Another thing that’s pretty crucial here is that rationality is only aimed at expected winning.
Suppose we live on Lottery Planet, where nearly everyone has a miserable life, but you can buy a lottery ticket for a chance of $BIGNUM dollars. Nonetheless, the chances of winning the lottery are so small that the expected value of buying a ticket is negative. So the rational recommendation is to refrain from buying lottery tickets.
Nonetheless, the agents who would be “smiling down from their huge piles of utility” could only be the ones who “irrationally” bought lottery tickets. (Credit for this example goes to someone else, but I can’t remember who...)
You shouldn’t expect rationality to help you win absolutely. Some people will just get lucky. You should expect it to help you do better than average, however. The rationalist on lottery planet is certainly likely to be doing better than the average lottery-ticket buyer.
On a similar note: rationally succeeding and simply succeeding might involve two entirely different approaches. For example, if success is largely a result of other successful people conferring success on you because they see you displaying certain signals, it doesn’t follow that gaming the system will be as easy as naturally producing those signals. Signalling often relies on displays that are difficult to fake. The cognitive resources needed to fake it are often vastly disproportionate to the resources used in sincere signalling and, regardless, in many cases we may not even know what the signals are or how to fake them. The rational road to, say, political success might involve a multibillion dollar research program in social neuroscience whereas the natural road simply involves being born into the right family, going to the right schools, etc, and naturally acquiring all the signalling associated with that.
True. I’ve seen a few comments from successful folks(the one that was most memorable was the founders of Home Depot) saying that you need to gamble to be successful. In that particular case, it basically involved calling his boss an idiot and completely rearranging the business model of hardware stores. Now obviously, they wouldn’t have founded Home Depot without doing that, but I was thinking as I read this “For every one of you, there’s probably a thousand folks who got fired and a hundred who ran the business into the ground”. It’s a good guide for being extraordinarily successful, but by definition that can’t be done ordinarily.
So the rational recommendation is to refrain from buying lottery tickets.
The “rational recommendation” would be to figure out a way to decrease your effective ticket price (example: “Mom, next time, instead of buying me yet another pair of black socks I hate, just give me a few lottery tickets!”).
I feel like you’re fighting the hypothetical here. The point of the example was to illustrate a particular feature of rationality; obviously it’s going to break down if you allow yourself other options.
Another thing that’s pretty crucial here is that rationality is only aimed at expected winning.
Suppose we live on Lottery Planet, where nearly everyone has a miserable life, but you can buy a lottery ticket for a chance of $BIGNUM dollars. Nonetheless, the chances of winning the lottery are so small that the expected value of buying a ticket is negative. So the rational recommendation is to refrain from buying lottery tickets.
Nonetheless, the agents who would be “smiling down from their huge piles of utility” could only be the ones who “irrationally” bought lottery tickets. (Credit for this example goes to someone else, but I can’t remember who...)
You shouldn’t expect rationality to help you win absolutely. Some people will just get lucky. You should expect it to help you do better than average, however. The rationalist on lottery planet is certainly likely to be doing better than the average lottery-ticket buyer.
On a similar note: rationally succeeding and simply succeeding might involve two entirely different approaches. For example, if success is largely a result of other successful people conferring success on you because they see you displaying certain signals, it doesn’t follow that gaming the system will be as easy as naturally producing those signals. Signalling often relies on displays that are difficult to fake. The cognitive resources needed to fake it are often vastly disproportionate to the resources used in sincere signalling and, regardless, in many cases we may not even know what the signals are or how to fake them. The rational road to, say, political success might involve a multibillion dollar research program in social neuroscience whereas the natural road simply involves being born into the right family, going to the right schools, etc, and naturally acquiring all the signalling associated with that.
Yes, we already had that one out the first time around.
True. I’ve seen a few comments from successful folks(the one that was most memorable was the founders of Home Depot) saying that you need to gamble to be successful. In that particular case, it basically involved calling his boss an idiot and completely rearranging the business model of hardware stores. Now obviously, they wouldn’t have founded Home Depot without doing that, but I was thinking as I read this “For every one of you, there’s probably a thousand folks who got fired and a hundred who ran the business into the ground”. It’s a good guide for being extraordinarily successful, but by definition that can’t be done ordinarily.
The “rational recommendation” would be to figure out a way to decrease your effective ticket price (example: “Mom, next time, instead of buying me yet another pair of black socks I hate, just give me a few lottery tickets!”).
I feel like you’re fighting the hypothetical here. The point of the example was to illustrate a particular feature of rationality; obviously it’s going to break down if you allow yourself other options.