rationality

Bayesian updating with irrational belief change

PNRJ cognitive science, core principles, critique of neoclassical economics, ethics, heuristics and biases, personal, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Jul 27 JDN 2460884

For the last few weeks I’ve been working at a golf course. (It’s a bit of an odd situation: I’m not actually employed by the golf course; I’m contracted by a nonprofit to be a “job coach” for a group of youths who are part of a work program that involves them working at the golf course.)

I hate golf. I have always hated golf. I find it boring and pointless—which, to be fair, is my reaction to most sports—and also an enormous waste of land and water. A golf course is also a great place for oligarchs to arrange collusion.

But I noticed something about being on the golf course every day, seeing people playing and working there: I feel like I hate it a bit less now.

This is almost certainly a mere-exposure effect: Simply being exposed to something many times makes it feel familiar, and that tends to make you like it more, or at least dislike it less. (There are some exceptions: repeated exposure to trauma can actually make you more sensitive to it, hating it even more.)

I kinda thought this would happen. I didn’t really want it to happen, but I thought it would.

This is very interesting from the perspective of Bayesian reasoning, because it is a theorem (though I cannot seem to find anyone naming the theorem; it’s like a folk theorem, I guess?) of Bayesian logic that the following is true:

The prior expectation of the posterior is the expectation of the prior.

The prior is what you believe before observing the evidence; the posterior is what you believe afterward. This theorem describes a relationship that holds between them.

This theorem means that, if I am being optimally rational, I should take into account all expected future evidence, not just evidence I have already seen. I should not expect to encounter evidence that will change my beliefs—if I did expect to see such evidence, I should change my beliefs right now!

This might be easier to grasp with an example.

Suppose I am trying to predict whether it will rain at 5:00 pm tomorrow, and I currently estimate that the probability of rain is 30%. This is my prior probability.

What will actually happen tomorrow is that it will rain or it won’t; so my posterior probability will either be 100% (if it rains) or 0% (if it doesn’t). But I had better assign a 30% chance to the event that will make me 100% certain it rains (namely, I see rain), and a 70% chance to the event that will make me 100% certain it doesn’t rain (namely, I see no rain); if I were to assign any other probabilities, then I must not really think the probability of rain at 5:00 pm tomorrow is 30%.

(The keen Bayesian will notice that the expected variance of my posterior need not be the variance of my prior: My initial variance is relatively high (it’s actually 0.3*0.7 = 0.21, because this is a Bernoulli distribution), because I don’t know whether it will rain or not; but my posterior variance will be 0, because I’ll know the answer once it rains or doesn’t.)

It’s a bit trickier to analyze, but this also works even if the evidence won’t make me certain. Suppose I am trying to determine the probability that some hypothesis is true. If I expect to see any evidence that might change my beliefs at all, then I should, on average, expect to see just as much evidence making me believe the hypothesis more as I see evidence that will make me believe the hypothesis less. If that is not what I expect, I should really change how much I believe the hypothesis right now!

So what does this mean for the golf example?

Was I wrong to hate golf quite so much before, because I knew that spending time on a golf course might make me hate it less?

I don’t think so.

See, the thing is: I know I’m not perfectly rational.

If I were indeed perfectly rational, then anything I expect to change my beliefs is a rational Bayesian update, and I should indeed factor it into my prior beliefs.

But if I know for a fact that I am not perfectly rational, that there are things which will change my beliefs in ways that make them deviate from rational Bayesian updating, then in fact I should not take those expected belief changes into account in my prior beliefs—since I expect to be wrong later, updating on that would just make me wrong now as well. I should only update on the expected belief changes that I believe will be rational.

This is something that a boundedly-rational person should do that neither a perfectly-rational nor perfectly-irrational person would ever do!

But maybe you don’t find the golf example convincing. Maybe you think I shouldn’t hate golf so much, and it’s not irrational for me to change my beliefs in that direction.


Very well. Let me give you a thought experiment which provides a very clear example of a time when you definitely would think your belief change was irrational.


To be clear, I’m not suggesting the two situations are in any way comparable; the golf thing is pretty minor, and for the thought experiment I’m intentionally choosing something quite extreme.

Here’s the thought experiment.

A mad scientist offers you a deal: Take this pill and you will receive $50 million. Naturally, you ask what the catch is. The catch, he explains, is that taking the pill will make you staunchly believe that the Holocaust didn’t happen. Take this pill, and you’ll be rich, but you’ll become a Holocaust denier. (I have no idea if making such a pill is even possible, but it’s a thought experiment, so bear with me. It’s certainly far less implausible than Swampman.)

I will assume that you are not, and do not want to become, a Holocaust denier. (If not, I really don’t know what else to say to you right now. It happened.) So if you take this pill, your beliefs will change in a clearly irrational way.

But I still think it’s probably justifiable to take the pill. This is absolutely life-changing money, for one thing, and being a random person who is a Holocaust denier isn’t that bad in the scheme of things. (Maybe it would be worse if you were in a position to have some kind of major impact on policy.) In fact, before taking the pill, you could write out a contract with a trusted friend that will force you to donate some of the $50 million to high-impact charities—and perhaps some of it to organizations that specifically fight Holocaust denial—thus ensuring that the net benefit to humanity is positive. Once you take the pill, you may be mad about the contract, but you’ll still have to follow it, and the net benefit to humanity will still be positive as reckoned by your prior, more correct, self.

It’s certainly not irrational to take the pill. There are perfectly-reasonable preferences you could have (indeed, likely dohave) that would say that getting $50 million is more important than having incorrect beliefs about a major historical event.

And if it’s rational to take the pill, and you intend to take the pill, then of course it’s rational to believe that in the future, you will have taken the pill and you will become a Holocaust denier.

But it would be absolutely irrational for you to become a Holocaust denier right now because of that. The pill isn’t going to provide evidence that the Holocaust didn’t happen (for no such evidence exists); it’s just going to alter your brain chemistry in such a way as to make you believe that the Holocaust didn’t happen.

So here we have a clear example where you expect to be more wrong in the future.

Of course, if this really only happens in weird thought experiments about mad scientists, then it doesn’t really matter very much. But I contend it happens in reality all the time:

  • You know that by hanging around people with an extremist ideology, you’re likely to adopt some of that ideology, even if you really didn’t want to.
  • You know that if you experience a traumatic event, it is likely to make you anxious and fearful in the future, even when you have little reason to be.
  • You know that if you have a mental illness, you’re likely to form harmful, irrational beliefs about yourself and others whenever you have an episode of that mental illness.

Now, all of these belief changes are things you would likely try to guard against: If you are a researcher studying extremists, you might make a point of taking frequent vacations to talk with regular people and help yourself re-calibrate your beliefs back to normal. Nobody wants to experience trauma, and if you do, you’ll likely seek out therapy or other support to help heal yourself from that trauma. And one of the most important things they teach you in cognitive-behavioral therapy is how to challenge and modify harmful, irrational beliefs when they are triggered by your mental illness.

But these guarding actions only make sense precisely because the anticipated belief change is irrational. If you anticipate a rational change in your beliefs, you shouldn’t try to guard against it; you should factor it into what you already believe.

This also gives me a little more sympathy for Evangelical Christians who try to keep their children from being exposed to secular viewpoints. I think we both agree that having more contact with atheists will make their children more likely to become atheists—but we view this expected outcome differently.

From my perspective, this is a rational change, and it’s a good thing, and I wish they’d factor it into their current beliefs already. (Like hey, maybe if talking to a bunch of smart people and reading a bunch of books on science and philosophy makes you think there’s no God… that might be because… there’s no God?)

But I think, from their perspective, this is an irrational change, it’s a bad thing, the children have been “tempted by Satan” or something, and thus it is their duty to protect their children from this harmful change.

Of course, I am not a subjectivist. I believe there’s a right answer here, and in this case I’m pretty sure it’s mine. (Wouldn’t I always say that? No, not necessarily; there are lots of matters for which I believe that there are experts who know better than I do—that’s what experts are for, really—and thus if I find myself disagreeing with those experts, I try to educate myself more and update my beliefs toward theirs, rather than just assuming they’re wrong. I will admit, however, that a lot of people don’t seem to do this!)

But this does change how I might tend to approach the situation of exposing their children to secular viewpoints. I now understand better why they would see that exposure as a harmful thing, and thus be resistant to actions that otherwise seem obviously beneficial, like teaching kids science and encouraging them to read books. In order to get them to stop “protecting” their kids from the free exchange of ideas, I might first need to persuade them that introducing some doubt into their children’s minds about God isn’t such a terrible thing. That sounds really hard, but it at least clearly explains why they are willing to fight so hard against things that, from my perspective, seem good. (I could also try to convince them that exposure to secular viewpoints won’t make their kids doubt God, but the thing is… that isn’t true. I’d be lying.)

That is, Evangelical Christians are not simply incomprehensibly evil authoritarians who hate truth and knowledge; they quite reasonably want to protect their children from things that will harm them, and they firmly believe that being taught about evolution and the Big Bang will make their children more likely to suffer great harm—indeed, the greatest harm imaginable, the horror of an eternity in Hell. Convincing them that this is not the case—indeed, ideally, that there is no such place as Hell—sounds like a very tall order; but I can at least more keenly grasp the equilibrium they’ve found themselves in, where they believe that anything that challenges their current beliefs poses a literally existential threat. (Honestly, as a memetic adaptation, this is brilliant. Like a turtle, the meme has grown itself a nigh-impenetrable shell. No wonder it has managed to spread throughout the world.)

Expressivism

PNRJ cognitive science, ethics, Logic of Kindness , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Sep 29 JDN 2460583

The theory of expressivism, often posited as an alternative to moral realism, is based on the observation by Hume that factual knowledge is not intrinsically motivating. I can believe that a food is nutritious and that I need nutrition to survive, but without some emotional experience to motivate me—hunger—I will nonetheless remain unmotivated to eat the nutritious food. Because morality is meant to be intrinsically motivating, says Hume, it must not involve statements of fact.

Yet really all Hume has shown is that if indeed facts are not intrinsically motivating, and moral statements are intrinsically motivating, then moral statements are not merely statements of fact. But even statements of fact are rarely merely statements of fact! If I were to walk down the street stating facts at random (lemurs have rings on their tails, the Sun is over one million kilometers in diameter, bicycles have two wheels, people sit on chairs, time dilates as you approach the speed of light, LGBT people suffer the highest per capita rate of hate crimes in the US, Coca-Cola in the United States contains high fructose corn syrup, humans and chimpanzees share 95-98% of our DNA), I would be seen as a very odd sort of person indeed. Even when I state a fact, I do so out of some motivation, frequently an emotional motivation. I’m often trying to explain, or to convince. Sometimes I am angry, and I want to express my anger and frustration. Other times I am sad and seeking consolation. I have many emotions, and I often use words to express them. Nonetheless, in the process I will make many statements of fact that are either true or false: “Humans and chimpanzees share 95-98% of our DNA” I might use to argue in favor of common descent; “Time dilates as you approach the speed of light” I have used in to explain relativity theory; “LGBT people suffer the highest per capita rate of hate crimes in the US” I might use to argue in favor of some sort of gay rights policy. When I say “genocide is wrong!” I probably have some sort of emotional motivation for this—likely my outrage at an ongoing genocide. Nonetheless I’m pretty sure it’s true that genocide is wrong.

Expressivism says that moral statements don’t express propositions at all, they express attitudes, relations to ideas that are not of the same kind as belief and disbelief, truth and falsehood. Much as “Hello!” or “Darn it!” don’t really state facts or inquire about facts, expressivists like Simon Blackburn and Allan Gibbard would say that “Genocide is wrong” doesn’t say anything about the facts of genocide, it merely expresses my attitude of moral disapproval toward genocide.

Yet expressivists can’t abandon all normativity—otherwise even the claim “expressivism is true” has no moral force. Allan Gibbard, like most expressivists, supports epistemic normativity—the principle that we ought to believe what is true. But this seems to me already a moral principle, and one that is not merely an attitude that some people happen to have, but in fact a fundamental axiom that ought to apply to any rational beings in any possible universe. Even more, Gibbard agrees that some moral attitudes are more warranted than others, that “genocide is wrong” is more legitimate than “genocide is good”. But once we agree that there are objective normative truths and moral attitudes can be more or less justified, how is this any different from moral realism?

Indeed, in terms of cognitive science I’m not sure beliefs and emotions are so easily separable in the first place. In some sense I think statements of fact can be intrinsically motivating—or perhaps it is better to put it this way: If your brain is working properly, certain beliefs and emotions will necessarily coincide. If you believe that you are about to be attacked by a tiger, and you don’t experience the emotion of fear, something is wrong; if you believe that you are about to die of starvation, and you don’t experience the emotion of hunger, something is wrong. Conversely, if you believe that you are safe from all danger, and yet you experience fear, something is wrong; if you believe that you have eaten plenty of food, yet you still experience hunger, something is wrong. When your beliefs and emotions don’t align, either your beliefs or your emotions are defective. I would say that the same is true of moral beliefs. If you believe that genocide is wrong but you are not motivated to resist genocide, something is wrong; if you believe that feeding your children is obligatory but you are not motivated to feed your children, something is wrong.

It may well be that without emotion, facts would never motivate us; but emotions can warranted by facts. That is how we distinguish depression from sadness, mania from joy, phobia from fear. Indeed I am dubious of the entire philosophical project of noncognitivism, of which expressivism is the moral form. Noncognitivism is the idea that a given domain of mental processing is not cognitive—not based on thinking, reason, or belief. There is often a sense that noncognitive mental processing is “lower” than cognition, usually based on the idea that it is more phylogenetically conserved—that we think as men but feel as rats.

Yet in fact this is not how human emotions work at all. Poetry—mere words—often evokes the strongest of emotions. A text message of “I love you” or “I think we should see other people” can change the course of our lives. An ambulance in the driveway will pale the face of any parent. In 2001 the video footage of airplanes colliding with skyscrapers gave all of America nightmares for weeks. Yet stop and think about what text messages, ambulances, video footage, airplanes, and skyscrapers are—they are technologies so advanced, so irreducibly cognitive, that even the world’s technological superpower had none of them 200 years ago. (We didn’t have text messages forty years ago!) Even something as apparently dry as numbers can have profound emotional effects: In the statements “Your blood sugar is X mg/dL” to a diabetic, “You have Y years to live” to a cancer patient, or “Z people died” in a news report, the emotional effects are almost wholly dependent upon the value of the numbers X, Y, and Z—values of X = 100, Y = 50 and Z = 0 would be no cause for alarm (or perhaps even cause for celebration!), while values of X = 400, Y = 2, and Z = 10,000 would trigger immediate shock, terror and despair. The entire discipline of cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy depends upon the fact that talking to people about their thoughts and beliefs can have profound effects upon their emotions and actions—and in empirical studies, cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy is verified to work in a variety of circumstances and is more effective than medication for virtually every mental disorder. We do not think as men but feel as rats; we thinkandfeel as human beings.

Because they are evolved instincts, we have limited control over them, and other animals have them, we are often inclined to suppose that emotions are simple, stupid, irrational—but on the contrary they are mind-bogglingly complex, brilliantly intelligent, and the essence of what it means to be a rational being. People who don’t have emotions aren’t rational—they are inert. In psychopathology a loss of capacity for emotion is known as flat affect, and it is often debilitating; it is often found in schizophrenia and autism, and in its most extreme forms it causes catatonia—that is, a total lack of body motion. From Plato to Star Trek, Western culture has taught us to think that a loss of emotion would improve our rationality; but on the contrary, a loss of all emotion would render us completely vegetative. Lieutenant Commander Data without his emotion chip should stand in one place and do nothing—for this is what people without emotion actually do.

Indeed, attractive and aversive experiences—that is, emotions—are the core of goal-seeking behavior, without which rationality is impossible. Apparently simple experiences like pleasure and pain (let alone obviously complicated ones like jealousy and patriotism) are so complex that the most advanced robots in the world cannot even get close to simulating them. Injure a rat, and it will withdraw and cry out in pain; damage a robot (at least any less than a state-of-the-art research robot), and it will not react at all, continuing ineffectually through the same motions it was attempting a moment ago. This shows that rats are smarter than robots—an organism that continues on its way regardless of the stimulus is more like a plant than an animal.

Our emotions do sometimes fail us. They hurt us, they put us at risk, they make us behave in ways that are harmful or irrational. Yet to declare on these grounds that emotions are the enemy of reason would be like declaring that we should all poke out our eyes because sometimes we are fooled by optical illusions. It would be like saying that a shirt with one loose thread is unwearable, that a mathematician who once omits a negative sign should never again be trusted. This is not rationality but perfectionism. Like human eyes, human emotions are rational the vast majority of the time, and when they aren’t, this is cause for concern. Truly irrational emotions include mania, depression, phobia, and paranoia—and it’s no accident that we respond to these emotions with psychotherapy and medication.

Expressivism is legitimate precisely because it is not a challenger to moral realism. Personally, I think that expressivism is wrong because moral claims express facts as much as they express attitudes; but given our present state of knowledge about cognitive science, that is the sort of question upon which reasonable people can disagree. Moreover, the close ties between emotion and reason may ultimately entail that we are wrong to make the distinction in the first place. It is entirely reasonable, at our present state of knowledge, to think that moral judgments are primarily emotional rather than propositional. What isnot reasonable, however, is the claim that moral statements cannot be objectively justified—the evidence against this claim is simply too compelling to ignore. If moral claims are emotions, they are emotions that can be objectively justified.

Against Self-Delusion

PNRJ cognitive science, core principles, personal , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Mar 10 JDN 2460381

Is there a healthy amount of self-delusion? Would we be better off convincing ourselves that the world is better than it really is, in order to be happy?


A lot of people seem to think so.

I most recently encountered this attitude in Kathryn Schulz’s book Being Wrong (I liked the TED talk much better, in part because it didn’t have this), but there are plenty of other examples.

You’ll even find advocates for this attitude in the scientific literature, particularly when talking about the Lake Wobegon Effect, optimism bias, and depressive realism.

Fortunately, the psychology community seems to be turning away from this, perhaps because of mounting empirical evidence that “depressive realism” isn’t a robust effect. When I searched today, it was easier to find pop psych articles against self-delusion than in favor of it. (I strongly suspect that would not have been true about 10 years ago.)

I have come up with a very simple, powerful argument against self-delusion:

If you’re allowed to delude yourself, why not just believe everything is perfect?

If you can paint your targets after shooting, why not always paint a bullseye?

The notion seems to be that deluding yourself will help you achieve your goals. But if you’re going to delude yourself, why bother achieving goals? You could just pretend to achieve goals. You could just convince yourself that you have achieved goals. Wouldn’t that be so much easier?

The idea seems to be, for instance, to get an aspiring writer to actually finish the novel and submit it to the publisher. But why shouldn’t she simply imagine she has already done so? Why not simply believe she’s already a bestselling author?

If there’s something wrong with deluding yourself into thinking you’re a bestselling author, why isn’t that exact same thing wrong with deluding yourself into thinking you’re a better writer than you are?

Once you have opened this Pandora’s Box of lies, it’s not clear how you can ever close it again. Why shouldn’t you just stop working, stop eating, stop doing anything at all, but convince yourself that your life is wonderful and die in a state of bliss?

Granted, this is not generally what people who favor (so-called) “healthy self-delusion” advocate. But it’s difficult to see any principled reason why they should reject it. Once you give up on tying your beliefs to reality, it’s difficult to see why you shouldn’t just say that anything goes.

Why are some deviations from reality okay, but not others? Is it because they are small? Small changes in belief can still have big consequences: Believe a car is ten meters behind where it really is, and it may just run you over.

The general approach of “healthy self-delusion” seems to be that it’s all right to believe that you are smarter, prettier, healthier, wiser, and more competent than you actually are, because that will make you more confident and therefore more successful.

Well, first of all, it’s worth pointing out that some people obviously go way too far in that direction and become narcissists. But okay, let’s say we find a way to avoid that. (It’s unclear exactly how, since, again, by construction, we aren’t tying ourselves to reality.)

In practice, the people who most often get this sort of advice are people who currently lack self-confidence, who doubt their own abilities—people who suffer from Impostor Syndrome. And for people like that (and I count myself among them), a certain amount of greater self-confidence would surely be a good thing.

The idea seems to be that deluding yourself to increase your confidence will get you to face challenges and take risks you otherwise wouldn’t have, and that this will yield good outcomes.

But there’s a glaring hole in this argument:

If you have to delude yourself in order to take a risk, you shouldn’t take that risk.

Risk-taking is not an unalloyed good. Russian Roulette is certainly risky, but it’s not a good career path.

There are in fact a lot of risks you simply shouldn’t take, because they aren’t worth it.

The right risks to take are the ones for which the expected benefit outweighs the expected cost: The one with the highest expected utility. (That sounds simple, and in principle it is; but in practice, it can be extraordinarily difficult to determine.)

In other words, the right risks to take are the ones that are rational. The ones that a correct view of the world will instruct you to take.

That aspiring novelist, then, should write the book and submit it to publishers—if she’s actually any good at writing. If she’s actually terrible, then never submitting the book is the correct decision; she should spend more time honing her craft before she tries to finish it—or maybe even give up on it and do something else with her life.

What she needs, therefore, is not a confident assessment of her abilities, but an accurate one. She needs to believe that she is competent if and only if she actually is competent.

But I can also see how self-delusion can seem like good advice—and even work for some people.

If you start from an excessively negative view of yourself or the world, then giving yourself a more positive view will likely cause you to accomplish more things. If you’re constantly telling yourself that you are worthless and hopeless, then convincing yourself that you’re better than you thought is absolutely what you need to do. (Because it’s true.)

I can even see how convincing yourself that you are the best is useful—even though, by construction, most people aren’t. When you live in a hyper-competitive society like ours, where we are constantly told that winning is everything, losers are worthless, and second place is as bad as losing, it may help you get by to tell yourself that you really are the best, that you really can win. (Even weirder: “Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing.” Uh, that’s just… obviously false? Like, what is this even intended to mean that “Winning is everything” didn’t already say better?)

But that’s clearly not the right answer. You’re solving one problem by adding another. You shouldn’t believe you are the best; you should recognize that you don’t have to be. Second place is not as bad as losing—and neither is fifth, or tenth, or fiftieth place. The 100th-most successful author in the world still makes millions writing. The 1,000th-best musician does regular concert tours. The 10,000th-best accountant has a steady job. Even the 100,000th-best trucker can make a decent living. (Well, at least until the robots replace him.)

Honestly, it’d be great if our whole society would please get this memo. It’s no problem that “only a minority of schools play sport to a high level”—indeed, that’s literally inevitable. It’s also not clear that “60% of students read below grade level” is a problem, when “grade level” seems to be largely defined by averages. (Literacy is great and all, but what’s your objective standard for “what a sixth grader should be able to read”?)

We can’t all be the best. We can’t all even be above-average.

That’s okay. Below-average does not mean inadequate.

That’s the message we need to be sending:

You don’t have to be the best in order to succeed.

You don’t have to be perfect in order to be good enough.

You don’t even have to be above-average.

This doesn’t require believing anything that isn’t true. It doesn’t require overestimating your abilities or your chances. In fact, it asks you to believe something that is more true than “You have to be the best” or “Winning is everything”.

If what you want to do is actually worth doing, an accurate assessment will tell you that. And if an accurate assessment tells you not to do it, then you shouldn’t do it. So you have no reason at all to strive for anything other than accurate beliefs.

With this in mind, the fact that the empirical evidence for “depressive realism” is shockingly weak is not only unsurprising; it’s almost irrelevant. You can’t have evidence against being rational. If deluded people succeed more, that means something is very, very wrong; and the solution is clearly not to make more people deluded.

Of course, it’s worth pointing out that the evidence is shockingly weak: Depressed people show different biases, not less bias. And in fact they seem to be more overconfident in the following sense: They are more certain that what they predict will happen is what will actually happen.

So while most people think they will succeed when they will probably fail, depressed people are certain they will fail when in fact they could succeed. Both beliefs are inaccurate, but the depressed one is in an important sense more inaccurate: It tells you to give up, which is the wrong thing to do.

“Healthy self-delusion” ultimately amounts to trying to get you to do the right thing for the wrong reasons. But why? Do the right thing for the right reasons! If it’s really the right thing, it should have the right reasons!

Love is more than chemicals

PNRJ cognitive science, core principles, current events, ethics, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Feb 18 JDN 2460360

One of the biggest problems with the rationalist community is an inability to express sincerity and reverence.

I get it: Religion is the world’s greatest source of sincerity and reverence, and religion is the most widespread and culturally important source of irrationality. So we declare ourselves enemies of religion, and also end up being enemies of sincerity and reverence.

But in doing so, we lose something very important. We cut ourselves off from some of the greatest sources of meaning and joy in human life.

In fact, we may even be undermining our own goals: If we don’t offer people secular, rationalist forms of reverence, they may find they need to turn back to religion in order to fill that niche.

One of the most pernicious forms of this anti-sincerity, anti-reverence attitude (I can’t just say ‘insincere’ or ‘irreverent’, as those have different meanings) is surely this one:

Love is just a chemical reaction.

(I thought it seemed particularly apt to focus on this one during the week of Valentine’s Day.)

On the most casual of searches I could find at least half a dozen pop-sci articles and a YouTube video propounding this notion (though I could also find a few articles trying to debunk the notion as well).

People who say this sort of thing seem to think that they are being wise and worldly while the rest of us are just being childish and naive. They think we are seeing something that isn’t there. In fact, they are being jaded and cynical. They are failing to see something that is there.

(Perhaps the most extreme form of this was from Rick & Morty; and while Rick as a character is clearly intended to be jaded and cynical, far too many people also see him as a role model.)

Part of the problem may also be a failure to truly internalize the Basic Fact of Cognitive Science:

You are your brain.

No, your consciousness is not an illusion. It’s not an “epiphenomenon” (whatever that is—I’ve never encountered one in real life). Your mind is not fake or imaginary. Your mind actually exists—and it is a product of your brain. Both brain and mind exist, and are in fact the same.

It’s so hard for people to understand this that some become dualists, denying the unity of the brain and the mind. That, at least, I can sympathize with, even though we have compelling evidence that it is wrong. But there’s another tack people sometimes take, eliminative materialism, where they try to deny that the mind exists at all. And that I truly do not understand. How can you think that nobody can think? Yet intelligent, respected philosophers have claimed to believe such things.

Love is one of the most important parts of our lives.

This may be more true of humans than of literally any other entity in the known universe.

The only serious competition comes from other mammals: They are really the only other beings we know of that are capable of love. And even they don’t seem to be as good at it as we are; they can love only those closest to them, while we can love entire nations and even abstract concepts.

And once you go beyond that, even to reptiles—let alone fish, or amphibians, or insects, or molluscs—it’s not clear that other animals are really capable of love at all. They seem to be capable of some forms of thought and feeling: They get hungry, or angry, or horny. But do they really love?

And even the barest emotional capacities of an insect are still categorically beyond what most of the universe is capable of feeling, which is to say: Nothing. The vast, vast majority of the universe feels neither love nor hate, neither joy nor pain.

Yet humans can love, and do love, and it is a large part of what gives our lives meaning.

I don’t just mean romantic love here, though I do think it’s worth noting that people who dismiss the reality of romantic love somehow seem reluctant to do the same for the love parents have for their children—even though it’s made of pretty much the same brain chemicals. Perhaps there is a limit to their cynicism.

Yes, love is made of chemicals—because everything is made of chemicals. We live in a material, chemical universe. Saying that love is made of chemicals is an almost completely vacuous statement; it’s basically tantamount to saying that love exists.

In other contexts, you already understand this.

“That’s not a bridge, it’s just a bunch of iron atoms!” rightfully strikes you as an absurd statement to make. Yes, the bridge is made of steel, and steel is mostly iron, and everything is made of atoms… but clearly there’s a difference between a random pile of iron and a bridge.

“That’s not a computer, it’s just a bunch of silicon atoms!” similarly registers as nonsense: Yes, it is indeed mostly made of silicon, but beach sand and quartz crystals are not computers.

It is in this same sense that joy is made of dopamine and love is made of chemical reactions. Yes, those are in fact the constituent parts—but things are more than just their parts.

I think that on some level, even most rationalists recognize that love is more than some arbitrary chemical reaction. I think “love is just chemicals” is mainly something people turn to for a couple of reasons: Sometimes, they are so insistent on rejecting everything that even resembles religious belief that they end up rejecting all meaning and value in human life. Other times, they have been so heartbroken, that they try to convince themselves love isn’t real—to dull the pain. (But of course if it weren’t, there would be no pain to dull.)

But love is no more (or less) a chemical reaction than any other human experience: The very belief “love is just a chemical reaction” is, itself, made of chemical reactions.

Everything we do is made of chemical reactions, because we are made of chemical reactions.

Part of the problem here—and with the Basic Fact of Cognitive Science in general—is that we really have no idea how this works. For most of what we deal with in daily life, and even an impressive swath of the overall cosmos, we have a fairly good understanding of how things work. We know how cars drive, how wind blows, why rain falls; we even know how cats purr and why birds sing. But when it comes to understanding how the physical matter of the brain generates the subjective experiences of thought, feeling, and belief—of which love is made—we lack even the most basic understanding. The correlation between the two is far too strong to deny; but as far as causal mechanisms, we know absolutely nothing. (Indeed, worse than that: We can scarcely imagine a causal mechanism that would make any sense. We not only don’t know the answer; we don’t know what an answer would look like.)

So, no, I can’t tell you how we get from oxytocin and dopamine to love. I don’t know how that makes any sense. No one does. But we do know it’s true.

And just like everything else, love is more than the chemicals it’s made of.

Administering medicine to the dead

PNRJ core principles, ethics, personal, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , ,

Jan 28 JDN 2460339

Here are a couple of pithy quotes that go around rationalist circles from time to time:

“To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason, […] is like administering medicine to the dead[…].”

― Thomas Paine, The American Crisis

“It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.”

― Jonathan Swift

You usually hear that abridged version, but Thomas Paine’s full quotation is actually rather interesting:

“To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason, and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in contempt, is like administering medicine to the dead, or endeavoring to convert an atheist by scripture.”

― Thomas Paine, The American Crisis

It is indeed quite ineffective to convert an atheist by scripture (though that doesn’t seem to stop them from trying). Yet this quotation seems to claim that the opposite should be equally ineffective: It should be impossible to convert a theist by reason.

Well, then, how else are we supposed to do it!?

Indeed, how did we become atheists in the first place!?

You were born an atheist? No, you were born having absolutely no opinion about God whatsoever. (You were born not realizing that objects don’t fade from existence when you stop seeing them! In a sense, we were all born believing ourselves to be God.)

Maybe you were raised by atheists, and religion never tempted you at all. Lucky you. I guess you didn’t have to be reasoned into atheism.

Well, most of us weren’t. Most of us were raised into religion, and told that it held all the most important truths of morality and the universe, and that believing anything else was horrible and evil and would result in us being punished eternally.

And yet, somehow, somewhere along the way, we realized that wasn’t true. And we were able to realize that because people made rational arguments.

Maybe we heard those arguments in person. Maybe we read them online. Maybe we read them in books that were written by people who died long before we were born. But somehow, somewhere people actually presented the evidence for atheism, and convinced us.

That is, they reasoned us out of something that we were not reasoned into.

I know it can happen. I have seen it happen. It has happened to me.

And it was one of the most important events in my entire life. More than almost anything else, it made me who I am today.

I’m scared that if you keep saying it’s impossible, people will stop trying to do it—and then it will stop happening to people like me.

So please, please stop telling people it’s impossible!

Quotes like these encourage you to simply write off entire swaths of humanity—most of humanity, in fact—judging them as worthless, insane, impossible to reach. When you should be reaching out and trying to convince people of the truth, quotes like these instead tell you to give up and consider anyone who doesn’t already agree with you as your enemy.

Indeed, it seems to me that the only logical conclusion of quotes like these is violence. If it’s impossible to reason with people who oppose us, then what choice do we have, but to fight them?

Violence is a weapon anyone can use.

Reason is the one weapon in the universe that works better when you’re right.

Reason is the sword that only the righteous can wield. Reason is the shield that only protects the truth. Reason is the only way we can ever be sure that the right people win—instead of just whoever happens to be strongest.

Yes, it’s true: reason isn’t always effective, and probably isn’t as effective as it should be. Convincing people to change their minds through rational argument is difficult and frustrating and often painful for both you and them—but it absolutely does happen, and our civilization would have long ago collapsed if it didn’t.

Even people who claim to have renounced all reason really haven’t: they still know 2+2=4 and they still look both ways when they cross the street. Whatever they’ve renounced, it isn’t reason; and maybe, with enough effort, we can help them see that—by reason, of course.

In fact, maybe even literally administering medicine to the dead isn’t such a terrible idea.

There are degrees of death, after all: Someone whose heart has stopped is in a different state than someone whose cerebral activity has ceased, and both of them clearly stand a better chance of being resuscitated than someone who has been vaporized by an explosion.

As our technology improves, more and more states that were previously considered irretrievably dead will instead be considered severe states of illness or injury from which it is possible to recover. We can now restart many stopped hearts; we are working on restarting stopped brains. (Of course we’ll probably never be able to restore someone who got vaporized—unless we figure out how to make backup copies of people?)

Most of the people who now live in the world’s hundreds of thousands of ICU beds would have been considered dead even just 100 years ago. But many of them will recover, because we didn’t give up on them.

So don’t give up on people with crazy beliefs either.

They may seem like they are too far gone, like nothing in the world could ever bring them back to the light of reason. But you don’t actually know that for sure, and the only way to find out is to try.

Of course, you won’t convince everyone of everything immediately. No matter how good your evidence is, that’s just not how this works. But you probably will convince someone of something eventually, and that is still well worthwhile.

You may not even see the effects yourself—people are often loathe to admit when they’ve been persuaded. But others will see them. And you will see the effects of other people’s persuasion.

And in the end, reason is really all we have. It’s the only way to know that what we’re trying to make people believe is the truth.

Don’t give up on reason.

And don’t give up on other people, whatever they might believe.

Good enough is perfect, perfect is bad

PNRJ book reviews, cognitive science, core principles, critique of neoclassical economics, personal , , , , , , , , , ,

Jan 8 JDN 2459953

Not too long ago, I read the book How to Keep House While Drowning by KC Davis, which I highly recommend. It offers a great deal of useful and practical advice, especially for someone neurodivergent and depressed living through an interminable pandemic (which I am, but honestly, odds are, you may be too). And to say it is a quick and easy read is actually an unfair understatement; it is explicitly designed to be readable in short bursts by people with ADHD, and it has a level of accessibility that most other books don’t even aspire to and I honestly hadn’t realized was possible. (The extreme contrast between this and academic papers is particularly apparent to me.)

One piece of advice that really stuck with me was this: Good enough is perfect.

At first, it sounded like nonsense; no, perfect is perfect, good enough is just good enough. But in fact there is a deep sense in which it is absolutely true.

Indeed, let me make it a bit stronger: Good enough is perfect; perfect is bad.

I doubt Davis thought of it in these terms, but this is a concise, elegant statement of the principles of bounded rationality. Sometimes it can be optimal not to optimize.

Suppose that you are trying to optimize something, but you have limited computational resources in which to do so. This is actually not a lot for you to suppose—it’s literally true of basically everyone basically every moment of every day.

But let’s make it a bit more concrete, and say that you need to find the solution to the following math problem: “What is the product of 2419 times 1137?” (Pretend you don’t have a calculator, as it would trivialize the exercise. I thought about using a problem you couldn’t do with a standard calculator, but I realized that would also make it much weirder and more obscure for my readers.)

Now, suppose that there are some quick, simple ways to get reasonably close to the correct answer, and some slow, difficult ways to actually get the answer precisely.

In this particular problem, the former is to approximate: What’s 2500 times 1000? 2,500,000. So it’s probably about 2,500,000.

Or we could approximate a bit more closely: Say 2400 times 1100, that’s about 100 times 100 times 24 times 11, which is 2 times 12 times 11 (times 10,000), which is 2 times (110 plus 22), which is 2 times 132 (times 10,000), which is 2,640,000.

Or, we could actually go through all the steps to do the full multiplication (remember I’m assuming you have no calculator), multiply, carry the 1s, add all four sums, re-check everything and probably fix it because you messed up somewhere; and then eventually you will get: 2,750,403.

So, our really fast method was only off by about 10%. Our moderately-fast method was only off by 4%. And both of them were a lot faster than getting the exact answer by hand.

Which of these methods you’d actually want to use depends on the context and the tools at hand. If you had a calculator, sure, get the exact answer. Even if you didn’t, but you were balancing the budget for a corporation, I’m pretty sure they’d care about that extra $110,403. (Then again, they might not care about the $403 or at least the $3.) But just as an intellectual exercise, you really didn’t need to do anything; the optimal choice may have been to take my word for it. Or, if you were at all curious, you might be better off choosing the quick approximation rather than the precise answer. Since nothing of any real significance hinged on getting that answer, it may be simply a waste of your time to bother finding it.

This is of course a contrived example. But it’s not so far from many choices we make in real life.

Yes, if you are making a big choice—which job to take, what city to move to, whether to get married, which car or house to buy—you should get a precise answer. In fact, I make spreadsheets with formal utility calculations whenever I make a big choice, and I haven’t regretted it yet. (Did I really make a spreadsheet for getting married? You’re damn right I did; there were a lot of big financial decisions to make there—taxes, insurance, the wedding itself! I didn’t decide whom to marry that way, of course; but we always had the option of staying unmarried.)

But most of the choices we make from day to day are small choices: What should I have for lunch today? Should I vacuum the carpet now? What time should I go to bed? In the aggregate they may all add up to important things—but each one of them really won’t matter that much. If you were to construct a formal model to optimize your decision of everything to do each day, you’d spend your whole day doing nothing but constructing formal models. Perfect is bad.

In fact, even for big decisions, you can’t really get a perfect answer. There are just too many unknowns. Sometimes you can spend more effort gathering additional information—but that’s costly too, and sometimes the information you would most want simply isn’t available. (You can look up the weather in a city, visit it, ask people about it—but you can’t really know what it’s like to live there until you do.) Even those spreadsheet models I use to make big decisions contain error bars and robustness checks, and if, even after investing a lot of effort trying to get precise results, I still find two or more choices just can’t be clearly distinguished to within a good margin of error, I go with my gut. And that seems to have been the best choice for me to make. Good enough is perfect.

I think that being gifted as a child trained me to be dangerously perfectionist as an adult. (Many of you may find this familiar.) When it came to solving math problems, or answering quizzes, perfection really was an attainable goal a lot of the time.

As I got older and progressed further in my education, maybe getting every answer right was no longer feasible; but I still could get the best possible grade, and did, in most of my undergraduate classes and all of my graduate classes. To be clear, I’m not trying to brag here; if anything, I’m a little embarrassed. What it mainly shows is that I had learned the wrong priorities. In fact, one of the main reasons why I didn’t get a 4.0 average in undergrad is that I spent a lot more time back then writing novels and nonfiction books, which to this day I still consider my most important accomplishments and grieve that I’ve not (yet?) been able to get them commercially published. I did my best work when I wasn’t trying to be perfect. Good enough is perfect; perfect is bad.

Now here I am on the other side of the academic system, trying to carve out a career, and suddenly, there is no perfection. When my exam is being graded by someone else, there is a way to get the most points. When I’m the one grading the exams, there is no “correct answer” anymore. There is no one scoring me to see if I did the grading the “right way”—and so, no way to be sure I did it right.

Actually, here at Edinburgh, there are other instructors who moderate grades and often require me to revise them, which feels a bit like “getting it wrong”; but it’s really more like we had different ideas of what the grade curve should look like (not to mention US versus UK grading norms). There is no longer an objectively correct answer the way there is for, say, the derivative of x^3, the capital of France, or the definition of comparative advantage. (Or, one question I got wrong on an undergrad exam because I had zoned out of that lecture to write a book on my laptop: Whether cocaine is a dopamine reuptake inhibitor. It is. And the fact that I still remember that because I got it wrong over a decade ago tells you a lot about me.)

And then when it comes to research, it’s even worse: What even constitutes “good” research, let alone “perfect” research? What would be most scientifically rigorous isn’t what journals would be most likely to publish—and without much bigger grants, I can afford neither. I find myself longing for the research paper that will be so spectacular that top journals have to publish it, removing all risk of rejection and failure—in other words, perfect.

Yet such a paper plainly does not exist. Even if I were to do something that would win me a Nobel or a Fields Medal (this is, shall we say, unlikely), it probably wouldn’t be recognized as such immediately—a typical Nobel isn’t awarded until 20 or 30 years after the work that spawned it, and while Fields Medals are faster, they’re by no means instant or guaranteed. In fact, a lot of ground-breaking, paradigm-shifting research was originally relegated to minor journals because the top journals considered it too radical to publish.

Or I could try to do something trendy—feed into DSGE or GTFO—and try to get published that way. But I know my heart wouldn’t be in it, and so I’d be miserable the whole time. In fact, because it is neither my passion nor my expertise, I probably wouldn’t even do as good a job as someone who really buys into the core assumptions. I already have trouble speaking frequentist sometimes: Are we allowed to say “almost significant” for p = 0.06? Maximizing the likelihood is still kosher, right? Just so long as I don’t impose a prior? But speaking DSGE fluently and sincerely? I’d have an easier time speaking in Latin.

What I know—on some level at least—I ought to be doing is finding the research that I think is most worthwhile, given the resources I have available, and then getting it published wherever I can. Or, in fact, I should probably constrain a little by what I know about journals: I should do the most worthwhile research that is feasible for me and has a serious chance of getting published in a peer-reviewed journal. It’s sad that those two things aren’t the same, but they clearly aren’t. This constraint binds, and its Lagrange multiplier is measured in humanity’s future.

But one thing is very clear: By trying to find the perfect paper, I have floundered and, for the last year and a half, not written any papers at all. The right choice would surely have been to write something.

Because good enough is perfect, and perfect is bad.

Small deviations can have large consequences.

PNRJ core principles, critique of neoclassical economics, market failure , , , , , ,

Jun 26 JDN 2459787

A common rejoinder that behavioral economists get from neoclassical economists is that most people are mostly rational most of the time, so what’s the big deal? If humans are 90% rational, why worry so much about the other 10%?

Well, it turns out that small deviations from rationality can have surprisingly large consequences. Let’s consider an example.

Suppose we have a market for some asset. Without even trying to veil my ulterior motive, let’s make that asset Bitcoin. Its fundamental value is of course $0; it’s not backed by anything (not even taxes or a central bank), it has no particular uses that aren’t already better served by existing methods, and it’s not even scalable.

Now, suppose that 99% of the population rationally recognizes that the fundamental value of the asset is indeed $0. But 1% of the population doesn’t; they irrationally believe that the asset is worth $20,000. What will the price of that asset be, in equilibrium?

If you assume that the majority will prevail, it should be $0. If you did some kind of weighted average, you’d think maybe its price will be something positive but relatively small, like $200. But is this actually the price it will take on?

Consider someone who currently owns 1 unit of the asset, and recognizes that it is fundamentally worthless. What should they do? Well, if they also know that there are people out there who believe it is worth $20,000, the answer is obvious: They should sell it to those people. Indeed, they should sell it for something quite close to $20,000 if they can.

Now, suppose they don’t already own the asset, but are considering whether or not to buy it. They know it’s worthless, but they also know that there are people who will buy it for close to $20,000. Here’s the kicker: This is a reason for them to buy it at anything meaningfully less than $20,000.

Suppose, for instance, they could buy it for $10,000. Spending $10,000 to buy something you know is worthless seems like a terribly irrational thing to do. But it isn’t irrational, if you also know that somewhere out there is someone who will pay $20,000 for that same asset and you have a reasonable chance of finding that person and selling it to them.

The equilibrium outcome, then, is that the price of the asset will be almost $20,000! Even though 99% of the population recognizes that this asset is worthless, the fact that 1% of people believe it’s worth as much as a car will result in it selling at that price. Thus, even a slight deviation from a perfectly-rational population can result in a market that is radically at odds with reality.

And it gets worse! Suppose that in fact everyone knows that the asset is worthless, but most people think that there is some small portion of the population who believes the asset has value. Then, it will still be priced at that value in equilibrium, as people trade it back and forth searching in vain for the person who really wants it! (This is called the Greater Fool theory.)

That is, the price of an asset in a free market—even in a market where most people are mostly rational most of the time—will in fact be determined by the highest price anyone believes that anyone else thinks it has. And this is true of essentially any asset market—any market where people are buying something, not to use it, but to sell it to someone else.

Of course, beliefs—and particularly beliefs about beliefs—can very easily change, so that equilibrium price could move in any direction basically without warning.

Suddenly, the cycle of bubble and crash, boom and bust, doesn’t seem so surprising does it? The wonder is that prices ever become stable at all.


Then again, do they? Last I checked, the only prices that were remotely stable were for goods like apples and cars and televisions, goods that are bought and sold to be consumed. (Or national currencies managed by competent central banks, whose entire job involves doing whatever it takes to keep those prices stable.) For pretty much everything else—and certainly any purely financial asset that isn’t a national currency—prices are indeed precisely as wildly unpredictable and utterly irrational as this model would predict.

So much for the Efficient Market Hypothesis? Sadly I doubt that the people who still believe this nonsense will be convinced.

Commitment and sophistication

PNRJ cognitive science, heuristics and biases , , , , , , , , , ,

Mar 13 JDN 2459652

One of the central insights of cognitive and behavioral economics is that understanding the limitations of our own rationality can help us devise mechanisms to overcome those limitations—that knowing we are not perfectly rational can make us more rational. The usual term for this is a somewhat vague one: behavioral economists generally call it simply sophistication.

For example, suppose that you are short-sighted and tend to underestimate the importance of the distant future. (This is true of most of us, to greater or lesser extent.)

It’s rational to consider the distant future less important than the present—things change in the meantime, and if we go far enough you may not even be around to see it. In fact, rationality alone doesn’t even say how much you should discount any given distance in the future. But most of us are inconsistent about our attitudes toward the future: We exhibit dynamic inconsistency.

For instance, suppose I ask you today whether you would like $100 today or $102 tomorrow. It is likely you’ll choose $100 today. But if I ask you whether you would like $100 365 days from now or $102 366 days from now, you’ll almost certainly choose the $102.


This means that if I asked you the second question first, then waited a year and asked you the first question, you’d change your mind—that’s inconsistent. Whichever choice is better shouldn’t systematically change over time. (It might happen to change, if your circumstances changed in some unexpected way. But on average it shouldn’t change.) Indeed, waiting a day for an extra $2 is typically going to be worth it; 2% daily interest is pretty hard to beat.

Now, suppose you have some option to make a commitment, something that will bind you to your earlier decision. It could be some sort of punishment for deviating from your earlier choice, some sort of reward for keeping to the path, or, in the most extreme example, a mechanism that simply won’t let you change your mind. (The literally classic example of this is Odysseus having his crew tie him to the mast so he can listen to the Sirens.)

If you didn’t know that your behavior was inconsistent, you’d never want to make such a commitment. You don’t expect to change your mind, and if you do change your mind, it would be because your circumstances changed in some unexpected way—in which case changing your mind would be the right thing to do. And if your behavior wasn’t inconsistent, this reasoning would be quite correct: No point in committing when you have less information.

But if you know that your behavior is inconsistent, you can sometimes improve the outcome for yourself by making a commitment. You can force your own behavior into consistency, even though you will later be tempted to deviate from your plan.

Yet there is a piece missing from this account, often not clearly enough stated: Why should we trust the version of you that has a year to plan over the version of you that is making the decision today? What’s the difference between those two versions of you that makes them inconsistent, and why is one more trustworthy than the other?

The biggest difference is emotional. You don’t really feel $100 a year from now, so you can do the math and see that 2% daily interest is pretty darn good. But $100 today makes you feel something—excitement over what you might buy, or relief over a bill you can now pay. (Actually that’s one of the few times when it would be rational to take $100 today: If otherwise you’re going to miss a deadline and pay a late fee.) And that feeling about $102 tomorrow just isn’t as strong.

We tend to think that our emotional selves and our rational selves are in conflict, and so we expect to be more rational when we are less emotional. There is some truth to this—strong emotions can cloud our judgments and make us behave rashly.

Yet this is only one side of the story. We also need emotions to be rational. There is a condition known as flat affect, often a symptom of various neurological disorders, in which emotional reactions are greatly blunted or even non-existent. People with flat affect aren’t more rational—they just do less. In the worst cases, they completely lose their ability to be motivated to do things and become outright inert, known as abulia.

Emotional judgments are often less accurate than thoughtfully reasoned arguments, but they are also much faster—and that’s why we have them. In many contexts, particularly when survival is at stake, doing something pretty well right away is often far better than waiting long enough to be sure you’ll get the right answer. Running away from a loud sound that turns out to be nothing is a lot better than waiting to carefully determine whether that sound was really a tiger—and finding that it was.

With this in mind, the cases where we should expected commitment to be effective are those that are unfamiliar, not only on an individual level, but in an evolutionary sense. I have no doubt that experienced stock traders can develop certain intuitions that make them better at understanding financial markets than randomly chosen people—but they still systematically underperform simple mathematical models, likely because finance is just so weird from an evolutionary perspective. So when deciding whether to accept some amount of money m1 at time t1 and some other amount of money m2 at time t2, your best bet is really to just do the math.

But this may not be the case for many other types of decisions. Sometimes how you feel in the moment really is the right signal to follow. Committing to work at your job every day may seem responsible, ethical, rational—but if you hate your job when you’re actually doing it, maybe it really isn’t how you should be spending your life. Buying a long-term gym membership to pressure yourself to exercise may seem like a good idea, but if you’re miserable every time you actually go to the gym, maybe you really need to be finding a better way to integrate exercise into your lifestyle.

There are no easy answers here. We can think of ourselves as really being made of two (if not more) individuals: A cold, calculating planner who looks far into the future, and a heated, emotional experiencer who lives in the moment. There’s a tendency to assume that the planner is our “true self”, the one we should always listen to, but this is wrong; we are both of those people, and a life well-lived requires finding the right balance between their conflicting desires.

How to change minds

PNRJ core principles, ethics, heuristics and biases, politics, science and academia, tribal paradigm , , , , ,

Aug 29 JDN 2459456

Think for a moment about the last time you changed your mind on something important. If you can’t think of any examples, that’s not a good sign. Think harder; look back further. If you still can’t find any examples, you need to take a deep, hard look at yourself and how you are forming your beliefs. The path to wisdom is not found by starting with the right beliefs, but by starting with the wrong ones and recognizing them as wrong. No one was born getting everything right.

If you remember changing your mind about something, but don’t remember exactly when, that’s not a problem. Indeed, this is the typical case, and I’ll get to why in a moment. Try to remember as much as you can about the whole process, however long it took.

If you still can’t specifically remember changing your mind, try to imagine a situation in which you would change your mind—and if you can’t do that, you should be deeply ashamed and I have nothing further to say to you.

Thinking back to that time: Why did you change your mind?

It’s possible that it was something you did entirely on your own, through diligent research of primary sources or even your own mathematical proofs or experimental studies. This is occasionally something that happens; as an active researcher, it has definitely happened to me. But it’s clearly not the typical case of what changes people’s minds, and it’s quite likely that you have never experienced it yourself.

The far more common scenario—even for active researchers—is far more mundane: You changed your mind because someone convinced you. You encountered a persuasive argument, and it changed the way you think about things.

In fact, it probably wasn’t just one persuasive argument; it was probably many arguments, from multiple sources, over some span of time. It could be as little as minutes or hours; it could be as long as years.

Probably the first time someone tried to change your mind on that issue, they failed. The argument may even have degenerated into shouting and name-calling. You both went away thinking that the other side was composed of complete idiots or heartless monsters. And then, a little later, thinking back on the whole thing, you remembered one thing they said that was actually a pretty good point.

This happened again with someone else, and again with yet another person. And each time your mind changed just a little bit—you became less certain of some things, or incorporated some new information you didn’t know before. The towering edifice of your worldview would not be toppled by a single conversation—but a few bricks here and there did get taken out and replaced.

Or perhaps you weren’t even the target of the conversation; you simply overheard it. This seems especially common in the age of social media, where public and private spaces become blurred and two family members arguing about politics can blow up into a viral post that is viewed by millions. Perhaps you changed your mind not because of what was said to you, but because of what two other people said to one another; perhaps the one you thought was on your side just wasn’t making as many good arguments as the one on the other side.

Now, you may be thinking: Yes, people like me change our minds, because we are intelligent and reasonable. But those people, on the other side, aren’t like that. They are stubborn and foolish and dogmatic and stupid.

And you know what? You probably are an especially intelligent and reasonable person. If you’re reading this blog, there’s a good chance that you are at least above-average in your level of education, rationality, and open-mindedness.

But no matter what beliefs you hold, I guarantee you there is someone out there who shares many of them and is stubborn and foolish and dogmatic and stupid. And furthermore, there is probably someone out there who disagrees with many of your beliefs and is intelligent and open-minded and reasonable.

This is not to say that there’s no correlation between your level of reasonableness and what you actually believe. Obviously some beliefs are more rational than others, and rational people are more likely to hold those beliefs. (If this weren’t the case, we’d be doomed.) Other things equal, an atheist is more reasonable than a member of the Taliban; a social democrat is more reasonable than a neo-Nazi; a feminist is more reasonable than a misogynist; a member of the Human Rights Campaign is more reasonable than a member of the Westboro Baptist Church. But reasonable people can be wrong, and unreasonable people can be right.

You should be trying to seek out the most reasonable people who disagree with you. And you should be trying to present yourself as the most reasonable person who expresses your own beliefs.

This can be difficult—especially that first part, as the world (or at least the world spanned by Facebook and Twitter) seems to be filled with people who are astonishingly dogmatic and unreasonable. Often you won’t be able to find any reasonable disagreement. Often you will find yourself in threads full of rage, hatred and name-calling, and you will come away disheartened, frustrated, or even despairing for humanity. The whole process can feel utterly futile.

And yet, somehow, minds change.

Support for same-sex marriage in the US rose from 27% to 70% just since 1997.

Read that date again: 1997. Less than 25 years ago.

The proportion of new marriages which were interracial has risen from 3% in 1967 to 19% today. Given the racial demographics of the US, this is almost at the level of random assortment.

Ironically I think that the biggest reason people underestimate the effectiveness of rational argument is the availability heuristic: We can’t call to mind any cases where we changed someone’s mind completely. We’ve never observed a pi-radian turnaround in someone’s whole worldview, and thus, we conclude that nobody ever changes their mind about anything important.

But in fact most people change their minds slowly and gradually, and are embarrassed to admit they were wrong in public, so they change their minds in private. (One of the best single changes we could make toward improving human civilization would be to make it socially rewarded to publicly admit you were wrong. Even the scientific community doesn’t do this nearly as well as it should.) Often changing your mind doesn’t even really feel like changing your mind; you just experience a bit more doubt, learn a bit more, and repeat the process over and over again until, years later, you believe something different than you did before. You moved 0.1 or even 0.01 radians at a time, until at last you came all the way around.

It may be in fact that some people’s minds cannot be changed—either on particular issues, or even on any issue at all. But it is so very, very easy to jump to that conclusion after a few bad interactions, that I think we should intentionally overcompensate in the opposite direction: Only give up on someone after you have utterly overwhelming evidence that their mind cannot ever be changed in any way.

I can’t guarantee that this will work. Perhaps too many people are too far gone.

But I also don’t see any alternative. If the truth is to prevail, it will be by rational argument. This is the only method that systematically favors the truth. All other methods give equal or greater power to lies.

To a first approximation, all human behavior is social norms

PNRJ core principles, critique of neoclassical economics, tribal paradigm , , , , , ,

Dec 15 JDN 2458833

The language we speak, the food we eat, and the clothes we wear—indeed, the fact that we wear clothes at all—are all the direct result of social norms. But norms run much deeper than this: Almost everything we do is more norm than not.

Why do sleep and wake up at a particular time of day? For most people, the answer is that they needed to get up to go to work. Why do you need to go to work at that specific time? Why does almost everyone go to work at the same time? Social norms.

Even the most extreme human behaviors are often most comprehensible in terms of social norms. The most effective predictive models of terrorism are based on social networks: You are much more likely to be a terrorist if you know people who are terrorists, and much more likely to become a terrorist if you spend a lot of time talking with terrorists. Cultists and conspiracy theorists seem utterly baffling if you imagine that humans form their beliefs rationally—and totally unsurprising if you realize that humans mainly form their beliefs by matching those around them.

For a long time, economists have ignored social norms at our peril; we’ve assumed that financial incentives will be sufficient to motivate behavior, when social incentives can very easily override them. Indeed, it is entirely possible for a financial incentive to have a negative effect, when it crowds out a social incentive: A good example is a friend who would gladly come over to help you with something as a friend, but then becomes reluctant if you offer to pay him $25. I previously discussed another example, where taking a mentor out to dinner sounds good but paying him seems corrupt.

Why do you drive on the right side of the road (or the left, if you’re in Britain)? The law? Well, the law is already a social norm. But in fact, it’s hardly just that. You probably sometimes speed or run red lights, which are also in violation of traffic laws. Yet somehow driving on the right side seem to be different. Well, that’s because driving on the right has a much stronger norm—and in this case, that norm is self-enforcing with the risk of severe bodily harm or death.

This is a good example of why it isn’t necessary for everyone to choose to follow a norm for that norm to have a great deal of power. As long as the norms include some mechanism for rewarding those who follow and punishing those who don’t, norms can become compelling even to those who would prefer not to obey. Sometimes it’s not even clear whether people are following a norm or following direct incentives, because the two are so closely aligned.

Humans are not the only social species, but we are by far the most social species. We form larger, more complex groups than any other animal; we form far more complex systems of social norms; and we follow those norms with slavish obedience. Indeed, I’m a little suspicious of some of the evolutionary models predicting the evolution of social norms, because they predict it too well; they seem to suggest that it should arise all the time, when in fact it’s only a handful of species who exhibit it at all and only we who build our whole existence around it.

Along with our extreme capacity for altruism, this is another way that human beings actually deviate more from the infinite identical psychopaths of neoclassical economics than most other animals. Yes, we’re smarter than other animals; other animals are more likely to make mistakes (though certainly we make plenty of our own). But most other animals aren’t motivated by entirely different goals than individual self-interest (or “evolutionary self-interest” in a Selfish Gene sort of sense) the way we typically are. Other animals try to be selfish and often fail; we try not to be selfish and usually succeed.

Economics experiments often go out of their way to exclude social motives as much as possible—anonymous random matching with no communication, for instance—and still end up failing. Human behavior in experiments is consistent, systematic—and almost never completely selfish.

Once you start looking for norms, you see them everywhere. Indeed, it becomes hard to see anything else. To a first approximation, all human behavior is social norms.