Explicit and tacit rationality

1. I'd particularly expect many people to have good tacit rationality without having good explicit rationality in domains where success is strongly determined by "people skills." This is the kind of thing I expect LWers to be particularly bad at (being neurotypical helps immensely here) and is not the kind of thing that most people can explain how they do (I think it takes place almost entirely in System 1).

2. When evaluating the relationship between success and rationality it seems worth keeping in mind survivorship bias. For example, a small number of people can be wildly successful in finance through sheer luck due to the large number of people in finance and the randomness of finance. Those people don't necessarily have any rationality, explicit or otherwise, but you're more likely to have heard of them than a random person in finance. But I don't know enough about Oprah to say anything about how much of her being promoted to our collective attention constitutes survivorship bias and how much is genuine evidence of her competence.

3. One setting where explicit rationality seems instrumentally more useful than tight feedback loops is in determining which tight feedback loops to expose yourself to, e.g. determining whether you should switch from one domain to a very different domain, and if so, which different domain you should switch to. IIRC there are various instances of well-known and respected scientists doing good work in one field and then going on to spout nonsense in another, and this seems like the kind of thing that explicit rationality could help prevent.

Agree that I am spending too much time reading LessWrong, though. I've been quantifying this using RescueTime and the numbers aren't pretty.

Do you want to get more specific about what you mean by "tight feedback loops"? I spent a few years focusing on startup things, and I don't think "tight feedback loops" are a good characterization. It can take a lot of work to figure out whether a startup idea is viable. That's why it's so valuable to gather advance data when possible (hence the lean startup movement). If you want "tight feedback loops", it seems like trying to master some flash game would offer a much better opportunity.

As far as I can tell, what actual entrepreneurs have that wannabee entrepreneurs don't is the ability to translate their ideas in to action. They're bold enough to punch through unendorsed aversions, they're not afraid to make fools of themselves, they don't procrastinate, they actually try stuff out, and they push on without getting easily discouraged. You could think of these skills as being multipliers on rationality... if your ability to act on your ideas is 0, it doesn't matter how good your ideas are and you should focus on improving your ability to act, not improving your ideas. It might help to start distrusting yourself whenever you say "I'll do X" and think "hm... am I really going to do X? What's the first step? When and how am I going to take that step? Why am I not taking it now? If I'm not going to take it now, will I ever take it?" (Relevant.)

BTW, one possible explanation for why some people are able to make good decisions in practice but not in theory could be the near/far thing Robin Hanson likes to bring up.

Lots of people are successful at many things, but that doesn't mean that for any particular person, like Oprah, there will be generalizable insights about success to be gathered from their life. For example, maybe what caused Oprah to skyrocket to billionaire status (instead of being a regular old driven, fairly successful person) was that she came up with a great gimmick. I'm not sure studying her example would provide much insight in to how to be successful for non-talk show people. But if you think it would, there are lots of biographies of famous, successful people you could mine for success insights.

What's the evidence that rationality leads to winning? I don't think that claim has been demonstrated.

This whole post seems very circular to me. You believe that rationality leads to winning, in fact you seem to believe that rationality is a necessary condition for winning, so when you see someone win, you conclude that therefore they are rational. And by extension whatever they are doing is rational. And if what the winners do doesn't look rational to us at first glance, we look deeper and rationalize as necessary until we can claim they are rational.

This reminds me not a little of classical economists who believe that people are rational consumers, and therefore treat anything consumers do, no matter how ridiculous, as expressing hidden preferences. I.e. they believe that rational consumers maximize their utility, so they contort utility functions such that they are maximized by whatever consumers choose, rather than recognizing the fact that consumers are often irrational. For instance, if consumers are willing to pay $50 for a bottle of bourbon they won't pay $10 for, they assert that consumers are buying a status symbol rather than a bottle of bourbon. You're proposing an equivalent sort of hidden rationality.

But rationality is not winning. It has a specific and reasonable definition. Epistemic rationality is the ability to form correct beliefs about the world. Instrumental rationality is the ability to choose and take reasonable actions toward ones goals.

Whether either or both of these characteristics leads one to "win" or accumulate massive piles of utility, is an empirical question. If demonstrably irrational people nonetheless manage to win, then we have good evidence that rationality is not a necessary condition for winning. Perhaps it is not even correlated to winning. Worse yet, perhaps it is anti-correlated; and irrational people are more likely to win than irrational people. Or perhaps not. Maybe there are just a lot more irrational people in the world than rational, so more winners are drawn from this larger pool. Perhaps more rational people have a higher probability of winning. But either way, whether rationality leads to winning or losing and if so by how much, is an empirical question to be answered by measurement and research, not something to be blithely asserted.

last $ sort $ map (\x -> (log(60000 - 90*x) + log(60000) + log(60000 + 900*x), x)) [0..500]
(34.11321061509552,300.0)

I'd love to hear a story (or maybe stories) of someone becoming an LW regular, improving their "rationality skills" and going on to "win" (define and achieve their personal goals), thanks to those skills.

Here I explicitly exclude LW-related goals, such as understanding the sequences, attending a CFAR workshop or being hired by CFAR, signing up for cryonics or figuring out how to donate more to GiveWell. Instead, I'd love to hear how people applied what they learned on this site to start a business, make money, improve their love life (hooking up with an LW poly does not count for this purpose), or maybe to take over the world.

Hopefully some of the stories have already been posted here, so links would be appreciated.

If Rationality is Winning, or perhaps more explicitly Making The Decisions That Best Accomplish Whatever Your Goals Happen to Be, then Rationality is so large that it swallows everything. Like anything else, spergy LW-style rationality is a small part of this, but it seems to me that anything which one can meaningfully discuss is going to be one such small portion. One could of course discuss Winning In General at a sufficiently high level of abstraction, but then you'd be discussing spergy LW stuff by definition - decision theory, utility, and so on.

If businessfolk are rather rational at running businesses, but no rational than anyone else about religion, or if people who have become experts on spergy LW stuff are no more winningful about their relationships, &c. &c. this (to my mind) brings into question the degree to which a General Rationality-as-Winningness skill exists. You acknowledge the distinction between explicit and tacit rationality, but do you expect successful entrepreneurs to be relatively more successful in their marital life? When you say you want to teach tacit rationality, do you mean something distinct from Teaching People How To Do Things Good?

You say that, "I know plenty of business managers and entrepreneurs who have a steady track record of good decisions and wise judgments, and yet they are religious, or they commit basic errors in logic and probability when they talk about non-business subjects."

You must know different business managers and entrepreneurs than I do. I can think of few if any business managers and entrepreneurs who have a steady track record of good decisions and wise judgments. There are some common positive characteristics I see in the business managers I know, and another group of common characteristics I see in the entrepreneurs I know (nor do the two groups share the same set of common characteristics, I might add) but in neither group are good decisions and wise judgments part of those common characteristics.

I do see a lot of hindsight bias and survivorship bias in both groups though. Out of a large pool of managers and entrepreneurs, the successful ones inevitably attribute their success to personal characteristics and skill, but it's not at all obvious they aren't just the lucky ones who happened to stumble into a profitable opportunity. One frequent characteristic of successful entrepreneurs is that they have tried many things, and usually failed at more of them they've succeeded at. If they were both rational and able to apply rationality to their plans, you'd expect them to succeed a lot more often.

In short, she had to be fairly rational, at least in some domains of her life.

Not a comment about Oprah. Repeat, not a comment about Oprah. Once more: not a comment about Oprah.

But a comment about the idea that rationality leads to success. Deception and violence also lead to success. These problem solvers are systemized winning: IF (application of fraud) THEN (goal met) ELSE (blame others). "Violence isn’t the only answer, but it is the final answer." - Jack Donovan. Violence and deception are social skills. When talking rationality comes apart, these two are means for winning rationality.

"When you are not practicing, remember, someone somewhere is practicing, and when you meet him he will win." - Ed Macauley. Practice the means to not be taken in by deception or undone by violence. Of course neither I nor anyone anywhere would advocate deceiving others or being violent, ever, under any circumstances, no matter how rational and life-saving and winning.

Which of these three options do you think will train rationality (i.e. systematized winning, or "winning-rationality") most effectively?

One of these things is not like the others. I can read the Sequences for free, and I can attend a workshop relatively cheaply, but the time and money investments into a startup are quite significant. Most people cannot afford them. Eating cake is not an option for them; they can barely afford bread.

One simplification I think you're making that raises some problems is money. Why Oprah? Why not Charles Wuorinen, who makes excellent musical decisions and has many learned skills? Who has access to tight feedback loops as soon as someone else listens to what he writes? Who is really good at what he does? Because Oprah's skills are better for collecting slips of green paper.

Now, one can collect quite a few slips of green paper and still, say, suffer from depression, or just generally be unhappy. Perhaps we could even claim that Wuorinen is happier than Oprah - I wouldn't know, but it doesn't sound outlandish. But you, you are someone trying to save the world, and you have excellent uses for slips of green paper. So maybe you were just focused on the skills related to slips of green paper because of what you (or other world-savers) could do with those skills.

And so I propose a definition of tacit rationality that takes this into account: The skills that to you would be highly valuable.

Explicit rationality can help you realize that you should force tight feedback loops into whichever domains you want to succeed in, so that you can have develop good intuitions about how to succeed in those domains.

A realization:

PUA, or at least what seems to me to be the core concept of some schools of PUA, makes a ton of sense when viewed in this light. Trying to pick up a stranger in a bar is probably the tightest feedback loop possible for social skills, and like the OP says, social skills are massively important for success and happiness. Therefore, going out every Friday night and brazenly flirting with as many attractive people as possible seems like an incredibly good way to rapidly improve your life and chances of success. I was always baffled and repelled by the "self-actualization teachings disguised as advice on how to get laid" nature of some PUA, but now it seems really really desirable.

Another interesting example of the utility of tight feedback loops, this time as applied to education, is extreme apprenticeship. I've been taking one math class built around the XA method, and it has felt considerably more useful and rewarding than ordinary math classes.

Among other things, XA employs bidirectional feedback loops - student-to-teacher and teacher-to-student. Students are given a lot of exercises to do from day one, but the exercises are broken into small chunks so that the students can get a constant sense of making progress, and so that they can clearly articulate the thing that they didn't understand in case they run into trouble. While students can just do the exercises by themselves if they wish, there are also scheduled exercise sessions during which constant help is available. When the exercises do get done, they are checked by the teaching staff and the students are requested to redo them with corrections in case there are major flaws.

Because the exercises are also returned each week, the teaching staff gets constant feedback on the things that the students are having difficulties with, and the content of the lectures can be modified on the fly. In general, lectures are kept to a minimum, and tend to build on content that the students already learned from the exercises rather than introduce entirely new material.

Some reports of the method: 1, 2, more.

Hypothesis for what tacit rationality might be: glomming onto accurate premises about what actions are likely to achieve one's goals without having a conscious process for how one chooses premises.

(the first CFAR workshop was May 2013)

May 2012*

I think it would probably be worth going into a bit more about what delineates tacit rationality from tacit knowledge. Rationality seems to me to apply to things that you can reflect about, and so the concept of things that you can reflect about but can't necessarily articulate seems weird.

For instance, at first it wasn't clear to me that working at a startup would give you any rationality-related skills except insofar as it gives you instrumental rationality skills, which could possibly just be explained as better tacit knowledge -- you know a bajillion more things about the actual details necessary to run a business and make things happening.

There's actually a ton of non-tacit knowledge potential powerups from running a startup though! That probably even engage reflection!

For instance, a person could learn what it feels like when they're about to be too tired to work for the rest of the day, and learn to stop before then so that they could avoid burnout. This would be a reflective skill (noticing a particular sensation of tiredness), and yet it would be nigh impossible to articulate (can you describe what it feels like to almost be unable to work well enough that I can detect it in myself?).

I take objection on Mark Zuckerberg and Oprah:

I would ascribe Oprah's success more to her being a charismatic personality/communicator and Zuckerberg didn't even make FB, he paid some guys to make it, the idea of fb wasn't new(there was Orkut, Myspace) it's just the one that ended up taking off. And the latter was due to the good implementation, fb was always simple, fast and snappy. I don't know if Zuckerberg was the one that drove this point or if he had just good guys on the technical side who understood what matters. The same can be said for Google, it was just one simple idea, the pagerank algorithm, that's all. They even wanted to sell it to Yahoo for a couple millions before it became the success it is nowadays.

If you want good examples of rationality in Business I would vote for Warren Buffett applying Value Investing. This is really a guy who has a consistent track record of beating the market for decades. Another one is Ray Dalio. Ray Dalio has published his principles, if you ever read them you will see that they match very well with what is preached in LW. Both follow certain principles consistently over decades. Charles Munger(Buffett's partner) has also written down his thinking, very rational stuff.

What means "allowing "the energy of the universe" to lead her." ? We can make an analogy. Imagine a fetus inside the womb. The mother's womb is the energy of the universe leading the fetus. Normally, fetus have no rationality and free will, they can't do nothing. But adult humans are different, they can drive their destiny, taking decisions. Since that fetus do nothing he will be successful in relation to its mother's state but, if its mother is poor, ugly, living at non-hospitable location, he will be not successful in relation to its destiny. Oprah must had to be a collaborator when molested and learned survivor bias and maybe got something as reward by the molesters. To her, the molesters were the energy of the Universe and one must be submitted to it, dancing this music, for to be rewarded. Then, " give to people what they want".

But...did Oprah the right thing to do? Yes if we are merely animals, and not if we have post-death existence, be it as a soul or genetically imprinted into our offspring. Because the Earth's biosphere is the womb of human beings and it is product of chaos due the fall of our ancestors non-biological astronomical systems (see Matrix/DNA models for understanding it). The biosphere's laws are not the laws of the Universe at ordered state. I think that if I am a fetus with intelligence, knowing that my mother's womb is making me poor, ugly, for to be a slave, I will fight against these " universal energies" and i will be born different than my parents, their immediate world, on which I will be not successful. But I did it right in relation to long term destiny...and if there is long term destiny, Oprah is doing everything wrong...