Most people look at a “crazy idea” — like seasteading — and say: “That’s obviously dumb and not worth trying, lol, you morons.”
Well, it is. There are so many easier ways to dodge taxes.
Does irrationality fuel innovation?
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Re: Does irrationality fuel innovation?
#22There's another thing he doesn't seem to mention: the problem in all learning systems of converging on and then getting stuck in local maxima.
Perhaps when things get stuck it is in fact rational to be irrational-- to strategically adopt odd heterodox modes of thought or even employ a bit of randomness (Monte Carlo methods) to shake yourself free of a local maximum.
Re: Does irrationality fuel innovation?
#23Oh come on, guys. Sure, sampling from the tails of the distribution means you sample points with low probability, but if you sample them with disproportionately low probability, you're simply failing to accurately sample the distribution.
Translated: if you don't try crazy ideas sometimes, you're not accurately modeling the chances an idea is crazy.
Re: Does irrationality fuel innovation?
#24One of the reasons radicals have amassed so much power in the middle east is because they were the only ones willing to stand up to the west as the more reasonable people realized they couldn't do anything. A bit of craziness can create very unexpected results, with a destabalization wave having many orders of effects. The strong become weak, the weak strong, the poor rich, the stupid "smart". So much of the status q…
I followed this up until the final comment, which seemed to come out of nowhere. Each human doesn't provide the same value to each scenario. Case in point, your opening sentence singled out "radicals" as having an entirely separate influence.
Re: Does irrationality fuel innovation?
#25One of the reasons radicals have amassed so much power in the middle east is because they were the only ones willing to stand up to the west as the more reasonable people realized they couldn't do anything. A bit of craziness can create very unexpected results, with a destabalization wave having many orders of effects. The strong become weak, the weak strong, the poor rich, the stupid "smart". So much of the status q…
I agree with another comment that your last sentence goes against most of the rest and I think it makes an otherwise very poignant comment fall a bit flat. I'm not saying that there's no truth to it, just that it's flawed and doesn't explain as much as the rest.
Each human doesn't provide the 'same value'. However, I believe value creation is much more chaotic than what economic praxis will try to make it appear. Any person has the potential to create value - under very peculiar circumstances that are not very well understood.
In today's society one person may end up creating more value than a thousand others, by inventing something, by being lucky or just by having the right combination of values, connections and friends at the right time and at the right place. Then again, effort still counts, but it's just one of many factors.
Re: Does irrationality fuel innovation?
#26Cognitive dissonance is extremely "expensive". Deliberately suspending one's beliefs takes very good storytelling and/or resources corresponding to a movie budget. All that so that each person could suspend their beliefs for a couple of hours. For the kind of long-term emotional investment it takes to do research or develop something new, one (typically) needs to have "buy-in" at an emotional level (aka irrationality…
> Deliberately suspending one's beliefs takes very good storytelling and/or resources corresponding to a movie budget
I think the "cost" entirely depends on the frame in which the truth is held. It is my belief/hypothesis, that internally visualized truths are cheap to be "rational" in the internal frame. Out here, in reality, those "truths" become irrational, i.e. a lot of expensive work must go into manifesting those truths in the "hardness" of reality.
Irrational truths can manifest "on the cheap" here, I think, if they don't involve speaking for other's truths. Sticking to your own vision, for yourself (or a god), seems to be a common teaching across multiple religions and philosophies. Maybe groups can manifest things cheaply here if it is a common truth for a large amount of the group (and only one or two groups).
I appreciate someone else knows about dissonance. It's a powerful force, when involved in complexity.
Re: Does irrationality fuel innovation?
#27Yes but it also fuels failure. The lines that separate what we know is possible, what is actually possible but we don't know it and what isn’t at all— are very very fine. Fools often rush in and are successful because they didn't know they shouldn’t have been able to do something. But more often than not, I think they’re met with disaster simply because the skillset they lack is the same one they need to be successfu…
"When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong." https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke's_three_laws (The first of his three laws, the third of which is the magic-tech one)
Are you implying time travel is certainly possible?
"Even if it turns out that time travel is impossible, it is important that we understand why it is impossible." - Stephen Hawking
Re: Does irrationality fuel innovation?
#28The first article that appeared in my feed after reading this one: The Emerging Trump Doctrine: Don’t Follow Doctrine.
This article made me think of this line from Does irrationality fuel innovation? "A lot of important truths come from v. irrational ppl."
You guys are smarter than I am. Any correlation? Is there any hope that his irrationality might just be what the world needed? Crazy like a fox? Didn't he gain most of his support from people's desire to shake things up? People didn't necessarily like him. They had an overwhelming desire that maybe a force from the outside traditional government could bring a change.
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/04/08/us/politics/trump-doct...
Re: Does irrationality fuel innovation?
#29"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." --George Bernard Shaw
Re: Does irrationality fuel innovation?
#30Paul Feyerabend argues as much in [Against Method](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_Method), that "science is an anarchic enterprise." Our greatest innovations were created by people who were claiming "irrational" things against the backdrop of the knowledge of their time.