I would add (or maybe it is already mentioned in some of the linked articles) that luck and long-term traits (some of them immutable) seem to play a larger role in winning than most people here seem to imagine. Also, success seems to require not doing one thing right, but rather avoiding many possible mistakes (some of them by skills, others by luck), so even dramatically improving on one of those things may have little overall effect.
The opposite of this is what some people call “one weird trick” mentality—the belief that there is one thing so important that if you get it right, it will dramatically improve your entire life, and that all you need to get it right is to read one more important idea (that the rationalist community could provide).
As an example of getting many things right, imagine that your goal is to become rich. One possible way (let’s call it “the path of the employee”) is to do all of the following:
become great at some rare and useful skill (such as programming)
learn to negotiate to get a high salary
don’t mindlessly increase your spending proportionally to your income
put the extra money in passively managed index funds
Notice how failing at any 1 of these means not getting rich, even if you get the remaining 3 right. Without skills, there is nothing to build on (from this perspective, even bullshitting is a skill). Without negotiation, your skills will only make your boss rich, not you. If you don’t save money, the greater salary can afford you better clothes or a nicer home, but as soon as you lose the job, you lose everything, so this might actually increase your stress and make you do more overtime, potentially reducing the quality of your life. Finally, if you invest your savings in some scam, you will lose them all, and you have to start from zero again, only older. So even if you had a magical wand that fixes one of these things instantly, there is still a long way from there to actually getting rich.
At any step, you can be sabotaged in many ways. You may learn a technology that goes out of fashion. It may turn out that even if you learn programming, you don’t have what it takes to become great at it. You might be caught in a loop where poverty requires you to work two low-paying jobs, so you can never find the time to learn programming. Maybe you are so unattractive or autistic, that no one wants to hire you and give you high salary regardless of your skills. You may have a health problem that prevents you from working full-time. Even if you want to save your money, your partner may waste it, and the domestic arguments make you too exhausted. Perhaps you have poor relatives, who expect you to help them financially, and refusing them would be too costly for you socially. Maybe the passively managed index funds do not exist in your country, or are highly taxed, or maybe illegal.
Many things that need to be done right, and many possible accidents that can ruin it all. And even if you succeed at all of this, this is just money. What about health? Mental health? Relationships? Meaning in life? What is the point of getting rich if in the middle of the way you die of something preventable, or get depressed and kill yourself? Winning kinda requires having it all, otherwise the grass will feel greener on the other side.
And as a benchmark for your progress, you will probably look at people who started at a better position, and proceeded faster than you thanks to the Matthew effect. I guess this is another important detail: even if rationality does not work for you, that doesn’t automatically imply that something else would have worked better. Maybe the cards were simply stacked against you.
Thank you, this is great!
I would add (or maybe it is already mentioned in some of the linked articles) that luck and long-term traits (some of them immutable) seem to play a larger role in winning than most people here seem to imagine. Also, success seems to require not doing one thing right, but rather avoiding many possible mistakes (some of them by skills, others by luck), so even dramatically improving on one of those things may have little overall effect.
The opposite of this is what some people call “one weird trick” mentality—the belief that there is one thing so important that if you get it right, it will dramatically improve your entire life, and that all you need to get it right is to read one more important idea (that the rationalist community could provide).
As an example of getting many things right, imagine that your goal is to become rich. One possible way (let’s call it “the path of the employee”) is to do all of the following:
become great at some rare and useful skill (such as programming)
learn to negotiate to get a high salary
don’t mindlessly increase your spending proportionally to your income
put the extra money in passively managed index funds
Notice how failing at any 1 of these means not getting rich, even if you get the remaining 3 right. Without skills, there is nothing to build on (from this perspective, even bullshitting is a skill). Without negotiation, your skills will only make your boss rich, not you. If you don’t save money, the greater salary can afford you better clothes or a nicer home, but as soon as you lose the job, you lose everything, so this might actually increase your stress and make you do more overtime, potentially reducing the quality of your life. Finally, if you invest your savings in some scam, you will lose them all, and you have to start from zero again, only older. So even if you had a magical wand that fixes one of these things instantly, there is still a long way from there to actually getting rich.
At any step, you can be sabotaged in many ways. You may learn a technology that goes out of fashion. It may turn out that even if you learn programming, you don’t have what it takes to become great at it. You might be caught in a loop where poverty requires you to work two low-paying jobs, so you can never find the time to learn programming. Maybe you are so unattractive or autistic, that no one wants to hire you and give you high salary regardless of your skills. You may have a health problem that prevents you from working full-time. Even if you want to save your money, your partner may waste it, and the domestic arguments make you too exhausted. Perhaps you have poor relatives, who expect you to help them financially, and refusing them would be too costly for you socially. Maybe the passively managed index funds do not exist in your country, or are highly taxed, or maybe illegal.
Many things that need to be done right, and many possible accidents that can ruin it all. And even if you succeed at all of this, this is just money. What about health? Mental health? Relationships? Meaning in life? What is the point of getting rich if in the middle of the way you die of something preventable, or get depressed and kill yourself? Winning kinda requires having it all, otherwise the grass will feel greener on the other side.
And as a benchmark for your progress, you will probably look at people who started at a better position, and proceeded faster than you thanks to the Matthew effect. I guess this is another important detail: even if rationality does not work for you, that doesn’t automatically imply that something else would have worked better. Maybe the cards were simply stacked against you.