I’d particularly expect many people to have good tacit rationality without having good explicit rationality in domains where success is strongly determined by “people skills.” This is the kind of thing I expect LWers to be particularly bad at (being neurotypical helps immensely here) and is not the kind of thing that most people can explain how they do (I think it takes place almost entirely in System 1).
When evaluating the relationship between success and rationality it seems worth keeping in mind survivorship bias. For example, a small number of people can be wildly successful in finance through sheer luck due to the large number of people in finance and the randomness of finance. Those people don’t necessarily have any rationality, explicit or otherwise, but you’re more likely to have heard of them than a random person in finance. But I don’t know enough about Oprah to say anything about how much of her being promoted to our collective attention constitutes survivorship bias and how much is genuine evidence of her competence.
One setting where explicit rationality seems instrumentally more useful than tight feedback loops is in determining which tight feedback loops to expose yourself to, e.g. determining whether you should switch from one domain to a very different domain, and if so, which different domain you should switch to. IIRC there are various instances of well-known and respected scientists doing good work in one field and then going on to spout nonsense in another, and this seems like the kind of thing that explicit rationality could help prevent.
Agree that I am spending too much time reading LessWrong, though. I’ve been quantifying this using RescueTime and the numbers aren’t pretty.
When evaluating the relationship between success and rationality it seems worth keeping in mind survivorship bias.
An interesting case is that Will Smith seems likely to be explicitly rational in a way that other people in entertainment don’t talk about—he’ll plan and reflect on various movie-related strategies so that he can get progressively better roles and box office receipts.
For instance, before he started acting in movies, he and his agent thought about what top-grossing movies all had in common, and then he focused on getting roles in those kinds of movies.
An interesting case is that Will Smith seems likely to be explicitly rational in a way that other people in entertainment don’t talk about
In the same venue, I’ve been impressed by Greene’s account of 50 Cent he made in the book “The 50th law”. If that’s really 50′s way of thinking, it’s brutally rational and impressively strategical.
I’d particularly expect many people to have good tacit rationality without having good explicit rationality in domains where success is strongly determined by “people skills.” This is the kind of thing I expect LWers to be particularly bad at (being neurotypical helps immensely here) and is not the kind of thing that most people can explain how they do (I think it takes place almost entirely in System 1).
When evaluating the relationship between success and rationality it seems worth keeping in mind survivorship bias. For example, a small number of people can be wildly successful in finance through sheer luck due to the large number of people in finance and the randomness of finance. Those people don’t necessarily have any rationality, explicit or otherwise, but you’re more likely to have heard of them than a random person in finance. But I don’t know enough about Oprah to say anything about how much of her being promoted to our collective attention constitutes survivorship bias and how much is genuine evidence of her competence.
One setting where explicit rationality seems instrumentally more useful than tight feedback loops is in determining which tight feedback loops to expose yourself to, e.g. determining whether you should switch from one domain to a very different domain, and if so, which different domain you should switch to. IIRC there are various instances of well-known and respected scientists doing good work in one field and then going on to spout nonsense in another, and this seems like the kind of thing that explicit rationality could help prevent.
Agree that I am spending too much time reading LessWrong, though. I’ve been quantifying this using RescueTime and the numbers aren’t pretty.
An interesting case is that Will Smith seems likely to be explicitly rational in a way that other people in entertainment don’t talk about—he’ll plan and reflect on various movie-related strategies so that he can get progressively better roles and box office receipts.
For instance, before he started acting in movies, he and his agent thought about what top-grossing movies all had in common, and then he focused on getting roles in those kinds of movies.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1689234,00.html
In the same venue, I’ve been impressed by Greene’s account of 50 Cent he made in the book “The 50th law”. If that’s really 50′s way of thinking, it’s brutally rational and impressively strategical.