the right-but-boring things, and help you brainstorm the opportunities.
There is a methodological problem of how to distinguish between “gains from rationality” vs ordinary gains from talent and hard work. Here I used Scott Alexander as an example of a famous successful rationalist… but when I imagine him in a parallel universe where the rationality community does not exist, maybe he is just as famous and successful there, too? And even if the community provided him some good ideas, a place to publish, and encouragement, maybe in that parallel universe he found a different community that provided him the same things.
...uh, no conclusion here, other than I agree that we should collect some rationality success stories. But expect that many will be disappointing in various ways: too simple, too specific, too slow, and with dubious relation to rationality.
I cannot be more specific about winning rationality because I don’t know how to do it. One would first have to set out to create the art, go out there, win and report back.
Then again I might read more of what people have published on LW and find that it’s already as good as it gets, who knows.
Yes. My experience with “winning” suggests that there are three basic categories of interventions:
stop doing something harmful or wasteful
exploit an idiosyncratic opportunity
do the correct things and experience a slow and steady growth
The first category includes things like: stop taking drugs, leave your abusive partner, quit your bad job, find new friends who are not losers, stop doomscrolling, quit social networks, etc. If you are making any of these mistakes, it may dramatically improve your life when you stop doing them. But it will be unimpressive for observers, because they will be like “why were they even doing this stupid thing?”. Also, it moves you from negative to neutral, which is great, but it doesn’t move you from neutral to positive. It will make you good, but not great. And once you stop doing the obviously bad stuff, there is little progress to be gained in this category.
The second category is great and impressive, but the advice only applies to a specific kind of person in a specific situation, so most likely it is useless for you. An example would be Scott Alexander quitting his job and starting to make money on his Substack blog: it seems to have made him rich (and more importantly, financially secure, so he no longer has to worry about doxing, and can fully focus on doing the things that he wants to do); but from our perspective, the disadvantage of this strategy is that you need to be Scott Alexander first. Similarly, I met a guy in real life, who was a successful entrepreneur, but he started to hate his business, and didn’t know what else to do; we crunched some numbers and figured out that if he sells his business, he can retire early; he did that and he seems quite happy (later he started another business, but of a different kind, and most importantly, he does not depend on it: he can simply sell it the very moment it stops being fun). Again, a great solution for him, but if you don’t already have a successful company to sell, it won’t work for you. Maybe there is something approximately in this category for me, and I am just too blind to see it; but you would need to know my specific situation, and my specific strengths and weaknesses to find it; there is no general advice. There is also no guarantee that such thing exists.
The third category is completely boring for the outside observer: get enough sleep, learn new stuff, get a good job, eat healthy food, exercise regularly, put your savings in passively managed index funds, follow dozen more pieces of wisdom like this… and unless some misfortune happens, 10 years later you will be healthy and fit; 20-30 years later you will be healthy, fit, and rich; 30-50 years later you will be healthy, fit, rich, and famous if you care about that. (This works better if you start following this strategy while you still have many years of life ahead of you.) The disadvantage is that it takes a lot of time for the benefits to appear; the first few years may be completely unimpressive, and it may require a lot of willpower to stay on the right track regardless. Notice that the entire rationality community exists only slightly longer than ten years, so even in the hypothetical case if we all followed this advice religiously (which is definitely not the case) there still wouldn’t be sufficiently dramatic evidence to convince a skeptical outsider.
Some people believe that there is also a fourth category—an intervention that works perfectly for anyone, and delivers amazing results quickly. All you need is typically to give a lot of money to the guru who will teach you the secrets, or quit your job and join the pyramid / multi-level business / binary system / whatever people call it these days while it is still growing. In my experience, this usually does not work well. -- A more innocent version of this is taking an example from the “idiosyncratic opportunity” category and trying to apply it to everyone: “Hey, did you know that Scott Alexander is successful on Substack? Why don’t you start your own blog?” and it turns out that unfortunately, you are not Scott, you don’t have the stamina to write so many so good articles, and after a few years you only have dozen articles, three followers, and zero dollars.
I think it would be useful to collect success stories in the three categories above. (Of course, there is a risk of selection bias: you won’t get the stories of people who tried to do the same, and failed.) But I suspect that the general outline would be: first you get some quick boost from abandoning the harmful things, from that point on it is mostly a lot of work that produces slow progress (which looks amazing in hindsight, but boring when observed on a daily basis), with an occasional quick jump by exploring a unique opportunity. It may help a lot if you are surrounded by smart and friendly people who support you at doing the right-but-boring things, and help you brainstorm the opportunities.
There is a methodological problem of how to distinguish between “gains from rationality” vs ordinary gains from talent and hard work. Here I used Scott Alexander as an example of a famous successful rationalist… but when I imagine him in a parallel universe where the rationality community does not exist, maybe he is just as famous and successful there, too? And even if the community provided him some good ideas, a place to publish, and encouragement, maybe in that parallel universe he found a different community that provided him the same things.
...uh, no conclusion here, other than I agree that we should collect some rationality success stories. But expect that many will be disappointing in various ways: too simple, too specific, too slow, and with dubious relation to rationality.