Incremental Progress and the Valley

oh, shi*.. RUNS AWAY

"No," you say, "I'm talking about how startup founders strike it rich by believing in themselves and their ideas more strongly than any reasonable person would. ..."

It's important to realize that this is another myth perpetuated by the media and our ignorance of the statistics. Most startups fail; I think the statistics are that 80% die in the first 5 years. But the ones that get written up in glowing articles are the ones that succeeded. Of course all those founders who struck it rich believed strongly in their ideas, but so did many of those that failed. That irrational belief may be a crucial ingredient for success, but it doesn't supply a guarantee. Most of the people who held that irrational belief worked for businesses that failed--but they didn't get their name in the paper, so they're relatively invisible.

Some historical context:

16th through 19th-century rationalists advocated views something like the views Eliezer is advocating. This view was eventually reflected in the art of the day, as exemplified by Bach and, later, by the strict formalisms of classical music.

In the 19th century, romanticism was an artistic reaction against rationalism. We're talking Goethe, Beethoven, Byron, and Blake. In painting, it was also a reaction against photography, searching for a justification for continuing to paint.

During the romantic period, Nietzsche used romantic artistic ideas to criticize rationality, by saying that life is worth living when we commit to values, and rationality undermines our commitment to our values. He offered as an alternative the culture/value creator, who leads his culture to greatness. This greatness, he says, can only be attained if we reject rationalism. There is some happiness theory in there as well, including the idea that war isn't justified by values, war justifies values. This seems to be a riff on the idea that the striving and drama is itself what we value.

In the 20th century, Max Weber rephrased it this way: Societies are legitimized by tradition, reason, or charisma. Religious societies are legitimized by tradition. The Enlightenment introduced legitimization by reason. Nietzsche argued for legitimization by charisma.

By then, most intellectuals the world over sided with Nietzsche. (I use "intellectuals" in the standard way, which marginalizes the physicists, mathematicians, and other hard scientists whom many of us consider to be the world's true intellectuals.)

Then Hitler and Lenin-Stalin played out legitimization by charisma. Intellectuals the world over were repulsed. It didn't seem so noble in real life. They rejected Nietzsche's conclusions, but without finding any problems with Nietzsche's arguments.

Philosophy since then has been boring, probably because philosophers can't get worked up about any position anymore. Today, most intellectuals reject tradition, reason, and charisma for legitimizing society; and no one has come up with anything better.

To push the true rationalist agenda, someone needs to find the errors in Nietzsche.

This is not what I see happening. When I hear people defending the preference of truth over Happiness or utility, it sounds like they're trying to create a monstrous hybrid of the Enlightenment and Nietzsche by rooting the entire structure of rationalism in an act of charismatic Nietzschian value-creation. That's not true utilitarian rationality. It looks like rationality above the surface; but the roots are Nietzschian.

Oh no, more grandeur.

A rationalist can take a small concrete problem, reduce it to essentials, figure out a good strategy and follow it. No need to brainf*ck yourself and reevaluate your whole life - people have built bridges and discovered physical laws without it. For examples of what I want see Thomas Schelling's "Strategy of Conflict": no mystique, just clear mathematical analysis of many real-life problems. Starts out from toys, e.g. bargaining games and PD, and culminates in lots of useful tactics for nuclear deterrence that were actually adopted by the US military after the book's publication. How's that for "something to protect"?

I for one would be happy if you just wrote up, mathematically, your solution concept for Newcomb's and PD. Is it an extension of superrationality for asymmetric games, or something else entirely? If we slowly modify one player's payoffs in PD, at what precise moment do you stop cooperating?

When there is a conventional wisdom it usually pays for most people to become more rational just so they can better anticipate, assimilate, remember and use that conventional wisdom. But once your rationality becomes so strong that it leads you to often reject conventional wisdom, then you face a tougher tradeoff; there can be serious social costs from rejecting conventional wisdom.

Things are actually a bit worse than this, because there is also no theorem that says there is only one valley, so there's no guarantee that even after you climb out of this valley, your next step won't cause you to go off a precipice.

BTW, there's a very similar issue in economics, which goes under the name of the Theory of the Second Best. Markets will allocate resources efficiently if they are perfectly competitive and complete, but there is no guarantee that any incremental progress towards that state, such creating some markets that were previously missing, or making some markets more competitive, will improve social welfare.

An incremental step can be a loss where you have two errors reversing each other. You have error A that causes suffering a and error B that causes anti-a. You cure B, and suddenly you experience a. The anti-rationalist says "quick, reinstate B". I say "no, work back from a to A and cure A".

Example: pessimists make better calibrated estimates but are worse off for happiness and health. IMO the pessimists are probably not accepting the reality they predict, they are railing against it, which is a variety of magical thinking.

Even perfectly rational agents can lose. They just can't know in advance that they'll lose. They can't expect to underperform any other performable strategy, or they would simply perform it.

I think your formulation in this post is the clearest, and I agree with it. In previous posts, you may have said things which confused your point, such as this:

Said I: "If you fail to achieve a correct answer, it is futile to protest that you acted with propriety."

The strong interpretation of this quote is that if you lose, you weren't being rational. This may explain why so many people felt the urge to point out that rational people can lose. The weak interpretation is that if you lose, rather than protesting that you were rational, you should more closely scrutinize your thinking and whether it is really rational. Now it seems that the weak interpretation is what you intend.

But if you don't care about the truth - and you have nothing to protect - and you're not attracted to the thought of pushing your art as far as it can go - and your current life seems to be going fine - and you have a sense that your mental well-being depends on illusions you'd rather not think about -

..then it may already be too late, since the seed of doubt is already planted.

Most people are not signed up for cryonics, so if you postulate that the "benefit" to an individual of cryonics is massive compared to the increment in quality of life that being irrationally comforted brings, then almost everyone ought to be epistemically rational.

I don't know what's up with the italics here. It doesn't show like that in the editor or in the raw HTML. Copying to another application and repasting doesn't fix it, etc.

Rationality does not guarantee results at the single human scale.

Making a decision that is statistically correct only works out in the long run, over a number of such decisions.

You can make a decision that was the correct decision given the information you had, and then it doesn't work out.

This is an experiment with quoted text. Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country, don't ya think?

• This is item 1.
• This is item 2.
• This is item 3.

This is really important.

From a statistical standpoint, lottery winners don't exist - you would never encounter one in your lifetime, if it weren't for the selective reporting.

Well... one of my grandmothers' neighbors, whose son I played with as a child, did indeed win the lottery. (AFAIK, it was a relatively modest jackpot, but he did win!)

Also, re: cryonics: My current understanding is that being an organ donor is incompatible with cryonic preservation. Is this correct? (Myself, I think I'd rather be an organ donor...)

IAWYC, but am confused by the phrase

If you don't prefer truth to happiness with false beliefs...

Does it make sense to talk about preferring something over happiness? I know what you mean if we take a folk definition of happiness as something like "bubbly feelings". But I don't think you mean folk happiness; for this statement to have impact, it has to mean Happiness, defined to include all of your values.

I think what I'm trying to ask is: Isn't it by definition irrational (failing to maximize your happiness) to prefer truth to happiness?

And only now I finally get why some of the people I know kept telling me, again and again, "okay, but rationality is not enough for everyone to get through their lives, people need something to believe in..." they were just picturing the step of being "realistic".

It has dawned on me that nearly all the illusions I was wrapped in were making my life considerably unhappier. 

I guess that's why I've never experienced anything close as finding myself worse off because of studying rationality, not even after the first steps. 

Eliezer said: "Even the surveys are comparing the average religious person to the average atheist, not the most advanced theologians to the most advanced rationalists."

Very true. Wouldn't it be a kicker if that was done and we found out that the most advanced theologians ARE the most advanced rationalists? I suspect the chances of something like this being true are higher than most of us think.