On the Power of Intelligence and Rationality

Whether rationality is or isn't the best way to get things done depends very much on what those things are. Talk of generic success is either meaningless or a covert importation of cultural baggage.

Linguistic qualms aside, if you're cautioning people against expecting rationality to be an quick road to material wealth and power then I completely agree.

On an individual level, the most powerful ability is to leverage yourself by getting others to work for you, by whatever means cost you least time and effort (for example, defrauding or deluding them, paying them if you've the means, coercing them if you have a gang or an army). An individual's time and physical abilities are extremely limited, no matter how smart or rational a person is, he can only work so long and can only be in one place at a time. Until intelligent agents come along, using people is the only way to significant power, the more people the better.

Plenty of people achieve many of their goals despite being completely nuts.

I haven't yet read the whole discussion, but it seems to me that it is overlooking an important component of goal-reaching ability: not being nice. It applies to at least two major examples of 'winning' discussed here, namely Hitler (wasn't nice to conquered nations, Jews etc.) and Western Europe (to native Americans etc.)

It is obvious that an agent not constrained by ethics can plan shorter / less expensive paths through reality to its desired state than an ethically-constrained agent, and it may well be that the absence of ethical constraints can compensate for agent's irrationality.

What makes you think Hitler didn't deliberately think about how to yell at crowds?

We know, as a matter of historical fact, that Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party, despite being generally incompetent, unintelligent, irrational, superstitious and just plain insane, managed to take over a country of tens of millions of people from nothing, in the span of fifteen years.

A good case could be made that "incompetent, unintelligent, irrational, superstitious and just plain insane" applies as well to us modern-day westerners - at least, I can imagine a parallel 2009 where Nazis won World War 2 and marvel at the successes of democratic nations in the early 20th century despite them being "incompetent, unintelligent, irrational, superstitious and jew-ridden". Insanity can be hard to distinguish from up close.

You got facts entirely wrong.

Western Europe did not come to dominate the world thanks to science and rationality, but thanks to disease which wiped out the natives, effective use of organized violence, and successful use of divide-and-rule politics. Expansion happened long before scientific revolution had any success.

Key events in Western domination happened in final decades of the Late Middle Ages (the first few decades of 16th century still count as "Late Middle Ages" as far as I'm concerned) - like establishment of naval domination over Arabs in 1509, conquest of Aztecs in 1521, Incas in 1530s etc.

Nazis were quite sane, command of German armed forces was very clever, and Hitler was a very smart politician.

In both cases you can find plenty of intelligence where in mattered - organized violence and politics, and plenty of superstition and silliness in other areas.

Given wrong facts, I'm not sure what you're arguing about.

It seems to me that many of the objections here miss the point of the post — at least, it certainly isn't about rational argument not working on non-rationalists. (Though at least the last paragraph here seems correct and germane.) Tom, would this be a fair summary?

From e.g. the Nazis, we see that rationality is not necessary to win (in some important sense) when you have the right narrow skills and/or luck; and since (at least stereotypically) many of these skills are hard to develop or substitute for using rationality, it's not sufficient either. We should be skeptical of claims that sincere Bayesian wannabes have a justified high expectation of overwhelming general real-world success.

This discussion is difficult to jump into (and make any progress with) because the questions are so complex. Is there some way to back up and formalize what we're discussing? What is the main question? I suppose it's whether "success" and "rationality" correlate historically, among humans.

How would we define success? If success means 'achieving goals', then we can notice that we don't mean rationality as 'achieving goals' but as something more focused, like rationality as good reality mapping.

And then I will say that my experience is that human success is not at all correlated with good maps: while good maps and motivation will lead to achieving goals, it seems many people are successful despite bad maps.

An argument can be made that very successful people are likely to have extremely bad maps precisely in the area around their success. Hitler, Napoleon, mad scientists, mathematicians that can't distinguish formulas from furniture, politicians that people relate to but which are themselves impervious to criticism and self-awareness, surgeons that are actually misanthropic, etc., etc. I think it might have to do with obsession, which leads to uncanny expertise in the area of the obsession despite all wrong supporting ideas.

In term of impact, I'd say Ben Franklin beat Hitler. Rationality + energy vs. charisma + energy. Energy seems like the key unifier, shared by almost all highly successful people. Einstein was an exception to that, but I think he's uncommon. All of the above however, took major risks in life and show a survivorship bias. I think that energy is less critical for more mundane success.

Of course, energy can come in pills but those pills tend to sap one's rationality if it wasn't extremely high to begin with (and one's physical robustness). Erdos comes to mind, but also Kennedy, Nixon, Rand, and yes, Hitler. Pills in question mimic physiology, namely, excess adrenalin, so I expect highly successful people to have high adrenalin levels or rationality, but recognize that there is usually a trade-off. Where someone has both, extreme success becomes much more likely.

Nitpick:

the fact that many former top predators are now extinct

Mammoths, predators? My initial intuitive reaction was that that couldn't possibly be right - they're way too massive for that. It's a bit tricky to find definite statements on this on the web, but the relevant WP article does say that "Their teeth were also adapted to their diet of coarse tundra grasses". Also note that their closest surviving relatives are herbivores. I'm 0.9 sure mammoths weren't predators. Do you have evidence for your claim?

one of the key ingredients in the birth of the modern era was the discovery of science, and its counterpart, the discovery of the art of Traditional Rationality. Armed with these, the nations of Western Europe managed to dominate the entire rest of the world,

You'll actually find it pretty hard to find evidence to support this view, unless you interpret "science" so broadly as to make the claim uninteresting.

First, the Nazis were not stupid or incompetent. They didn't just yell at people, they persuaded. They formed a large and efficient media organization to push their program. In retrospect, much of what they advocated now seems obvious nonsense, but that's in retrospect: it was a lot more plausible at the time. The final success of the Nazis also occurred in the context of economic disaster. 25% unemployment tends to discredit orthodox, established doctrines. Did the Nazis screw up? Massively, in the end. But they would not have gotten in the position to make those mistakes without doing a lot of difficult things correctly first.

Second, "no group of people has managed to achieve anything even remotely similar using... rationality [and] deliberative thought"? How about the Founders of the United States? In fifteen years (1775-1790) they took their country from being the exploited colony of a Great Power to being a prosperous sovereign nation with the most advanced system of government in the world. And they were rational men and deliberate thinkers,

Roughly on the same topic, a few years ago I read Intelligence in War by John Keegan. I was expecting a glorification of that attribute which I believed to be so important; to read story after story of how proper intelligence made the critical difference during military battles.

Much to my surprise, Keegan spends the whole book basically shooting down that theory. Instead, he has example after example where one side clearly had a dominant intelligence advantage (admittedly, here we're talking about "information", not strictly "rationality"), but it always wound up being a mere minor factor in the outcome of the battle.

Definitely worth checking out, if you're at all interested in the power (or lack thereof) of being smarter, rather than all the other factors that determine the outcome of military battles.

Michael Vassar hit upon something which I think is probably more key than rationality: Charisma.

Hitler had goals, and by the means he had at his disposal, he was highly rational in achieving those goals (this does not mean that he was rational in the sense of being sane). I also recall from hearing my Great-Great Uncle talk about meeting Hitler once, that he said the man could talk a person into anything (he also related how devastated he was when he learned of how evil the man was. Of course, just not liking Jews was not considered to be exactly evil in much of Europe at the time either). Please, do not read this as apologizing for Hitler's actions. It is just a statement that he was a very skilled personal operator, and as someone later has stated, he managed to get other people to do his work for him.

That seems to be the MO of almost all politicians: To be able to personally charm those they meet, and then subtly suggest "You can help me if you go out and tell others about my GRAND PLAN" (Wasn't there a post about The One Big Theory? This seems to be among the tools of the politically motivated. That they have One Big Theory that will "fix it all").

That "One Big Theory" is so appealing to most people that they are willing to overlook the failures of the theory in order to feel god. It is exactly like a drug.

A perfect rationalist can mimic any kind of irrational behavior like Hitler's, for example.

Therefore we can expect, that the SAI may act weird just to utilize our irrationality.

My other comments in this thread seem to have misread Tom's intention, so let me try again. I'll summarize what I think the point is, so if I'm off, it'll be obvious.

The point is that, while rationality has been important and effective on the level of Western civilization, it isn't really a super power when it comes down to individual behaviour. Thus, claims about rationality being all-important are dramatically overstated; there are much more important criteria for success.

My criticism of this, and the reason that I think it's generating debate the way it is, is that the first half is simply false, and the second half is so obvious that people refuse to interpret it correctly.

Western civilization isn't particularly powered by rationality. There's a pretty complex cultural and institutional framework that powers the West and its prior success, some of which is thoroughly irrational (Mercantilism, anyone?). Rationality may have played some role in the West's rise to dominance - it certainly did in a technological context - but you don't need to be rational to point guns at people, even if you do need to be rational to invent guns.

Conversely, at the individual, rationality is easily outweighed by other factors. If you want to be a baseball player, hand-eye coordination, speed, and strength top rationality. For a politician, pick charisma. For a designer, pick social skills and taste. For a scientist, if you have basic competence in your field, pick skills conducive to publicity and obtaining grants. The only special thing about rationality is that, insofar as all of these professions must make decisions, additional rationality will help all of them, whereas running faster will not help most politicians.

There's also an issue of survivorship bias. There are a whole lot of very irrational people. Therefore, saying, "Being irrational isn't so bad; look at so-and-so, he did pretty well," is actually not a useful argument. I guarantee you that, if your goal is being a lottery winner, being less rational will serve you extremely well. If a million irrational people all set out to be movie stars, ten succeed, and the rest are miserable, this does not make irrationality a good strategy.

Your argument seems to conclude that:

It is impossible to reason with unreasonable people

Agreed. Now what?

Ostensibly your post is about how to swing the ethos of a large group of people towards behaving differently. I would argue that has never been necessary and still is not.

A good hard look at any large political or social movement reveals a small group of very dedicated and motivated people, and a very large group of passive marginally interested people who agree with whatever sounds like it is in their best interest without them really doing too much work.

So can rationality work on a large scale? Arguably, it always does work. I rarely hear political or social arguments that are obviously (to everyone) pure hokum. If you look at how the last 4 U.S. presidents campaigned, it was always on "save you money" talking points and "less waste, more justice" platform. All rational things in the mind of the average person.

I think however your implication is that rationality is not always obviously rational. Well friend, that is why you have to completely understand the implications of rational decision making in terms that the majority can agree on in order to describe why they are better decisions. You often have to connect the dots for people so that they can see how to get from some contrarian or "non-intuitive" idea to their goal of raising a happy family.

This is the essence of "selling." Of course spinners and politicians sell lots of crap to people by telling half truths, overcomplicated arguments or simply outright lying. These are obviously disingenuous. If you need to lie to sell your ethos it is probably wrong. That or you just aren't wise enough to make it comprehensible.

For instance, until the discovery of nuclear weapons, armed conflict was often a primary means of settling disputes between nation-states. However, if you tried to settle your dispute with your neighbor, or your company's dispute with its competitor, using armed force, it would achieve nothing except getting you thrown in prison.

This is really, really false. People use armed force all the time with their neighbors. Just like at the national level, armed force is very effective as long as no one bigger and badder will smack you down for using it, as they almost always will if you're a corporation operating on a large scale in an industrialized nation. The situation is virtually identical.

On a separate point, while the Nazis had some crazy beliefs, they still excelled in a number of important areas. A superintelligence trying to figure out how to take over a country would probably create a public enemy and invoke as much Nationalism as possible, and publish lots of propaganda, and indoctrinate the youth, and establish a cult of the leader, and so forth. Acting rationally does not mean winning your opponent over with well-reasoned blog posts, unless those are the most effective means you have of getting to him. Acting rationally means using the means that will accomplish your desired ends most effectively.

If the Nazis had had their crazy values but actually been rational and carried out their war differently (less aggression towards Russia, not dragging the US in, delaying the Holocaust until they could actually afford the military resources for it), they could have been a whole lot more successful than they actually were. So let's be glad they underrated rationality.

You seem to be indicating that rationality may not be the best way for an individual to achieve her goals. From the wiki:

The rational algorithm is to do what works, to get the actual answer—in short, to > win, whatever the method, whatever the means.

If you aren't achieving your goals in the best possible way you aren't practicing the rational way. If you are losing it should not be for your using rationality, but due to you poorly approximating an ideal rational agent.

However, neither of these imply that intelligence, science, and rationality, as a practical matter, are the best way to get things done by individual people operating in the year 2009.

I am not sure science belongs in that sentence. The application of science is an assumed part of my everyday life in the form of technology. Sure, I am not whipping up new chemicals to help me get through today, but I use computers, pens, clothing, dishwashers...

Intelligence certainly has a practical threshold. If you have no intelligence at all you cannot thrive in a world of computers, pens, clothing, dishwashers... On the other hand, technology has allowed some areas to lower their intelligence thresholds. People who have severe mental disabilities can function in relatively normal lifestyles. I see this as a good thing.

Rationality is probably the least necessary for everyday living, but I wonder if it works the same way as science and intelligence: Is applied rationality what we see day in day out? If something applied rationality to the world around us, would our personal lives get easier/better?

I am not really disagreeing with what you said. I guess I am more looking for clarification about what you meant by the quoted sentence above.

So far as I am aware, no group of people has managed to achieve anything even remotely similar using, not only rationality, but any skill involving deliberative thought, as opposed to skills such as yelling at huge crowds of people.

I would offer a reactionary counterpoint and say that most people who achieve things that similar were using deliberative thought. I have about as much evidence as you showed in your post. I really think you are underplaying Hilter's abilities. He deliberately set out to achieve a particular goal and succeeded. It's not like he accidently tried to take over the world. The British Empire, the Roman Empire, and any other large ruling body was also acting deliberately. I am not a big history buff, so I cannot think of many others. Mao? Stalin?

Today the large conquerers could be translated into people with money. Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, et al were able to systematically make money. They weren't lucky, unintelligent, crazy, or anything like that. They are smart, driven people with a specific goal who have succeeded.

I don't think I would assert that intelligence, science or rationality is the Ultimate Power on the individual level. But your argument to that point doesn't work at all, afaict.

We know, as a matter of historical fact, that Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party, despite being generally incompetent, unintelligent, irrational, superstitious and just plain insane, managed to take over a country of tens of millions of people from nothing, in the span of fifteen years.

What evidence is there that they were generally incompetent, unintelligent or irrational? They certainly were in some instances (efforts at racial categorization were certainly a waste of resources) but the instances of irrationality can almost always be traced to events that harmed Nazi Germany in some way. Hitler's poor military decisions were what brought them down. On the other hand, investment in the sciences gave them distinct advantages over their enemies. Certainly their ideology involved holding false beliefs that undermined their science (expelling Jewish physicists was definitely harmful) but a good deal of their science was just fine. Is there any indication that the German state was run less efficiently than the other major powers?

There is the argument that rationality should be seen as a meta-algorithm: you look at the particular situation, work out what specific algorithm will win, and then use that.

Having the meta-algorithm will work better (on average) than any particular algorithm, though in certain cases the time lag and limited foresight of rational methods will mean that there will usually be some specific algorithm that will beat rationality in a given context.

So far as I am aware, no group of people has managed to achieve anything even remotely similar

I doubt that the NSDAP of 1930 had any particular "secret sauce" for goal achievement; right place, right time, luck, populism and ambition seems to explain them. Also, as a matter of fact, they lost so badly and in such a horrific way that the agenda of white/aryan power has been badly damaged; they managed to actually anti-optimize their goal!

The real, human world seems to demand a time/context-varying skillset for goal achievement, and the context of 2010 MEDCs is the one of most interest.

I agree with the overall point, though.

Maybe the terminology is a little sloppy. To "get things done", the "things that work on a species level", people who "achieve many of their goals" etc. these are vague references, vagueness on which the text relies. In addition, it's not at all clear to me what being "generally incompetent" actually means (as opposed to "totally incompetent"?).

Be that as it may, the move from "all nazis are incompetent" and "they managed to take over x and do y" to "using something which we will tag as non-rationality might get you there even faster than using the opposite tag", this move is plainly fallacious.

But even if we had sufficient data to support that argument, we would still be trapped in the meaning of "being nuts" (it's the closest concept I found close to non-rationality in the text). How are we to understand "being nuts"?

Yes, improving your individual rationality won't necessarily allow you to duplicate the success of the luckiest individuals selected from a pool of billions of irrational people, but I don't see how this fact implies that individual rationality is useless.

"To anyone who would assert that intelligence, science or rationality is the Ultimate Power, not just on the level of a species or civilization, but on the level of an individual or small group, let them show that their belief is based in reality."

What is this, flame bait?