What are some good examples of rationality as “systematized winning”? E.g. a personal example of someone who practices rationality systematically for a long time, and there are good reasons to think doing that has substantially improved their life.
It’s easy to name a lot of famous examples where irrationally has caused harm. I’m looking for the opposite. Ideally, some stories that could interest intelligent, but practically minded people who have no previous exposure to the LW memeplex.
The easiest examples are typically business examples, but there’s always the risk of the thing people attributing their success to not being the actual cause of their success. (“I owe it all to believing in myself” vs. “I owe it all to sleeping with the casting director.”)
I think the cleanest example is Buffet and Munger, whose stated approach to investing is “we’re not going to be ashamed of only picking obviously good investments.” They predated LW by a long while, but they’re aware of the Heuristics and Biases literature (consider this talk Munger gave on it in 1995).
What are some good examples of rationality as “systematized winning”? E.g. a personal example of someone who practices rationality systematically for a long time, and there are good reasons to think doing that has substantially improved their life.
It’s easy to name a lot of famous examples where irrationally has caused harm. I’m looking for the opposite. Ideally, some stories that could interest intelligent, but practically minded people who have no previous exposure to the LW memeplex.
The easiest examples are typically business examples, but there’s always the risk of the thing people attributing their success to not being the actual cause of their success. (“I owe it all to believing in myself” vs. “I owe it all to sleeping with the casting director.”)
I think the cleanest example is Buffet and Munger, whose stated approach to investing is “we’re not going to be ashamed of only picking obviously good investments.” They predated LW by a long while, but they’re aware of the Heuristics and Biases literature (consider this talk Munger gave on it in 1995).
Scott Adams claims being rational in that sense in his book.