Rational Groups Kick Ass

Thank you! It's been said here before (by Robin Hanson among others) that the art of rationality as set out so far is a lonely art, and that's an artifact of how it was developed. In practice, it seems likely to me that even with the most desperate effort I could easily leave some central mistake like a detached lever at the heart of some complex of ideas, and someone else is going to have to point it out. We need to start thinking now about how to avoid the irrational diseases of groups, because groups can do so much to counteract the irrational diseases of individuals.

Concrete examples would be much appreciated here.

A point further in favor, dysrationalia accumulates in groups much as the small advantages you describe do.

Mensa and AMA members may not have superpowers(to pick two weakly rationalist groups), but they also don't spend millions of dollars sponsoring attempts to locate Noah's Ark, or traces of the Jewish tribe that the LDS church believes existed in South America.

The success of Yvain's post threw me off completely. My experience has been opposite to what he describes: x-rationality, which I've been working on since the mid-to-late nineties, has been centrally important to successses I've had in business and family life.

I don't believe you. I think a counterfactual Talisman with his x-rationality cut out and substituted for a double dose of "How to Make Friends and Influence People" would still have a succesfull business and family life. More or less successful, I really couldn't guess.

When it comes to groups--sized from two to a billion--Yvain couldn't be more wrong.

Nothing you said seemed to support that conclusion. Partly because it implies a bizarre charicature of Yvain's post and misses his main point.

It sounds like you're arguing that there are increasing returns to rationality in groups.

I am not sure. But I think that it would be helpful to think about what experiment would demonstrate the argument you're making here. e.g. Give a rationality diagnostic exam to a bunch of people, then put them in groups of various sizes and measure how well they perform various tasks.

If groups magnify the effectiveness of rational thinking, what would an entire community or nation of rationalists be like? And how could such an outcome be achieved?

I broadly agree with your conclusions, and I wanted to further note that this article in the PNAS draws a link between cognitive skills and material success in a way not simply mediated by job choice.

While we certainly cannot say that cognitive skills and rationality are identical, the article does discuss how groups with higher average ability to plan, take calculated risks, etc. seem to do better over the long-run, including a specific discussion of the Industrial Revolution in Britain.

It is true that groups magnify the importance of rational thinking, but I don't think the few examples cited prove that non-x rational thinking was the cause of the success and even if that were proven, it wouldn't prove that x-rational thinking would (given opportunity cost) make a group better. The first example is Toyota, but the link isn't a serious argument that the main cause for their success versus the US auto industry is the continuous improvement, nor that their adoption of continuous improvement was them being rational and the US auto industry not adopting it was them being less rational. I doubt all those claims.

I also doubt that "Companies with slightly better risk management are currently preparing to dominate the financial space." As best I can tell, this presupposes that the financial crises hit all companies the same and the difference in effects was due to risk management policies. I tend to think that the different crises hit different companies differently because the crisis were varied and somewhat random in their effects, so that some companies got lucky (though some probably did have better risk policies).

And I really don't understand the claim about certain countries having more rational systems which over centuries led to their current improved "ways of life." I assume this refers to the highly industrialized countries. Was their growth only .5% more per year than other countries? Was the Tsarist rule of Russia more rational than that of imperial China? Or Great Britain more rational than Denmark? I highly doubt that amounts of rationality is what explains the current economic distinctions between countries.

Finally, there is the cliche about finance professors--if they really understood it, why aren't they rich? Similarly, why not start a company using x-rationality to guide it? Find, for example, a new small business that is growing, and just do the same thing--only using x-rationality.