Rationality is overvalued for day to day life. It works for certain things like science, where you are lead by the evidence and you constantly adjust some model of understanding of reality to more accurate standards, but it really don't seem to work well for everything in one's life. The reason is that we operate under deeply unscientific environments like partial-information, uncertainty and unpredictability. In these environments 'intuition' that might not be backed by rational thought is frequently more valuable. Technically you can try to be always rational in your life and play the 'risk minimization' game, but you will probably have a very mediocre life with limited success.
I think rationality is both overvalued and undervalued for day-to-day life. Being able to write out the Bayes formula or recite the list of logical fallacies on the spot isn't useful for much at all, and nobody has time to do proper Bayesian updates on anything. But I do think that internalizing rational thinking is useful for honing your intuition.
Our modern world is more complicated than what our brains were used to. It's no longer just social issues and immediate survival in small communities. We aren't used to dealing with things too small to see with your eye, and distances too large to walk. We aren't used to a world when most rewards cannot be attributed to a particular person's work. We aren't used to a world, where the main threat to your well-being isn't bandits or wild animals, but the constant barrage of salesmen and advertisers, utilizing hundreds of years of research to trick you into doing something stupid. We aren't used to a world, where almost all relationships are transient.
For the last point, consider this comment. I'm an Internet stranger. You've probably read my other comments in the past, you'll probably read some more in the future. But quite likely, you won't connect all of them together and attribute to a single person in your head; you'll see each as a piece written by a different Internet stranger, next to all other comments here. Every comment is thus a momentary interaction without prior context, and which doesn't give you any context for future interactions. The same is true for most news you read, and most social media comments you see. This is not exactly useful for our intuitions, which are optimized for processing actual relationships with people. So I think it may be helpful to study rational thought in order to calibrate your intuitions for these new times.
I don't think rationality per se is overvalued but our capacity to achieve it consciously may be overestimated while the capacity of our brains to unconsciously generate reasonably accurate approximations to rational decisions may be underestimated.
It's clear that there is far more information processing occurring in our brains than we are ever consciously aware of. We end up being conscious only of the final result and we tend to call this "intuition". It would be a mistake to dismiss using intuition as irrational just because we aren't conscious of the mental activities that generated it. Of course intuition isn't necessarily right, it needs to be consciously evaluated and we should also use our conscious minds to train our intuition to increase its accuracy.
We don't trust intuition for the same reason we don't trust the output of neural networks, because the process that generated it is inscrutable. It is ironic that neural networks, an essentially irrational tool, have become so popular in a culture obsessed with rationality.
Yes, that analogy occurred to me as well. But I don't think a blanket policy of distrust is optimal for either of those "technologies". Both are useful in the right circumstances and trustworthy alternatives are often not available.
If rationality is about accomplishing your goals, then it takes many forms, including intuition and habits. We are not trying to copy Spock. We are trying to make good sense of the world, and to make good decisions to achieve our goals.
The reason is that we operate under deeply unscientific environments like partial-information, uncertainty and unpredictability.
On the contrary, we developed tool of thoughts for working in environments of vast uncertainty. Consider the battlefield, for example, commanders must make decisions in the fog of war. They are certainly interested in trying to make the winning decisions to achieve their strategic or tactical goals.
Technically you can try to be always rational in your life and play the 'risk minimization' game, but you will probably have a very mediocre life with limited success.
If a mediocre life isn't what you're looking for, then it isn't very rational to make choices that result in a boring life.
Exactly. I think there's a difference between "epistemic rationality" (avoiding cognitive biases, attempting to achieve accurate, rigorous beliefs) and "instrumental rationality" (holding beliefs that lead to a result, even if they are not strictly speaking, correct -- this would be heuristics, bias toward action and exploration).
A focus on eliminating cognitive biases seems like it should lead us to the right solutions, but outside of certain academic fields, it often doesn't because the focus is more on not having incorrect thoughts instead of doing something, even if that something is wrong (at first). This means a mastery of all the material on "LessWrong" likely isn't going to make you better at innovating.
I don't think rationality is overvalued so much as "epistemic rationality" is overvalued.
This. Human success is much more attributable to our social instincts than it is to our capacity for reason. As an individual, your survival chances were much greater if you were part of a group than on your own, even if that group was highly irrational. For the most part, it is better to believe in imaginary gods as part of a group, than to believe in science and be on your own.
A quote from George Bernard Shaw (some would say insisting people use your middle name is unreasonable):
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
Irrationality is just an extreme form of being unreasonable, is it?
I guess the issue is that it's really difficult to draw the line between being unreasonable or even momentarily irrational and just being delusional. It's hard to admit to yourself that you're delusional, so that quote, which gives lots of people comfort and seems attractive in some ways, probably leads a lot of people down paths which have no possible return - or delusion, and it can destroy their lives and others (like this current crisis).
To get back to the article, yeah, some irrationality is probably necessary, because it takes irrational (unreasonable) people believing they can do things other people gave up on. But the important thing is probably being aware that you can be unreasonable and not letting that drive. There's a book, Becoming Steve Jobs, that is probably my favorite Jobs bio, because it's really about him learning to mitigate those flaws and becoming better in his second go around because of it. Steve was certainly delusional at times, and he shouldn't have been encouraged. You know, like denying the paternity of your child. Steve really personally hurt himself and others because of that kind of irrationality and it wasn't a positive in that context.
I think there are a lot of other people that do some really kind of delusional stuff, but we accept that because they are successful. You know, like Musk slurring an innocent person (or being really premature on every self-imposed deadline, or Holmes being a complete fraud. I've got no doubt that given enough time the latter probably would have figured out enough to pull half of a rabbit out of a hat to prove to people they had it all figured out, but it doesn't mean they weren't delusional, and it doesn't mean that that's healthy for them or us as societies to encourage lying to yourself and others, even if sometimes you get lucky.
Guess I'm just complaining. I see genuinely crazy stuff posted on HN and other places and to me irrationality isn't sexy, it's something that we need to do a better job of being honest about.
> I guess the issue is that it's really difficult to draw the line between being unreasonable or even momentarily irrational and just being delusional.
"The distance between insanity and genius is measured only by success." - Bruce Feirstein.
The only thing that "unreasonable" means is that when you tried to convince someone they should stop a certain course of action, you could not convince them and they did not refute you using logic. Mostly, the term is used as a polemic device to point out people whose axioms disagree with your own.
A lot of people simply have faith in their abilities, and a priori argumentation is not even a valid way of testing whether that faith is misguided. They are irrational because Empiricism is the opposite of Rationalism.
I've heard it rumored that one of Peter Thiel's private beliefs is that tech bubbles are necessary to fund non-trivial innovation in new industries (when expected value to investors is largely negative). This is a fascinating question either way.
I basically agree with him but I'd put it a bit differently: non-trivial innovation requires something able to burn money on it beyond the constraints of rational short to medium term profit motive.
That could be a bubble that throws off so much surplus money that some of it gets spent on things that end up "failing" but generating a return in the long term. It could also be large government R&D expenditures, and that's indeed what it was through the most innovative period of the 20th century. Lastly it could be a massive cash cow monopoly like Ma Bell and its Bell Labs, but that usually overlaps a bit with government since usually those kinds of monopolies exist because of some form of government action in the marketplace.
"I also like the strategy of temporarily suspending your disbelief and throwing yourself headlong into something for a while, allowing your emotional state to be as if you were 100% confident"
All work happens because of this essentially. A result of over-zealousness. Irrational thoughts that keep you going that extra mile at 2 am because you really believe in an idea (more than it ought to be believed many times). If people didn't feel irrationally strong about things, then nothing meaningful (sometimes low probability of success, but high expected value as the author mentions) would get done.
Indeed, irrationality fuels innovation! Look at the phenomenon called life.
Life evolves by doing random mutations, and throwing away everything that fails hard enough. No analysis is performed at all, and reams of completely pointless changes are tried.
This process has produced the most innovative and advanced chemical, mechanical, and information-processing devices known to date.
The problem of course is that the random-walk approach immensely wasteful. In our daily lives, we strive to somehow less waste, and tend to avoid being an unfortunate random mutation destined to fail. Here genetic evolution gives way to memetic evolution.
But the memetic evolution has many of the same properties: many "random" things are tried, and a number of most spectacular successes are results of lucky coincidences and following patently wrong initial ideas. Of course, most of such crazy ideas just fail, like in biological evolution.
I would compare innovation to stock market: while you can sort of predict some local movements with a chance better than rolling a dice, you still face a fundamentally random process, and it's rational to approach it like one. For one thing, it means to accept its unpredictability and the limited usefulness of any rational models. Following a hunch may be as good a strategy as careful analysis. Probably a mix of both would give the best results; it looks like what some famous innovators did.
Imagine this is something you know to be true about yourself, or is an attitude necessary/useful to fuel innovation: “What matters most to me is doing something daring that plausibly benefits others”.
I suspect many people have deep drives of this nature, featuring multiple values - in this case, being daring (a matter of character) and benefitting others (a matter of welfare).
It would be irrational in such case to pursue a project:
(1) that isn’t daring,
(2) without regard to whether it’s daring,
(3) with exclusive regard to whether it’s daring,
(4) that doesn’t plausibly benefit others,
(5) without regard to whether it plausibly benefits others, or
(6) with exclusive regard to whether it plausibly benefits others.
3 and 5, and 2 and 6, are corollaries.
Is irrationality necessary or helpful to fuel innovation? Of course depends on what we mean by "rationality" and what value(s) rationality is meant to serve. My answer would be "no".
How so? Clearly I view rationality as an adverbial matter. 1 through 6 remain true even if you add the word "rationally" to the what-matters-most statement. The list would get longer than six.
"You are under no obligation to remain the same person you were a year ago, a month ago, or even a day ago. You are here to create yourself, continuously" --Feynman
I believe that all projects I've been involved in would not have been green-lighted had the full extent of time, effort, and costs been known up front.
And I think that's part of the game. How much leg do you need to reveal to get the signature?
They've all been worthwhile projects in the end, however.
Just been thinking about the why of this. I think comes down to the details. It's those little details, the real weeds, where the complexity lies that makes system implementations difficult. And, generally, management doesn't want to know, and often don't have the technical knowledge to understand those very details, no matter how well or deeply they're explained.
The other side of that coin is the fact that on the technical knowledge side, if they know the details they have to consider, there's a kind of hubris that blinds them to the actual effort required to cater to those details. Not maliciously, but just by the fact it's considered a known rather than unknown it just may not get the pre-project attention necessary to determine time and effort required, and so it gets under-estimated.
I think what I'm trying to say is that the tension between good, fast, and cheap is the fundamental reason, in my experience. Management tends to want all three, and so that's what's catered to to get the thing kicked off.
I think startup founders are irrational, crazy optimistic, because the odds of making it compared to the effort put in are completely off. But they get to do what they enjoy, perhaps for a while. This is possibly even more true for the employees in such companies.
Rational people go into corporations, and get an MBA, which is at its core a course in (economic) rationality. And the result of this rationality is bottom line is everything, even if it means to suck the soul out of everything or even shrinking the company, or even destroying the Earth.
I admit, I despise (economic) rationality. Rationality is only ever reactive, it cannot give you a goal, or a vision. It cannot give society any values. The values or goals have to be irrational, by definition.
There are some nice examples from game theory underlying this, but probably the best is Varoufakis' story about students of economics and business he taught.
When Yanis came to his game theory class, he gave a proposal to students, instead of them having to work and getting a mark for the course based on their knowledge, the students would just secretly vote on what mark they should get and they would all get the minimal mark anybody voted for. But the proposal would only be implemented if all the students agree. Inevitably, there were some people against this. Later Yanis asked these students in private, why did they vote against the proposal, they could certainly save themselves a lot of effort! They always, and without any hint of irony, told him that they believe there would be some idiot who would irrationally put in a bad mark. The irony being, of course, it was them, who was irrational!
I think this story beautifully underlies the futility of the quest for ultimate rationality.
And I find it hilarious that while free market ideology touts rationality as the ultimate goal, the reality of capitalism is that it actually requires people to create startups and small businesses, which is inherently irrational behavior.
You equivocate, as we all do, on the meaning of "rational".
If "rational people go into corporations" then it can't be the case rationality serves other values (as you also note) because in that case we'd need to know the employee's values.
"But they get to do what they enjoy, perhaps for a while." <-- Then pursuing a startup is perfectly rational if you prize doing what you enjoy. I don't think you'd disagree, just noting that multiple meanings we ascribe to "rational" complicates discussions like this.
Yeah, but I think the point is, whatever meaning of "rational" do you pick, then you seemingly always encounter a similar problem, i.e. some clearly innovative behavior will not fit the bill of being rational.
Money and free market (and economic rationality) is our current best shot at defining rationality (what makes sense to do) through a mechanism (algorithm).
We can talk about utilons instead of money. But then any theory of decision making is worthless, because we cannot apply it to groups of people, they have different units! It pushes the problem one level away.
We all have powerful non-pecuniary motives: friendship, honor, adventure, etc., and we view ourselves as applying rationality to these pursuits. For example: "If I'm really a friend to Billy, then what I should do here is ...". On your view, that would not constitute rational deliberation.
In a way yes, I think we never apply the rationality to it rigorously, we for example might not question that relationship. So it is a matter of where do you draw the line, and that seems to be a personal choice, which defies an explanation. (And in fact people who try to be rational rigorously seem to behave like psychopaths.)
Don't take this thread the wrong way, I like rationality, and I like Julia's writing on the topic. But it seems to have a fundamental limit, so there is a bit of irrationality always required.
You misrepresent economic rationality, which is not defined based on some particular accounting standards. You also sound like you've read enough to know better.
It sounds to me like your problem is other people don't share your values, and you are calling this "rationality", whereas other people have the same issue, but often call it "irrationality". Yet you are saying at the same time that rationality is orthogonal to values. If so, then it doesn't oppose them. It all seems incoherent yet cliched to me.
Well, if what you're saying is that for a decision (say, to pursue a certain path which leads to innovation) you need to have both rationality and values, then you're already admitting that rationality is not enough, and therefore you need (at least a little bit of) irrationality.
But I think the paradox is deeper, and it ultimately means that we cannot really define "rationality", it is contradictory. And I think that's what economists are trying to do (and what they teach MBAs), to make a theory of how to make the best decision, regardless of values. The paradox seems to be that you cannot follow any theory like that blindly.
Perhaps it is cliched, I don't know. I wish Yanis would write a popular book about the paradox (he is certainly fond of it, see his book Economic Indeterminacy).
