Contests vs. Real World Problems

Rather than just gambling with money, people could gamble with their lives. A global warming denier, for example, could announce that he is so sure that the earth will not be significantly warmer in ten years than it is today that if he is wrong about this he will kill himself. A legal system that enforced such a promise would, clearly, make it possible for someone to very credibly communicate the sincerity of his beliefs.

One obvious "cheat" - ask someone else for an answer.

The fear and hatred of gambling. Contra Tyler Cowen, betting your beliefs is one of the best paths to both individual and group rationality. You should be doing it twice a day, like brushing your teeth. The beliefs that don't get bet get cavities and rot; the beliefs that are unbettable create unbreakable deadlocks that later require ophtalmological intervention. Bet!

I warn those of you with a Netflix account that Redbelt is one awful mess of a movie. Yes, the Brazilian jiu-jitsu instructor refuses to compete against the evil Brazilians, but it's not because prize fights are inherently different from grappling matches. It's for some sort of dedication to an ideal of honoring a Japanese-looking master that even he can't coherently articulate. Brazilian jiu-jitsu is built upon wrestling others - in class, in tournaments, in MMA fights and in real life.

It's one thing to have an arbitrary restriction; it's another to have one that's simultaneously a contradiction of the core principles of your profession and so unclear even the person following it can't tell you what it is. And it's yet another thing to reward the instructor with a redbelt - the supposed highest honor in jiu-jitsu - solely for getting angry, beating up security guards and brawling in the hallways of an arena to protest the stealing of his stupid idea.

Mamet tried to do about eleven different things with his script and only Eijofor's performance gave that movie its sole redeeming feature.

That being said, this "do not hit a girl" thing has always annoyed me. There are biological difference between genders, but if someone deserves to be punched, they deserve to be punched.

The first thing that springs to mind are the arcane company policies in large corporations, where responsibilities and duties are so finely assigned that they often become barriers to getting actual work done. This becomes especially true if a situation comes along that there aren't codified rules for (or as I like to think of it, a selection pressure is introduced that the system isn't adapted for).

I also think it's interesting to contrast this to the rational technique of the least convenient possible world, where instead of removing artificial restrictions you keep adding them.

Ad hominems. We are so well schooled in 'traditional' deductive rationality that we instinctively shy away from using this strategy, even though it's quite powerful and often we're using it in practice anyway.

Well, are you talking about higher academia, or earlier schooling too? ie, there's always the classic "your paper must be at least X pages long", which in college professors will explicitly say that you have to unlearn.

Is Science Doesn't Trust Your Rationality along the lines of what you're thinking?

Problems in the real world have much more detailed context which can be used to "guess" an answer to then test rationally. Even if it turns out the answer isn't adequate as it stands, and it often isn't, it usually does provide an "advanced base" to find a better answer.

Also real world problems rarely have an accessible "best" answer; you need to find one that is good enough; and you usually need to define "good enough" on the fly as well.