I radically distrust the message of this short piece. It’s a positive affirmation for “rationalists” of the contemporary sort who want to use brain science to become super-achievers. The paragraph itemizing the powers of agency especially reads like wishful thinking: Just pay a little more attention to small matters like fixity of purpose and actually acting in your own interest, and you’ll get to be famous, rich, and a historical figure! Sorry, that is entirely not ruthless enough. You also need to be willing to lie, cheat, steal, kill, use people, betray them. (Wishes can come true, but they usually exact a price. ) It also helps to be chronically unhappy, if it will serve to motivate your extreme and unrelenting efforts. And finally, most forms of achievement do require domain-specific expertise; you don’t get to the top just by looking pretty and statusful.
The messy, inconsistent, and equivocating aspects of the mind can also be adaptive. They can save you from fanaticism, lack of perspective, and self-deception. How often do situations really permit a calculation of expected utility? All these rationalist techniques themselves are fuel for rationalization: I’m employing all the special heuristics and psychological tricks, so I must be doing the right thing. I’ve been so focused lately, my life breakthrough must be just around the corner.
It’s funny that here, the use of reason has become synonymous with “winning” and the successful achievement of plans, when historically, the use of reason was thought to promote detachment from life and a moderation of emotional extremes, especially in the face of failure.
The paragraph itemizing the powers of agency especially reads like wishful thinking: Just pay a little more attention to small matters like fixity of purpose and actually acting in your own interest, and you’ll get to be famous, rich, and a historical figure! Sorry, that is entirely not ruthless enough. You also need to be willing to lie, cheat, steal, kill, use people, betray them. (Wishes can come true, but they usually exact a price. ) It also helps to be chronically unhappy, if it will serve to motivate your extreme and unrelenting efforts. And finally, most forms of achievement do require domain-specific expertise; you don’t get to the top just by looking pretty and statusful.
How could you reliably know these things, and how could you make intentional use of that knowledge, if not with agentful rationality?
You can’t. I won’t deny the appeal of Luke’s writing; it reminds me of Gurdjieff, telling everyone to wake up. But I believe real success is obtained by Homo machiavelliensis, not Homo economicus.
This is reminding me of Steve Pavlina’s material about light-workers and dark-workers. He claims that working to make the world a better place for everyone can work, and will eventually lead you to realizing that you need to take care of yourself, and that working to make your life better exclusive of concern for others can work and will eventually convince you of the benefits of cooperation, but that slopping around without being clear about who you’re benefiting won’t work as well as either of those.
How can you tell the ratio between Homo machiavelliensis and Homo economicus, considering that HM is strongly motivated to conceal what they’re doing, and HM and HE are probably both underestimating the amount of luck required for their success?
fMRI? Also, some HE would be failed HM. The model I’m developing is that in any field of endeavor, there are one or two HMs at the top, and then an order-of-magnitude more HE also-rans. The intuitive distinction: HE plays by the rules, HM doesn’t; victorious HM sets the rules to its advantage, HE submits and gets the left-over payoffs it can accrue by working within a system built by and for HMs.
My point was that both the “honesty is the best policy” and the “never give a sucker an even break” crews are guessing because the information isn’t out there.
My guess is that different systems reward different amounts of cheating, and aside from luck, one of the factors contributing to success may be a finely tuned sense of when to cheat and when not.
I suspect some degree of sarcasm, but that’s actually an interesting topic. After all, a successful cheater can’t afford to get caught very much in the process of learning how much to cheat.
I radically distrust the message of this short piece. It’s a positive affirmation for “rationalists” of the contemporary sort who want to use brain science to become super-achievers.
Interesting. Personally I read it as a kind of “get back to Earth” message. “Stop pretending you’re basically a rational thinker and only need to correct some biases to truly achieve that. You’re this horrible jury-rig of biases and ancient heuristics, and yes while steps towards rationality can make you perform much better, you’re still fundamentally and irreparably broken. Deal with it.”
But re-reading it, your interpretation is probably closer to the mark.
You also need to be willing to lie, cheat, steal, kill, use people, betray them.
This is false.
If we are talking about how to become rich, famous, and a historically significant person, I suspect that neither of us speaks with real authority. And of course, just being evil is not by itself a guaranteed path to the top! But I’m sure it helps to clear the way.
You also need to be willing to lie, cheat, steal, kill, use people, betray them.
This if false.
I would say ‘overstated’. I assert that most people who became famous, rich and a historical figure used those tactics. More so the ‘use people’, ‘betray them’ and ‘lie’ than the more banal ‘evils’. You don’t even get to have a solid reputation for being nice and ethical without using dubiously ethical tactics to enforce the desired reputation.
Personally, I find that being nice and ethical is the best way to get a reputation for being nice and ethical, though your mileage may vary.
I don’t have a personal statement to make about my strategy for gaining a reputation for niceness. Partly because that is a reputation I would prefer to avoid.
I do make the general, objective level claim that actually being nice and ethical is not the most effective way to gain that reputation. It is a good default and for many, particularly those who are not very good at well calibrated hypocrisy and deception, it is the best they could do without putting in a lot of effort. But it should be obvious that the task of creating an appearance of a thing is different to that of actually doing a thing.
It’s funny that here, the use of reason has become synonymous with “winning”
I don’t think anyone’s arguing that “reason” is synonymous with winning. There are a lot of people, however, arguing that “rationality” is systematized winning. I’m not particularly interested in detaching from life and moderating my emotional response to failure. I have important goals that I want to achieve, and failing is not an acceptable option to me. So I study rationality. Honestly, EY said it best:
There is a meme which says that a certain ritual of cognition is the paragon of reasonableness and so defines what the reasonable people do. But alas, the reasonable people often get their butts handed to them by the unreasonable ones, because the universe isn’t always reasonable. Reason is just a way of doing things, not necessarily the most formidable; it is how professors talk to each other in debate halls, which sometimes works, and sometimes doesn’t. If a hoard of barbarians attacks the debate hall, the truly prudent and flexible agent will abandon reasonableness.
No. If the “irrational” agent is outcompeting you on a systematic and predictable basis, then it is time to reconsider what you think is “rational”
I radically distrust the message of this short piece. It’s a positive affirmation for “rationalists” of the contemporary sort who want to use brain science to become super-achievers. The paragraph itemizing the powers of agency especially reads like wishful thinking: Just pay a little more attention to small matters like fixity of purpose and actually acting in your own interest, and you’ll get to be famous, rich, and a historical figure! Sorry, that is entirely not ruthless enough. You also need to be willing to lie, cheat, steal, kill, use people, betray them. (Wishes can come true, but they usually exact a price. ) It also helps to be chronically unhappy, if it will serve to motivate your extreme and unrelenting efforts. And finally, most forms of achievement do require domain-specific expertise; you don’t get to the top just by looking pretty and statusful.
The messy, inconsistent, and equivocating aspects of the mind can also be adaptive. They can save you from fanaticism, lack of perspective, and self-deception. How often do situations really permit a calculation of expected utility? All these rationalist techniques themselves are fuel for rationalization: I’m employing all the special heuristics and psychological tricks, so I must be doing the right thing. I’ve been so focused lately, my life breakthrough must be just around the corner.
It’s funny that here, the use of reason has become synonymous with “winning” and the successful achievement of plans, when historically, the use of reason was thought to promote detachment from life and a moderation of emotional extremes, especially in the face of failure.
How could you reliably know these things, and how could you make intentional use of that knowledge, if not with agentful rationality?
You can’t. I won’t deny the appeal of Luke’s writing; it reminds me of Gurdjieff, telling everyone to wake up. But I believe real success is obtained by Homo machiavelliensis, not Homo economicus.
This is reminding me of Steve Pavlina’s material about light-workers and dark-workers. He claims that working to make the world a better place for everyone can work, and will eventually lead you to realizing that you need to take care of yourself, and that working to make your life better exclusive of concern for others can work and will eventually convince you of the benefits of cooperation, but that slopping around without being clear about who you’re benefiting won’t work as well as either of those.
How can you tell the ratio between Homo machiavelliensis and Homo economicus, considering that HM is strongly motivated to conceal what they’re doing, and HM and HE are probably both underestimating the amount of luck required for their success?
fMRI? Also, some HE would be failed HM. The model I’m developing is that in any field of endeavor, there are one or two HMs at the top, and then an order-of-magnitude more HE also-rans. The intuitive distinction: HE plays by the rules, HM doesn’t; victorious HM sets the rules to its advantage, HE submits and gets the left-over payoffs it can accrue by working within a system built by and for HMs.
My point was that both the “honesty is the best policy” and the “never give a sucker an even break” crews are guessing because the information isn’t out there.
My guess is that different systems reward different amounts of cheating, and aside from luck, one of the factors contributing to success may be a finely tuned sense of when to cheat and when not.
Yeah, and the people who have the finest-tuned sense of when to cheat are the people who spent the most effort on tuning it!
I suspect some degree of sarcasm, but that’s actually an interesting topic. After all, a successful cheater can’t afford to get caught very much in the process of learning how much to cheat.
Love the expression. :)
Interesting. Personally I read it as a kind of “get back to Earth” message. “Stop pretending you’re basically a rational thinker and only need to correct some biases to truly achieve that. You’re this horrible jury-rig of biases and ancient heuristics, and yes while steps towards rationality can make you perform much better, you’re still fundamentally and irreparably broken. Deal with it.”
But re-reading it, your interpretation is probably closer to the mark.
Agency is still pretty absent there too. As it happens, I have something of an essay on just that topic: http://www.gwern.net/on-really-trying#on-the-absence-of-true-fanatics
This if false.
Yes. And domain-specific expertise is something that can be learned and practiced, by applying agency to one’s life. I’ll add it to the list.
If we are talking about how to become rich, famous, and a historically significant person, I suspect that neither of us speaks with real authority. And of course, just being evil is not by itself a guaranteed path to the top! But I’m sure it helps to clear the way.
Sure. I’m only disagreeing with what you said in your original comment.
I would say ‘overstated’. I assert that most people who became famous, rich and a historical figure used those tactics. More so the ‘use people’, ‘betray them’ and ‘lie’ than the more banal ‘evils’. You don’t even get to have a solid reputation for being nice and ethical without using dubiously ethical tactics to enforce the desired reputation.
Personally, I find that being nice and ethical is the best way to get a reputation for being nice and ethical, though your mileage may vary.
I don’t have a personal statement to make about my strategy for gaining a reputation for niceness. Partly because that is a reputation I would prefer to avoid.
I do make the general, objective level claim that actually being nice and ethical is not the most effective way to gain that reputation. It is a good default and for many, particularly those who are not very good at well calibrated hypocrisy and deception, it is the best they could do without putting in a lot of effort. But it should be obvious that the task of creating an appearance of a thing is different to that of actually doing a thing.
I don’t think anyone’s arguing that “reason” is synonymous with winning. There are a lot of people, however, arguing that “rationality” is systematized winning. I’m not particularly interested in detaching from life and moderating my emotional response to failure. I have important goals that I want to achieve, and failing is not an acceptable option to me. So I study rationality. Honestly, EY said it best: