If Rationality is Winning, or perhaps more explicitly Making The Decisions That Best Accomplish Whatever Your Goals Happen to Be, then Rationality is so large that it swallows everything. Like anything else, spergy LW-style rationality is a small part of this, but it seems to me that anything which one can meaningfully discuss is going to be one such small portion. One could of course discuss Winning In General at a sufficiently high level of abstraction, but then you’d be discussing spergy LW stuff by definition—decision theory, utility, and so on.
If businessfolk are rather rational at running businesses, but no rational than anyone else about religion, or if people who have become experts on spergy LW stuff are no more winningful about their relationships, &c. &c. this (to my mind) brings into question the degree to which a General Rationality-as-Winningness skill exists. You acknowledge the distinction between explicit and tacit rationality, but do you expect successful entrepreneurs to be relatively more successful in their marital life? When you say you want to teach tacit rationality, do you mean something distinct from Teaching People How To Do Things Good?
I never did find out if any sizable fraction of Less Wrongers would bite this bullet. That is to say, to affirm the claim that, all else equal, a person with more physical strength is necessarily more rational.
I don’t see a bullet. Obviously, other things matter as well as rationality. Rationality, even instrumental rationality, is not defined as winning. Those who speak as if it was are simply wrong, and your example is the obvious refutation of such silliness.
Well, the assumption here is that a better knowledge of the world gives you a better chance of achieving your goal, so rationality equals more winning only in strategical domains. Which I suspect are the majority in today’s environment, but still being better looking / stronger / better armed etc. counts in certain other domains.
Well, the assumption here is that a better knowledge of the world gives you a better chance of achieving your goal, so rationality equals more winning only in strategical domains.
That sentence should end at the comma. Rationality never “equals” more winning. It is, or should be, a cause (among others) of more winning. That is not a relationship that can be called “equals”.
That is not a relationship that can be called “equals”
It’s an incorrect translation of a figure of speech that exists in Italian but apparently not in English: the correct formulation is “rationality never decreases your probability of winning”.
I’m curious to know what the literal Italian would be. In English, people do often say “X is Y”, “X equals Y”, “X is objectively Y” (political historians will recognise that one), X means Y, etc. when X and Y are different things that the speaker is rhetorically asserting to be so closely connected as to be the same thing. For example, the extreme environmental slogan, “a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy”. I believe it is a figure of speech better avoided.
Well, if you’re curious: “essere razionali equivale a vincere maggiormente solo nei domini strategici”. ‘equivale’ I translated to ‘equals’, but a more precise meaning would be on the line of ‘implies’, ‘leads to’.
It’s used most often when listing the component of a process: “A equivale a B che equivale a C” usually is in the meaning of “A → B → C” rather than “A = B = C”.
I think your thought experiment illustrates well that often the “Rationality is Winning” meme doesn’t quite carve the space too well. Here, rationality is using the right tactics or, if only one is available, spending the right amount of time on the right tasks proportional to how much they value their goals and how achievable they are.
If we resurrect Alice and Bob as hypothetical monovalue agents who only exclusively value deadlifting X, and who have only one method of attempting/training to deadlift X, then the game tree is skewed, Bob wins faster, Alice is screwed and wins slower. Both are fully rational if they spend all available resources on this goal (since it’s all these hypothetical agents value), even though Alice spends more resources for longer before achieving the goal.
For more game theory mumbo-jumbo: I view “rationality” more in terms of how you build and navigate the game tree, rather than a post-hoc analysis of who ended up in the best cell of the payoff matrices. Or, to put it differently, rationality is ending up at the best cell of your payoff matrix, regardless of whether someone else just has +5 on all cells of their matrix or has more options or whatever.
So if my understanding that you were making with this a critique of the “Rationality is winning” meme, I agree that it’s a bit misleading and simplistic, but it still is “taking the best course of action with the resources and options available to you, reflectively and recursively including how much you spend figuring out which courses of action are better”—Expected Winning Within Available Possible Futures
This is a really good point and it is also related to Manfred’s comment that I don’t personally know how to reconcile with some of the points in the article. On one hand, I would like to have a lot of money because a lot of inconvenient things would suddenly become much easier. On the other hand, I would have to do other inconvenient things, like manage a lot of money. Also, I don’t think I would be happy doing Oprah’s job, even if it resulted in a lot of money. Basically, I would not mind lots of money but it is not currently a priority. So I don’t know if I’m actually winning or not, oops.
Therefore, a poll!
How successful are you? [pollid:426]
From a fame, money or bragging rights perspective, how ambitious are your current goals?[pollid:427]
If Rationality is Winning, or perhaps more explicitly Making The Decisions That Best Accomplish Whatever Your Goals Happen to Be, then Rationality is so large that it swallows everything. Like anything else, spergy LW-style rationality is a small part of this, but it seems to me that anything which one can meaningfully discuss is going to be one such small portion. One could of course discuss Winning In General at a sufficiently high level of abstraction, but then you’d be discussing spergy LW stuff by definition—decision theory, utility, and so on.
If businessfolk are rather rational at running businesses, but no rational than anyone else about religion, or if people who have become experts on spergy LW stuff are no more winningful about their relationships, &c. &c. this (to my mind) brings into question the degree to which a General Rationality-as-Winningness skill exists. You acknowledge the distinction between explicit and tacit rationality, but do you expect successful entrepreneurs to be relatively more successful in their marital life? When you say you want to teach tacit rationality, do you mean something distinct from Teaching People How To Do Things Good?
I never did find out if any sizable fraction of Less Wrongers would bite this bullet. That is to say, to affirm the claim that, all else equal, a person with more physical strength is necessarily more rational.
I don’t see a bullet. Obviously, other things matter as well as rationality. Rationality, even instrumental rationality, is not defined as winning. Those who speak as if it was are simply wrong, and your example is the obvious refutation of such silliness.
Well, the assumption here is that a better knowledge of the world gives you a better chance of achieving your goal, so rationality equals more winning only in strategical domains. Which I suspect are the majority in today’s environment, but still being better looking / stronger / better armed etc. counts in certain other domains.
That sentence should end at the comma. Rationality never “equals” more winning. It is, or should be, a cause (among others) of more winning. That is not a relationship that can be called “equals”.
It’s an incorrect translation of a figure of speech that exists in Italian but apparently not in English: the correct formulation is “rationality never decreases your probability of winning”.
I’m curious to know what the literal Italian would be. In English, people do often say “X is Y”, “X equals Y”, “X is objectively Y” (political historians will recognise that one), X means Y, etc. when X and Y are different things that the speaker is rhetorically asserting to be so closely connected as to be the same thing. For example, the extreme environmental slogan, “a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy”. I believe it is a figure of speech better avoided.
Well, if you’re curious: “essere razionali equivale a vincere maggiormente solo nei domini strategici”. ‘equivale’ I translated to ‘equals’, but a more precise meaning would be on the line of ‘implies’, ‘leads to’. It’s used most often when listing the component of a process: “A equivale a B che equivale a C” usually is in the meaning of “A → B → C” rather than “A = B = C”.
I think your thought experiment illustrates well that often the “Rationality is Winning” meme doesn’t quite carve the space too well. Here, rationality is using the right tactics or, if only one is available, spending the right amount of time on the right tasks proportional to how much they value their goals and how achievable they are.
If we resurrect Alice and Bob as hypothetical monovalue agents who only exclusively value deadlifting X, and who have only one method of attempting/training to deadlift X, then the game tree is skewed, Bob wins faster, Alice is screwed and wins slower. Both are fully rational if they spend all available resources on this goal (since it’s all these hypothetical agents value), even though Alice spends more resources for longer before achieving the goal.
For more game theory mumbo-jumbo: I view “rationality” more in terms of how you build and navigate the game tree, rather than a post-hoc analysis of who ended up in the best cell of the payoff matrices. Or, to put it differently, rationality is ending up at the best cell of your payoff matrix, regardless of whether someone else just has +5 on all cells of their matrix or has more options or whatever.
So if my understanding that you were making with this a critique of the “Rationality is winning” meme, I agree that it’s a bit misleading and simplistic, but it still is “taking the best course of action with the resources and options available to you, reflectively and recursively including how much you spend figuring out which courses of action are better”—Expected Winning Within Available Possible Futures
This is a really good point and it is also related to Manfred’s comment that I don’t personally know how to reconcile with some of the points in the article. On one hand, I would like to have a lot of money because a lot of inconvenient things would suddenly become much easier. On the other hand, I would have to do other inconvenient things, like manage a lot of money. Also, I don’t think I would be happy doing Oprah’s job, even if it resulted in a lot of money. Basically, I would not mind lots of money but it is not currently a priority. So I don’t know if I’m actually winning or not, oops.
Therefore, a poll!
How successful are you? [pollid:426]
From a fame, money or bragging rights perspective, how ambitious are your current goals?[pollid:427]