This post seems to fail to ask the fundamental question “winning at what?”. If you don’t want to become a leading politician or entrepeneur, then applying rationality skills obviously won’t help you get there.
The EA community (which is distinct from the rationality community, which the author fails to note) clearly has a goal however: doing a lot of good. How much money GiveWell has been able to move to AMF clearly has improved a lot over the past ten years, but as the author says, that only proves they have convinced others of rationality. We still need to check whether deaths from malaria have actually been going down a corresponding amount due to AMF doing more distributions. I am not aware of any investigations of this question.
Some people in the rationalist community likely only have ‘understand the world really well’ as their goal, which is hard to measure the success of, though better forecasts can be one example. I think the rationality community stocking up on food in February before it was sold out everywhere is a good example of a success, but probably not the sort of shining example the author might be looking for.
If your goal is to have a community where a specific rationalist-ish cluster of people shares ideas, it seems like the rationalist community has done pretty well.
[Edit: redacted for being quickly written, and in retrospective failing to engage with the author’s perspective and the rationality community’s stated goals]
This post seems to fail to ask the fundamental question “winning at what?”. If you don’t want to become a leading politician or entrepeneur, then applying rationality skills obviously won’t help you get there.
The EA community (which is distinct from the rationality community, which the author fails to note) clearly has a goal however: doing a lot of good. How much money GiveWell has been able to move to AMF clearly has improved a lot over the past ten years, but as the author says, that only proves they have convinced others of rationality. We still need to check whether deaths from malaria have actually been going down a corresponding amount due to AMF doing more distributions. I am not aware of any investigations of this question.
Some people in the rationalist community likely only have ‘understand the world really well’ as their goal, which is hard to measure the success of, though better forecasts can be one example. I think the rationality community stocking up on food in February before it was sold out everywhere is a good example of a success, but probably not the sort of shining example the author might be looking for.
If your goal is to have a community where a specific rationalist-ish cluster of people shares ideas, it seems like the rationalist community has done pretty well.
[Edit: redacted for being quickly written, and in retrospective failing to engage with the author’s perspective and the rationality community’s stated goals]