“And if we can’t win, it means we weren’t such good rationalists as we thought, and ought to try something different the next time around.”
This attitude, that somehow, every single obstacle to success or happiness is solved by rationality, is a mistake, I think. People are not in control of the amount of opportunity they have, and i don’t think being supremely rational is a sure way to triumph. Victims of slavery and car crashes are extreme examples, but I think there’s more subtle situations in which no reasoned plan of action can straightforwardly help you “win.”
The point, I think, is not that you can achieve arbitrarily large success no matter what your starting point. It’s that you achieve the most success that is possible given your starting point.
In other words: yes, life is unfair. You now have two options. You can either:
1. Do the best you can with what you are given. This doesn’t mean quietly acquiescing to whatever default fate is expected of you, or going the path of least resistance; it can mean doing grandiose, ambitious, seemingly-crazy things. Maybe you decide that your best option, given your starting point, is to try to change the world (or at least some relevant part of it). But at any rate, your strategy takes your starting point as given.
or...
2. Sit there and whine that the world isn’t fair, while behaving as if the world actually did work the way you think it should work. This strategy will, of course, fail. It seems obvious to me that whatever external factors have conspired to keep you down, at least part of the responsibility for such failure is your own.
ETA: I think one source of contention in your comment is that when we talk about “triumphing”, or “solving” an obstacle, what we mean is simply achieving the best result given the starting conditions, rather than achieving some given point on an absolute scale of success.
“And if we can’t win, it means we weren’t such good rationalists as we thought, and ought to try something different the next time around.”
This attitude, that somehow, every single obstacle to success or happiness is solved by rationality, is a mistake, I think. People are not in control of the amount of opportunity they have, and i don’t think being supremely rational is a sure way to triumph. Victims of slavery and car crashes are extreme examples, but I think there’s more subtle situations in which no reasoned plan of action can straightforwardly help you “win.”
The point, I think, is not that you can achieve arbitrarily large success no matter what your starting point. It’s that you achieve the most success that is possible given your starting point.
In other words: yes, life is unfair. You now have two options. You can either:
1. Do the best you can with what you are given. This doesn’t mean quietly acquiescing to whatever default fate is expected of you, or going the path of least resistance; it can mean doing grandiose, ambitious, seemingly-crazy things. Maybe you decide that your best option, given your starting point, is to try to change the world (or at least some relevant part of it). But at any rate, your strategy takes your starting point as given.
or...
2. Sit there and whine that the world isn’t fair, while behaving as if the world actually did work the way you think it should work. This strategy will, of course, fail. It seems obvious to me that whatever external factors have conspired to keep you down, at least part of the responsibility for such failure is your own.
ETA: I think one source of contention in your comment is that when we talk about “triumphing”, or “solving” an obstacle, what we mean is simply achieving the best result given the starting conditions, rather than achieving some given point on an absolute scale of success.