That said, on further consideration, I’m not sure the “Bayesian Conspiracy” has a choice, given its goals.
It’s possible that, even though these sorts of policies do turn away perfectly competant rationalists, they are the only alternative to ending up with a comfortable community of one-or-two-sigmas-above-the-mean rationalists rather than an ultra-elite x-rationality club that can bootstrap itself into the sort of excellence that we enjoy labelling in Japanese.
This has nothing to do with rationality, extreme or otherwise. For any property P, if you want to maintain a minimum standard of P within in a group, you need some way to test for P. If you have a highly reliable test for P that has negligible false positives and few false negatives, great, use that! But lacking one, a test with negligible false positives and lots of false negatives might be good enough, if you can afford to exclude a lot of potential. (Or even a series of mostly independent tests might work well enough, even when no individual test is highly reliable, as long as you exclude anyone who fails any of the tests… which also raises your false-negative rate.)
So, hey, if the ultra-elite rationality club is meeting somewhere and plotting optimized utility, great. More power to them. The most sensible thing for them to do is not even let me waste their time by knowing they exist. LessWrong certainly isn’t that club; it’s at best a self-selecting group of people who think that club would be a good thing if it existed, plus some others who think they ought to be in it.
Which is OK with me.
Unrelatedly, a specific quibble:
If I was rational enough to pick only stocks that would go up, I’d become successful regardless of how little willpower I had, as long as it was enough to pick up the phone and call my broker.
Well, and enough to actually do all the necessary research to obtain the data from which you could rationally conclude that a given stock will go up. And to continue attending to that data (and researching additionally relevant data) so that you can make rational decisions about whether to sell or hold those stocks tomorrow, next week, next month, etc.
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. And also yes.
I had a similar reaction to the fictional rationalist initiation ceremony.
That said, on further consideration, I’m not sure the “Bayesian Conspiracy” has a choice, given its goals.
It’s possible that, even though these sorts of policies do turn away perfectly competant rationalists, they are the only alternative to ending up with a comfortable community of one-or-two-sigmas-above-the-mean rationalists rather than an ultra-elite x-rationality club that can bootstrap itself into the sort of excellence that we enjoy labelling in Japanese.
This has nothing to do with rationality, extreme or otherwise. For any property P, if you want to maintain a minimum standard of P within in a group, you need some way to test for P. If you have a highly reliable test for P that has negligible false positives and few false negatives, great, use that! But lacking one, a test with negligible false positives and lots of false negatives might be good enough, if you can afford to exclude a lot of potential. (Or even a series of mostly independent tests might work well enough, even when no individual test is highly reliable, as long as you exclude anyone who fails any of the tests… which also raises your false-negative rate.)
So, hey, if the ultra-elite rationality club is meeting somewhere and plotting optimized utility, great. More power to them. The most sensible thing for them to do is not even let me waste their time by knowing they exist. LessWrong certainly isn’t that club; it’s at best a self-selecting group of people who think that club would be a good thing if it existed, plus some others who think they ought to be in it.
Which is OK with me.
Unrelatedly, a specific quibble:
Well, and enough to actually do all the necessary research to obtain the data from which you could rationally conclude that a given stock will go up. And to continue attending to that data (and researching additionally relevant data) so that you can make rational decisions about whether to sell or hold those stocks tomorrow, next week, next month, etc.