It is hard to evaluate how essential your martial-art-style rationality was in your life, relative to possible institutional substitutes, without knowing more about it. “Two bad decisions about cars” just doesn’t say enough. Poker is designed exactly to be a martial-art-style rationality competition, so of course such skills would be more useful there.
Perhaps I am prejudiced by poker (and games in general), but I see life as a constant series of decisions. The quality of those decisions, combined with luck, gives an outcome. Life is a game of chance and skill, in other words.
MAS rationality makes for better quality decisions, and thus makes for better outcomes. When there are institutional substitutes, I agree they can also make for better outcomes, but there are no institutional substitutes for the vast majority of the constant stream of decisions we encounter in life. I predict if you went through your day, noticed every decision you make (hundreds?), and scored them based on whether it is plausible that the decision could entirely be made via an institutional substitute, removing your own need to be rational completely, you would find almost none qualify. Those that do would be among the most important (medical decisions, how to invest your money), but some important decisions would remain (acting in an emergency situation).
One would also notice that almost never did one consciously use rationality techniques. Consider that we are already highly evolved to survive, and we are all descendants of survivalist winners. We have some baseline rationality hard-wired in us. It is this wiring that guides most of our actions, and it is there even if we don’t have a single year of schooling.
If you have to make all those decisions yourself, sooner or later you are going to make a mistake(law of the conjunction, what is the probability to get it right every time?). The idea is to take off the burden of as much decisions as possible(at least the important ones) from the individual.
In the case of cars for example, it’s much safer to just take a bus and sit down and relax.
The idea is to take off the burden of as much decisions as possible(at least the important ones) from the individual.
Luckily, we have built-in mechanisms for this. By behaving rationally, we can develop good habits that will help us automatically make the right decision in the future. Aristotle called these sorts of habits ‘virtues’.
This is a whole new discussion but I’ll still give some pointers.
If you consider a city as a whole it would probably be much safer to take all cars off the street and put buses in their place. Less vehicles + trained drivers + less drunk driving ⇒ less accidents.
But even considering the normal city with lots of cars, I consider buses safer because:
they usually drive slower
they are big and heavy, so even in the case that a bus collides with a car it will probably be safer in the bus. Ok, if you have a collision against another bus it is another question.
It is hard to evaluate how essential your martial-art-style rationality was in your life, relative to possible institutional substitutes, without knowing more about it. “Two bad decisions about cars” just doesn’t say enough. Poker is designed exactly to be a martial-art-style rationality competition, so of course such skills would be more useful there.
Perhaps I am prejudiced by poker (and games in general), but I see life as a constant series of decisions. The quality of those decisions, combined with luck, gives an outcome. Life is a game of chance and skill, in other words.
MAS rationality makes for better quality decisions, and thus makes for better outcomes. When there are institutional substitutes, I agree they can also make for better outcomes, but there are no institutional substitutes for the vast majority of the constant stream of decisions we encounter in life. I predict if you went through your day, noticed every decision you make (hundreds?), and scored them based on whether it is plausible that the decision could entirely be made via an institutional substitute, removing your own need to be rational completely, you would find almost none qualify. Those that do would be among the most important (medical decisions, how to invest your money), but some important decisions would remain (acting in an emergency situation).
One would also notice that almost never did one consciously use rationality techniques. Consider that we are already highly evolved to survive, and we are all descendants of survivalist winners. We have some baseline rationality hard-wired in us. It is this wiring that guides most of our actions, and it is there even if we don’t have a single year of schooling.
If you have to make all those decisions yourself, sooner or later you are going to make a mistake(law of the conjunction, what is the probability to get it right every time?). The idea is to take off the burden of as much decisions as possible(at least the important ones) from the individual.
In the case of cars for example, it’s much safer to just take a bus and sit down and relax.
Luckily, we have built-in mechanisms for this. By behaving rationally, we can develop good habits that will help us automatically make the right decision in the future. Aristotle called these sorts of habits ‘virtues’.
Are buses safer than cars? For one thing, they don’t have seat belts.
This is a whole new discussion but I’ll still give some pointers.
If you consider a city as a whole it would probably be much safer to take all cars off the street and put buses in their place. Less vehicles + trained drivers + less drunk driving ⇒ less accidents.
But even considering the normal city with lots of cars, I consider buses safer because:
they usually drive slower
they are big and heavy, so even in the case that a bus collides with a car it will probably be safer in the bus. Ok, if you have a collision against another bus it is another question.
btw, there are buses with seat-belts.