Should rationalists (be seen to) win?
There is an saying that Rationalists should win. This stems from the belief that rationality should be useful and that winning is what everyone should strive to do.
I’m going to point out three different problems with this idea.
The first is that it is easily goodhearted, competitions can be set up and people can win them, showing their rationality. However all this activity may not advance the goals of the people if they were honest about them.
This leads to the second point, long term goals don’t have obvious winners. Who knows which of the many people working on biorisk will actually stop a pandemic, it may not be an easy assessment to make even after the fact.
The third is that it prefers visible discrete impact. You might find very impactful people in the spies that cannot talk about their work or the person that kept a team from falling apart in a high stress scenario. They are both aiming for and having an impact, just not one that is legible.
Relatedly, if rationalism mainly works by giving you an advantage in inferring true and useful information, then you run into a commons problem because information can be copied so most of the value goes to the extended community in which the information is shared, rather than to the person themselves.
And that’s why rationalists should hang out with other rationalists, to also receive some of that value in turn. And to benefit the wider society, rationalists should blog. ;)
Though, more seriously, if other people are willing to copy the true information, that already sounds quite optimistic. It is probably more often the case that people ignore it, or laugh at it. (Like, you know, it’s not exactly a secret that we had a covid pandemic recently. It’s just… controversial, to put it mildly.)
That’s true. Communities that can encourage truth speaking and exploration will probably get more of it and be richer for it in the long term.
Such communities are then easily pulverized by communities who value strong groupthink and appeal to authority, and thus are easier whipped into frenzy.
I think “rationalists should win” is one of those snippets that is picked for its catchiness—it embodies a kernel of truth, but simplifies it and smooths it over much, to the point that perhaps it becomes counterproductive. The kernel of truth is of course “having a systematic way of grounding your knowledge in the real world gives you an advantage in pursuing any goal compared to people who don’t do the same”. This is more of a general on-average statement. For example, you might still lose to people pursuing different goals that are just easier. Or you might lose to people who are not acting rationally, but just happen to have very good heuristics for that specific goal (this is actually IMO a common thing with politicians—they often have a very good instinctive feel for the problem of getting people to like and support them, then they’re absolutely terrible at anything involving object-level problems because their only mental toolset is the one that deals with people).
So yeah, honestly, I think in the end it does more harm than good. It sounds like a badass boast, which already makes you sound arrogant and loses you some points in some people’s eyes; but nothing worse than a badass boast on which you can’t even consistently deliver. And adding all the required caveats would make it not sound sufficiently laconic any more, so honestly, maybe it’s better to drop the snappy motto altogether.
Proposing a softer version:
Rationalists should not suck (compared to average population) at the things they strongly care about.
Yeah, somewhat less inspiring.
parades around with Game of Thrones-like heraldry crest
“WE DO NOT SUCK”