Abram pointed out concerns about focusing rationality of prediction. I agree with those concerns, and have said before that many of the skills involved in prediction can be Goodharted well past the point of usefulness more generally. For example, frequently updating, tracking source of information to quickly capture when a question should have been considered resolved, or tracking the group aggregate are all effective strategies that are minimally helpful for other parts of rationality.
On the other hand, to argue via analogy, while martial arts are clearly too narrowly focused on form, and adapted to constraints rather than optimizing for winning, the best mixed martial artists, and I suspect many of the best hand-to-hand fighters in general, are experts in one or several martial arts. That’s because even if the practice of any martial art was Goodharted well past the point of usefulness, and waste time because of that, fighters still need all of the skills that martial arts teach.
Similarly, I think that the best rationalists will need to be really good forecasters. The return will drop as you optimize too much for forecasting, obviously, but I imagine that there’s a huge return on being in the top, say, 1% of humans at forecasting. That’s not an incredibly high bar, since most people are really bad at this. I’ll guess that the top 1% level would probably fall somewhere below the median of Good Judgement Open’s active participant rankings—but I think it’s worth having people interested in honing their rationality skills participate and improve enough to get to at least that level.
Prediction
Abram pointed out concerns about focusing rationality of prediction. I agree with those concerns, and have said before that many of the skills involved in prediction can be Goodharted well past the point of usefulness more generally. For example, frequently updating, tracking source of information to quickly capture when a question should have been considered resolved, or tracking the group aggregate are all effective strategies that are minimally helpful for other parts of rationality.
On the other hand, to argue via analogy, while martial arts are clearly too narrowly focused on form, and adapted to constraints rather than optimizing for winning, the best mixed martial artists, and I suspect many of the best hand-to-hand fighters in general, are experts in one or several martial arts. That’s because even if the practice of any martial art was Goodharted well past the point of usefulness, and waste time because of that, fighters still need all of the skills that martial arts teach.
Similarly, I think that the best rationalists will need to be really good forecasters. The return will drop as you optimize too much for forecasting, obviously, but I imagine that there’s a huge return on being in the top, say, 1% of humans at forecasting. That’s not an incredibly high bar, since most people are really bad at this. I’ll guess that the top 1% level would probably fall somewhere below the median of Good Judgement Open’s active participant rankings—but I think it’s worth having people interested in honing their rationality skills participate and improve enough to get to at least that level.