Have there been any rationalists on Jeopardy or similar game shows? It seems like there are a lot of high-IQ, well-educated, high-agency people in the rationality community who could make a good amount of money from such competitions fairly easily, which they could then use at least partially for effective altruism or similar high-utility causes.
I agree that learning trivia for the sake of learning trivia isn’t all that instrumentally useful, but don’t a lot of people around here already know enough to generate the necessary trivia, especially since shows with clues like Jeopardy, and also shows with multiple-choice questions like Who Wants to Be a Millionaire are designed to allow deductive reasoning? I anticipate that at least a quarter of the LW population could get most of the clues on a game of Jeopardy right without any further training. One could test his ability to do so by simply watching a show from home and trying to answer all the clues/questions.
And besides, if a utilitarian sees a way to save potentially dozens of people by gaining money to donate to effective charities, does it matter if they would have to do things that would be a waste of time if not for the arbitrary but still very real chance of gaining money from doing so? Isn’t that reason enough on its own?
I’m sure there are plenty of other things to take into consideration than simply the ability to win on game shows, such as potential status loss for appearing and higher potential status loss for losing, personal reasons to not want to go on national TV, etc., but this just seems like such an obvious thing to try to exploit for altruistic or even just personal purposes.
Well, I don’t know the difficulty level of American TV quiz, but most European ones are chock full of pop culture and sports stuff and would you really know who won high jumping in the olympics in 1960 or who was the drummer of some silly hair metal band in 1980?
There was a good discussion on LW about Arthur Chu’s performance on Jeopardy LINK—especially how he took advantage of regular patterns underlying question selection and “random” events to try and maximise his winnings.
The comment thread on that discussion also mentions other “rationalist” practices by other contestants.
Specifically, he hates the idea that “politics is the mindkiller”.
If I understand him correctly (which I probably don’t), I would say he believes he can rationally decide which side in a political conflict is “good” and which one is “evil”, and then the correct strategy is simply to attack the opponents with everything you have. The whole concept of corrupted hardware and ethical injuctions probably seems to him like a clever excuse for not doing the right thing.
If I tried to steelman (what I imagine to be) his position, I would say that today people overestimate their personal importance. Unlike in the ancient tribes, today the political battles have millions “fighting” against millions. Your own input is a very small fraction of the whole, and your probability of becoming a leader of the tribe is almost zero. Therefore your epistemic rationality is not really important in the large scale, but spreading memes that make people better or worse fighters can make a difference.
Something like “Your price for joining” taken to the extreme—your own sanity is the price, if you really care about an issue. If you care about your own rationality more than about the issue, that’s your choice, but it is not the one that maximizes human happiness.
Have there been any rationalists on Jeopardy or similar game shows? It seems like there are a lot of high-IQ, well-educated, high-agency people in the rationality community who could make a good amount of money from such competitions fairly easily, which they could then use at least partially for effective altruism or similar high-utility causes.
I think you need to learn the kind of things for that that many people here would consider a waste of time to learn.
I agree that learning trivia for the sake of learning trivia isn’t all that instrumentally useful, but don’t a lot of people around here already know enough to generate the necessary trivia, especially since shows with clues like Jeopardy, and also shows with multiple-choice questions like Who Wants to Be a Millionaire are designed to allow deductive reasoning? I anticipate that at least a quarter of the LW population could get most of the clues on a game of Jeopardy right without any further training. One could test his ability to do so by simply watching a show from home and trying to answer all the clues/questions.
And besides, if a utilitarian sees a way to save potentially dozens of people by gaining money to donate to effective charities, does it matter if they would have to do things that would be a waste of time if not for the arbitrary but still very real chance of gaining money from doing so? Isn’t that reason enough on its own?
I’m sure there are plenty of other things to take into consideration than simply the ability to win on game shows, such as potential status loss for appearing and higher potential status loss for losing, personal reasons to not want to go on national TV, etc., but this just seems like such an obvious thing to try to exploit for altruistic or even just personal purposes.
Well, I don’t know the difficulty level of American TV quiz, but most European ones are chock full of pop culture and sports stuff and would you really know who won high jumping in the olympics in 1960 or who was the drummer of some silly hair metal band in 1980?
There was a good discussion on LW about Arthur Chu’s performance on Jeopardy LINK—especially how he took advantage of regular patterns underlying question selection and “random” events to try and maximise his winnings.
The comment thread on that discussion also mentions other “rationalist” practices by other contestants.
Note that Arthur does not consider himself a rationalist, and hates LW.
Specifically, he hates the idea that “politics is the mindkiller”.
If I understand him correctly (which I probably don’t), I would say he believes he can rationally decide which side in a political conflict is “good” and which one is “evil”, and then the correct strategy is simply to attack the opponents with everything you have. The whole concept of corrupted hardware and ethical injuctions probably seems to him like a clever excuse for not doing the right thing.
If I tried to steelman (what I imagine to be) his position, I would say that today people overestimate their personal importance. Unlike in the ancient tribes, today the political battles have millions “fighting” against millions. Your own input is a very small fraction of the whole, and your probability of becoming a leader of the tribe is almost zero. Therefore your epistemic rationality is not really important in the large scale, but spreading memes that make people better or worse fighters can make a difference.
Something like “Your price for joining” taken to the extreme—your own sanity is the price, if you really care about an issue. If you care about your own rationality more than about the issue, that’s your choice, but it is not the one that maximizes human happiness.
So, he was playing almost like Watson?
I seem to remember Roger Craig used a very systematic and rational approach to winning Jeopardy.
Why would it help with trivia?