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Comment by jscn | Hacker News Reader

Did you read the article?

According to the article, you are acting rationally if you are behaving in ways that maximise achievment of your goal(s). So rationality does (tend to) correlate with doing well in the fields you mentioned (excluding law-abidingness, perhaps).

The article seems to be using people's susceptibility to the cognitive biases identified by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky as a measure of rationality.

The author states that there are methods of "fixing" these errors, and that they should be a priority in education, instead of focusing on "intelligence".

As mentioned elsewhere, the community blog http://www.lesswrong.com is dedicated to the pursuit of instrumental rationality.

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behaving in ways that maximise achievment of your goal(s)

But that's exactly what IQ tests measure, at least in the context of academic and job performance. IQ tests are used because they are the most economical predictor of achievement in certain areas.

Stanovich seems to be saying that he can predict some kind of achievement (or "well-being," whatever that is) by examining people's susceptibility to certain mental quirks like the sunk cost fallacy. Ok, it's a fine hypothesis, but where's the data?

behaving in ways that maximise achievment of your goal(s)

But that's exactly what IQ tests measure, at least in the context of academic and job performance.

The longer book, published only at the beginning of this year, by the same author includes numerous examples of high-IQ individuals NOT achieving their goals because of nimble but irrational thinking. The kind of tests developed by Kahneman (and replicated in practice by many other investigators, repeatedly) show that IQ scores are essentially devoid of predictive value in showing who will make rational decisions most consistently. (Most human beings don't make rational decisions particularly often, and having a higher IQ doesn't lower the rate of irrational decisions on many kinds of tests of rationality.)

The data can be found in the abundant citations to the primary research literature in the book by the same author. I'm all too well aware that you know how to find the book

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=622924

so rather than repeat myself here, I'll simply mention that the book is well evidenced, well written, interesting, and a good contribution to the popular literature by scholars on cognitive psychology.

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