[HN Gopher] Why is it so hard to be rational?
___________________________________________________________________
Why is it so hard to be rational?
Author : ubuwaits
Score : 261 points
Date : 2021-08-16 12:57 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.newyorker.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.newyorker.com)
| jsight wrote:
| Isn't the answer obvious? Because doing otherwise involves a lot
| more work, and people choose the easier path.
| MarioMan wrote:
| 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.
| esarbe wrote:
| To quote evolution; why go for perfect when you can go for good
| enough?
| btilly wrote:
| 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 - e, for 0 < e, 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.
| snarf21 wrote:
| 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.
| jdmichal wrote:
| 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/
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| 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.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| 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.
| kazinator wrote:
| > _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".
| UnFleshedOne wrote:
| 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.
| kazinator wrote:
| > _You can 't say values are irrational_
|
| People basically do say that, though.
|
| (Values can be contradictory/inconsistent. E.g. you say you
| value self-preservation, but you also enjoy whacking your
| head with a hammer. That would be a kind of irrational.
| That's not what I'm referring to though.)
| UnFleshedOne wrote:
| I think they make a category mistake when they do then.
| Values tell you where you want to be, rationality is a
| most accurate process to get where you want to go and
| maybe to check if you want to be there before actually
| getting there and checking out personally. (I think we
| basically agree btw btw, it is all those other people who
| are wrong :))
| varjag wrote:
| Thing is the common failures of rational thinking are not
| approaching any computational limits. Witness the dumbassery of
| the past two years.
| irrational wrote:
| Past 5-6 years you mean.
| jaredhansen wrote:
| All past years you mean. It's not exactly a recent
| phenomenon.
| mcguire wrote:
| Life would be easier if we could agree on one rational
| decisions in history and then just repeat it as
| necessary.
| irrational wrote:
| It's both sides, right? Right....
| mistermann wrote:
| Logically, "both" sides seems like the correct answer to
| me.
| Tenoke wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| Tenoke wrote:
| Sure, but I doubt you actually think that everyone is
| already operating as well as they can within the contexts
| they are placed. There's definitely room for improvement.
| There are all sorts of scenarios where even knowing nearly
| optimal techniques outcomes can be improved by going the
| TimSort way due to the context you most often find yourself
| in.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| 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.
| yann2 wrote:
| 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.
| ggm wrote:
| I've made it a life rule to try to avoid conversations with
| people who use "correct" to respond to statements, unless
| they are in the role of a teacher.
|
| Tell me, are you aware of the myriad of alternate words to
| express your agreement with somebody else aside from correct?
| You aren't here as judge of the right or wrong. Semantically,
| philosophically, you're expressing agreement not correctness.
|
| Or .. am I incorrect...?
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| > 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.
| zepto wrote:
| > It's a model not a fact. As a model, it can't really be
| correct only more or less accurate.
|
| This is not true. Models of an external world may be only
| more or less accurate, but models of other models may be
| true or false. Mathematical proofs rely on this.
| Rationality itself is a _model_ so models _of_ rationality
| may be true or false.
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| Unless you have very peculiar and idiosyncratic
| definition of the world model, I am fairly confident that
| what you are saying doesn't make much sense.
|
| In economy in a way that is not dissimilar to physics,
| model has a precise meaning. To quote Wikipedia, it is a
| simplified version of reality that allows us to observe,
| understand, and make predictions about economic behavior.
| You can't have a model of a model. That just doesn't
| really make sense.
|
| > Mathematical proofs rely on this
|
| I'm confused by what you want to say here. Mathematical
| proofs don't use models.
|
| Every proved statements in mathematics can be built from
| axioms which are presupposed true applying logical rules
| which are themselves part of the axiomatic system. Saying
| that something is mathematically proved basically means
| that given this set of rules we can build up to that
| point.
|
| > Rationality itself is a model
|
| Once again I'm fairly lost by what you are trying to
| mean. I'm fairly certain that for most accepted meaning
| of the world model and the world rationality, rationality
| is in fact not a model in the same way that a dog is not
| a theory.
| md224 wrote:
| > Mathematical proofs don't use models.
|
| Maybe the person you replied to was taking a model
| theoretic perspective?
|
| https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/modeltheory-fo/
| zepto wrote:
| > Once again I'm fairly lost by what you are trying to
| mean.
|
| You may want to look up the difference between _formal_
| models and _informal_ models.
|
| Since both rationality and the paper showing that it is
| bounded are based on _formal_ models, it is reasonable to
| assume this is what we are talking about.
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| Sorry, I don't understand your argument. Are you actually
| talking about rational choice theory?
|
| > Since both rationality and the paper showing that it is
| bounded are based on formal models
|
| There is no paper showing that "rationality" is bounded.
| Models use to consider actors making purely rational
| choices in the sense that they are always optimizing
| their utility functions using all available information.
| Bounded rationility is a different way of modeling actors
| choice function. It's just a different model. There is no
| model of models.
|
| Still I don't see what any of that has to do with the
| difference between formal and informal models. Informal
| model is a term I have never heard used outside of policy
| discussion. It's basically dress up for "because the
| expert said so".
| zepto wrote:
| > Sorry, I don't understand your argument.
|
| Understood.
|
| It's worth noting that the definition of a model that you
| said you were using doesn't match with typical
| definitions of a formal model.
|
| You aren't talking about formal models, and I accept that
| you are only thinking in terms of economic models.
|
| Perhaps that explains where the difference in
| understanding lies.
| abc_lisper wrote:
| any model better than naive intuition is better imo
| loopz wrote:
| It's a fact many people believe themselves rational and use
| models expecting rational actors. Proof lacks that it
| actually works that way. The opposite is often most
| probable since you rarely have perfect knowledge in
| practice. Exceptions can be games like tic-tac-toe and
| chess.
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| > Proof lacks that it actually works that way
|
| I mean everyone know it doesn't really work that way.
|
| The actual question is: does viewing the average actor as
| trying to perfectly optimise their utility function using
| all the information available constitute a good
| estimation of how actors work in aggregate and does it
| yield accurate and interesting predictions?
|
| The real insight of Simon in _Models of Man_ is not that
| actors are not in fact perfectly rational. It 's that you
| can actually model the limits of actors while keeping a
| fairly rigorous and manageable formalization.
| loopz wrote:
| Sure, but such models are hackable / breakable, just by
| breaking the rules or reinventing the game.
| vendiddy wrote:
| Could someone explain in laymen terms what "bounded"
| rationality means?
| glial wrote:
| Rationality can be re-phrased as coming up with the optimal
| solution to a problem. If you only have finite
| compute/memory/time, your solution is 'bounded' by those
| constraints - i.e. your job is now find the best solution
| possible _given the constraints_.
| btilly wrote:
| 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.
| threatofrain wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| heresie-dabord wrote:
| > 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
| didibus wrote:
| 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.
| Jensson wrote:
| 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.
| lalaithion wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > the goal is to do better
|
| Why is that "the" goal?
|
| Who sets "the" goal?
| Nav_Panel wrote:
| Yudkowsky and other prominent contributors set "the" goal
| as a sort of revealed wisdom regarding their speculations
| about what a super powerful AI will do.
|
| Pragmatically, the goals themselves appeal to individuals
| who want to maintain conventional (liberal) morality yet
| also position themselves as superior, typically as a form
| of compensation.
| nitrogen wrote:
| _position themselves as superior_
|
| This is why we can't have nice things. Any time someone
| tries to find more effective ways of making good
| decisions or accomplishing their goals, someone has to
| bring out the most tortured cynical interpretation to
| tear them down.
| Nav_Panel wrote:
| Have you hung out much with rationalists?
| JohnPrine wrote:
| i consider myself a rationalist (or at least, an aspiring
| rationalist), and people like hanging out with me.
| learning about this stuff has changed my life and
| relationships for the better.
| voxic11 wrote:
| Its the goal of the LessWrong/Rationalist community.
| analog31 wrote:
| Less Wrong seems to be a manifestation of a thing that
| comes in cycles: Something triggers the rise of a
| "rationalist" movement, including possibly a new
| evangelist or a new medium. Eventually, rational _ism_
| and rational _people_ end up at a standoff. Then the
| whole thing repeats itself after a period of time.
|
| I'm probably rational _enough_ but also can 't make sense
| of much of the rationalist literature, so I simply follow
| my own compass and hope for the best.
| JohnPrine wrote:
| The goal is to make decisions that are "better" as defined
| by your own utility function given limited information.
| This is also called "winning"
| hanche wrote:
| I wouldn't be surprised to learn that even being less wrong
| is NP-hard.
| whatshisface wrote:
| The saving grace of being able to survive in the universe
| is that it's possible to climb up NP hard problems far
| enough to get real results with hard work.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| It also means that you might not know if the hard work is
| climbing up or down (towards or away) from the solution.
| whatshisface wrote:
| No, you know if you're getting better or worse in an NP
| problem because checking answers is in P.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| If you find a solution, yes
| whatshisface wrote:
| Oh, you're thinking of NP-hard yes-no problems. Many if
| not most NP-hard problems of practical importance,
| including the traveling salesman, involve integer rather
| than boolean scores.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Thanks for the additional clarification :)
| karpierz wrote:
| NP-hardness by definition is only yes-no decision
| problems. The NP-hard formulation of Traveling Salesman
| is "given the weighted graph G and an integer X, is there
| a Hamiltonian cycle in G with total weight less than X?"
| hanche wrote:
| Indeed. And thanks! I needed a little morale booster now,
| for reasons unrelated to this topic.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| 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.
| ret2plt wrote:
| > 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.
|
| To be clear, the argument (in rationalist circles) is not
| that climate change is no big deal, it's that there's
| already a ton of people worrying about it, so it is better
| to allocate some extra resources to underfunded problems.
| kirse wrote:
| 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.
| tines wrote:
| Actually I think this is the same fallacy as one of Zeno's
| paradoxes, and has the same resolution. We are discovering
| more wrong, as you say, but the "infinity" of wrongs is in
| the direction of the infinitely small (or "infinitely
| detailed"), not the infinitely large. In other words, every
| time we fill in a gap in our knowledge, we create two more
| gaps, so to speak, but nevertheless we know more than we
| did before.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| 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.
| polote wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| polote wrote:
| There was no new evidence. I'm not sure we have even
| learned anything regarding the efficacy of masks trough the
| pandemic. All what we know was already known prior of it.
| btilly wrote:
| First, there is active research and we demonstrably have
| learned something. See https://aricjournal.biomedcentral.
| com/articles/10.1186/s1375...,
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-72798-7, and
| https://www.pnas.org/content/118/4/e2014564118 for
| several examples.
|
| Second, your simplistic analysis demonstrated that you,
| personally, are ignorant of the real tradeoffs involved
| in whether masks work.
|
| Wearing a mask reduces how much virus leaves your mouth.
| But when you breathe out, most of the virus is in larger
| droplets that quickly hit the ground. However breathing
| out through a mask creates perfect conditions to create
| an aerosol, which can allow more of the virus to stay in
| the air for an indefinite period of time. So there is a
| tradeoff, and there were reasons to question whether
| cloth masks were better than simple social distancing.
|
| It turns out that what matters most is not that you get
| exposed, but rather the initial viral load that you get.
| You see, the virus will go on an exponential growth until
| the relatively fixed time it takes the immune system to
| figure things out and start shutting it down. If the
| virus gets a solid head start, the odds of serious
| illness go up. Therefore the lingering aerosol from a
| mask is (except if it accumulates in poorly ventilated
| indoor spaces) of less concern than an unmasked person
| talking directly to you.
|
| So the result is that masks work. Even crappy cloth masks
| work.
| varjag wrote:
| ...and as they mentioned, we knew that masks work
| already.
| btilly wrote:
| The quality of our evidence is easy to misjudge in
| retrospect.
|
| The last opportunity to study the effectiveness of
| mandating low-quality masks in preventing community
| spread during a pandemic was around a century old.
| (Literally, the Spanish Flu epidemic.) In the meantime a
| lot of new and untried modeling tools were in use, as
| well as updated disease models, and lots of reasons to
| question old data.
|
| See
| https://www.albertahealthservices.ca/assets/info/ppih/if-
| ppi... for an idea of what was reasonable for educated
| specialists in public health to believe. Note phrases
| like, _" There was agreement that although the evidence
| base is poor, the use of masks in the community is likely
| to be useful in reducing transmission from community
| based infected persons, particularly those with
| symptomatic illness."_
|
| So it is accurate to say that we had reason to believe
| that masks work. But it is easy to overstate how much we
| "knew" it to be true at the time.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Most of all of your linked papers are summaries of
| earlier experiments, going back to the 1940's in some
| cases.
|
| Very little new knowledge was added.
|
| >So the result is that masks work. Even crappy cloth
| masks work.
|
| I would agree if you change "results" to expert
| conjecture and "work" to probably do something.
|
| But again, this was always known.
| kbelder wrote:
| 'We' as the scientific community may not have, but 'we'
| the unwashed public learned much.
| polote wrote:
| Being rational doesn't prevent you to be wrong. If your
| assumption is that the government tells the truth and you
| conclude that mask don't work. Then you have reasoned
| rationally.
|
| But if you dont trust the governement, and for this
| specific case you followed them, then this is not
| rational.
| mcguire wrote:
| Aside: As a general rule of thumb, conspiracy theories
| are not rational.
| UnFleshedOne wrote:
| 2 years ago I would agree with you 100%. Lately though
| conspiracy theories become conspiracy facts with alarming
| frequency. And the speed with which media reaches "We've
| always been at war with Eastasia" zeitgeist on each shift
| does not inspire confidence.
| tunesmith wrote:
| What a lot of people have forgotten is that in March 2020,
| they thought COVID was droplets, not aerosol - remember all
| the emphasis on washing hands and hand sanitizer? - and as
| such, masks would be overkill for most. Combine that with
| the worry that people would hoard masks when PPE was in
| short supply for people would be interacting directly with
| patients, then the initial discouragement on masks seems
| more understandable.
|
| As the science changed to suggest that COVID was aerosol,
| scientific opinions on masks got updated as well.
|
| It also didn't help that some hyper-rational people got
| hung up on ranting about how masks weren't perfect, and how
| the virus could still get through if you wore a mask. It
| was as if they imagined they heard someone said "masks are
| 100% effective" and really really wanted to register their
| counterpoints. So they said "they don't work!" when they
| meant "they're not 100% effective!", and other people heard
| "they don't work!" and took it to mean "they're 0%
| effective!" That's one of those patterns you start to see
| all over the place when you know to look for it - people
| confusing "there exists" and "forall".
| notsureaboutpg wrote:
| >You are limited by your ability to distinguish colors but
| you can still decide rationally.
|
| Rationally, the ability to distinguish colors varies between
| human beings, so much so that with a sufficient number of
| tomatoes (say 50), you will have different people have
| different answers for which are the greenest.
|
| Knowing that your ability to distinguish these colors of
| tomatoes might not be as strong as, say, a tomato farmer's
| (since he likely works with these specific fruits and colors
| all the time), you may be rationally inclined to follow his
| logic in choosing which are the greenest.
|
| Do you follow your intuition or trust an expert? Your
| contrived example is already difficult to actually make the
| most rational decision for.
| mcguire wrote:
| > 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
| ...)
| dahfizz wrote:
| > 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.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| I think yes, you can call those statements rational, but
| that just gets at an additional level of difficulty here.
| Bayes only gets you so far as holding a belief with maximum
| probability it is true, _given_ some level of seen
| evidence. To actually get maximally probably true beliefs
| without the qualification, you need to actually gather more
| evidence. In some cases, that may just mean accumulating
| knowledge that other people already generated, but in some
| cases, you may need to generate knowledge from scratch. The
| ability to do that may be severely bounded by resource and
| time constraints. One person can 't personally do all
| science, so now you need division of labor and assignment
| of workers to efforts, so you need optimal matching and
| scheduling algorithms. These are theoretically not
| computationally intractable, but the algorithms rely upon
| pre-existing accurate ability and preference ranking, so
| now you need to go back to information gathering and
| suddenly you have a bootstrapping problem here that feeding
| your algorithm the data it needs to tell you how to gather
| data in the first place requires you to gather data first.
| clairity wrote:
| > "You should wear masks because rigorous science tells us
| that it is effective."
|
| you've really just glossed over the hard part, which is
| when and where masks work, which is in turn the difficult
| political problem to solve.
|
| simplifying, covid spreads mouth-to-mouth with a brief
| stint in the air, not mouth-to-air-then-(much)-later-to-
| mouth, which is the mediopolitical narrative that's being
| pushed vehemently but irrationally, and upon which masking
| policies are erroneously based.
|
| what's always ignored in these narratives is that the virus
| falls apart quickly all by itself outside the cozy confines
| of the body, not to mention floats away to oblivion quickly
| when outside.
|
| if we're really concerned about masks working, we'd have to
| force people to wear them among friends and family in
| private spaces like homes, not outside and in grocery
| stores where they have basically no effect.
|
| "masks work" is a grossly overreaching blanket political
| statement, not a summary of "the science". scientific
| evidence suggests masks _reduce_ droplets (and aerosols,
| with better masks) being ejected into the air. there 's
| less clear evidence that it reduces airborne viral
| particles being inhaled through the mask. but there's
| almost no evidence that the way we've deployed masks is
| doing much other than signalling our fears and concerns.
|
| i'd be open to supporting mask policies that are based on
| actual evidence (e.g., wear them when socializing at home),
| but not the mediopolitically fearmongering policies we
| have.
| tisthetruth wrote:
| Not being jacked up on sugar and caffeine can help
| tremendously.
|
| I would still like to see some studies which delve into whether
| sugar and caffeine are catalysts for biasing us towards system
| 1 and how they affect system 2, mindfulness, patience, etc...
| ulucs wrote:
| Why bother reasoning with NP-hardness when you can just invoke
| incompleteness? No brain power limitations are needed.
| drdeca wrote:
| Because incompleteness isn't really relevant here?
|
| Are you just saying "people aren't logically omniscient, and
| can't be because of incompleteness"?
| yibg wrote:
| 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.
| garbagetime wrote:
| > 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?
| dwd wrote:
| 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!
| strulovich wrote:
| 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.
| nostrademons wrote:
| 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.
| btilly wrote:
| 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.
| strulovich wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Similarly even mediocre programmers do a pretty good job
| writing programs that halt.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| 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.
| amelius wrote:
| Ok, so what is the class of problems that is hard for any
| input?
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Reducing entropy.
| lisper wrote:
| 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.
| btilly wrote:
| 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.)
| lisper wrote:
| I kind of intended that comment to be ironic self-
| deprecating humor because, of course, I have no way of
| knowing whether or not I'm being irrational. Irrational
| people think they're rational, and so the fact that I think
| I'm rational does not mean that I am. But it's likewise for
| everyone. The real point is that everyone ought to have a
| little more humility about their own rationality
| (especially all the idiots who are downvoting my original
| comments. Now _they_ are being totally irrational!)
| lisper wrote:
| To late to edit the above comment, but just for the
| record, this is my actual response to the many-worlders:
|
| http://blog.rongarret.info/2019/07/the-trouble-with-many-
| wor...
| breuleux wrote:
| Thanks, that was interesting :)
|
| One thing I'm curious about: I haven't read the
| literature all that well, but my personal understanding
| of MWI, after trying to wrap my head around it, is that
| there's probably no branching or peeling at all: every
| possible configuration of the universe immutably exists
| and is associated with a complex amplitude. What does
| change are the amplitudes. When I make a choice at point
| A and the universe "splits" into B and C, the only thing
| that happens is that the amplitude in bucket A is split
| into buckets B and C. But there's no reason to think A, B
| and C were ever empty or will ever be empty: after all,
| some other state Z might pour amplitude into A at the
| same time A pours into B and C. We might even currently
| be in a steady state where the universal wavefunction is
| perfectly static, because every single "branch" is
| perfectly compensated by a "join". If so, MWI would
| challenge the very idea that existence is a binary
| predicate (it's actually a continuous complex amplitude).
| I'm honestly not sure how we're even supposed to reason
| about that thing.
|
| Does that make any sense, or am I way off base?
| btilly wrote:
| I read it, but from it you seem to be making three
| points.
|
| 1. Many worlds is indeed what QM predicts should happen.
|
| 2. Popular descriptions are oversimplified and the full
| explanation is very complicated.
|
| 3. Even if many worlds is true, it doesn't change my
| experience and should not rationally change how I act
| when faced with quantum uncertainty.
|
| If I am correct, then I'm in violent agreement with all
| three points. And am left with, "So until more data, I
| will provisionally accept many worlds as the best
| explanation."
|
| My impression is that you seem to be left with, "If it is
| true, then it is irrelevant to my life, and so I don't
| care about whether it might be true."
| lisper wrote:
| > Many worlds is indeed what QM predicts should happen.
|
| No. Many-worlds is what the SE predicts should happen.
| But the SE != QM. MW does not explain the Born rule,
| which is part of QM's predictions. MW is also violently
| at odds with subjective experience. So MW is not a good
| explanation of what is observed.
| hindsightbias wrote:
| 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.
| legrande wrote:
| 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.
| OnACoffeeBreak wrote:
| 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.
| FinanceAnon wrote:
| 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?
| jjbinx007 wrote:
| 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
| WhompingWindows wrote:
| 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".
| legrande wrote:
| > 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
| digitalsushi wrote:
| I knew what you meant. I feel like we almost have our own
| culture, sometimes. Weird.
| jklinger410 wrote:
| 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.
| _moof wrote:
| 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.
| jhgb wrote:
| Why? Are you equating rationality with omniscience? Then why
| have the separate word "rationality" in the first place?
| rafaelero wrote:
| 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.
| flixic wrote:
| 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.
| _moof wrote:
| 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.
| UnFleshedOne wrote:
| A soulless and mathematically applied principles is a good
| was to actually reduce the number of people suffering.
| Assuming that's what your goal was from the start. If you
| only look at "lived experience" and then make a random
| change you feel might help, but don't actually check if it
| does, you can make things worse (see the outcomes of all
| the aid to Africa for example).
| rafaelero wrote:
| 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.
| HPsquared wrote:
| It's irrational to pretend as if we are rational.
| [deleted]
| eevilspock wrote:
| 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._
| nathias wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| And they are ever so full of themselves. They're a perfect
| embodiment of Dunning-Kruger.
| TheGigaChad wrote:
| Idiot dumbass, get cancer and die squealing like a lab rat.
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| 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.
| jhgb wrote:
| 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?
| kerblang wrote:
| 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.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| You won't make any engineers angry.
|
| We know you're talking about _other_ engineers, and we agree
| about those fools!
| kerblang wrote:
| 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.
| DamnYuppie wrote:
| 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.
| marsven_422 wrote:
| We are human, glorious humans.
| okamiueru wrote:
| It's going against entropy. There are few ways to be rational,
| and infinitely many ways to irrational.
| alecst wrote:
| 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.
| sjg007 wrote:
| 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.
| polote wrote:
| 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
| XorNot wrote:
| > 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"?
| [deleted]
| alecst wrote:
| 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.
| mindslight wrote:
| Your thinking is most certainly rational. The
| contraposition to Godel's incompleteness theorem tells us
| that any framework with sufficient explanatory power will
| necessarily contain contradictions. Since we attempt to
| reason about everything, our framework is necessarily large
| enough to be full of contradictions. Since we've got to
| deal with contradictions, they are not something to be
| avoided but rather _acknowledged_. If you 're not
| acknowledging the contradictions and the "opposite side"
| for the implications you visit, then you will miss when
| that "other side" starts making more sense than the chain
| you're following. Not doing this means ending up at a
| nonsensical position while ignoring its contradictory
| obvious truth, a result we call cognitive dissonance.
|
| This dual-thinking is related to the computer security
| mindset - you can't naively write code thinking your
| assertions will simply hold as you intend, but rather you
| need to be continually examining what every assertion
| "gives away" to a hostile counterparty.
|
| There are alternative systems of logic that attempt to
| formalize reasoning in the presence of contradictions, to
| keep a single contradiction from being able to prove
| everything. For example, intuitionistic logic and
| paraconsistent logic. These feel much more in line with
| reasoning in an _open world_ where a lack of a negative
| doesn 't necessarily imply truth. The focus on a singular
| "logic" that asserts that everything has some single
| rational "answer" is a source of much of our modern strife.
| karmakaze wrote:
| 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.
| antisthenes wrote:
| > 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.
|
| That's such an incredibly rare occurrence, that having a
| stable belief system far outweighs its potential drawbacks.
| Not to mention that rationality itself encompasses the
| ability to make such a switch anyway if the new information
| actually does upend volumes of "settled" knowledge.
|
| A much bigger problem, though, is people lacking critical
| thinking skills to adequately assign probabilities to the
| new information being valuable/useful/correct.
|
| Hint: it's very low. (in the current stage of civilization,
| there are definitely periods where it was different).
| karmakaze wrote:
| We may be in agreement and only categorizing 'stable'
| differently. Of course you want a single-coherent world
| view. What doesn't work well is if inferred or partial-
| case knowledge is committed as rigid facts that are
| incompatible with new information.
| jcims wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| 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.
| nvilcins wrote:
| 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.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| The rational approach is to acknowledge that you do not
| have sufficient information to proceed, or acknowledge the
| various assumptions (better word than "belief) that you are
| using.
|
| If you are using contradicting assumptions, then you should
| probably check to see if you are doing so because you want
| the conclusion that you are getting from the assumption.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| We make decisions based on imperfect information and
| conflicting values every day. We generally can't wait
| until we have sufficient information to proceed.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| That does not require using conflicting assumptions
| though.
| bluetomcat wrote:
| 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.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| 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.
| MrPowers wrote:
| 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.
| newbamboo wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > but we're more enlightened now
|
| We hope.
| nostromo wrote:
| 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.
| mcguire wrote:
| 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.
| clairity wrote:
| that's not irrationality, that's decision-making under
| uncertainty, which is the norm, not the exception.
| probabilities are dynamic, information is imperfect, and so
| decision-making must incorporate that uncertainty.
|
| the sunk cost fallacy is simply considering existing loss
| when deciding on continued investment (in time, money and
| other resources), when you should only consider future cost
| for future benefit. it's thinking erroneously that existing
| loss is not already locked in, that it's salvageable
| somehow. but no, it's already lost.
|
| in a project with continuously updating probabilities of
| success, and under imperfect information, the go-or-no-go
| decision should only be based on the likelihood of future
| gains exceeding future losses, not future+existing losses.
|
| in this framework, persistence would be having credible
| evidence (e.g., non-public information), not just belief,
| of the likelihood of future net gain relative to
| opportunity cost. it'd be irrational to be persistent
| simply on belief rather than credible information and
| probability estimation.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| The difference between sunk-cost fallacy and persistence is
| that of motivation. If you keep doing something because
| "you've worked so hard already" then that's sunk-cost
| fallacy. If you keep doing something because "success is
| just around the corner" then that's persistence.
|
| You can't go back in time and not work hard on something,
| so whether or not you should continue is purely a function
| of whether or not you think you will succeed, not a
| function of how much effort you've already put into it.
| oldsklgdfth wrote:
| 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.
| wyager wrote:
| "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_ wrote:
| > 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?
| wyager wrote:
| Sure. Fallacies, as usually stated, tell you when something
| that feels like a logical entailment isn't actually a
| logical entailment.
|
| Intuitively, people find "bob is an idiot so he's wrong" a
| reasonable statement.
|
| Technically, the implication does not hold (stupid people
| can be correct) and this is an ad hominem fallacy.
|
| However, if we analyze this statement from a Bayesian
| standpoint (which we should), the rules of entailment are
| different and actually bob being stupid is _evidence_ that
| he's wrong. So maybe this is actually a pretty reasonable
| thing to say! Certainly reasonable people should use
| speakers' intelligence when deciding how much to trust
| speakers' claims, even though this is narrowly "fallacious"
| in an Aristotelian sense.
|
| I'm not aware of any reading on this topic. It seems under-
| explored in my circles. However I know some other people
| have been having similar thoughts recently.
| PicassoCTs wrote:
| 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?
| joelbondurant wrote:
| USA members need the Fact-Check algorithm integrated into
| permanent surgically installed face masks.
| mncharity wrote:
| 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
| tomgp wrote:
| "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.
| andi999 wrote:
| 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.
| damoe wrote:
| Because there is a good chance reality is not rational.
| karmakaze wrote:
| 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
| coldtea wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| linuxhansl wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| esarbe wrote:
| 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.
| raman162 wrote:
| 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
| mrxd wrote:
| 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.
| UnFleshedOne wrote:
| 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.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| 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
| adrhead wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| eevilspock wrote:
| "Useless" https://xkcd.com/55/
| [deleted]
| achenatx wrote:
| 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.
| derbOac wrote:
| 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 EUR 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.
| _greim_ wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| FinanceAnon wrote:
| 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?
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| 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?
| SamBam wrote:
| 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.
| notahacker wrote:
| Don't think that follows automatically. My dollar - in
| isolation - can feed someone tomorrow, even if it doesn't
| feed others and they're all hungry next week. Lack of my
| dollar alone won't change the ethics of Amazon in the
| slightest, and much as the more ethical shopkeeper won't
| mind the extra number in his bank account it's unlikely to
| allow him to displace ethical companies or do anything else
| wonderful with it. The difference between direct, tangible
| outcomes and perhaps more significant outcomes which depend
| on a lot more other people acting in a particular way is
| one of the thornier questions about what's rational to
| prioritise. tbh when I do boycott stuff it's mostly an
| emotional response
|
| (notwithstanding better objections to the original example:
| in practice most donors' finances aren't so tight that
| buying the $90 product rather than the $100 dollar one is
| really necessary to free up the donor funds for a worthy
| cause, as opposed to emotionally salve donor conscience for
| buying from an unworthy vendor...)
| vdqtp3 wrote:
| > removing a tiny bit of business from Amazon and paying
| your local shopkeeper probably also has meaning.
|
| It might be fair to say that removing business from Amazon
| has no real impact but giving that business to a small
| business does.
| UnFleshedOne wrote:
| 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.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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).
| belter wrote:
| "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
| belter wrote:
| I am with you :-) https://xkcd.com/1132/
| tomjakubowski wrote:
| 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.
| neonate wrote:
| https://archive.is/7dAh5
| swayvil wrote:
| 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?
| newbamboo wrote:
| My answer, in jeopardy format: What is Psychology? Every mind is
| different; a feature not a bug.
| danans wrote:
| 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.
| lazide wrote:
| 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.
| danans wrote:
| > 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).
| lazide wrote:
| Nope, explicitly using logic. We didn't invent thinking
| about things in the last hundred years after all.
|
| If you don't know what is behind x thing, and every y times
| someone walks by a thing like x thing they get jumped by a
| leopard, then only walk by x thing when the risk is worth
| it. Which it rarely is.
|
| If you're referring to formal logic, then sure - but almost
| no one in that thread seems to be using that definition
| either. Formal logic is incredibly expensive (mentally),
| and only a few percent of folks even now can afford to use
| it with any regularity.
| wyager wrote:
| 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.
| UnFleshedOne wrote:
| 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.
| SamBam wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| slingnow wrote:
| Somehow you took their response to mean "the rational thing
| to do is avoid all bushes, forever, no matter the
| consequences".
|
| The OP merely stated you should adjust your behavior to the
| 1% chance. That would include weighing it against the risk
| of dying from dehydration, in your example.
| johnwheeler wrote:
| 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.
| raldi wrote:
| 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.
| johnwheeler wrote:
| ah, you should have read the second sentence
| raldi wrote:
| I don't see how the second sentence makes sense of the
| first. A perfectly rational actor would not do nothing;
| they would carry out the most reasonable action given the
| information available.
| johnwheeler wrote:
| But then you're not being perfectly rational. You're
| calculating the odds, which is what my second sentence
| says.
|
| Being perfectly rational is impossible.
|
| See: perfect rationality vs bounded rationality
| JohnPrine wrote:
| I think you may have a confused definition of what it
| means to be a rational actor. Being rational means making
| the optimal decision given the information available
| johnwheeler wrote:
| No, you're confused. See
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bounded_rationality
| raldi wrote:
| Maybe I don't understand what you mean by "perfectly
| rational". I'm using the definition from the article: A
| perfectly calibrated individual will be right X% of the
| time about statements in which they are X% confident.
|
| Are you using a different definition?
| johnwheeler wrote:
| Perfectly rational means just what it sounds like. Making
| the correct decision because you have all available data.
|
| Being perfectly rational is impossible.
| raldi wrote:
| Would a perfectly rational person duck if there were a
| 50% chance they were about to be punched? Or would they
| do nothing?
| throwaway9690 wrote:
| 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?
| pessimizer wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| someguy321 wrote:
| 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.
| teddyh wrote:
| > _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.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway9690 wrote:
| 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.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Preferences do not need to be rationally justified; without
| axiomic preferences, we have no preferences at all.
| throwaway9690 wrote:
| I'm referring more to prejudices rather than preferences.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| > _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._
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| kubb wrote:
| 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.
| someguy321 wrote:
| 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?
| kubb wrote:
| Don't get me wrong, gorging yourself on a variety of foods
| from around the world can be pleasurable. It also gives you
| zero insight into how people in that country are different
| than elsewhere.
|
| You could understand more about a country by studying it
| from home than by visiting it for a week.
|
| I don't like that it's presented as a lifestyle that people
| should strive to pursue. I know certain people here will
| vehemently oppose this opinion, because in effect it's a
| critique of them or that which they admire.
| Retric wrote:
| It goes both ways.
|
| No you really can't understand a culture from a week of
| study the same way you can from being there for a week.
| The issue is the millions of unknown unknowns that you
| never really consider. How large is people's personal
| space, where do they stand and look in an elevator,
| what's traffic like, how loud are people, etc etc. Of
| course a week or three isn't that long, but there are
| real diminishing returns here.
|
| On the other hand personal experience is very narrow in
| scope. You're never going to find out country wide crime
| rates by wondering around for a week.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| >Of course a week or three isn't that long, but there are
| real diminishing returns here.
|
| I suspect you have to live and work in a place to really
| understand it. If you are wealthy and visiting a poor
| country there is virtually zero chance, you will always
| be too insulated from the reality.
| pessimizer wrote:
| If you are wealthy _and born and raised_ in a poor
| country, you will likely be quite ignorant of most of the
| lifestyle of most of its people.
| karmakaze wrote:
| That actually sounds very resourceful than wasteful, as
| readers can have vicarious experiences through his
| writings.
| zepto wrote:
| The people you describe do seem to exist, but what makes you
| think Cohen is one of them?
| SMAAART wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I don't disagree but I have to say this absolute reads like a
| voice-over from an Adam Curtis documentary.
| cortesoft wrote:
| I think part of it is a quote from Fight Club
| chromaton wrote:
| Quote Investigator says it's from 1928 newspaper column:
| https://quoteinvestigator.com/2016/04/21/impress/
| zentropia wrote:
| Fight Club, bus scene
| marcod wrote:
| I maintain that the concept of "common sense" is also quite
| useless now :p
| athenot wrote:
| This sounds cynical but yes, unfortunately, there are many
| incentives to _not_ be rational.
| Siira wrote:
| 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.
| jimbokun wrote:
| 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.
| pessimizer wrote:
| "Classical liberalism" has little or no relationship to any
| sentiment you've expressed here, as far as I know.
| ret2plt wrote:
| 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.
| toshk wrote:
| When all experiences we have are based in meaning those
| emotional experiences in some sense might be more "real" then a
| logical thought.
| WhompingWindows wrote:
| 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.
| paganel wrote:
| 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.
| morpheos137 wrote:
| 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.
| myfavoritedog wrote:
| Human irrationality will only get worse on average. There's very
| little evolutionary disadvantage for humans to be irrational in
| our modern society.
|
| Not synching up with reality would likely cost you your ability
| to be in the genetic pool back in the day.
| jscipione wrote:
| 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."
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