If the word “win” is getting in people’s way because it makes them think of zero-sum scenarios, social status conflicts, or Charlie Sheen, then we can and should find other ways of explaining the same concept.
Rationality should make you better off than you would be if you didn’t have it. That doesn’t imply defeating or outdoing other people. It just means that the way we evaluate candidate decision procedures is whether they create beneficial outcomes — not bogus standards such as how unemotional they are, how many insignificant bits of data they take in, how much they resemble Traditional Scholarship, how much CPU time they consume, or whether they respect naïve ideas of causality.
Yup. Personally, I prefer “optimizers should optimally achieve their goals” to “rationalists should win”. But there exist people who find the latter version pithier, easier to remember, and more compelling. Different phrasings work better for different people, so it helps to be able to say the same thing in multiple ways, and it helps to know your audience.
I have elsewhere argued essentially this, though “optimized” and “optimal” are importantly different. The conclusion I came to reading the comments there was that people vary in how they process the relevant connotations, and arguing lexical choice makes my teeth ache, but personally I nevertheless try to avoid talking about “rational X choosing” when I mean optimizing my choice of X for particular goals.
If the word “win” is getting in people’s way because it makes them think of zero-sum scenarios, social status conflicts, or Charlie Sheen, then we can and should find other ways of explaining the same concept.
Rationality should make you better off than you would be if you didn’t have it. That doesn’t imply defeating or outdoing other people. It just means that the way we evaluate candidate decision procedures is whether they create beneficial outcomes — not bogus standards such as how unemotional they are, how many insignificant bits of data they take in, how much they resemble Traditional Scholarship, how much CPU time they consume, or whether they respect naïve ideas of causality.
Yup. Personally, I prefer “optimizers should optimally achieve their goals” to “rationalists should win”. But there exist people who find the latter version pithier, easier to remember, and more compelling. Different phrasings work better for different people, so it helps to be able to say the same thing in multiple ways, and it helps to know your audience.
“Lesswrong, a community blog dedicated to the art of optimal goal-seeking, mostly through optimal belief acquisition.”
I kinda like that. It’s wordier, but it loses some of the connotations of “rational” that invariably trip up newcomers.
I have elsewhere argued essentially this, though “optimized” and “optimal” are importantly different. The conclusion I came to reading the comments there was that people vary in how they process the relevant connotations, and arguing lexical choice makes my teeth ache, but personally I nevertheless try to avoid talking about “rational X choosing” when I mean optimizing my choice of X for particular goals.