If LessWrong had originally been targeted at and introduced to an audience of competent business people and self-improvement health buffs instead of an audience of STEM specialists and Harry Potter fans, things would have been drastically different. Rationalists would be winning.
This sounds like “the best way to make sure your readers are successful is to write for people who are already successful”. It makes sense if you want to brag about how successful are your readers. But if your goal is to improve the world, how much change would that bring? There is already a ton of material for business people and self-help fans; what is yet another website for them going to accomplish? If people are already competent self-improving businessmen, what motive would they have to learn about rationality?
The Bayesian Conspiracy podcast … proposed … that rationality can only help us improve a limited amount relative to where we started out. They predicted that people who started out at a lower level of life success/cognitive functioning/talent cannot outperform non-rationalists who started out at a sufficiently high level.
The past matters, because changing things takes time. Obtaining “the same knowledge, skills, qualities or experience” requires time and money. (Money, because while you are chasing the knowledge and experience, you are not maximizing your short-term income.) Sometimes I wonder how life would be in a parallel universe where LessWrong would appear when I was 15, as opposed to 35. I had a ton of free time while studying at university; I have barely any free time now. I lived at my parents; now I need a daily job to pay my bills. Even putting money into index funds (such a simple advice, yet no one from my social group was able to give it to me) would have brought more interest. In this universe I cannot get on average as far as I could have in the parallel one.
So why haven’t we been dominating prediction and stock markets? Why aren’t we dominating them right now?
Because there are people who already spent years learning all that stuff, and now they do it as a day job; some of them 16 hours a day. Those are the ones you would have to compete against, not the average person.
In my own case, … I can’t afford to bet on things since I don’t have enough money of my own for it, and my income is highly irregular and hard to predict so it’s difficult to budget things. … Do a lot of other people here have such extenuating circumstances? Somehow that would feel like too much of a coincidence.
For me it feels like too much of a coincidence when a person complaining about why others aren’t achieving greater success immediately comes with a good excuse for themselves.
Speaking for myself, my income is nice and regular, but I have kids to feed and care about, and between my daily job and taking care of my kids, I don’t have enough time to research things to make bets about, or learn to understand finance as a pro. That is a quite different situation, but still one that makes making miracles difficult. I suppose some people are busy doing their scientific careers, etc.
And then, a few people are actually winning a lot. Now, maybe you overestimate the size of the rationalist community. How many people even among those who participate at meetups, are truly serious about this rationality stuff (and how many are there merely for social reasons)? Maybe it’s in total only a few dozen people, worldwide. Some of them have good reasons to not be super winning, and some of them are super winning. Not a very surprising outcome.
I believe there is a lot of space for improvement. I believe there is specifically a lot to improve in “making our kind cooperate”. But at the end of the day, we are just a handful of people.
And of course I’m looking forward to your friend’s articles.
Because there are people who already spent years learning all that stuff, and now they do it as a day job; some of them 16 hours a day°
That’s a simple and plausible point, but its also rather devastating to the claim that you can get significant value out of learning generic rationality skills.
I’m confused; it seems like evidence against the claim that you can get arbitrary amounts of value out of learning generic rationality skills, but I don’t see it as “devastating” to the claim you can get significant value, unless you’re claiming that “spent years learning all that stuff, and now do it as a day job; some of them 16 hours a day” should imply only a less-than-significant improvement. Or am I missing something here?
Yeah, this. It is a mistake—and I suspect a popular one—to think that rationality trumps any amounts of domain-specific knowledge or resources.
Ceteris paribus, a rational person playing the stock market should have an advantage against an irrational one, with same amount of skills, experience, time spent, etc. Question is, whether this advantage creates a big difference or a rounding error. Another question is whether playing the stock market is actually a winning move: how much is skill, how much is luck, and whether the part that is skill is adequately rewarded… compared to using the same amount of skill somewhere else, and putting your savings into a passively managed index fund.
If you invest your own money, even if you do everything right, you profit will be 1000 times smaller compared with a person who invests 1000× more money equally well. So, even if you make a profit, it may be less than your potential salary somewhere else, because you are producing a multiplier only for a moderate amount of money (unless you started as a millionaire).
On the other hand, if you invest other people’s money, it depends on the structure of the market: how much other people’s money is there to be invested, and how many people are competing for this opportunity. Maybe there are thousands of wannabe investors competing for the opportunity to manage a few dozen funds. Then, even if the smartest ones make a big profit, their personal reward may be quite small. Because the absolute value of your skill is not relevant here; it is the relative value of employing you versus employing the other guy who would love to take your position; and the other guy is pretty smart, too.
This sounds like “the best way to make sure your readers are successful is to write for people who are already successful”. It makes sense if you want to brag about how successful are your readers. But if your goal is to improve the world, how much change would that bring? There is already a ton of material for business people and self-help fans; what is yet another website for them going to accomplish? If people are already competent self-improving businessmen, what motive would they have to learn about rationality?
The past matters, because changing things takes time. Obtaining “the same knowledge, skills, qualities or experience” requires time and money. (Money, because while you are chasing the knowledge and experience, you are not maximizing your short-term income.) Sometimes I wonder how life would be in a parallel universe where LessWrong would appear when I was 15, as opposed to 35. I had a ton of free time while studying at university; I have barely any free time now. I lived at my parents; now I need a daily job to pay my bills. Even putting money into index funds (such a simple advice, yet no one from my social group was able to give it to me) would have brought more interest. In this universe I cannot get on average as far as I could have in the parallel one.
Because there are people who already spent years learning all that stuff, and now they do it as a day job; some of them 16 hours a day. Those are the ones you would have to compete against, not the average person.
For me it feels like too much of a coincidence when a person complaining about why others aren’t achieving greater success immediately comes with a good excuse for themselves.
Speaking for myself, my income is nice and regular, but I have kids to feed and care about, and between my daily job and taking care of my kids, I don’t have enough time to research things to make bets about, or learn to understand finance as a pro. That is a quite different situation, but still one that makes making miracles difficult. I suppose some people are busy doing their scientific careers, etc.
And then, a few people are actually winning a lot. Now, maybe you overestimate the size of the rationalist community. How many people even among those who participate at meetups, are truly serious about this rationality stuff (and how many are there merely for social reasons)? Maybe it’s in total only a few dozen people, worldwide. Some of them have good reasons to not be super winning, and some of them are super winning. Not a very surprising outcome.
I believe there is a lot of space for improvement. I believe there is specifically a lot to improve in “making our kind cooperate”. But at the end of the day, we are just a handful of people.
And of course I’m looking forward to your friend’s articles.
That’s a simple and plausible point, but its also rather devastating to the claim that you can get significant value out of learning generic rationality skills.
I’m confused; it seems like evidence against the claim that you can get arbitrary amounts of value out of learning generic rationality skills, but I don’t see it as “devastating” to the claim you can get significant value, unless you’re claiming that “spent years learning all that stuff, and now do it as a day job; some of them 16 hours a day” should imply only a less-than-significant improvement. Or am I missing something here?
Yeah, this. It is a mistake—and I suspect a popular one—to think that rationality trumps any amounts of domain-specific knowledge or resources.
Ceteris paribus, a rational person playing the stock market should have an advantage against an irrational one, with same amount of skills, experience, time spent, etc. Question is, whether this advantage creates a big difference or a rounding error. Another question is whether playing the stock market is actually a winning move: how much is skill, how much is luck, and whether the part that is skill is adequately rewarded… compared to using the same amount of skill somewhere else, and putting your savings into a passively managed index fund.
If you invest your own money, even if you do everything right, you profit will be 1000 times smaller compared with a person who invests 1000× more money equally well. So, even if you make a profit, it may be less than your potential salary somewhere else, because you are producing a multiplier only for a moderate amount of money (unless you started as a millionaire).
On the other hand, if you invest other people’s money, it depends on the structure of the market: how much other people’s money is there to be invested, and how many people are competing for this opportunity. Maybe there are thousands of wannabe investors competing for the opportunity to manage a few dozen funds. Then, even if the smartest ones make a big profit, their personal reward may be quite small. Because the absolute value of your skill is not relevant here; it is the relative value of employing you versus employing the other guy who would love to take your position; and the other guy is pretty smart, too.