Check out Gladwell’s new book—Outliers. Our success cannot be attributed to our individuality to the degree that most American’s think it can. There are huge cultural influences, arbitrary society rules, birth year, etc… There’s a chapter on why high IQ only matters to a certain point. Once you’re “inteligent enough”, practical wisdom takes over in determination of success. I don’t think akrasia has that much to do with it. We live in a world of lower inteligence and have to play by those rules. It pays to be ONE step ahead of the mob, not 10! You cannot make money in the stock market by being 10 steps ahead. You’d be shorting stocks into oblivious in the 90′s and 2006-2007, while the mob was getting more and mroe exuberant. By the same token i don’t think success is a good measuring stick for rationality. Success depends on irrational subjects’ interpretation and understanding of your actions, which cannot happen by definition. Unless in your endevours outside your brain you dumb it down to be one step ahead instead of ten, but then you gotta think like a dummy, which is not a skill of rationality.
″ It pays to be ONE step ahead of the mob, not 10! You cannot make money in the stock market by being 10 steps ahead. You’d be shorting stocks into oblivious in the 90′s and 2006-2007, while the mob was getting more and mroe exuberant.”
It is NOT rational to think that people are smarter than they are. If you really are better at predicting where stocks are going, factoring other peoples irrationality in is part of the game.
Check out Gladwell’s new book—Outliers. Our success cannot be attributed to our individuality to the degree that most American’s think it can. There are huge cultural influences, arbitrary society rules, birth year, etc… There’s a chapter on why high IQ only matters to a certain point. Once you’re “inteligent enough”, practical wisdom takes over in determination of success. I don’t think akrasia has that much to do with it. We live in a world of lower inteligence and have to play by those rules. It pays to be ONE step ahead of the mob, not 10! You cannot make money in the stock market by being 10 steps ahead. You’d be shorting stocks into oblivious in the 90′s and 2006-2007, while the mob was getting more and mroe exuberant. By the same token i don’t think success is a good measuring stick for rationality. Success depends on irrational subjects’ interpretation and understanding of your actions, which cannot happen by definition. Unless in your endevours outside your brain you dumb it down to be one step ahead instead of ten, but then you gotta think like a dummy, which is not a skill of rationality.
It is NOT rational to think that people are smarter than they are. If you really are better at predicting where stocks are going, factoring other peoples irrationality in is part of the game.