In term of impact, I’d say Ben Franklin beat Hitler. Rationality + energy vs. charisma + energy. Energy seems like the key unifier, shared by almost all highly successful people. Einstein was an exception to that, but I think he’s uncommon. All of the above however, took major risks in life and show a survivorship bias. I think that energy is less critical for more mundane success.
Of course, energy can come in pills but those pills tend to sap one’s rationality if it wasn’t extremely high to begin with (and one’s physical robustness). Erdos comes to mind, but also Kennedy, Nixon, Rand, and yes, Hitler. Pills in question mimic physiology, namely, excess adrenalin, so I expect highly successful people to have high adrenalin levels or rationality, but recognize that there is usually a trade-off. Where someone has both, extreme success becomes much more likely.
Hitler seems to have failed in all of his goals except for harming Jews and Slavs, and to have had far from total success in those two goals.
The US still exists, while the Third Reich is long gone.
Franklin seems to have succeeded at being rich, amusing himself, having lots of children who retained a high level of socio-economic status and probably lots of unknown children. Living two or three times the contemporary life expectancy and having what most people would see as an extremely successful family life, scientific career, business life, literary career, non-family Romantic life, and a maximally successful political career seems to me to meet a best guess for the content of “winning” regardless of what his goals may have been.
I agree that Franklin fulfilled his goals much, much better than Hitler. But it’s not clear to me that one of them had a bigger impact on the world than the other. It’s just that Hitler’s impact wasn’t aligned with his intentions.
I probably should have read “success” rather than (raw) “impact”.
And how does it correlate with their own stated goals or unstated desires?
Unstated desires: Hitler was right on the money. Sure, his plans didn’t quite work out. Take over the world? It’s kind of a long shot. But given the payoff and the probabilities of success (remarkably high it would seem, given how close he got) the expected utility is rather high.
And consider what was motivating him. That nearly ubiquitous drive to dominate the world. Sure, the ‘world’ was historically a bit smaller than, you know, the actual world but the unstated desire still seems to be in place. The problem with taking over the world (or the several tribes between the inhospitable desert and the uncrossable river) is it doesn’t tend to last all that long. Someone else wants a turn. And has a big stick. So you’d better make the most of raping the conquered and servicing the concubines while you’re still in power. From what I understand Hitler didn’t really take advantage of his situation from the perspective of genetic fitness. His unstated sexual goals didn’t line up too well with the ‘short lived yet prolifically sexual dominance’ reproductive strategy but I don’t really hold that against his rationality.
When all is said and done I consider even Hitler’s short lived rise to power a far more successful fulfillment of goals than Ben Franklin managed and Hitler himself an example of rationality far above the mean rather than a counterexample of successful irrationality. He declined towards the end. His paranoia went from being an incredibly well calibrated asset to a liability as burn out took over. His judgement became impaired as he tried to push himself beyond human limits with stimulants, overwork and stress. A more rational person would have deduced that he was similar to all the other humans he could see not being able to achieve superhuman feats of achievement indefinitely and made allowances for that. History may have turned out differently if he had cut down on his workload and relaxed a bit.
“In term of impact, I’d say Ben Franklin beat Hitler.”
Ben Franklin was extremely rational, but he also had Hitler’s charisma. (I was not arguing that rationality was generally bad, just that it was not a large advantage.)
In term of impact, I’d say Ben Franklin beat Hitler. Rationality + energy vs. charisma + energy. Energy seems like the key unifier, shared by almost all highly successful people. Einstein was an exception to that, but I think he’s uncommon. All of the above however, took major risks in life and show a survivorship bias. I think that energy is less critical for more mundane success.
Of course, energy can come in pills but those pills tend to sap one’s rationality if it wasn’t extremely high to begin with (and one’s physical robustness). Erdos comes to mind, but also Kennedy, Nixon, Rand, and yes, Hitler. Pills in question mimic physiology, namely, excess adrenalin, so I expect highly successful people to have high adrenalin levels or rationality, but recognize that there is usually a trade-off. Where someone has both, extreme success becomes much more likely.
How do you define or measure this impact? And how does it correlate with their own stated goals or unstated desires?
Hitler seems to have failed in all of his goals except for harming Jews and Slavs, and to have had far from total success in those two goals.
The US still exists, while the Third Reich is long gone.
Franklin seems to have succeeded at being rich, amusing himself, having lots of children who retained a high level of socio-economic status and probably lots of unknown children. Living two or three times the contemporary life expectancy and having what most people would see as an extremely successful family life, scientific career, business life, literary career, non-family Romantic life, and a maximally successful political career seems to me to meet a best guess for the content of “winning” regardless of what his goals may have been.
I agree that Franklin fulfilled his goals much, much better than Hitler. But it’s not clear to me that one of them had a bigger impact on the world than the other. It’s just that Hitler’s impact wasn’t aligned with his intentions.
I probably should have read “success” rather than (raw) “impact”.
Unstated desires: Hitler was right on the money. Sure, his plans didn’t quite work out. Take over the world? It’s kind of a long shot. But given the payoff and the probabilities of success (remarkably high it would seem, given how close he got) the expected utility is rather high.
And consider what was motivating him. That nearly ubiquitous drive to dominate the world. Sure, the ‘world’ was historically a bit smaller than, you know, the actual world but the unstated desire still seems to be in place. The problem with taking over the world (or the several tribes between the inhospitable desert and the uncrossable river) is it doesn’t tend to last all that long. Someone else wants a turn. And has a big stick. So you’d better make the most of raping the conquered and servicing the concubines while you’re still in power. From what I understand Hitler didn’t really take advantage of his situation from the perspective of genetic fitness. His unstated sexual goals didn’t line up too well with the ‘short lived yet prolifically sexual dominance’ reproductive strategy but I don’t really hold that against his rationality.
When all is said and done I consider even Hitler’s short lived rise to power a far more successful fulfillment of goals than Ben Franklin managed and Hitler himself an example of rationality far above the mean rather than a counterexample of successful irrationality. He declined towards the end. His paranoia went from being an incredibly well calibrated asset to a liability as burn out took over. His judgement became impaired as he tried to push himself beyond human limits with stimulants, overwork and stress. A more rational person would have deduced that he was similar to all the other humans he could see not being able to achieve superhuman feats of achievement indefinitely and made allowances for that. History may have turned out differently if he had cut down on his workload and relaxed a bit.
“And consider what was motivating him. That nearly ubiquitous drive to dominate the world.”
Most people don’t actually want to conquer the world, or do much of anything, really. What most people actually want can be nicely summed up here.
“In term of impact, I’d say Ben Franklin beat Hitler.”
Ben Franklin was extremely rational, but he also had Hitler’s charisma. (I was not arguing that rationality was generally bad, just that it was not a large advantage.)