I don’t see the ‘why aren’t you winning?’ critique as that powerful, and I’m someone who tends critical of rationality writ-large.
High-IQ societies and superforecasters select for demonstrable performance at being smart/epistemically rational. Yet on surveying these groups you see things like, “People generally do better-than-average by commonsense metrics, some are doing great, but it isn’t like everyone is a millionaire”. Given the barrier to entry to the rationalist community is more, “sincere interest” than “top X-percentile of the population”, it would remarkable if they exhibited even better outcomes as a cohort.
There’s also going to be messy causal inference worries that cut either way. If there is in some sense ‘adverse selection’ (perhaps alike IQ societies) for rationalists tending to have less aptitude at social communication, greater prevalence of mental illness (or whatever else), then these people enjoying modest to good success in their lives reflects extremely well on the rationalist community. Contrariwise, there’s plausible confounding where smart creative people will naturally gravitate to rationality-esque discussion, even if this discussion doesn’t improve their effectiveness (I think a lot of non-rationalists were around OB/LW in the early days): the cohort of people who ‘teach themselves general relativity for fun’ may also enjoy much better than average success, but it probably wasn’t the relativity which did it.
A deeper worry wrt to rationality is there may not be anything to be taught. The elements of (say) RQ don’t show much of a common factor (unlike IQ), correlate more strongly with IQ than one another, and improvements in rational thinking have limited domain transfer. So there might not be much of a general sense of (epistemic) rationality, and limited hope for someone to substantially improve themselves in this area.
I don’t see the ‘why aren’t you winning?’ critique as that powerful, and I’m someone who tends critical of rationality writ-large.
High-IQ societies and superforecasters select for demonstrable performance at being smart/epistemically rational. Yet on surveying these groups you see things like, “People generally do better-than-average by commonsense metrics, some are doing great, but it isn’t like everyone is a millionaire”. Given the barrier to entry to the rationalist community is more, “sincere interest” than “top X-percentile of the population”, it would remarkable if they exhibited even better outcomes as a cohort.
There’s also going to be messy causal inference worries that cut either way. If there is in some sense ‘adverse selection’ (perhaps alike IQ societies) for rationalists tending to have less aptitude at social communication, greater prevalence of mental illness (or whatever else), then these people enjoying modest to good success in their lives reflects extremely well on the rationalist community. Contrariwise, there’s plausible confounding where smart creative people will naturally gravitate to rationality-esque discussion, even if this discussion doesn’t improve their effectiveness (I think a lot of non-rationalists were around OB/LW in the early days): the cohort of people who ‘teach themselves general relativity for fun’ may also enjoy much better than average success, but it probably wasn’t the relativity which did it.
A deeper worry wrt to rationality is there may not be anything to be taught. The elements of (say) RQ don’t show much of a common factor (unlike IQ), correlate more strongly with IQ than one another, and improvements in rational thinking have limited domain transfer. So there might not be much of a general sense of (epistemic) rationality, and limited hope for someone to substantially improve themselves in this area.