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My hypothesis: Rationalists are the opposite of visionaries. A job at Google making $200-400k, having good work life balance and enough time to pursue your ho
by screye 6y ago
My hypothesis:
Rationalists are the opposite of visionaries.
A job at Google making $200-400k, having good work life balance and enough time to pursue your hobbies is success. It is also more reliably achievable. A rationalist thrives in the absence of uncertainty. Becoming a decent engineer is a far more reliable way to be successful than starting the next billion dollar company. That is practically leaving everything up to luck.
The truth is, we only see two kinds of successful people in media. The lucky, the pig-headed visionary and those who fall in line. Rationalists are by ideology averse to luck, stubbornness and compliance. Go figure, why they do not feature in cohorts so opposed to their core ideology.
Now militant rationalists are rarely rationalists. If anything, acknowledging the virtue of gut feeling/intuition in presence of uncertainty and the the prevalence of uncertainty in everything we do, are the 2 most evident facts of our universe. To make a strong claim of correctness in the presence of massive uncertainty, is innately irrational.
That being said, a lot of the most successful people I've met, use various tools of rationalism quite frequently.
- CydeWeys 6y agoThat's me to a T. I was a "militant rationalist" as it were, back in high school. Anyone remember talk.origins?
- spiritplumber 6y agoit's no longer around? talkorigins.org seems to work
- CydeWeys 6y agoI was referring more to the newsgroup than the archives site, but I used past tense because I haven't been a regular there in almost two decades now. [1] https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins
- cecilpl2 6y agoYes, I spent a lot of time there and on the JREF forums.
- munificent 6y ago> A job at Google making $200-400k, having good work life balance and enough time to pursue your hobbies is success. It is also more reliably achievable. Yes. Perhaps restating your point in statistical terms, "Where Are All the Successful Rationalists?" is entirely the wrong question. A rationalist is not particularly interested in outliers and assumes their outcome is no likely to be better than the odds predict. The right question is "What is the median level of success among all rationalists compared to other groups?" My hunch is that you'd find that they do tend to be more successful in the aggregate. If you only look at the set of people who have made a ton of money to draw your conclusions, it would tell you you should buy more lottery tickets.
- klipt 6y agoCorrelation is not causation. Maybe nerdiness makes you interested in both software and movements with names like "rationalism", but if the movement didn't exist I think nerdy people would still be making good money in software without it.
- musicale 6y ago> A job at Google making $200-400k, having good work life balance and enough time to pursue your hobbies is success. What job at Google (or anywhere for that matter) do you have that actually facilitates good work-life balance?
- afthonos 6y agoSoftware engineer. Source: at Google for 4.5 years. Rarely if ever had to stay late.