michael_nielsen

For a long time I thought ppl were saying dumb things about rationality, until I realized they were using a different definition of rationality from me. I think their definition is something like "If social consensus is that an idea is unpromising, then that idea is irrational"https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1090608908534800384 …

Not so much that the consensus is x, but that an intelligent, unbiased (or if you prefer, nonspecialist) person would conclude x.

Yeah, that does seem closer to the definition people are using. But it still means that people who are correctly perceiving something that most other intelligent people can't perceive get classified as irrational.

I wasn't talking about what people perceive so much as what they enjoy. E.g. Wozniak didn't start building computers because he perceived that microcomputers would be a big business, but rather because he enjoyed it. So financially it was an irrational choice.