This is an excellent point that I think is under-appreciated, especially by would-be and new rationalists.
It’s really tempting to dismiss stuff that looks like it shouldn’t work. And to some extent that’s fair, but only because most stuff doesn’t work, including the stuff that looks like it should work. Things have to be tried, and even then the result of our best attempts at controlled experiments sometimes return inconclusive results. Determining causal relationships is hard, and when you find something that seems to work sometimes you just have to go with it whether it makes sense or not since reality is going to be how it is whether or not it fits within your model.
Meanwhile we’ve got to get on with the project of living our best lives whether the things we do seem like they should lead to winning. If you want to win, you’ve got to sometimes be willing to take the status hit, get out there, and do something weird that people will think is nuts to try because it sometimes works. It doesn’t mean throwing out everything you know, but it does mean bothering to go live in the real world where things are messy and you can’t always figure out what’s up.
Time will tell. If you keep doing crazy stuff after it becomes clear it doesn’t work, sure, that’s a mistake. But it’s also a mistake not to check. If you never verified that you don’t have psychic powers, can’t teleport, that healing crystals don’t work, etc. then you’re also going to miss out on things like weird therapy modalities that do work for some people for unclear reasons and idiosyncratic dietary changes that dramatically improve your life but would make someone else’s life worse.
As you point out, the leading edge is not respectable. Being on the leading edge has costs, but also rewards. It’s a test of one’s strength of a rationalist to be able to go all in on something that has high EV and low probability to see if it might work. The only real failure is the failure to update once the evidence comes in.
This is an excellent point that I think is under-appreciated, especially by would-be and new rationalists.
It’s really tempting to dismiss stuff that looks like it shouldn’t work. And to some extent that’s fair, but only because most stuff doesn’t work, including the stuff that looks like it should work. Things have to be tried, and even then the result of our best attempts at controlled experiments sometimes return inconclusive results. Determining causal relationships is hard, and when you find something that seems to work sometimes you just have to go with it whether it makes sense or not since reality is going to be how it is whether or not it fits within your model.
Meanwhile we’ve got to get on with the project of living our best lives whether the things we do seem like they should lead to winning. If you want to win, you’ve got to sometimes be willing to take the status hit, get out there, and do something weird that people will think is nuts to try because it sometimes works. It doesn’t mean throwing out everything you know, but it does mean bothering to go live in the real world where things are messy and you can’t always figure out what’s up.
Time will tell. If you keep doing crazy stuff after it becomes clear it doesn’t work, sure, that’s a mistake. But it’s also a mistake not to check. If you never verified that you don’t have psychic powers, can’t teleport, that healing crystals don’t work, etc. then you’re also going to miss out on things like weird therapy modalities that do work for some people for unclear reasons and idiosyncratic dietary changes that dramatically improve your life but would make someone else’s life worse.
As you point out, the leading edge is not respectable. Being on the leading edge has costs, but also rewards. It’s a test of one’s strength of a rationalist to be able to go all in on something that has high EV and low probability to see if it might work. The only real failure is the failure to update once the evidence comes in.