Why is it so hard to be rational?

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/08/23/why-is-it-so-hard-to-be-rational

by ubuwaits • 5 years ago

354 295 5 years ago

legrande2• 5 years ago

I try to avoid mind viruses, or ideas that can hijack your decisions and thought process and take over. Think of a mind virus as a sort of dangerous meme that underpins everything you do. This is why first principles and making decisions based on sound foundations is better, absent of some sort of virulent dogma.

jjbinx007• 5 years ago

Viruses. Virii isn't the plural of virus.

There's a YouTube channel (1) called Street Epistemology which has a guy interview members of the public and ask them if they have a belief they hold to be true such as "the supernatural exists" or "climate change is real" or "x is better than y".

He then asks them to estimate how certain they are that it's true.

Then they talk. The interviewer asks a question and makes notes, then tries to summarise the reply. He questions how they know what they think they know and at the end he asks them to again say how confident they are that what they said is true.

It's fascinating to see people actually talk about and discuss what are usually unsaid thoughts and it shows some glaring biases logical fallacies.

(1) https://youtube.com/c/AnthonyMagnabosco210

legrande2• 5 years ago

Virii isn't the plural of virus.

Thanks for correcting me. I will refrain from ever using virii again!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plural_of_virus

WhompingWindows2• 5 years ago

I may be wrong, but "Mind Virii" could be using the genitive or possessive form of Virus, like "Mind of a Virus" or "Virus's Mind".

jklinger410• 5 years ago

Glad to hear you aren't the only person thinking of the mind virus idea!

Exactly what you said. Once you accept one toxic thought, it tends to branch out into other decisions. Unfortunately there are many, many memes out there ready to cause an infection.

These things can be fatal.

OnACoffeeBreak• 5 years ago

Sci-fi novel "Lexicon" by Max Barry explores the idea of words used for persuasion to the extent of actually hacking the brain via spoken word to take control of the subject's thoughts and actions.

FinanceAnon2• 5 years ago

I thought about something similar in the context of "dangerous" AI. In a hypothetical scenario where super-smart AI got control of the internet and all the devices, would it be able to start controlling people?

jkmcf• 5 years ago

This is what the Sophists were accused of by the Stoics and others.

Source: https://literatureandhistory.com/index.php/episode-032-trees...

nathias2• 5 years ago

Ah yes, the modern rationalists, few things are as cringe as modern adaptation of classical intellectual currents. Like reddit atheism, it makes a great disservice to the concept from which they steal their name. They have no education beyond their narrow limits, no interest in what lies beyond their time or their common sense.

jgeada• 5 years ago

And they are ever so full of themselves. They're a perfect embodiment of Dunning-Kruger.

MrBuddyCasino• 5 years ago

Sure, naive rationalism is intellectually dead, but post-rationalism deserves a better endorsement, thus the downvotes. I suspect most people aren't yet familiar with the discourse. If I was more qualified I'd write it myself, but alas.

jhgb2• 5 years ago

What is this "naive rationalism" and "post-rationalism"? And how is rationalism dead in the first place? Did science and logic suddenly stop working without us noticing?

nathias2• 5 years ago

Yea, I consider myself a rationalist because I share a similar epistemological framework to the classical rationalism, I was very disappointed to find that a 'rationalist' movement exists and takes nothing but the name from rationalism.

alecst2• 5 years ago

It's really hard (for me, and I imagine, for everyone else) to not put myself into my views and opinions. Like, when someone shows me that I'm wrong, it's natural for me to feel attacked, instead of just taking it as a learning moment. Noticing when this happens and working with it has been my main struggle in learning how to be more rational. Those views and opinions really don't need to be a part of what I consider "myself."

Rationality, to me, is really about an open-minded approach to beliefs. Allowing multiple beliefs to overlap, to compete, to adapt, without interfering too much with the process.

XorNot• 5 years ago

Allowing multiple beliefs to overlap

This doesn't seem very rational. If your beliefs are in conflict and you're content to not resolve that, then pretty much by definition you're accepting a logical inconsistency.

If resolving the intersection doesn't lead to a new stable belief system, then aren't you basically going with "whatever I'm feeling that day"?

alecst2• 5 years ago

It's an ambitious and admirable goal to be completely logically consistent, but I've given up on that. Sometimes there are two different but consistent stories for the same thing. I get that maybe it doesn't seem rational, but sometimes there's no way to pick between stories.

And, also, sometimes you think you've settled on the right path, but then you later get a new piece of information and have to reevaluate.

So to me it's not so cut and dry.

nvilcins• 5 years ago

We all operate with abstractions and simplifications - because it's impractical (and actually impossible given the complexity of the world) to process end evaluate every single detail.

Dealing with contradictions in our own beliefs (paradoxes) is a part of life. The rational approach is to accept that and "fuse" those beliefs carefully, not (a) accept one and reject the others or (b) avoid the topic entirely.

jcims• 5 years ago

This doesn't seem very rational. If your beliefs are in conflict and you're content to not resolve that, then pretty much by definition you're accepting a logical inconsistency.

This is just my perspective, but very few beliefs or values map to the whole of reality...they tend to bind to certain aspects of it with a variable priority along the spectrum of that particular dimension, wither its personal agency, the color red, public health, spiders, etc.

However, reality rarely provides us with the ability take a position purely on one factor...nearly every context in which a decision is required operates at the nexus of an uncountable number of these dimensions. Some you can feel swelling to the fore as their slope in your mental 'values' model increases, others stay dormant because you don't see how they apply. This is how most of my decisions that might look outwardly 'inconsistent' arise, there are confounding factors that dominate the topology and steer me in a different direction.

claudiawerner• 5 years ago

I've personally come to see this as a more complicated issue. Often, rational priorities contradict and overlap in scope - for example, discrepancies between moral reasoning and instrumental reasoning. Although I try to be reasonable about these, it's not always possible or preferable to side with one over the other.

However, the drive for total and pure consistency is also misguided in my judgement. One reason why we usually feel so motivated and conflicted (to the point where it can lead to depression) with inconsistency is the psychological effect of cognitive dissonance. It's not clear to me that the only way to quieten cognitive dissonance is to resolve the dissenting thoughts.

Another way is to accept that not everything needs to be resolved. This can be great for mental health - again, just in my experience. Don't let the (sometimes irrational) effects of cognitive dissonance override your decision making. Resolution can work, but so can acceptance.

karmakaze4• 5 years ago

People who gain knowledge by adding to a consistent/stable belief system are the ones who have the most difficulty adapting to new situations and processing new information that may upend volumes of settled knowledge. You can recognize them as the dogmatic types that remember the rules but forget how/why they adopted them and are at a loss to update them.

sjg007• 5 years ago

If you demonstrate an open mind when someone says you're wrong you are more likely to open their mind. That's a win.

Focus on yourself and controlling your emotions. Be the calm.

polote4• 5 years ago

The basis of a rational decision, is to work with hypothesis. When someone shows you that you are wrong. Just ask yourself, my belief is based of which hypothesis ? Did his points showed that the logic between my hypothesis and my opinion were flawed? Did he show that my hypothesis were false ?

If you want to be rational about an opinion, you have to think first, "what are my hypothesis". Most people start with the opinion and then go down to the hypothesis. That can't work like that. That's the hypothesis + the logic that should create an opinion. Not the other way around

bluetomcat• 5 years ago

You can only be rational within a greater framework defined by a set of beliefs. When society at large believes that market capitalism is the only way for promoting prosperity, the rational action for a single individual is to get a job, pay the bills and have a life. Other possible actions might have a stronger moral justification, but aren't as beneficial or rational for the individual.

s1artibartfast2• 5 years ago

The is no division between moral action and rationality. People just pick what they wish to optomize for. You can rationally pursue any moral cause just as easily as personal comfort.

adrhead• 5 years ago

It is quite hard to become rational as humans are emotional beings. Sometimes, emotions will take over rationality in making decisions. This is why people struggle to make wise decisions.

TuringTest• 5 years ago

Conversely, it is impossible to be rational without emotions.

Reason needs axioms (beliefs) to build a rational discourse, and without emotions, it is impossible to choose a limited set of starting axioms to begin making logical inferences from.

I agree with the person above who said being rational is about making post-hoc rationalizations. We know by cognitive science that a majority of explanations are build that way: after observing facts, we intuitively develop a story that is consistent with our expectations about the fact, as well as with our preconceived beliefs. "Being rational" in this context would be limited to reviewing our beliefs when these ad-hoc rationalizations become inconsistent one with another.

swayvil• 5 years ago

Rationality is a game of checkers played outside in a meadow.

So many distractions. Wind, rain, bees, rampant squirrels.

And what makes that game more interesting than a squirrel anyway?

inkblotuniverse• 5 years ago

The money.

(And you're playing the game agaonst the squirrels anyway.)

SMAAART• 5 years ago

Nobody wants to deal with rational people.

Big business want people to buy things they don't need, with money they don't have to impress people they don't like

Politicians want people who will drink the cool-aid and follow what they (the politicians) say (and not what they do)

Religions... well, same.

And so all messages from advertisement, to movies, TV, narrative is about hijacking people's feelings and suppressing rationality. Common sense is no longer common, and doesn't make much sense.

DoingIsLearning• 5 years ago

I don't disagree but I have to say this absolute reads like a voice-over from an Adam Curtis documentary.

cortesoft• 5 years ago

I think part of it is a quote from Fight Club

zentropia• 5 years ago

Fight Club, bus scene

athenot• 5 years ago

This sounds cynical but yes, unfortunately, there are many incentives to not be rational.

Siira• 5 years ago

I think you’re confusing group rationality with individual rationality. There is never an individual incentive not to be individually rational, by definition. Bad Nash equilibria, in game-theoretic terms.

toshk• 5 years ago

When all experiences we have are based in meaning those emotional experiences in some sense might be more "real" then a logical thought.

jimbokun• 5 years ago

I think this is connected to another reason why so many seem to reject "rationality" today.

They are rejecting the authorities that in the past have tried to associate themselves with "rationality". The political think tanks. The seminaries. The universities. Government agencies. Capitalist CEOs following the "invisible hand" of the market.

All of these so-called elites have biases and agendas, so of course none of them should be accepted at face value.

I think what's missed, is rationality is not about trusting people and organizations, but about trusting a process. Trusting debates over lectures. Trusting well designed studies over trusting scientists. Trusting free speech and examining a broad range of ideas over speech codes and censorship. Trusting empirical observation over ideological purity.

This is the value system of the so called "classical liberals", and they are an ever more lonely and isolated group. There is a growing embrace for authoritarianism and defense of tribal identity on both the "left" and the "right" taking its place.

pessimizer3• 5 years ago

"Classical liberalism" has little or no relationship to any sentiment you've expressed here, as far as I know.

marcod• 5 years ago

I maintain that the concept of "common sense" is also quite useless now :p

ret2plt2• 5 years ago

It's worse than that. The problem is that being truly rational is hard, unpleasant work that few people want to do. If you read an article that makes your political opponents look bad, you can't just feel smugly superior, you have to take into account that you are predisposed to believe convenient sounding things, so you have to put extra effort into checking the truth of that claim. If you follow the evidence instead of tribal consensus, you will probably end up with some beliefs that your friends and relatives wont like, etc.

tim333• 5 years ago

Sometimes you want to deal with rational people - for example if you want things fixed and to work. I'd like a rational doctor, plumber and government. But I see your point that there are major incentives for encouraging irrationality in your customers.

_ea1k• 5 years ago

Isn't the answer obvious? Because doing otherwise involves a lot more work, and people choose the easier path.

esarbe3• 5 years ago

To quote evolution; why go for perfect when you can go for good enough?

MarioMan• 5 years ago

Sometimes I go into deep-dives to try to find some truth to a contentious issue. I think it’s important not to take the easy path; certainly not if you want a well-learned opinion. Any sense of superiority this gives me is dashed when I realize:

1) It’s not reasonable to expect someone to dig so deeply, and there isn’t enough time to do it for every issue.

2) Someone, somewhere, has done an even deeper dive into the same issue. From their perspective, I’m the one that hasn’t done my research. When it’s “enough” is a fuzzy line.

btilly12• 5 years ago

I maintain that it isn't just hard, it is computationally impossible.

We should all know that given a belief about the world, and evidence, Bayes' Theorem describes how to update our beliefs.

But what if we have a network of interrelated beliefs? That's called a Bayesian net, and it turns out that Bayes' Theorem also prescribes a unique answer. However, unfortunately, it turns out that working out that answer is NP-hard.

OK, you say, we can come up with an approximate answer. Sorry, no, coming up with an approximate answer that gets within probability 0.5 - ε, for 0 < ε, is ALSO NP-hard. It is literally true that under the right circumstances a single data point logically should be able to flip our entire world view, and which data point does it is computationally intractible.

Therefore our brains use a bunch of heuristics, with a bunch of known failure modes. You can read all the lesswrong you want. You can read Thinking, Fast and Slow and learn why we fail as we do. But the one thing that we cannot do, no matter how much work or effort we put into it, is have the sheer brainpower required to actually BE rational.

The effort of doing better is still worthwhile. But the goal itself is unachievable.

yann2• 5 years ago

Correct. Rationality is Bounded. That fact won a Nobel Prize - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_A._Simon

The recommendation of the theory is if you cant be rational about a specific problem pick another problem, preferably a simpler problem.

Unfortunately lots of chimps in the troupe are incapable of doing that and therefore we shall always have drama.

WastingMyTime894• 5 years ago

Correct. Rationality is Bounded. That fact won a Nobel Prize.

It's a model not a fact. As a model, it can't really be correct only more or less accurate.

btilly12• 5 years ago

That Nobel was won in 1978, and is based on the fact that in practice we can't be rational.

The NP demonstrations that, in theory, updating a Bayesian is a computationally infeasible problem was G. F. Cooper in 1990 (for Bayesian Networks). The stronger result that approximating the update is also computationally infeasible was Dagum, P. & Luby, M., 1993.

So Simon's work relates to what I said, but isn't based on it.

vendiddy• 5 years ago

Could someone explain in laymen terms what "bounded" rationality means?

carrolldunham• 5 years ago

* A Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, officially the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, commonly but falsely referred to as the Nobel Prize in Economics

lalaithion• 5 years ago

That's why it's called "less wrong". The goal isn't to be perfect, the goal is to do better. To be less wrong.

wombatmobile• 5 years ago

the goal is to do better

Why is that "the" goal?

Who sets "the" goal?

hanche2• 5 years ago

I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that even being less wrong is NP-hard.

kirse• 5 years ago

Which is ironic because the pursuit of knowledge only continues to increase the landscape of unknowns towards infinity - the branches of the tree of undiscovered and unknown knowledge continues to grow exponentially. It's as-if today we thought the choices were A or B, yet tomorrow we discover there was a C, and the next day D and so forth. If anything we are only discovering we are "more wrong" every day.

AndrewKemendo2• 5 years ago

I think this misses the point. Even being "less" wrong requires an amount of work that even the best/smartest etc... cannot consistently apply.

I do believe this is zero-sum in that improving on one set of decisions means no applying the same rigor to others.

This is often seen in the form of very smart people also believing conspiracy theories or throwing their hands up around other massive issues. As an example, the "Rationalist crowd" has de-emphasized work on climate change mitigation in favor of more abstract work on AI safety.

polote4• 5 years ago

Well, it depends on the topic. Choosing rationally between the most green of two tomatoes is easy. You are limited by your ability to distinguish colors but you can still decide rationally.

Not all questions have answers, if you want to be rational when you are asked to answer those question, you can just say "I dont know"

At the beginning of the pandemic, when politics were saying mask dont work. You could just say, well, if we transmit covid by air, then putting something in front of my mouth is going to decrease the spread. That's what is being rational. Of course that's not going to be all the time the good answer, but you have still thought rationally.

I'm not really sure what you are trying to prove. Of curse being rational is possible. All people are rational for most of their decisions.

not2b• 5 years ago

A rationalist would recognize that we update our beliefs as new evidence is available and not attack people for having erroneous beliefs before that evidence was available. The "masks don't work" advice was active for a short time in March 2020 and almost immediately dumped. They thought at the time that only n95 masks would be good enough, these masks were in short supply and health care workers needed them, this was the "politics" of it. But by mid March 2020 people were already being encouraged to make cloth masks and how to do it. That is when my daughter got out the sewing machine and made a bunch, based on instructions from nurses.

dahfizz• 5 years ago

You could just say, well, if we transmit covid by air, then putting something in front of my mouth is going to decrease the spread. That's what is being rational.

If I squint at a statement like this, I guess it could be called rational, but it is certainly not rigorous or convincing. You brush over too much and are making lots of assumptions.

Are these statements rational?

The sun is warm, so if I climb a ladder I will be closer to the sun and therefore warmer.

Masks impede airflow, so if I wear a mask I will suffocate.

Bleach kills germs, so drinking bleach will make me healthier.

It is very easy to make an incorrect idea seem rational. You should wear masks because rigorous science tells us that it is effective. That is the only valid justification. "Common sense" is used to justify a lot of junk science.

mcguire4• 5 years ago

At the beginning of the pandemic, when politics were saying mask dont work.

Are straw-man statements rational?

"Then there is the infamous mask issue. Epidemiologists have taken a lot of heat on this question in particular. Until well into March 2020, I was skeptical about the benefit of everyone wearing face masks. That skepticism was based on previous scientific research as well as hypotheses about how covid was transmitted that turned out to be wrong. Mask-wearing has been a common practice in Asia for decades, to protect against air pollution and to prevent transmitting infection to others when sick. Mask-wearing for protection against catching an infection became widespread in Asia following the 2003 SARS outbreak, but scientific evidence on the effectiveness of this strategy was limited.

"Before the coronavirus pandemic, most research on face masks for respiratory diseases came from two types of studies: clinical settings with very sick patients, and community settings during normal flu seasons. In clinical settings, it was clear that well-fitting, high-quality face masks, such as the N95 variety, were important protective equipment for doctors and nurses against viruses that can be transmitted via droplets or smaller aerosol particles. But these studies also suggested careful training was required to ensure that masks didn’t get contaminated when surface transmission was possible, as is the case with SARS. Community-level evidence about mask-wearing was much less compelling. Most studies showed little to no benefit to mask-wearing in the case of the flu, for instance. Studies that have suggested a benefit of mask-wearing were generally those in which people with symptoms wore masks — so that was the advice I embraced for the coronavirus, too.

"I also, like many other epidemiologists, overestimated how readily the novel coronavirus would spread on surfaces — and this affected our view of masks. Early data showed that, like SARS, the coronavirus could persist on surfaces for hours to days, and so I was initially concerned that face masks, especially ill-fitting, homemade or carelessly worn coverings could become contaminated with transmissible virus. In fact, I worried that this might mean wearing face masks could be worse than not wearing them. This was wrong. Surface transmission, it emerged, is not that big a problem for covid, but transmission through air via aerosols is a big source of transmission. And so it turns out that face masks do work in this case.

"I changed my mind on masks in March 2020, as testing capacity increased and it became clear how common asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic infection were (since aerosols were the likely vector). I wish that I and others had caught on sooner — and better testing early on might have caused an earlier revision of views — but there was no bad faith involved."

"I’m an epidemiologist. Here’s what I got wrong about covid."(https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/04/20/epidemiolo...)

snarf21• 5 years ago

Agreed. The world is too complicated. There is too much noise. It might be possible to become fairly knowledgeable about a single issue but it would need to amount to an obsession. This is why we are so keen to belong. We've always tried to apply the "wisdom of the crowds". It is why people latch onto one viewpoint or the other, e.g. Red/Blue, FOX/CNN, etc., it takes all the work out of it. Once you find a source that you agree with on even ONE issue, just blindly trust/agree with them for everything. We'd rather spend our time streaming shows and living life than investing into deep knowledge of any subject.

Take a non political example: How safe are whole tomatoes to eat? What did the grocery store spray on them? Is it safe? Will it wash off? What about the warehouse were they were stored for months, what did they put on them to keep them from spoiling? What about the farmer, what did they spray on them to protect against pests? What is in the water, is it safe? Now we're ready to eat: Does anyone in my family have any kind of intolerance to raw tomatoes? And this is a pretty simple toy example.... In general, we've collectively decided to trust in the good in people. We hope that if something is bad/lie/harmful, then someone in the know will raise the alarm for the group.

lisper6• 5 years ago

Ironically, some of the most irrational people I know are the ones who profess to hew to rationality, to the point where, in certain circles, "rationality" has become a sort of cult. This is particularly evident in militant anti-theism (whose adherents insist that the only possible explanation for someone believing in God is that they are idiots or otherwise mentally deficient), hard-core libertarians (who, ironically, end up politically aligned with hard-core fundamentalist Christians, at least in the U.S.) and a particularly weird strain of this disease that causes people to subscribe to (and actively proselytize!) the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. It's bizarre, and unendingly frustrating. Sometimes I feel like I'm the only rational creature in the universe because, of course, none of my beliefs are anything at all like theirs.

btilly12• 5 years ago

How do you know that they are the ones who are being irrational here, and not you?

This is a serious question. We should always challenge our preconceptions. To take your examples:

1. Traditional Judeo-Christian religions all claim we should believe because of claims made in holy books of questionable provenance, held by primitive people who believed things like (for example) disease being caused by demons. What rational reason is there for believing these holy books to be particularly truthful? (I was careful to not include Buddhism, whose basis is in experiences that people have while in altered states of consciousness from meditation.)

2. The shortcomings of libertarianism involve various tragedies of the commons. (My favorite book on this being, The Logic of Collective Action.) However the evidence in favor of most government interventions is rather weak. And the evidence is very strong that well-intended government interventions predictably will, after regulatory capture, wind creating severe problems of their own. How do you know that the interventions which you like will actually lead to good results? (Note, both major US parties are uneasy coalitions of convenience kept together through the only electoral realities of winner takes all. On the left, big labor and environmentalism are also uncomfortable bedfellows.)

3. To the extent that the observer is described by quantum mechanics, many-worlds is provably a correct description of the process of observation. In the absence of concrete evidence that quantum mechanics breaks down for observers like us, what rational reason is there to advocate for any other interpretation? (The fact that it completely violates our preconceptions about how the world should work is an emotional argument, not a rational one.)

hindsightbias• 5 years ago

Watching the SSC and NYTimes drama was pretty eye opening about rationlists rational discourse.

Even when SA himself eventually started questioning his response/allegations, few of the mob (there really is no other word for it) would not have it. All absolutist and conspiracy laden.

PG said keep your identity small. I’ve found few rationalist or libertarians of any bent who meet that criteria.

6gvONxR4sf7o2• 5 years ago

That’s true for arbitrary graphs, but I don’t believe it’s practically relevant here any more than the fact that I can’t compute the first 10000 digits of pi in my head is. We are much worse than our computational limits.

varjag3• 5 years ago

Thing is the common failures of rational thinking are not approaching any computational limits. Witness the dumbassery of the past two years.

irrational2• 5 years ago

Past 5-6 years you mean.

Jensson• 5 years ago

Being rational includes being rational about computation power and heuristics used on a specific choice. Therefore irrational is when people make completely stupid choices that aren't computationally hard to make, not that people can't solve NP-hard problems.

_v7gu• 5 years ago

Why bother reasoning with NP-hardness when you can just invoke incompleteness? No brain power limitations are needed.

drdeca• 5 years ago

Because incompleteness isn’t really relevant here?

Are you just saying “people aren’t logically omniscient, and can’t be because of incompleteness”?

Tenoke2• 5 years ago

Nobody is disputing this. You can, however, clearly be more or less 'rational', adopt better or worse heuristics, etc. which is what you attempt to get from reading LessWrong or Kahneman.

nicoburns• 5 years ago

But what constitutes a better heuristic is context dependent. In particular, if I must make a decision in a time-constrained manner then any heuristic that blows the time budget is going to be worse even if it would be better given more time. And one can't really know in advance how much time spent thinking is optimal. So one has to pick a strategy. The fact that humans have evolved to use a variety of strategies fast and slow (depending on the human) suggests that there is no single optimal strategy.

See also Gigerenzer's Ecological Rationality.

joe_the_user• 5 years ago

Not mention we don't actually know with certain the probability of even simple things. The average person is almost never reasoning about simple, repeatable sequences of events. You know there's a chance of your car breaking down each day but you don't know the probability of that event and yet you still deal with that possibility.

nonameiguess2• 5 years ago

We should note the limitations of Bayes as well. I already responded to another comment in this thread that giving an update procedure based on seeing new evidence is necessarily bounded in how quickly it can get you to beliefs more likely to be true by your ability to actually gather that evidence or possibly even to generate it if it doesn't already exist. We don't have any perfect algorithms for doing that, and it is of course not a purely computational problem anyway. Take general relativity. It was proposed in 1915 and only confirmed in the very strong gravitational field limit in 2016, because that was our first opportunity to observe a black hole merger, which is not something we have the ability to recreate in a lab.

Even beyond the hard process bottleneck on creating or lucking upon events that produce the evidence we need, however, there is also the limitation that Bayes only gives you a probability. It doesn't give you a decision theory or even a thresholding function. For those, you need a whole lot of other things like utility functions, discount rates, receiver operating characteristics and an understanding of asymmetric costs of false positives versus false negatives, that are often different for each decision domain.

And, of course, to get a utility function meaningful for humans, you need values. There is no algorithm that can give you values. They're just there as a basic primitive input to all other decision making procedures, yet they often conflict in ways that cannot be reconciled even within a single person, let alone across a society of many people.

strulovich2• 5 years ago

NP hard problems get abused for justifying things they cannot.

An NP hard problem, even if it cannot be approximated does not mean the average input cannot be solved efficiently.

Examples:

- An NP hard problem is not sufficient for building crypto.

- Type solving for many programming languages is EXP TIME complete, yet those languages prosper and compile just fine.

Beware the idea of taking a mathematical concept and proof and inducing from it to the world outside the model.

DiggyJohnson• 5 years ago

First of all I do see that you called it an example; I don't think you're straw-manning or anything:

I think using chaos theory / Bayesian concepts is a significantly better metaphor for "life as we experience it" than it is for the examples you gave.

nostrademons• 5 years ago

And human beings make approximate solutions for the average input all the time. That's what gut feelings, instincts, heuristics, and motivated reasoning are, along with all the other shortcuts we take to function in daily life.

The article is asking why it's so hard to be rational though, i.e. follow a logically-valid set of inferences forward to an unambiguous conclusion. Assuming one of your premises is that correct rationality implies reasoning statistically about a network of interrelated beliefs, the uncomputability of a Bayesian net is relevant to that.

strulovich2• 5 years ago

Also, adding on my previous comment, for an interesting take on the limitations of NP hard applicability to real life problems see Parameterized Complexity:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parameterized_complexity

User23• 5 years ago

Similarly even mediocre programmers do a pretty good job writing programs that halt.

amelius2• 5 years ago

Ok, so what is the class of problems that is hard for any input?

btilly12• 5 years ago

You are correct. For example the worst and average cases for the Simplex Method are dramatically different.

However, in practice, complex Bayesian nets do wind up being computationally intractable. Therefore attempts to build real world machine learning systems consistently find themselves going to computationally tractable heuristic methods with rather obvious failure modes.

morpheos1372• 5 years ago

One thing I notice these days on line is people overgeneralise about everything (irony intended).

kazinator2• 5 years ago

I maintain that it isn't just hard, it is computationally impossible.

I further maintain that it's definitionally impossible. Before we find it computationally impossible, we will find that we can't write the a complete, detailed requirements specification defining what rational is.

(Of course, we recognize egregious irrationality when we see it; that's not what I mean; you can't just define rationality as the opposite of that.)

People can behave rationally (or not) with respect to some stated values that they have. But those can be arbitrary. So the requirement specification for rationality has to refer to a "configuration space", so to speak, where we program these values. This means that the output is dependent on it; we can't write some absolute test case for rationality that doesn't include this.

Problem is, people with different values look at each other's values and point to them and say, "those values are irrational; those people should adopt my values instead".

UnFleshedOne7• 5 years ago

You can't say values are irrational -- they just are. If you really like paperclips, no amount of logic can tell you otherwise. What logic can tell you (and other people could), is that your values conflict with each other and you have to balance one against another. Turning whole universe into paperclips is counterproductive if you also value pins. If you literally have no value the other person is basing their arguments on, then they can't convince you to have it.

Luckily we get our values from bunch of heuristics developed through millions of years of biological and social evolution, so we mostly have the same ones, just with different relative weights.

Won't be true if we ever meet (or make) some other sentient critters.

didibus• 5 years ago

That might be true given a single brain, but we as a species have access to billions of brains.

The question is, can we organize and educate ourselves so we can leverage that parallel power and let each person become experts in their areas with proper trusts and incentives? And manage to pass along the previous generation computation to the next, without corrupting the data?

Edit: And I forgot all the tools we've designed to help us compute all that, of which I'd count math as a tool to help us compute, and computers as another.

jdmichal• 5 years ago

In addition to Thinking, Fast and Slow, I'd recommend Annie Duke's Thinking in Bets. It builds on literature such as Thinking, Fast and Slow to discuss the separation of decisions and results. Specifically, thanks to luck, the quality of the decision is not always represented by the quality of the result. And in order to learn, one has to be able to recognize good and bad decisions regardless of results.

This seems to be a pretty good overview:

https://www.athenarium.com/thinking-in-bets-annie-duke/

heresie-dabord• 5 years ago

I maintain that it isn't just hard, it is computationally impossible. [...] The effort of doing better is still worthwhile. But the goal itself is unachievable.

The goal of rational thinking is not some conceit of perfection [1] but debugging the runtime for a better result. Humans are in fact very good at communication and at debugging language errors. They have evolved a rational capacity. It can evidently be developed but it needs to be exercised.

This is where hypothesis of an educational system often enters the discussion.

[1] Galef and others call the "Star Trek" Spock character a Vulcan Strawman or Straw Vulcan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_Galef

threatofrain• 5 years ago

Daniel Kahneman has soured on his own System 1/2 theory, plus his original theory discussed bounded rationality and not the kind of objective rationality which fell out of favor in econ literature a long time ago.

ad8e• 5 years ago

I'm interested in learning more. Is there a resource where I can see Kahneman's changed thoughts?

AndrewKemendo2• 5 years ago

This nails it.

I'd go further to say that there are real world issues that compound the variables. Namely that individual actions increasingly have global consequences eg. individual purchasing behaviors have externalities that the market is not pricing in and thus fall to the consumer to have to calculate.

Further, given that these global issues these kinds of calculations are game theoretic by their nature, making it even more complicated.

garbagetime• 5 years ago

We should all know that given a belief about the world, and evidence, Bayes' Theorem describes how to update our beliefs.

Should we? What of the problem of induction?

btilly12• 5 years ago

The problem of induction is a problem of how we may create a prior out of raw experience.

And neither logic nor mathematics offers a solution. In practice, however, we do. But, as any parent should know, we don't do it through a rational process.

yibg• 5 years ago

Being NP-hard doesn't make it computationally impossible in all cases though. So while it might be computationally impossible to be rational in ALL cases, it could be computationally possible to be rational in some (or even many) cases. I think that's the goal to strive for.

dwd• 5 years ago

Memory and learning is additive - we don't have a delete key, except for where a model can be completely replaced with something new, which is usually at that simple fact level - but it's then assimilated into the rest of what we believe (like a wave function collapse) but it allows for discordant ideas at a distance - irrationality!

kirso• 5 years ago

Does this mean then that all the mental models are basically useless because the outcome may be irrational?

MrPowers• 5 years ago

Studying logical fallacies and behavioral economics biases have been the best ways for me to become more rational. I'm constantly calling myself out for confirmation bias, home country bias, and the recency effect in my internal investment thought process.

Learning about logical fallacies and identifying them in conversations is great. Don't tell the counterparty of their logical fallacies in conversations cause that's off putting. Just note them internally for a more rational inner dialogue.

Learning other languages and cultures is another way to learn about how different societies interact with objective truth. Living other places taught me a lot about how denial works in different places.

Thinking rationally is quite hard and I've learned how to abandon it in a lot of situations in favor of human emotions. How someone feels is more important than how they should feel.

nostromo• 5 years ago

The sunk cost fallacy is particularly important to learn about and teach your children about.

I see it everywhere, from my own decision making process to international politics. Just this morning I was thinking about it as I read the news about the US leaving Afghanistan, and last week talking with a friend who is staying at a bad job.

mcguire4• 5 years ago

Here's a question for you: what is the difference between the sunk cost fallacy and persistence?

And here's the answer: Persistence is good when it is successful. If the activity us unsuccessful, it's an example of the irrational sunk cost fallacy. (Making decisions without knowledge of future events is quite hard.)

And the important lesson: If you bail at the first sign of adversity, no one can ever accuse you of being irrational. Of course, as the old saying goes, all progress is made due to the irrational.

newbamboo2• 5 years ago

Some are grateful to have them pointed out, after a bit of initial discomfort and resistance. Didn’t work out so well for Socrates of course, but we’re more enlightened now.

Matticus_Rex• 5 years ago

but we’re more enlightened now

We hope.

contravariant• 5 years ago

If you want to be like Socrates it'd be better to not simply point out the fallacy but make people realize the fallacy with the Socratic method.

As far as arguments go "That's an XXX fallacy" is one of the weaker ones, if not fallacious in and of itself.

wyager4• 5 years ago

“Logical fallacies” are mostly Boolean/Aristotelian and identifying them is completely useless and/or counterproductive in 99% of real world scenarios. Most of your reasoning should be Bayesian, not Boolean, and under Bayesian reasoning a lot of “fallacies” like sunk cost, slippery slope, etc. are actually powerful heuristics for EV optimization.

jitter_• 5 years ago

under Bayesian reasoning a lot of “fallacies” like sunk cost, slippery slope, etc. are actually powerful heuristics for EV optimization.

Can you elaborate on that?

This really piqued my interest. I feel like logic is easy to apply retrospectively (especially so for spotting fallacies), but trying to catch myself in a fallacy in the present feels like excessive second quessing and overanalyzing. The sort that prevents forward momentum and learning.

Would you by any change have any recommendations on reading on the topic?

oldsklgdfth• 5 years ago

In an attempt to catch myself in the act of logical fallacies I have a flash card app on my phone. One of the sets I have is of logical fallacies. Educating myself has helped make me more aware of them and when I fall victim to them.

It's not an easy task. But 10 minutes a day can add up and reinforce that information.

A related idea is cognitive distortion. It's basically an irrational thought pattern that perpetuates negative emotions and a distorted view of reality. One example many here can relate to is imposter syndrome. But to feel like an imposter you have to overlook your achievements and assets and cherry-pick negative data points.

anyfoo• 5 years ago

Learning other languages and cultures is another way to learn about how different societies interact with objective truth. Living other places taught me a lot about how denial works in different places.

This also had a rather frustrating effect. It is true that not just intensely traveling (not in the sight seeing way), but also actual living in several different countries and cultures, changed my horizon a lot. It definitely had the effect you talk about.

But then what? You cannot tell your partner in discussion "you would not think like that if you had traveled/lived outside of your culture", and it's also impossible to send everyone off to travel in order to experience the same. Much less in the US, where for most of the country you cannot just hop into a train for a few hours to encounter a completely different language and culture. (I grew up in Europe and moved to the US as an adult, but I've also lived in several different European countries before, and traveled to far away places like Asia.)

achenatx• 5 years ago

The ultimate issue is that underpinning every action is a value system. Value systems are opinions and are fundamentally not rational.

Virtually every political disagreement is based on values, though most of the time people dont recognize it.

Values determine priorities and priorities underpin action.

For example some people feel that liberty (e.g. choice) is more important than saving lives when it comes to vaccines.

Some people feel that economic efficiency is less important than reducing suffering.

Some people feel that the life of an unborn child is worth less than the ability to choose whether to have that child

Even in the article, is a stereo that sounds better actually better than a stereo that looks better? That is a value judgement and there is no right or wrong.

No one is actually wrong since everything is value judgements. Many people believe in universal view of ethics/morality. There is almost no universal set of ethics/morality if you look across space and time.

However some values allow a culture to out compete other cultures causing the "inferior" values to disappear. New mutations are constantly being created. Most are neutral and have no impact on societal survival. Some are negative and some are positive.

_greim_• 5 years ago

is a stereo that sounds better actually better than a stereo that looks better? That is a value judgement and there is no right or wrong.

Disagree; value systems are the inputs to rationality. The only constraint is that you do the introspection in order to know what it is that you value. In that sense buying a stereo based on appearance is the right decision if you seek status among peers or appreciate aesthetics. It's the wrong decision if you want sound quality or durability.

I think the real issue is that people don't do the necessary introspection, and instead just glom onto catch-phrases or follow someone else's lead. That's why so many people hold political views that are contrary to their own interests.

mariodiana• 5 years ago

Yes, and I think when people claim to be describing what a "rational actor" would do, what they often leave out are the normative assumptions inherent in their rational analysis. Moreover, I suspect the omission at times is not accidental.

derbOac• 5 years ago

I came to say something similar, that rational decision making is really a poorly posed problem at some level.

Take money for example. You can create a theoretical decision-making dilemma involving certain sums of money, and work out what the most rational strategy is, but in reality, the differences between different sums of money is going to differ between people depending on different value systems and competing interests. So then you get into this scenario where 1 unit of money means something different to different people (the value you put on 1 € is going to be different from the value I put on it; the exchange rates are sort of an average over all these valuations), which might throw off the relevance of the theoretical scenario for reality, or change the optimal decision scenario.

The other issue beside the one you're relating to -- the subjectivity of the weights assigned to different outcomes, the achille's heel of utility theory -- is uncertainty not just about the values in the model, but whether the model is even correct at all. That is, you can create some idea that some course of action is more rational, but what happens when there's some nontrivial probability that the whole framework is incorrect? Your decision about A and B, then, shouldn't just be modeled in terms of whatever is in your model, but all the other things you're not accounting for. Maybe there are other decisions, C and D, which you're not even aware of, or someone else is, but you have to choose B to get to them.

Just yesterday I read this very well-reasoned, elegant, rational explanation by an epidemiologist about why boosters aren't needed. But about 3/4 of the way through I realized it was all based on an assumption that is very suspect, and which throws everything out the window. There are still other things their arguments were missing. So by the end of it I was convinced of the opposite conclusion.

Rationality as a framework is important, but it's limited and often misleading.

johnwheeler6• 5 years ago

Perfect rationality is impossible because in order to make correct decisions you need all the facts and a rational actor would do nothing at all given that all the facts can’t be had. The best you can do is to be an odds maker;therefore, an odds maker would spend their time looking for as many of the lowest effort ventures with the highest chances of success and biggest payoffs relative to effort and chance. In their free time (time when no reasonable opportunities were present), they would learn as much as possible to increase decision making power thus odds of success.

raldi4• 5 years ago

Your opening sentence makes no sense. If you and I don’t know the results of a coin toss, and I offer you a two-for-one wager on the result, the rational choice for you would be to take that bet, even without knowing the most relevant fact.

johnwheeler6• 5 years ago

ah, you should have read the second sentence

throwaway96903• 5 years ago

I think part of the problem is that most people are conditioned into many beliefs from a young age

I know a guy who hates foo (using a place holder). In fact he's downright foophobic. He is pretty convinced he has a natural unbiased hate of foo and is being rational when he expresses it.

To me as an outsider it is pretty obvious that his hate of foo is the result of cultural conditioning. To him it is perfectly rational to hate foo and to me it is totally irrational, especially since he can't give any concrete reason for it.

So who is right and who is being rational?

wizzwizz43• 5 years ago

Preferences do not need to be rationally justified; without axiomic preferences, we have no preferences at all.

throwaway96903• 5 years ago

I'm referring more to prejudices rather than preferences.

someguy3212• 5 years ago

Value judgements exist in a separate domain than pure rationality.

I like chocolate ice cream more than vanilla ice cream, and you're not gonna convince me otherwise by debating the flavor with me. It entirely could be the case that my preference is from cultural conditioning, but it's not my concern.

If your friend has a mindset of "to each his own" there's no problem.

dfxm12• 5 years ago

It really depends what foo is. I don't think it's rational to waste time on unimportant things. If foo is eating red meat, then I don't think it's rational to really worry about it one way or another.

I think part of the problem is that most people are conditioned into many beliefs from a young age

I think it's irrational to not consider new information when processed. So, again, this depends on what foo is. If it is obeying speed limits even when no one else is on the road, and your friend learns the penalties for not obeying road signs when they get their license, they would probably find it irrational to not do the speed limit, even if they hate it. They wouldn't want to risk the fines, license suspension, etc.

However, let's say your friend's brother has stronger beliefs and can afford any fines and legal action. He could think about it and still decide that it's rational to not obey the speed limit. This doesn't make it right; I think right and rational are mutually exclusive.

throwaway96903• 5 years ago

When I mention conditioning, I mean from a very young age.

For example: Throw salt over your shoulder if you spill some -or- Green skinned people are bad and you should never trust them or allow them in your neighborhood.

Now the former is pretty harmless but not so the latter. In both cases the only explanation is "that's how I was raised" which I don't find compelling or rational.

teddyh• 5 years ago

to me it is totally irrational, especially since he can't give any concrete reason for it.

In my experience, people usually can give ‘concrete’ reasons for it, but what constitutes ‘concrete’ is a matter of opinion, and I don’t consider everybody’s reasons to be valid. But of course, they do.

pessimizer3• 5 years ago

natural unbiased hate

...is a pretty silly phrase. If you don't have a reason for something, it can't (by definition) be reasonable.

carry_bit• 5 years ago

It could be a case of implicit vs explicit knowledge. In the context of evolved culture beliefs, the foophobia may serve some real purpose, even if most/all of the enculturated individuals can't explicitly state what the real purpose is.

It could be that, like dietary restrictions to reduce the spread of disease, the foophobia is no longer needed, but keep Chesterton's fence in mind before you say it's unneeded.

wizzwizz43• 5 years ago

In a recent interview, Cowen—a superhuman reader whose blog, Marginal Revolution, is a daily destination for info-hungry rationalists—told Ezra Klein that the rationality movement has adopted an “extremely culturally specific way of viewing the world.” It’s the culture, more or less, of winning arguments in Web forums.

This matches my observations, too.

Cowen suggested that to understand reality you must not just read about it but see it firsthand; he has grounded his priors in visits to about a hundred countries, once getting caught in a shoot-out between a Brazilian drug gang and the police.

kubb2• 5 years ago

One of my many pet peeves are people who travel to more than a 100 countries to get "experiences". It feels misguided, wasteful, excessive and done to impress others, as a sort of a status symbol. I bet he wouldn't be able to name all those countries and cities that he's been to. A deep and meaningful experience requires way more than a superficial visit.

someguy3212• 5 years ago

I read that fellow's blog (marginalrevolution.com) and he goes out of the way to get the best authentic local food he can get, he's well read about the history of many different countries and the economic implications of the recent history (he's an academic economist). He often does a brief blog writeup about the particularly culturally unique bits of places after he visits. Part of his job as an academic/ popular econ culture writer is to understand cultures and economies around the world.

I don't mind if part of his motivation is to impress others, or if it's wasteful, etc. Why would his motivations have to be pure for it to be meaningful for him?

zepto4• 5 years ago

The people you describe do seem to exist, but what makes you think Cohen is one of them?

michael1999• 5 years ago

He's an academic in economics with interests in the role of institutions and culture in how we economies develop and function (or don't function). How else shall he do his job? I would suggest you should save your disdain for economists who never leave their office.

SamoyedFurFluff• 5 years ago

I agree that a culture of “winning arguments in Web forums” often has bias in of itself that requires going out and diversifying experiences. But I don’t think it will always require travel. Volunteering at a soup kitchen, fostering a rescue animal, organizing a community event, and talking to the elderly in care facilities will all expose you to experiences outside of the internet and don’t require travel.

skybrian• 5 years ago

Sure, those are good for learning more about your own community.

But you’re not going to learn the same things you would from travel. For example, you’re not likely to learn another language if everyone you talk to speaks English. Similarly for learning about other cultures that aren’t near you.

But I’m not sure how much brief travel to see the tourist sites helps, and hanging out with expats might not help so much.

andi999• 5 years ago

I believe it is also an evolutionary advantage. Let's assume with all information available it looks like the rational best decision to do something. Then unexpectedly that thing kills you. There is only a species left if not everybody did it.

mncharity• 5 years ago

Jim Keller (famous cpu designer; Lex Fridman interview)[1]: "Really? To get out of all your assumptions, you think that's not going to be unbelievably painful?" "Imagine 99% of your thought process is protecting your self conception, and 98% of that's wrong". "For a long time I've suspected you could get better [...] think more clearly, take things apart [...] there are lots of examples of that, people who do that". "I would say my brain has this idea that you can question first [sic] assumptions, and but I can go days at a time and forget that, and you have to kind of like circle back to that observation [...] it's hard to keep it front and center [...]".

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nb2tebYAaOA&t=4962s

FinanceAnon2• 5 years ago

It's impossible to be absolutely rational. I feel like there is so many different levels and viewpoints that there is no right answer.

Simple example:

Let's say the same pair of shoes is available in two different shops, but in one shop it's more expensive. It seem more rational to buy it in the cheaper shop. However, what if you've heard that the cheaper shop is very unethical in how it conducts the business. Is it still more rational to buy the shoes there?

And then you might also start considering this situation "in the grand scheme of things" - in the grand scheme of things does it make any difference if I buy it in shop A or B?

And at which point does it become irrational to be overthinking simple things in order to try to be rational? What if trying to always be rational is stressing you out, and turns out to be worse in the long run?

MisterBastahrd2• 5 years ago

Yeah, for example, let's say that I can buy from ShoeCo or big, evil Amazon. But big, evil Amazon allows me to donate a portion of their proceeds to a charity of my choice, and furthermore, I am also within my rights as an individual to take the difference between ShoeCo's price and Amazon's and donate it to another cause as well.

Some will say that buying from Amazon simply perpetuates Amazon... but Amazon is so large at this point that it doesn't matter WHAT I do. So ultimately, is the world better off with my two donations from my Amazon purchase or giving my money away for the same product to ShoeCo?

SamBam2• 5 years ago

If Amazon is so big that your purchase is meaningless, then the problems of the world are also so big that your donations are probably meaningless.

If your donations have some tiny bit of meaning to them, then removing a tiny bit of business from Amazon and paying your local shopkeeper probably also has meaning.

UnFleshedOne7• 5 years ago

Deciding when to stop overthinking is also a rational process. Some choices truly don't matter, or not matter enough to spend time and energy on them.

If consumer ethics is important to you then it obviously warrants some deliberation, weighted by an upper bound of your potential impact. But identifying areas of meaningless choice and simply choosing randomly (and not even caring if the choice is sufficiently random) frees up a lot of mental energy.

dgant• 5 years ago

This dilemma is addressable in a rational framework. Utilitarianism suggests you can attempt to quantify the harm done by your purchase, and decide how to discount that harm against your own self interest. You're also able to estimate whether the costs involved are probably so marginal that it's outweighed by the cost of thinking about the dilemma such that it would be best to commit to either decision rather than continue deliberating.

WhompingWindows2• 5 years ago

Can rationality exist outside of our minds? Is it just another mental heuristic?

In meditation, a common teaching is to examine an object for a long period, really just stare at it and allow your mind to focus on it fully. I see a coffee mug, it has a handle and writing on it, it's off-white and has little coffee stains. This descriptive mind goes a mile-a-minute normally, but eventually you can break through that and realize, this is just a collection of atoms, this is something reflecting photons and pushing back electrically against my skins' atoms. Even deeper, it's just part of the environment, all the things I can notice, like everything else we care about.

Such exercises can help reveal the nature of mind. There are many layers of this onion, and many separate onions vying for our attention at once. Rationality relies upon peeling back these superficial layers of the thought onion to get towards "the truth." That means peeling back biases, emotions, hunches, instincts, and all the little mental heuristics that are nice "shortcuts" for a biologically limited thinker.

But outside our minds, how is there any rationality left? It feels like another program or heuristic we use to make decisions to help us survive and reproduce.

karmakaze4• 5 years ago

Recognition of "motivated reasoning" can replace a whole lot of recognizing logical fallacies in your own or others' thought processes.

Here's an 20m audio interview[0] with the author of "The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don’t"

It very well summarizes the way I like to gather information in an area so that I can form an opinion and direction of movement on a problem.

[0] https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/1881404483658

okamiueru• 5 years ago

It's going against entropy. There are few ways to be rational, and infinitely many ways to irrational.

esarbe3• 5 years ago

Because we didn't evolve to be rational. We evolved to reproduce as often as possible, not to thing as precises as possible. We're not thinking machines, we're reproduction machines.

That we are able to think somewhat rational-ish is only because we adapted by adopting extensive modeling simulations. The fundamental function of these simulations is to simulate other beings, primarily human. And in that our brainware is lazy as hell, because - to quote evolution; why do perfect, when you can do good enough? Saves a ton of energy.

The wetware we employ was never expected to rationally solve differential equations or do proper statistical analysis. At best it was expected to guess the parabola of a thrown stone or spear, or empate the best way to mate without facing repercussions from the tribe.

So, really. It's not that thinking is hard. It's just that we're just not equipped to do it.

morpheos1372• 5 years ago

Because people have feelings. Because rationality is poorly defined. For example some times it may be rational to agree with something that is factually wrong if it is popular or serves one's self interest.

newbamboo2• 5 years ago

My answer, in jeopardy format: What is Psychology? Every mind is different; a feature not a bug.

danans2• 5 years ago

I think there is a simpler explanation that draws from evolutionary theory: being excessively rational is not a good survival strategy, be it in the distant past or today.

If our ancestors would have made the rational assessment that there is unlikely to be a predator hiding behind the bush, that would have worked only as long as it worked, until one day they got eaten.

Irrationally overestimating threats and risks is not an optimal approach, but as long as you can survive it can be a long-term optimal approach.

Humans using irrational stories to enable group cohesion and coordination are similarly irrational but intrinsic ways of being that also provide an evolutionary advantage.

Rationality, however is an incredible optimization tool when operating in domains that are well understood, like the example of stereo equipment that the author gave in the article. It can also help in the process of expanding knowledge by helping a systematically compare and contrast signals.

But it doesn't prevent the lion from eating you or the religious or temporal authority from ostracizing you from the safety of the settlement, and it may even make both of those outcomes more likely.

lazide2• 5 years ago

Humans operate by doing, then rationalizing, and much of the attempts at rational thought here demonstrate how easy it is to fool ourselves into thinking we are being rational, when really we are acting on feelings and delusions and then constructing what feels like a rational argument that we originally had - but falls apart upon analysis.

In the past, it is a rational concern to be worried about being jumped by a predator from behind a bush, and if you don’t know if or if not there is a predator, it is perfectly rational to be worried about such a concern!

Same with diseases and causes when you don’t know what is causing them, etc.

It’s a tendency to dismiss older concerns from a time when there was a severe lack of information as irrational, where when you know your limits and see the results, there is no other rational way to behave except to be concerned or avoid those things. While also not rational to believe clearly contradictory religious dogma that covers the topic, it is rational to follow or support it when it has clear alignment with visibly effective methods encoded in it for avoiding disease and other problems.

danans2• 5 years ago

In the past, it is a rational concern to be worried about being jumped by a predator from behind a bush, and if you don’t know if or if not there is a predator, it is perfectly rational to be worried about such a concern!

I think we agree, but I also think you are using "rational" here in the colloquial sense to mean the "smartest" thing to do.

The article, and my comment in response, uses the traditional definition of "rational" as something derived from logic, and not from impulse or instinct.

The two definitions are not the same (not that one is better than the other, they just mean different things).

SamBam2• 5 years ago

If our ancestors would have made the rational assessment that there is unlikely to be a predator hiding behind the bush, that would have worked only as long as it worked, until one day they got eaten.

That wouldn't have been a rational assessment, because it wouldn't have been an accurate assessment of the risks of being wrong, and the behavior required to avoid them.

If there's only a 1% chance that a predator is behind a bush, and that predator might eat you, it's absolutely rational to act as though there is a predator. You'll be seeing lots of bushes in your life, and you can't escape from those 1% chances for long.

The same thinking is why it would have been rational to try and avoid global warming 30 years ago. Even if the science was not settled, in the worst-case scenario, you'd have "wasted" a bunch of money making green energy production. In the best-case scenario, you saved the planet.

fallous• 5 years ago

It's not actually rational, let alone long-term optimal, to act as though there is a predator behind every bush given a 1% (in reality it's probably a couple of orders of magnitude less likely, but we'll ignore that). If you need water and head for the local watering hole, avoiding bushes will most likely result in you not getting water since bushes tend to grow where there is water. I may be 1% likely to get eaten by something hiding behind the bush but I am 100% likely to die if I don't drink water.

Avoidance of all possible risk is a recipe for paralysis. Part of being rational is evaluation of risks vs rewards as well as recognizing the dangers of unintended consequences and the fact that nearly all meaningful decisions are made with incomplete information and time limits.

wyager4• 5 years ago

This is also captured in the “midwit phenomenon”, where people who are just smart enough to start applying “rationality” make worse decisions than stupid people. This is because stupid people are operating off of hard-earned adaptations (encoded as traditions, folk wisdom, etc.). Midwits are smart enough to realize that the putative justifications for these adaptations are wrong, and therefore they toss out the adaptations. People who think about it even harder realize that these adaptations were mostly there for good reasons, and getting rid of them isn’t a good idea even if the relevant just-so stories explaining them don’t hold up to “rational” scrutiny.

UnFleshedOne7• 5 years ago

Midwits (which we all are to one degree or another) can be mostly fixed by applying Chesterton's Fence principle though. We just need a knock or two in both directions to better estimate a relative weight of that rule as a heuristic.

meatmanek• 5 years ago

Just because there's a 99% chance the bush has no predators behind it does not make it rational to assume there are no predators.

In Bayesian decision theory, you'd choose the action (walk directly by the bush; walk by the bush but have your guard up; steer clear of the bush) that minimizes your loss function (e.g. probability of dying or probability of your blood line dying out). You'd end up picking a path that balances the risk of being eaten by a lion with the cost of having to walk further (and thus having less time and energy to gather food; or tripping and cutting yourself and dying of infection; or whatever).

mbesto• 5 years ago

I like this, but I also like the even simpler explanation. Our bodies/minds require energy and "skipping" to conclusions (irrationally) expends less energy.

jscipione• 5 years ago

It is hard to be rational in the way the New Yorker intends because we are constantly being lied to and having information hidden from us by institutions and so we have lost trust in them.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower put it succinctly in his farewell address to the nation:

"The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded. Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific technological elite."

tomgp• 5 years ago

“Know things; want things; use what you know to get what you want”

I think the hardest bit of this is in some ways the middle, wanting things. How do we know we really want what we want, and how do we know what will make us happy. That’s the bit I struggle with anyway.

linuxhansl• 5 years ago

I read somewhere (truly forgot where, sorry) that we humans are mostly just lazy, that we avoid thinking as best as we can and rather gravitate towards that (people, circle, or news) which confirms what we already believe so that we do not have to think.

"Confirmation Bias" does not quite capture it. Really just laziness. :)

The other part, being decisive... I can definitely relate to that. I noticed that I often have a hard time making decisions and realized it's because I tend look at the world in terms of what I can possibly lose instead of looking at something new in terms of excitement.

SavantIdiot• 5 years ago

Critical thought is actually really, really hard. Pre-internet the problem was too little signal, post-internet the problem is too much noise.

I would argue we've largely been anesthetized due to successful Gish Galloping. I have great admiration for people who put the effort in to sort out the issues, academics and journalists. But just now everyone eye-rolled when I said those two terms.

m3kw9• 5 years ago

Because certain degree of emotions have rational basis. Asking humans to know which parts of their emotion is rational turns into a multidimensional problem they can’t just solve in a heat of the moment

_moof3• 5 years ago

It's impossible to be perfectly rational without perfect and complete information. Crucially, for questions that affect us personally, this includes perfect insight. I've yet to meet anyone who qualifies.

flixic• 5 years ago

That's why I appreciate that a rationality website is called LessWrong. Of course you can't be perfectly rational, but you can be less wrong.

_moof3• 5 years ago

Thanks for the reply. I think what I was trying to say by implication is that I think folks fall so far short of the ideal that it's actually a regression. Related to this is what I see as an implicit belief that "rationality" means completely dismissing the lived experience of actual humans, i.e. lots of people are suffering but hey, at least we applied principles in a soulless and mathematical way, because that's what's important.

jhgb2• 5 years ago

Why? Are you equating rationality with omniscience? Then why have the separate word "rationality" in the first place?

rafaelero2• 5 years ago

What a ridiculous take. Rationality is not the same as omniscience. Being rational is optimizing predictability by using the best available evidence we have. No one is claiming to know the answer for some future event, but trying to reach the best way to aggregate the current information.

kerblang2• 5 years ago

My problem in everyday work is so often I have to deal with so-called software engineers who fancy themselves quite the scientific thinkers but whose irrationality borders on delusional. In fact a lot of them believe "I'm very smart, so I am therefore the most rational" which is obviously not true at all. In fact this will probably make a lot of so-called software engineers angry but I tend to think of the non-technical folk as the rational ones and much easier to deal with as a result. Purely anecdotal though.

DamnYuppie• 5 years ago

I have observed that behavior in many other professions where the participants view themselves as very smart. Physicians and lawyers are at the top of that list.

nescioquid• 5 years ago

I was chatting with a couple of software engineers, one of whom had just come from working at a research hospital on a project involving some imaging devices. The other engineer asked him if the physicians were tough to deal with, and he responded that no, not especially. But the physicists! Oh, the doctors hated the physicists for thinking they knew everything!

_moof3• 5 years ago

Indeed. Academicians are some of the worst offenders in my experience.

Also, you know how software engineers like to think that they're rocket scientists? Well, it brings me no pleasure to report that rocket scientists think they're software engineers.

BurningFrog• 5 years ago

You won't make any engineers angry.

We know you're talking about other engineers, and we agree about those fools!

kerblang2• 5 years ago

I appreciate the humor, but I'm not. There are bitter disagreements based on different interpretations of the facts, and there are bitter disagreements based on a complete disregard for the facts, a refusal to verify assumptions, a persistent use of arrogance as a substitute for competence, blaming the tools for failures of the person using them, and more. In fact there is nothing so maddening as dealing with a delusional person and being told, "I don't know why you're always getting in arguments with them!" as if it's just one of those "personality conflicts" - I would describe it as practically a personality disorder conflict.

guskel• 5 years ago

Can you provide an example?

therealdrag0• 5 years ago

coldtea• 5 years ago

For starters, who said it's better to be rational?

Not being rational - and instead being based on guts - has an evolutionary advantage (it cuts through the noise, which, in the past could be a life or death situation).

dnissley• 5 years ago

Intuition could be said to be the opposite of reason, but not rationality. There are whole parts of the rationalist diaspora that emphasize how important it is to be in touch with one's intuitions / feelings and to integrate them successfully into one's decision making process with an aim towards being more rational.

eevilspock2• 5 years ago

"Useless" https://xkcd.com/55/

6gvONxR4sf7o2• 5 years ago

There are some good bits in here. I love the subtitle especially: "The real challenge isn’t being right but knowing how wrong you might be." Knowing when not to provide an answer is hard. A big part of my job is communicating statistical findings and giving a good non-answer is much harder than giving a good answer, both technically speaking and socially speaking.

One thing I'll add that drives me nuts is the fetishization of bayesian reasoning I see some times here on HN. There are times that bayesian reasoning is helpful and times that it isn't. Specifically, when you don't trust your model, bayes rule can mislead you badly (frequently when it comes to missing/counterfactual data). It's just a tool. There are others. It makes me crazy when it's someone's only hammer, so everything starts to look like a nail. Sometimes, more appropriate tools leave you without an answer.

Apparently that's not something we're willing to live with.

hinkley• 5 years ago

Thinking Fast and Slow left me with a feeling of despair about the human inability to reason effectively about statistics.

I like to tell people that charts work better for asking questions than answering them. Once people know you look for answers there, the data changes. More so than they do for question asking (people will try to smooth the data to avoid awkward questions).

belter2• 5 years ago

"Thinking Fast and Slow" left me with the same feeling but not because of "Thinking Fast and Slow"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27261501

belter2• 5 years ago

I am with you :-) https://xkcd.com/1132/

tomjakubowski• 5 years ago

Maybe I'm just missing the joke here, but "Bayesian reasoning" is hardly needed to realize that if the sun did explode, the $50 you'd lose in the bet is worthless anyway.

rafaelero2• 5 years ago

I am seeing a lot of "institutions lied to us and are actively keeping information from ourselves" when people try to justify acting irrationaly. I don't agree with this premise at all. What do you mean they keep information from you? This assumes that information can be contained, which in most cases is impossible. There is always leakage.

Now, to be more generous, I will assume that people are actually criticizing how "institutions impose a mainstream view that is difficult to replaced even when facts say it should". To that I say: fine. But even in this case, there should be enough resources to form a rational opinion over the matter (with probabilistic reasoning). Hell, I have a lot of non-orthodox opinions that are so out of Overton Window that I rarely can discuss them. And even in these cases, the internet and Google Scholar/Sci-hub were sources that helped me explore it.

So, I have no sympathy for this "institutions lied to us, let me believe now whatever I want" bullshit.

eevilspock2• 5 years ago

Rational thought is important, but not sufficient. For example, moral conscience is a far more important trait to me. Some people will argue that pure reason is enough to establish a sound moral system; I don't agree but that is a debate for another time. Looking at the end result, Greg is not someone I admire or would want to be:

Greg...became a director at a hedge fund. His net worth is now several thousand times my own.

neonate• 5 years ago

https://archive.is/7dAh5

PicassoCTs• 5 years ago

I find the distinction between emotions and logic to be quite synthetic. Emotions is nothing but logic, just hard coded, subconscious and hard to trace back from the inside. Alot of "rational" thought though, falls into a similar category as the emotional pre-chosen outcome is just decorated with "rational" arguments. The reason ultimately is the same as everywhere in life. Economics. In this case energy economics. Heuristics and early-outs, are more desirable then a long, energy-intensive search of a complex space, coming to a indecisive conclusion to wander between local maximums.

The real interesting thing here, is the answer to why emotions, work as they do and what the patterns and bits are that trigger them. To turn over that particular rock is to go to some deeply disturbing places. And to loose the illusion that emotion make one more "human" - meanwhile, if ones reaction is more hard coded, shouldn't it be considered more machine-like?

raman162• 5 years ago

I particularly enjoyed the concepts presented in this article, from recognizing how confident you are in a certain idea to understanding the steps it takes for someone to be rational.

Being self-aware I've only started learning post college and is something I wish I was taught more growing up. As a child I was always informed that I should do x and y because that's what you're supposed to do! Only now as an adult I'm taking the time to slowly ponder and analyze myself and be more strategic with my future goals.

Side note. Really enjoyed the audio version of this long form article

HPsquared• 5 years ago

It's irrational to pretend as if we are rational.

esarbe3• 5 years ago

It's funny how many people take offense. We really aren't rational creatures, are we..

paganel• 5 years ago

The rational powers that be were saying out loud 3 days ago that in an optimistic scenario the Afghan government would hang on for another 90 days, in a pessimistic scenario only for 30 days. As we all know it collapsed completely in just 2-3 days.

Early on during the pandemic (the first half of February 2020) the people writing on Twitter about covid in China were being labeled as conspiracy nuts, with some of them outright having their accounts suspended by Twitter. Covid/coronavirus was (I think purposefully) kept out of the trending charts on Twitter, the Oscars were seen as much more important.

And these are only two recent examples that came to my mind where the "rational" parts of our society (the experts and the media) failed completely, as such it's only rational not to trust these pseudo-rational entities anymore. Imo I think in a way the post-modernists were right, (almost) everything is negotiable or a social construct, there's no true or false, apart from death, I would say.

mrxd• 5 years ago

It's actually not hard.

Rationality is a form of communication. Its purpose to persuade other people and coordinate group activity, e.g. hunters deciding where they should hunt and making arguments about where the prey might be. In that setting, rationality works perfectly well because humans are quite good at detecting bad reasoning when they see it in others.

Because of the assumptions of psychological individualism, rationality is misunderstood as a type of cognition that guides an individual's actions. To a certain extent, this is a valid approach because incentives within organizations encourage people to act this way. We reward individual accomplishments more than collaboration.

But many cognitive biases disappear when you aren't working under the assumptions of psychological individualism. For example, in the artificial limitations of a lab, you can show that people are unduly influenced by irrelevant factors when making purchase decisions. But in reality, when a salesperson is influencing someone to spend too much on a car, people say things like "Let me talk it over with my wife."

We instinctively seek out an environment of social communication and collaboration where rationality can operate. Much of the advice about how to be individually rational comes down to simulating those conditions within your own mind, like scrutinizing your own thinking as if it was an argument being made by another person. That can work, but the vast majority of people adopt a more straightforward approach, which is to simply use rationality as it was designed to be used.

Rationality is hard, but only for a small number of "smart people" who live in an individualistic culture prevents them from using it in the optimal way.

UnFleshedOne7• 5 years ago

I think you are confusing the original purpose of our thinking apparatus (social proof first, discovering true facts distant second, unless facts can eat you quickly) and rationality as a system for discovering facts as true as possible with given energy budget that is running on that faulty hardware.

damoe• 5 years ago

Because there is a good chance reality is not rational.

heisenzombie• 5 years ago

This is a bit similar to the book-in-progress “In the cells of the eggplant”.

https://metarationality.com/

I highly recommend reading it. I found it extremely clarifying as a working scientist/engineer and someone who has been persistently nagged by the deification of rationality.

The OP even uses the term “metarational” (though used to mean something different), which made me surprised when “The Eggplant” was not mentioned.

elihu• 5 years ago

I think the main problem with trying to be 100% rational is that even if you could predict the outcome of your decisions perfectly, the question of which outcome is "best" is inherently not a rational one. First you need to have some goal in mind, then (maybe) you can apply logic and reason to achieve that goal.

I think a lot of political disagreements aren't really about logical arguments at all, but rather differences in opinion over relative priority of some ideals that are all important. There isn't always an objective right answer.

paulpauper2• 5 years ago

How much do you think Greg is worth? Several thousand is a lot but if the author has debt then maybe not

paulpauper2• 5 years ago

Greg has much more money but one of the perks of being a profesional writer or coljmnists is ppl care about your views and they have potentially some impact on society. The classics are immortalized but ray dalio a year ago wrote a book about his 'values'..it made a splash for a week and was soon forgotten, condemned to an early pulp-ing.

natmaka• 5 years ago

"hand over the thinking keys when someone else is better informed or better trained." implies rationality, as without it determining who is better informed/trained is difficult. Therefore we are back to square one.

This approach even favors the most informed and trained (the "best" being preferable to the "better"), offering an even more difficult challenge.

Indirect democracy replaces rationality with ill-formed trust.

Why is it so hard to be rational?

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