Paul GrahamVerified account

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.

What's going on here is that when some people (people at the leading edge of some change) like something, it's not as random as they think. Wozniak seems to like something the same way a model train enthusiast does, but in *his* case his liking has predictive value.

Yup. Same thing for scientists who "irrationally" refuse to give up on a theory when it seems to be contradicted by experimental results. Sometimes, a good scientist's intuitions - e.g., about the predictive value of "beauty" or "elegance" in a theory - turn out to be correct