[gog-ma-gog]

Rationalists seem extremely common amongst the $300k+/year software engineers I know. If that isn’t “successful”, then I’m not sure we’re using the same word anymore.

You can argue that the causal arrow doesn’t point in the right direction—that is, that people that are successful just happen to wear the affectation of “rationalist” because that happens to be fashionable, and not that their rationalism led them to a “successful” career, but that doesn’t seem to hold up against scrutiny, in my experience. Of those that I personally know, most have been engaged with the community since at least the golden days of lesswrong.

[paganel]

> Rationalists seem extremely common amongst the $300k+/year software engineers I know

I'm a programmer who lives on the other side of the world (so no chance for me to make $300k+/year) and I must say that all this "rationalism" discussion makes me a little confused: do people really believe in this sort of stuff? Do they actually equate "success" with (mostly owning) "money"? Do they really think a "rational"(-ist) person would mainly think about how to earn (supposedly more) money? Why on Earth would he/she do that? Money is just a tool. Holding an important position in society (CEO, founder, whatever) is just a hindrance, it keeps one away from actually thinking about the stuff that really matters.

I'm pretty sure all this stuff was explained a lot better a long time ago by people a lot more smarter than me (right now I'm thinking at one of Plato's works, maybe "Symposium"? I'm not sure, I've last read many of them ~20 years ago), point is this specific "view of the world" seems very US-specific to me.

[zmj]

Earning lots of money sets you up to donate lots of money to effective charities. Many rationalists believe that's the best thing you can be doing for global quality-of-life.

[lanstin]

If one understands that the value of your work is almost certainly higher than your salary, then you'd conclude to benefit the world the most, you'd be better allocating your work directly to the cause of global quality-of-life.

[mrmonkeyman]

This. Money is no hindrance. It can be set in motion for good. It's the only thing capable of producing real change.

[CydeWeys]

> Holding an important position in society (CEO, founder, whatever) is just a hindrance, it keeps one away from actually thinking about the stuff that really matters.

You may believe stuff like this, but many others don't, so it should be phrased as your opinion rather than as a fact.

Elon Musk, for example, has very strong beliefs about humanity's future on other planets. His position as founder/CEO of SpaceX lets him actually work towards making that dream a reality. You or I can dream all we want but we can't make them reality. If this is something you care about, then he's clearly successful in ways that we aren't, that are directly attributable solely to his role as wealthy person/founder.

[mpoteat]

I definitely recommend reading the sequences. More than anything, it's about recognizing cognitive biases. Altruism is where money comes in, but I would classify that as the Effective Altruism movement.

[darawk]

I think this is exactly right. Being successful in the top 0.1% is not actually rational. Even if you're brilliant, your chance of succeeding at that level is low. A truly rational person seeks out the best risk-adjusted return, not the best absolute return. If you're a technical minded person, making 300k/year in a software job is about the best risk-adjusted return of any profession I can think of.

[andi999]

Well the risk is you have to move to the US to get that kind of salary in a software job.

[klipt]

And the cost of living is so high that despite the fantastic salary most software engineers in Silicon Valley will never buy a house there.

Great place to make money before retiring elsewhere though.

[edanm]

Well yes, but many other countries have similar math when it comes to software engineering salaries as opposed to other fields. In most places, going into software is a good thing to do moneywise.

[andi999]

Germany not. Software is more on the lower end of high skilled work, definitely not at the top end.

[edanm]

Interesting. Still, am I correct that lower end of high skilled work is still middle-upper class in terms of income?

[andi999]

I find it difficult to find reliable numbers (since I work in a different industry), but it seems median entry salary for IT graduate is 40k€, which is 25k€ nett anually. I also find the middle-upper class difficult for germany (since salary upper class doesnt mean you are asset upperclass aka rich).

Personally I would say 25k€ nett is middle class; but here everybody wants to belong to the middle class so it usually has a wide stretch.

Big companies are unionized so salarys do not get that big, but are considered higher then in non-unionized companies.

How is the situation in the US?

[lanstin]

What is the optimal risk adjustment ratio? And it is chosen by reason or by personal preference? Many software engineers are a bit risk averse and just do what they are told to do. Many entrepreneurs would rather experience the rushes of a business roller-coaster and walk away with no money than just sit and program as told.

[darawk]

There is no optimal ratio per se. You just divide gain by risk and maximize that quantity. This is a scale invariant function, at least, with respect to its maximum.

[lanstin]

I think you must be omitting variables, or simply trying to maximize dollars or some other approximately ordered quantity rather than maximize subjective fulfillment in life.

[darawk]

Which variables are being omitted? Certainly there are other variables relevant to a quality life than money. But the rules apply to any utility function you might come up with. You want to maximize risk-adjusted return.

[matthewdgreen]

I’ve asked a number of people I know who are not “tech adjacent” (meaning that they don’t frequent boards like HN or tech Twitter, and they don’t live in the Bay Area) if they’ve ever heard of the Internet-based phenomenon that calls itself “rationalism”, and I have yet to find one who has heard of it. So I am skeptical about your claim regarding the causal arrow: I only know of this phenomenon because I’m in tech, and other tech people pointed me to it.

To me, this feels a little like saying “lots of tech people I know with high salaries were early contributors to Wikipedia, therefore being an early contributor to Wikipedia probably made them successful.”

[screye]

I had become a rationalist(ish) at least a decade before I knew what rationalism was as a movement. I very similarly has lost my faith in religion, far before I ever knew what atheism as a movement was too.

It can be considered causal. In that, many people follow the thought processes that underlie rationalism which direct them towards careers and outcomes of the sort that the person above was mentioning. (95+ percentile salary as a stable independent contributor in a field that values logic and structured thought). They may do it while being completely ignorant of the movement, but still being a rationalist for all intents and purposes.

[matthewdgreen]

> They may do it while being completely ignorant of the movement, but still being a rationalist for all intents and purposes.

If you consider “rationalism” (in the sense of the subject of this thread) to be equivalent to “following a scientific or rational thought process”, then the main question asked in the article becomes nonsensical. “Where are all the successful people who followed rational thought processes?” is a genuinely foolish question, because you can find countless notable examples with no effort at all.

But of course that’s not what the post was asking, and it’s why the poster has a harder time answering the question. The post refers to the very specific Internet phenomenon of “rationalism” which, while cleverly incorporating the notion of rational thought into its name, actually refers to a specific group of people who follow a specific set of teachings.

And those people are massively concentrated in US tech and tech-adjacent areas, largely because that’s where this specific set of beliefs took off first. That’s the causal arrow here.