Your article is interesting, and a lot of the points you make are valid. In practice, LW-style rationality might well have some of the effects you describe, especially in the hands of those who use it or understand it in a limited way. However, I don’t think your point is valid as a general argument. For example:
If you win too much, deprive those close to you the chance of winning, effectively causing them anxiety.
To me, this seems to be based on a fallacious understanding of LW-style “winning.” Winning here means accomplishing your goals, and using a “rationality” toolkit to win means that you accomplish more of your goals, or accomplish them better, than you would have without those tools.
For some people, being right about everything is a goal. For some people, harmonious social relationships are a goal. For a lot of people, these are both goals, although they may be prioritized differently, i.e. a different weight may be placed on each. If the goal of being right conflicts with the goal of harmonious relationships, and harmonious relationships are prioritary, then according to the toolkit of “rationality”, it is rational to lay off a bit and avoid threatening the self-image of your friends and family. This is certainly true for me. Being right, coming across as exceptionally smart, etc, are rather low-priority goals for me compared to making and keeping friends. (The fact that the former has always been easier than the latter may be a factor).
Naive use of a rationality toolkit, by people who don’t know their own desires, may in fact result in the kind of interpersonal conflict you describe, or in barreling too fast towards the wrong goal. That would be improper use of the tool...and if you cared to ask, the tool would be able to tell you that the use was improper-and aiming for the wrong goal is something that LW specifically warns against.
Nitpick: there’s something funny up with the formatting of this article. The text is appearing smaller than usual, making it somewhat hard to read. Maybe go back to ‘edit’ and see if you can play around with the font size?
For some people, being right about everything is a goal. For some people, harmonious social relationships are a goal. For a lot of people, these are both goals, although they may be prioritized differently, i.e. a different weight may be placed on each.
Thank you, your comments have helped crystallize my ideas. When I said to “rethink what game you are playing” that was a misleading statement. It would be more accurate to my idea to say that some times you have to know when to stop playing. The point I was trying to make is not that the goal you choose is damaging to your relations, but literally winning itself regardless of the goal. From my experience, people don’t care about what’s right as much as they care about being right.
Let’s imagine, as you say, your goal is social harmony. This is not an individual goal, like golf, it is a team goal. Achieving this goal requires both a proper method and team subordination. If you let the other players of your team play out their strategies, then you will not win. However, because of the phenomenon I have attempted to explain above (people’s need to fulfill certain ideal roles) taking the steps necessary to “win” is damaging to the other players, because it forces them to acknowledge their subordination, and thus in reality does not achieve the desired goal. Does this make sense?
It is similar to the daoist idea of action vs inaction. Inaction is technically a type of action, but it is also defined by existing outside of action. The type of “game” I am talking about is technically a game, but it is defined by relinquishing the power/position of control. Even if you can win/ know how to win, sometimes what people need more than winning is to attempt to win by themselves and know that you are in it with them.
Of course there are times when it is worth more to win, but I think there are times when it is worth the risk of losing to allow others the chance to feel that they can win, even if it is a lesser win than you envision.
I’m glad my comment helped clarify your ideas for you. I can’t say that I entirely understand your point, though.
It would be more accurate to my idea to say that some times you have to know when to stop playing.
Stop playing what game? Say you’re with a group of friends, and you’re all playing a game together, like Monopoly or something. You’re also playing the “game” of social relations, where people have roles like “the smart one”, “the cool one” or “the helpful one” that they want to fulfill. Do you mean that sometimes you have to know when to stop playing to win at Monopoly in order to smooth over the social relations game and prevent people from getting frustrated and angry with you? Or do you mean that sometimes you have to stop playing the social status/relations game? The former is, I think, fairly obvious. Some people get too caught up in games like Monopoly and assign more value to “winning” than to letting everyone else have fun, but that’s more a failure of social skills than “rationality”.
As for the latter, I’m not sure I understand what “deciding to stop playing” at social relations would mean. That you would stop trying to make yourself look good? That you would stop talking to the other people with you? More to the point, I don’t think social relations is a game where one person wins over everyone else. If I got to look cool, but it meant that some of my friends didn’t have fun and felt neglected, I certainly wouldn’t feel like I’d won the game of social harmony.
However, because of the phenomenon I have attempted to explain above (people’s need to fulfill certain ideal roles) taking the steps necessary to “win” is damaging to the other players, because it forces them to acknowledge their subordination, and thus in reality does not achieve the desired goal. Does this make sense?
This paragraph makes it sound like you’re talking about social status. Yes, social status is somewhat of a zero-sum game, in that you being cooler and getting tons of attentions makes everyone else a bit less cool by comparison and takes away from the attention they get. But that’s in no way the goal of social harmony, at least not as I define it. In a harmonious group, no one feels neglected, and everyone enjoys themselves.
In summary, I think you may just be describing a problem that doesn’t really happen to me (although, thinking back, it happened to me more back when I was 12 and didn’t have good social skills.) Given that intelligence and “nerdiness” is associated with poor social skills, and LW is considered a nerdy community, I can see why it wouldn’t be an unreasonable assumption to think that others in the community have this problem, and are liked less by other people because they try too hard to be right. But that’s most likely because they don’t think of “getting along with others” or “improving their social skills” as specific goals in their own right. Anyone who does form those goals, and apply the toolkit of LW-rationality to them, would probably realize on their own that trying to be right all the time, and “winning” in that sense, would mean losing at a different and perhaps more important game.
Sorry for such a late response, life really picked up this month in many amazing and wondrous ways and I found myself lacking the time or desire to respond. Now things have lulled back, and I would like to address your, and all the other responses to my ideas.
Stop playing what game? …As for the latter, I’m not sure I understand what “deciding to stop playing” at social relations would mean.
When I say game I am referring to a board game, a social game, a dream, really any desired outcome. Social status is a type of game, and it was the one I thought provided the most powerful analogy, but it is not the overall point. The overall point is the social harmony you speak of. You say that in your opinion,
In a harmonious group, no one feels neglected, and everyone enjoys themselves...
I agree with this definition of harmony. The idea I am trying to express goes beyond the poor social skills you are assuming I am attributing to this “nerdy community” (which I am not). Beyond individually motivated goals, I am suggesting that for no one to feel neglected and everyone to enjoy themselves it is necessary for the actor to stop trying to achieve any goal.
The pursuit of any one goal-orientation automatically excludes all other potential goal-orientations. If you have an idea of what is funny, what is cool, in attempting to actualize these ideas you are excluding all other possible interpretations of them.
For no one to feel neglected and everyone to truly enjoy themselves, then everyone’s ideas of happiness, security, camaraderie, humor, etc must be met. My idea is somewhat similar to Hinesburg’s uncertainty principle, in that your intentionally makes the goal you desire unattainable. Does this make sense?
for no one to feel neglected and everyone to enjoy themselves it is necessary for the actor to stop trying to achieve any goal.
Do you mean that the person in question has to just sit back and relax? That they have to stop trying to steer the direction of the conversation and just let it flow? Or that they have to focus on other people’s enjoyment rather than their own enjoyment? The former doesn’t feel true for me, in that having someone with good social skills and an idea of people’s interests steer the conversation can make it more enjoyable rather than less so. The latter, maybe true, but I wouldn’t want to live like that.
What justifies this unconventional definition of the word? Random House Dictionary offers three senses of “win”:
to finish first in a race, contest, or the like.
to succeed by striving or effort: He applied for a scholarship and won.
to gain the victory; overcome an adversary: The home team won.
Notice that 2 of the 3 involve a contest against another; definition 2 is closer to what’s wanted, but the connection between winning a competition is so strong, that when offering an example, the dictionary editors chose a competitive example.
This unconventional usage encourages equivocation, and it appeals to the hyper-competitive, while repelling those who shun excessive competition. Why LW’s attachment to this usage? It says little for the virtue of precision; it makes LWers seem like shallow go-getters who want to get ahead at any cost.
Nothing justifies it, really. Like most local jargon in any community, it evolves contingent on events.
In this case, the history is that the phrase “rationalists should win” became popular some years ago as a way of counteracting the idea that what being rational meant was constantly overanalyzing all problems and doing things I know are stupid because I can come up with a superficially logical argument suggesting I should do those things. Newcomb’s Problem came up a lot in that context as well. The general subtext was that if my notion of “rationality” is getting in the way of my actually achieving what I want, then I should discard that notion and instead actually concentrate on achieving what I want.
Leaving all that aside: to my mind, any definition of “win” that makes a win-win scenario a contradiction in terms is a poor definition, and I decline to use it.
Leaving that aside: do we seem to you like shallow go-getters who want to get ahead at any cost, or are we talking about how we seem to some hypothetical other people?
If the word “win” is getting in people’s way because it makes them think of zero-sum scenarios, social status conflicts, or Charlie Sheen, then we can and should find other ways of explaining the same concept.
Rationality should make you better off than you would be if you didn’t have it. That doesn’t imply defeating or outdoing other people. It just means that the way we evaluate candidate decision procedures is whether they create beneficial outcomes — not bogus standards such as how unemotional they are, how many insignificant bits of data they take in, how much they resemble Traditional Scholarship, how much CPU time they consume, or whether they respect naïve ideas of causality.
Yup. Personally, I prefer “optimizers should optimally achieve their goals” to “rationalists should win”. But there exist people who find the latter version pithier, easier to remember, and more compelling. Different phrasings work better for different people, so it helps to be able to say the same thing in multiple ways, and it helps to know your audience.
I have elsewhere argued essentially this, though “optimized” and “optimal” are importantly different. The conclusion I came to reading the comments there was that people vary in how they process the relevant connotations, and arguing lexical choice makes my teeth ache, but personally I nevertheless try to avoid talking about “rational X choosing” when I mean optimizing my choice of X for particular goals.
This is a little speculative and I wasn’t around for the original coining of the LW usage, but American geek slang has contained a much broader sense of “win” for quite a while. Someone conversant in that sociolect might say a project wins if it accomplishes its goals (related to but broader than sense 2 in the parent); they also might say an event is a win if it has some unexpected positive consequence, that a person wins if they display luck or excellence in some (not necessarily competitive) domain, et cetera. I’d expect that to have come from 1990s gamer jargon if you trace it back, but it’s metastasized pretty far from those origins by now.
I’m guessing that “rationalists should win” derives from that usage.
What justifies this unconventional definition of the word? Random House Dictionary offers three senses of “win”:
I apologize, I thought it was appropriate to base my discussion in community terminology. I guess I assumed Eliezer’s definition of “winning” and rationality were a community norm. My bad.
Your article is interesting, and a lot of the points you make are valid. In practice, LW-style rationality might well have some of the effects you describe, especially in the hands of those who use it or understand it in a limited way. However, I don’t think your point is valid as a general argument. For example:
To me, this seems to be based on a fallacious understanding of LW-style “winning.” Winning here means accomplishing your goals, and using a “rationality” toolkit to win means that you accomplish more of your goals, or accomplish them better, than you would have without those tools.
For some people, being right about everything is a goal. For some people, harmonious social relationships are a goal. For a lot of people, these are both goals, although they may be prioritized differently, i.e. a different weight may be placed on each. If the goal of being right conflicts with the goal of harmonious relationships, and harmonious relationships are prioritary, then according to the toolkit of “rationality”, it is rational to lay off a bit and avoid threatening the self-image of your friends and family. This is certainly true for me. Being right, coming across as exceptionally smart, etc, are rather low-priority goals for me compared to making and keeping friends. (The fact that the former has always been easier than the latter may be a factor).
Naive use of a rationality toolkit, by people who don’t know their own desires, may in fact result in the kind of interpersonal conflict you describe, or in barreling too fast towards the wrong goal. That would be improper use of the tool...and if you cared to ask, the tool would be able to tell you that the use was improper-and aiming for the wrong goal is something that LW specifically warns against.
Nitpick: there’s something funny up with the formatting of this article. The text is appearing smaller than usual, making it somewhat hard to read. Maybe go back to ‘edit’ and see if you can play around with the font size?
Thank you for your comments,
Thank you, your comments have helped crystallize my ideas. When I said to “rethink what game you are playing” that was a misleading statement. It would be more accurate to my idea to say that some times you have to know when to stop playing. The point I was trying to make is not that the goal you choose is damaging to your relations, but literally winning itself regardless of the goal. From my experience, people don’t care about what’s right as much as they care about being right. Let’s imagine, as you say, your goal is social harmony. This is not an individual goal, like golf, it is a team goal. Achieving this goal requires both a proper method and team subordination. If you let the other players of your team play out their strategies, then you will not win. However, because of the phenomenon I have attempted to explain above (people’s need to fulfill certain ideal roles) taking the steps necessary to “win” is damaging to the other players, because it forces them to acknowledge their subordination, and thus in reality does not achieve the desired goal. Does this make sense?
It is similar to the daoist idea of action vs inaction. Inaction is technically a type of action, but it is also defined by existing outside of action. The type of “game” I am talking about is technically a game, but it is defined by relinquishing the power/position of control. Even if you can win/ know how to win, sometimes what people need more than winning is to attempt to win by themselves and know that you are in it with them.
Of course there are times when it is worth more to win, but I think there are times when it is worth the risk of losing to allow others the chance to feel that they can win, even if it is a lesser win than you envision.
Thank you again for your comments.
I’m glad my comment helped clarify your ideas for you. I can’t say that I entirely understand your point, though.
Stop playing what game? Say you’re with a group of friends, and you’re all playing a game together, like Monopoly or something. You’re also playing the “game” of social relations, where people have roles like “the smart one”, “the cool one” or “the helpful one” that they want to fulfill. Do you mean that sometimes you have to know when to stop playing to win at Monopoly in order to smooth over the social relations game and prevent people from getting frustrated and angry with you? Or do you mean that sometimes you have to stop playing the social status/relations game? The former is, I think, fairly obvious. Some people get too caught up in games like Monopoly and assign more value to “winning” than to letting everyone else have fun, but that’s more a failure of social skills than “rationality”.
As for the latter, I’m not sure I understand what “deciding to stop playing” at social relations would mean. That you would stop trying to make yourself look good? That you would stop talking to the other people with you? More to the point, I don’t think social relations is a game where one person wins over everyone else. If I got to look cool, but it meant that some of my friends didn’t have fun and felt neglected, I certainly wouldn’t feel like I’d won the game of social harmony.
This paragraph makes it sound like you’re talking about social status. Yes, social status is somewhat of a zero-sum game, in that you being cooler and getting tons of attentions makes everyone else a bit less cool by comparison and takes away from the attention they get. But that’s in no way the goal of social harmony, at least not as I define it. In a harmonious group, no one feels neglected, and everyone enjoys themselves.
In summary, I think you may just be describing a problem that doesn’t really happen to me (although, thinking back, it happened to me more back when I was 12 and didn’t have good social skills.) Given that intelligence and “nerdiness” is associated with poor social skills, and LW is considered a nerdy community, I can see why it wouldn’t be an unreasonable assumption to think that others in the community have this problem, and are liked less by other people because they try too hard to be right. But that’s most likely because they don’t think of “getting along with others” or “improving their social skills” as specific goals in their own right. Anyone who does form those goals, and apply the toolkit of LW-rationality to them, would probably realize on their own that trying to be right all the time, and “winning” in that sense, would mean losing at a different and perhaps more important game.
Sorry for such a late response, life really picked up this month in many amazing and wondrous ways and I found myself lacking the time or desire to respond. Now things have lulled back, and I would like to address your, and all the other responses to my ideas.
When I say game I am referring to a board game, a social game, a dream, really any desired outcome. Social status is a type of game, and it was the one I thought provided the most powerful analogy, but it is not the overall point. The overall point is the social harmony you speak of. You say that in your opinion,
I agree with this definition of harmony. The idea I am trying to express goes beyond the poor social skills you are assuming I am attributing to this “nerdy community” (which I am not). Beyond individually motivated goals, I am suggesting that for no one to feel neglected and everyone to enjoy themselves it is necessary for the actor to stop trying to achieve any goal. The pursuit of any one goal-orientation automatically excludes all other potential goal-orientations. If you have an idea of what is funny, what is cool, in attempting to actualize these ideas you are excluding all other possible interpretations of them. For no one to feel neglected and everyone to truly enjoy themselves, then everyone’s ideas of happiness, security, camaraderie, humor, etc must be met. My idea is somewhat similar to Hinesburg’s uncertainty principle, in that your intentionally makes the goal you desire unattainable. Does this make sense?
Do you mean that the person in question has to just sit back and relax? That they have to stop trying to steer the direction of the conversation and just let it flow? Or that they have to focus on other people’s enjoyment rather than their own enjoyment? The former doesn’t feel true for me, in that having someone with good social skills and an idea of people’s interests steer the conversation can make it more enjoyable rather than less so. The latter, maybe true, but I wouldn’t want to live like that.
What justifies this unconventional definition of the word? Random House Dictionary offers three senses of “win”:
to finish first in a race, contest, or the like.
to succeed by striving or effort: He applied for a scholarship and won.
to gain the victory; overcome an adversary: The home team won.
Notice that 2 of the 3 involve a contest against another; definition 2 is closer to what’s wanted, but the connection between winning a competition is so strong, that when offering an example, the dictionary editors chose a competitive example.
This unconventional usage encourages equivocation, and it appeals to the hyper-competitive, while repelling those who shun excessive competition. Why LW’s attachment to this usage? It says little for the virtue of precision; it makes LWers seem like shallow go-getters who want to get ahead at any cost.
Nothing justifies it, really. Like most local jargon in any community, it evolves contingent on events.
In this case, the history is that the phrase “rationalists should win” became popular some years ago as a way of counteracting the idea that what being rational meant was constantly overanalyzing all problems and doing things I know are stupid because I can come up with a superficially logical argument suggesting I should do those things. Newcomb’s Problem came up a lot in that context as well. The general subtext was that if my notion of “rationality” is getting in the way of my actually achieving what I want, then I should discard that notion and instead actually concentrate on achieving what I want.
Leaving all that aside: to my mind, any definition of “win” that makes a win-win scenario a contradiction in terms is a poor definition, and I decline to use it.
Leaving that aside: do we seem to you like shallow go-getters who want to get ahead at any cost, or are we talking about how we seem to some hypothetical other people?
If the word “win” is getting in people’s way because it makes them think of zero-sum scenarios, social status conflicts, or Charlie Sheen, then we can and should find other ways of explaining the same concept.
Rationality should make you better off than you would be if you didn’t have it. That doesn’t imply defeating or outdoing other people. It just means that the way we evaluate candidate decision procedures is whether they create beneficial outcomes — not bogus standards such as how unemotional they are, how many insignificant bits of data they take in, how much they resemble Traditional Scholarship, how much CPU time they consume, or whether they respect naïve ideas of causality.
Yup. Personally, I prefer “optimizers should optimally achieve their goals” to “rationalists should win”. But there exist people who find the latter version pithier, easier to remember, and more compelling. Different phrasings work better for different people, so it helps to be able to say the same thing in multiple ways, and it helps to know your audience.
“Lesswrong, a community blog dedicated to the art of optimal goal-seeking, mostly through optimal belief acquisition.”
I kinda like that. It’s wordier, but it loses some of the connotations of “rational” that invariably trip up newcomers.
I have elsewhere argued essentially this, though “optimized” and “optimal” are importantly different. The conclusion I came to reading the comments there was that people vary in how they process the relevant connotations, and arguing lexical choice makes my teeth ache, but personally I nevertheless try to avoid talking about “rational X choosing” when I mean optimizing my choice of X for particular goals.
This is a little speculative and I wasn’t around for the original coining of the LW usage, but American geek slang has contained a much broader sense of “win” for quite a while. Someone conversant in that sociolect might say a project wins if it accomplishes its goals (related to but broader than sense 2 in the parent); they also might say an event is a win if it has some unexpected positive consequence, that a person wins if they display luck or excellence in some (not necessarily competitive) domain, et cetera. I’d expect that to have come from 1990s gamer jargon if you trace it back, but it’s metastasized pretty far from those origins by now.
I’m guessing that “rationalists should win” derives from that usage.
Indeed, one might even say that Less Wrong is for the win.
I apologize, I thought it was appropriate to base my discussion in community terminology. I guess I assumed Eliezer’s definition of “winning” and rationality were a community norm. My bad.