I believe the author is making the mistake of equating the "rational" in "economics' rational actors" to be people who choose wisely. The type of wise choices that most of society would agree to lead to positive outcomes.
My understanding is that formal economics is using "rational" as in "rational choice theory"[1]. It's a specific term-of-art that's different from the everyday usage of "rational." It's not some positive measure to satisfy a global optimum. A "rational actor" is simply someone who reliably arrives at the same consistent choices given the knowledge and preferences he happens to have. If a consumer chooses CocaCola over water even though soda's sugar content causes obesity and teeth decay, the consumer is still classified as "rational" even though it looks like a suboptimal choice within the bigger picture of healthy living. Economics' rational choices satisfy a local optimum (consumer's imperfect preferences) and not a global one.
Yes, that's basically correct. To an economist, you're rational (modulo some technicalities) if
(a) when you have to, you can always decide which of two things
you want more (yes, it's OK to want some things equally),
(b) whenever you want A more than B and B more than C, then
you want A more than C, and
(c) whatever you say you want (or think you want) your behavior
actually reflects (a) and (b).
If you're not rational in this sense, please stay indoors, or at least refrain from trading with bearded men in tweed, because a perfectly scrupulous economist will take you for everything you're worth by giving you exactly what you want. :P
For details, see these lecture notes [0], particularly the axioms of choice theory on slide 4. (Or take a micro theory course!)
Problem is, few people are actually like this. Behavioral economics have demonstrated that humans are vulnerable to hyperbolic discounting, which is irrational. Because what I want for myself now is different from what I want for myself next week. Telling people who are vulnerable to this to stay indoors is roughly the same as telling everyone to stay indoors.
Personally, I think the initial question is ill formed. It would be like asking, "do tall people exist?" Although now that I read the article, what the author is really answering is the question of whether rationality along different tests is correlated. That is, is there a common underlying variable. How fascinating.
I'm not sure hyperbolic discounting is all that irrational.
Example from Wikipedia illustrating hyperbolic discounting: "For instance: "Would you prefer a dollar today or three dollars tomorrow?" or "Would you prefer a dollar in one year or three dollars in one year and one day?" For certain range of offerings, a significant fraction of subjects will take the lesser amount today, but will gladly wait one extra day in a year in order to receive the higher amount instead."
To me, the biggest risk is the counterparty risk that you'll never see the other person again. I myself would take $1 today from someone I've never met over $3 tomorrow, because I'm quite skeptical they'd even show up. Of course, the chance a person shows back up 365 vs. 366 days from now is pretty much identical, so I'd take the $3.
I agree with your thoughts on hyperbolic discounting.
Maybe I'll be dead next year. Maybe I just don't trust you.
Probabilistic reasoning is a tricky business. Also, I can reason about the likelihood that the store is going to have a loaf of bread tomorrow because we have experience dealing with that every day. The kind of scenarios concocted by economists are quite odd. Rarely is a stranger just giving you money with no strings attached.
From my personal experience: If one is able to dig deeply enough, for what I guess to be something like 90% of the population, there is a level where people just declare "I feel that way" and there is no logic, nor even the barest respect for rationality. What's more, these feelings are very often used to justify the arbitrary bad treatment of others who are deemed to be "wrong" or "inferior."
All of these feelings have some "rationalization" as window dressing, but ultimately, it comes down to irrational feelings of tribal affiliation. This invariably comes out in politics and professional life.
We're goddamned grunting, screaming apes who have the ability to occasionally surpass our primitive nature and are well suited to being organized into groups. The vast majority of us do not have the intellectual integrity to hold consistently to a set of rational principles to the nth degree. In the end, our feelings hold sway, and our empathy often fails.
Prejudice is a part of our very nature, and it comes out all the time. There is no need for it to be attached to race or gender, and our society doesn't equip us with the intellectual tools to recognize it at the substrate level. Rather, our present societies are organized around it.
An old friend of mine had a theory that the purpose of emotion was to act as a tie breaker when rational decision making becomes deadlocked.
In many situations, no matter how rational the person, imperfect information can lead to two choices appearing equivalent. How is a perfectly rational being supposed to act at that point? Making a decision based on some kind of tribal affiliation ("Well, these two things seem the same, but this one is how it's been done in the past") might actually be a useful fallback behaviour, as past successful experience might be an insight when all other things seem equal.
It's interesting to note that many of the behavioural patterns that are labelled as "mental illness" often combine "difficulty making decisions" and "lacking emotional response". People who are excessively rational often have trouble functioning in society.
Fundamentally, I believe that those deep seated irrational axioms are necessary for us to function. Without them, we'd freeze and crash at the next logical paradox we came across. Without a little bit of irrationality, how do you decide what to do next? What do you do when you get to the end of the decision tree?
This is why I prescribe well practiced rationality leavened with empathy. The problem is not emotions being a tie-breaker per se. The problem is when people aren't clear about which feelings are involved.
Most commonly, people tell themselves they are acting "to protect" when they are really acting out of hate and aggression.
Also, I don't think it should be excused when someone is confronted with their contradictions, but they deny what they are doing anyways. Sometimes I think that that is my biggest problem with humanity.
If you are on the receiving end of the abuse it does get easier to see it for what it is. If the collective asserts your inferiority you don't have a lot of options besides from thinking for yourself.
At the same time it is much harder for those most favored by the community to reject the special treatment... if not impossible.
I like how you point out that race, gender and sexual preference are just extreme examples. I was sort of stuck there but it indeed seems to extend to the color of the nail polish, the brand of clothing, the choice of OS, political preference..... and pretty much everything else.
I hope this topic doesn't change hn into reddit. (just kidding)
To be fair, all of the best decisions I've ever made have come out of "I feel that way" and all of my worst decisions have come out of "This is rationally correct".
>To be fair, all of the best decisions I've ever made have come out of "I feel that way" and all of my worst decisions have come out of "This is rationally correct".
You could hypothesize things are likely to be that way because there is no rational purpose to life - you do some stuff then die. If anything you could say a successful life is one where you enjoyed the ride which may be maximised by doing what feels right. I guess.
Is it really that easy? The 'maximize' part? Maximizing happiness could then be to secure a big supply of heroin and being on an IV drip all the time.
Some people feel that way. For some - in the end deep emotional reason, I don't _want_ it to be that way for myself. Even though I probably have more pain that way, going through life.
Whenever it comes to potential harm to people of far social distance, well practiced rationality leavened by empathy had better hold sway.
Also, if you are a member of a privileged group, you may well have the luxury of just doing what you feel. You also may or may not be insulated from some of the consequences.
I'm a young white cis straight male from a low middle-class single-parent family currently striking it out on his own on a foreign continent without the safety net of friends, family, or a steady job. Also I'm short to boot (this is bad for men, I'm told)
Am I a member of a privileged group?
That said, gut feel has always guided me very well when I have incomplete information. I always have incomplete information.
I did the same, with pretty much the same cicomstances. The fact that we had a choice in the matter leaves us pretty much privileged, no doubt in my mind.
I am a firm believer of the idea that everyone's got a choice. It's the living with the consequences bit that's problematic.
Usually what people mean when they say "I don't have a choice" is actually "The probability and cost of catastrophic failure are too high to be worth it".
Okay, so there's a lot to break down here and a lot of conflations taking place.
At a base level we can understand, I know people in my life who seem more "rational" in general than people I know who I would describe as more "emotional". In this sense, you can think of "rational" thinking as any thought-pattern that activates the cortex -- roughly speaking, the region of the the brain associated with higher-order and abstract thinking.
On a more nuanced level, the author seems to be making a case about capital-R "Rationalism", as espoused by communities like Less Wrong, Effective Altruism, capital-L Libertarians, and the singularity wonks. In this, I feel like the author is making a huge conflation that I feel is kind of misleading and rather insulting to people who don't buy into one small communities ideas about cognitive bias and logical fallacies.
Often times, "evidence" of "irrational" behaviors, as displayed for example in the Linda problem and the Wason task, typically fail in that the askers don't understand language or how it's typically used. There are loads of people that have a rational bent that will get these problems wrong, simply because they don't put too much thought into it, or they're trying to answer a question linguistically, rather than purely "Rationally".
I have a lot of theories as to why LessWrong / Libertarian types develop this inflated sense of self importance about their "Rational" outlook of the world, but it's pedagogical, and probably insulting to those involved, so I'll leave it for another day.
I see absolute primacy given to ownership from people who live on land seized from Indians.
A belief in enforcement of contracts on people who didn't sign them, namely people born after the agreements were made.
The claim that utilities such as sewage and water supply would be better served if there were countless duplicate sewage systems in each city owned by different companies.
The assertion that the current ISP throttling issue would be fixed by eliminating the FCC.
The claim that the problem of the commons does not exist.
So, I humbly submit, that the claim to rationality is not the same as its possession.
A much better question than "do rational people exist" would be "do people generally behave in a rational way?" Who cares if I'm not 100% rational all the time. As long as people in general tend towards rationality then it makes sense to talk about 'rational people.'
downvote me if you wish but honestly the rationality movement seems like it is more interested in being elite than anything meaningful. If all the rationality movement can provide as a measure of success is just higher performance on some silly tests designed by psychologists to essentially trick you with wording then I would want nothing to do with it.
Unfortunately, one of my social IRC channels - one which used to revolve primarily around respect for emotions - got invaded by a certain well-known rationalist Internet community. Immediately, where channel operators hadn't been required for the past four years, they were left having to enforce simple rules on the new people, which they inevitably argued against. Every other week, there are serious issues involving violation of social etiquette.
Now, this isn't a problem with "aspies", as some might think. The channel, before this, had a remarkably high concentration of people with aspergers, and some with autism. This is a problem with people who honestly do not see emotions as a thing that they should care about. That is the rationalist movement at its core, for all they talk about, from my perspective.
Alien abduction
Alien implants
Alien space crafts
Cold fusion
Drawing energy from magnetic fields
noble gas engines
plasma reactors
gravity engines
making gold from other elements
turning water into pure hydrogen or pure oxygen
Remote viewing
Astral projection
Summoning spirits
Contacting the after life
Wireless electricity
HAARP
chemtrails / RF chaff
And of course animal rain to make it truly Fortean.[0]
Try not to make arguments from ignorance, provide sources based on actual research.
Oh, and don't confuse the examples for the topic!
Enjoy!
edit
I see the fear of the unknown has already produced 1 down vote. I shouldn't be asking but I'm curious why. Perhaps I should explain a bit more:
I think rationality is best tested where most people abandon it. If all of the above are not real we must have rational arguments for each item.
I dont claim to know anything about the items beyond a bit of superficial googling. The arguments found on the web left much to be desired. I cant just copy other peoples opinion if they didn't arrive there logically.
I think the most important thing to consider here is that these logic questions they use to test "rationality" are awkward word puzzles, and the test reveals more about how well people can work out what's being asked than their underlying rationality. The fact that most people would jump onto the "bank teller and feminist" option in the conjunction fallacy test is because the question as posed contains mainly feminist-related ideas, and so the brain's natural tendency is to jump to the answer containing the word feminism. That's less about rationality and more about how attuned are you to the likelihood that the questions you're being asked are worded in a tricky way.
> I think the most important thing to consider here is that these logic questions they use to test "rationality" are awkward word puzzles
They aren't. Have you looked at the CRT questions? There's nothing tricky about them, the challenge is simply actually checking your answer. And if it's 'just' a word puzzle, why is the correlation with IQ so low? And why does this sort of rationality inversely correlate with screwing your life up in various ways (see the research discussed in my comment in OP)? That's an odd thing for an 'awkward word puzzle' to do.
> The fact that most people would jump onto the "bank teller and feminist" option in the conjunction fallacy test is because the question as posed contains mainly feminist-related ideas, and so the brain's natural tendency is to jump to the answer containing the word feminism.
You know that was the very first criticism leveled against Kahneman & Tversky's conjunction fallacy results and they long ago showed that other wordings gave the fallacy too?
It's unfortunate that, as a person interested in puzzles, I've seen almost all of the common tests for rationality, lack of bias, etc., etc. So I have little to no way to assess whether I would pass these tests, because, for example, I first saw the "A bat and ball together cost $1.10. The bat costs a dollar more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?" puzzle when I was in grade school.
Has anyone published research-level assessments that I didn't see decades ago?
The article has an unstated assumption that being more rational is better. While clearly there are benefits to less biased thinking, there are also drawbacks that are supported by research.
Martin Seligman wrote a book called Learned Optimism that deeply explores the issue of optimistic vs. pessimistic explanatory styles. To oversimplify, when something bad happens to a pessimist they tell themselves it is permanent, personal, and universal, whereas optimists tell themselves it is temporary, impersonal, and specific. When something good happens, the two groups do the opposite.
Here is an excerpt from the book about the unfortunate evidence that depressed people have fewer cognitive biases. Snipped/edited for length:
There is considerable evidence that depressed people, though sadder, are wiser.
Ten years ago Lauren Alloy and Lyn Abramson, then graduate students at the University of Pennsylvania, did an experiment in which people were given differing degrees of control over the lighting of a light. Some were able to control the light perfectly: It went on every time they pressed a button, and it never went on if they didn't press. The other people, however, had no control at all: The light went on regardless of whether they pressed the button.
The people in both groups were asked to judge, as accurately as they could, how much control they had. Depressed people were very accurate, both when they had control and when they didn't. The nondepressed people shocked us. They were accurate when they had control, but when helpless they were undeterred: they still judged that they had a great deal of control.
[...]
These have been consistent findings over the last decade. Depressed people -- most of whom turn out to be pessimists -- accurately judge how much control they have. Nondepressed people -- optimists, for the most part -- believe they have much more control over things than they actually do, particularly when they are helpless and have no control at all.
Another kind of evidence for the thesis that depressed people, though sadder, are wiser involves judgments of skill. Several years ago, Newsweek reported that 80 percent of American men think they are in the top half of social skills. They must have been nondepressed American men, if the results of Peter Lewinsohn, a psychologist at the University of Oregon, and his colleagues are valid. These investigators put depressed and non-depressed patients in a panel discussions and later had the patients judge how well they did. To what extent were they persuasive? Likable? As judged by a panel of observers, depressed patients weren't very persuasive or likable; poor social skills are a symptom of depression. Depressed patients judged their lack of skill accurately. The surprising finding was from the nondepressed group. They markedly overestimated their skills, judging themselves as much more persuasive and appealing than the judges thought they were.
[...]
Overall, then, there is clear evidence that nondepressed people distort reality in a self-serving direction and depressed people tend to see reality accurately. How does this evidence, which is about depression, tie into optimism and pessimism? Statistically, most depressed people score in the pessimistic range of explanatory style, and most nondepressed people score optimistically.
So basically the research is suggesting that unbiased thinkers tend to be more pessimistic and depressed than people who irrationally distort the world into being better than it actually is. What a bummer.
I don't see how depressive realism refutes the various correlations and observations in OP...?
> So basically the research is suggesting that unbiased thinkers tend to be more pessimistic and depressed than people who irrationally distort the world into being better than it actually is. What a bummer.
How is that wrong? Suppose you looked at lottery winners and successful entrepreneurs; no doubt they are optimistic and risk-seeking. Does that mean optimism and risk-seeking and playing the lottery would make everyone better off...?
> I don't see how depressive realism refutes the various correlations and observations in OP...?
The purpose of my message was not to refute any of the article's claims, but rather to challenge the unstated assumption that people who avoid cognitive biases are necessarily better off.
For example the article asks where there is a "hyper-rational elite." This is implying that people who avoid cognitive bias are better than everyone else. As I said before, I think that rationality has lots of obvious benefits, but there are also benefits to irrational optimism.
> but rather to challenge the unstated assumption that people who avoid cognitive biases are necessarily better off.
But you haven't. Maybe depressive realism is better for getting things done - if, you know, you can get the 'realism' without the 'major mental disorder' part. (And why didn't you consider manic-depressive disorder? If being optimistic is so great, surely being manic is even greater...) Pointing to a literally diseased example doesn't raise much of a challenge at all.
I find it somewhat ironic that the people who are most staunchly advocating the superiority of rationality in their replies to my post are displaying the greatest cognitive bias by advancing a position that no one has offered any empirical evidence for.
And just to clarify, I wasn't even arguing that optimism is better than rationality. I am only calling into question the assumption that it is necessarily worse.
In other words, the article (in my opinion) assumed that R > O always. I wanted to challenge this assumption that argue that R <?> O. I am not arguing, as some people seem to suppose, that O > R always.
> Maybe depressive realism is better for getting things done - if, you know, you can get the 'realism' without the 'major mental disorder' part.
Maybe, but that is pure speculation that has no support.
Seligman's book offers a fair amount of evidence that optimists out-perform pessimists (the latter is not the same as being depressed, though they are correlated) in many areas of life.
> And why didn't you consider manic-depressive disorder? If being optimistic is so great, surely being manic is even greater...
Again, pure speculation. "More of a good thing is always better" is not a principle you can reasonably assume.
> In other words, the article (in my opinion) assumed that R > O always. I wanted to challenge this assumption that argue that R <?> O. I am not arguing, as some people seem to suppose, that O > R always.
So, you don't have evidence for it, you don't believe it, yet you're going to argue aggressively for it and call me biased to boot. What distinguishes your comments from garden-variety trolling?
If by "it" you mean "O > R always", then no, I don't have evidence for it nor do I believe it. What I do believe and have a whole book of evidence for is "not (R > O always)". That is what I am arguing for, and have been from my very first message.
My opinion of "not (R > O always)" would only be controversial if you believe that "R > O always". But "R > O always" has no evidence supporting it (at least none that anyone has presented or that I am aware of).
I came here to write this, too - it's a fascinating result (from a fascinating book - highly recommended). Humans, it seems, are just not well equipped to cope with reality. I think this shows through in many facets of life - essentially, much of it is much more random than people like to believe, and people really struggle with that.
And for the things over which we do have control it is unhealthy to take blame when they go awry. It's actually a kind of therapy to make people attribute more of the effects of their own failings on their environment.
Luckily there are effective techniques that pessimists can use to interrupt and challenge unduly negative thinking, thus hopefully preventing them sliding into depression.
Yes, definitely. The unfortunate part is that it irrational optimism seems to be the fuel for a lot of good things that can happen in people's psyche. The book talks a lot about how people with irrational optimism tend to display fortitude that makes them ultimately more successful than people with more realistic perceptions.
However, if you know that, and can put a price on your naive happiness, you can make a choice about whether you'd like to develop skills that will help you in a large number of areas of your life.
So, yes. Sacrifice that naive happiness. Sacrifice your willingness to believe things merely because you want them to be true. Sacrifice your false confidence. Use your better aim to set a wiser course.
A wiser course to unhappiness. I volunteer to give up some rationality to gain some happiness. If I can get less procrastination in the deal as well, then that would be great.
Remember that you're trading a fixed amount of happiness here for some sort of return (which might be less than the happiness than you sacrifice).
What sort of happiness trades are you willing to make at that price? Intelligence that measures as a 15 IQ point boost? 5 million dollars? Everything's got a price. At some point, sacrificing those things IS worth the return.
That's confusing cause and effect. Depressed people become more rational, but it's not rationality which is causing the depression. Because, there are several ways to become more rational that don't cause similar increases in depression.
I didn't actually suggest causation either way, only that depression and realism tend to be strongly correlated. On the other hand you have suggested depression->rationality causation without any evidence.
Yes you did. 'there are also drawbacks that are supported by research'
If increasing rationality has no effect on depression then it's not a drawback.
Or, put another way, being poor is correlated with being a minority. But, becoming poor is not going to transform you into a minority. Thus, saying being a minority is a drawback of being poor is confusing cause and effect.
You're demanding an awfully high level of rigor from me for someone who has claimed an exclusively one-way cause/effect here without any kind of support or evidence.
In a system as integrated as the brain I think you'd be hard-pressed to prove that causality between two different traits can only go in one direction.
"Rationality" is overrated. Our lives are not pure economics, thank goodness. A purely rational person would likely not experience any joy or love. But if they were capable of doing so, they wouldn't opt to pursue those things because they would need to spend time doing research into each economic decision they made.
This is commonly known as the Straw Vulcan Fallacy. If a course of action leads to less total utility (including fun, happiness, etc.) then choosing that course of action is irrational. This obviously includes overanalysis.
For one data point, I stopped attending the NYC Less Wrong meetup (through which I happen to know the author) when I met my wife (through said meetup) and decided I'd had enough of the sex, drugs, and roc^H^H^Hstrategy games lifestyle.
I believe the author is making the mistake of equating the "rational" in "economics' rational actors" to be people who choose wisely. The type of wise choices that most of society would agree to lead to positive outcomes.
My understanding is that formal economics is using "rational" as in "rational choice theory"[1]. It's a specific term-of-art that's different from the everyday usage of "rational." It's not some positive measure to satisfy a global optimum. A "rational actor" is simply someone who reliably arrives at the same consistent choices given the knowledge and preferences he happens to have. If a consumer chooses CocaCola over water even though soda's sugar content causes obesity and teeth decay, the consumer is still classified as "rational" even though it looks like a suboptimal choice within the bigger picture of healthy living. Economics' rational choices satisfy a local optimum (consumer's imperfect preferences) and not a global one.
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_actor