Bounded rationality is not an excuse
Discover more from the mind-killer
Bounded rationality is not an excuse
Susceptibility to manipulation is a natural human limitation, but some actively enjoy being riled up
Contents
Science vs speculation
Intellectual masochism :: art || gossip || marxian social theory; postmodernism || continentalism || unimaginative and proud || sloganeering || parochialism || learning from history and “tone-deafness” || bringing proxies to a direct evidence fight || the personal statement
Intellectual laziness :: frequentist statistics || traditional medicine || I lack time/expertise, so just listen to the experts
Sacred inefficiency :: children || capitalism is “impersonal” || the sacred personal || the noble savage || nature-worship
Bonus: list of selected cognitive biases :: thoughtcrime ethics || the privileging of easy to check facts || low-dimensional spectrum heuristics || the five-more-minutes fallacy || bias selection bias
Science vs speculation
“Is the world overpopulated?”
EIGHT BILLION! Can you even imagine how large that number is?
Have you ever visited the crowded slums of Mumbai?
People who have lots of kids are uneducated and religious.
… but the moment you investigate the question directly, from theoretical microeconomic foundations, and discover that the world popular is far, far lower than what is optimal — all these arguments turn to water.
For the fundamental distinction between science and speculation is that science hugs the query, while speculation skirts it.
Thus the speculation of a hundred expert committees, an infinite number of emotional teens and all the “common sense” in the world, is silenced by a single word of science.
It is okay (in fact essential) to speculate in the absence of science — to operate by means of heuristics when you haven’t exactly calculated the answer. It is understandable that you are not always able to discover the light for yourself—
—but inexcusable to deny the light even when it shoved in your face.
Intellectual masochism
There’s a type of person who is not only easily manipulated by the media and by his own irrationality — but continues to uphold these biases even when obviously aware of them — pompously boasting of how he was manipulated and worshipping his manipulators.
Art
This is seen among worshippers of art (eq. films, ads, stories, music) — who, upon watching an a heart-touching ad, asks, “How could you still support xx after watching this? Have you no heart?” — how could you not be so easily manipulated as I am?
Art is valued by its effectiveness at eliciting emotion, not by its effectiveness at conveying truth — this is its definition.
If you seek art to “tell you a message”, you are an intellectual masochist, seeking to be manipulated. If you argue that “art makes you think!” — art can make you think anything, not necessarily the truth. You can draw a face with money plastered on a mouth to say “money bad”, or a comic with TVs getting fat, or a fantasy story where trees have souls and shouldn’t be cut, but this is worthless to real-world questions.
The most effective ways of conveying truth to masses are memes and copypasta — which are despised by art snobs.
Instead, art — as well as the humanities, which are intrusions of art methodology to science domains — has been, throughout history, the slave of politics and the enemy of truth.
Gossip
“I won’t vote for a crook! It feels wrong!”
The well-being of the masses depends on said crook’s ideology and effectiveness, not on his image, and this far outweighs your squeamishness at “crookiness”. Just shut up and calculate.
Marxian social theory; postmodernism
He cries “You can only afford this view because of your privilege!”, draws moral legitimacy from the biasing effect of his “lived experience”.
It’s so odd that “lived experience” fans are also “inclusivity” fans. Data is exactly how you include other people’s lived experiences, and do so in an unbiased way.
Marxian social theory and postmodernism are both ways to provide “scriptural legitimacy” to this irrationality — the thesis that truth depends on how close you are to a factory. Marx argues that this is because the proletariat are more grounded in reality, while postmodernists excuse the irrationality of “oppressed people” by empathizing with them, defending this with a relativist argument that absolute truth is unattainable, belief is all you have. This is a perversion of that true philosophical point, because given the choice between being less informed and more informed, you should choose the latter, and level-headed thinking requires being detached from reality.
[A similar tendency is stakeholder bias — when presented with a reasoned and well-rounded argument for a policy, cry: “You would understand if you were an xx suffering yy!” Obviously, the whole point of making reasoned, well-rounded arguments is to account for xx as well as other concerns of importance
.]
Continentalism
An academic field is not really determined by its domain, but its methodology. A physicist will take “computational social science” over biology.
Even the darkest corners of academia — even the humanities — have been touched by the light of science, yet most academics in these fields do not adopt the methods of science, sticking instead to their primitive mystical ways. Most social scientists are not computational social scientists, they are instead morons. Historians actively prefer tertiary sources to primary ones, because correctness in their disciplines is determined by conformity.
When an entire academic field becomes so intellectually corrupt, the only suitable counter-argument is defunding.
Unimaginative and proud
He sees a fact, e.g. US vs EU life expectancy or crime rates by race, and cries “I can see no other explanation!” Your lack of imagination is hardly cause to celebrate.
Similar comments apply to Star Trek tier shit portrayals of aliens who are unable to understand capitalism or other human conceptions. Imagine being proud of your lack of intellectual empathy; your inability to simulate the other side’s arguments. Oh why haven’t we heard from aliens yet? Because they’ve decided to stay as retarded frogs in wells.
Sloganeering
The statement “healthcare is a right!” isn’t one of substance, but a signal of passion. The disagreement over healthcare policy isn’t on whether healthcare is good and should be provided — it’s on whether health insurance should be provided by the market or the state.
Yet the very act of declaring healthcare to be a right — which accomplishes nothing to provide better or cheaper healthcare, is viewed as fundamentally virtuous and genuine, and pointing out “nuance” has bad optics.
Parochialism
“Immigrants/scientists don’t vote for xx party — they’ve alienated me, not done anything to appeal to me!” is just a confession of one’s (identitarian/elitist) parochialism.
(It’s also an awfully self-patronizing argument. “I’m a woman, so I can only care about abortion and maternal leave. NGDP targeting, energy and housing regulations — these are for men to have opinions on!”)
Learning from history and “tone-deafness”
No cognitive bias is as snottily defended as the recency effect. Comparing recent injustices to medieval ones is deemed “tone-deaf”, even though the said tones are precisely the emotional heuristics that should be brutally suppressed by any intelligent creature.
In general, to learn from history (recent or ancient) is to fight the last war. The correct principle does not follow from the events of history, but the anticipation of the future, and history rarely repeats itself.
Bringing proxies to a direct evidence fight
Per-capita GDP (or median income, for inequality-adjusted) is the “correct” measure of welfare, because rather than dictating specific goods (e.g. education and healthcare, as HDI does), it directly measures income, letting the individual decide what to spend it on, and adjusts for differences in price level, government provision. That metrics like “HDI” and “the Happiness Index” even exist when we have GDP is an insult to your intelligence.
The same goes for those who cite anecdotes and tangential proxies (do you feel safe?) to counter data, or talk about inequality over poverty: you’re bringing proxy measures to a direct evidence fight.
The Personal Statement
The “personal statement” — in job, college applications and introductory parts of TED talks — is such an odd institution. It’s just the list of biases that caused you to do what you do, independent of any rationality or genuine intellectual passion.
“In 2011, the media publicized this particular incident, and a friend remarked, probably without an afterthought, I was really cut out for it, so I started down this line … ”
Needless to say, it’s irrelevant what your “story” is — much like history (or at least the superficial manner that people tend to infer from history) is largely irrelevant to what would work today.
It appears there is a strong tendency to be grow attached to heuristics trained on the ancestral environment, and emotionally and pompously defend them against opportunities to hone them to new domains that require serious analysis.
It is observed in political discourse, among those who use empathy and literary analysis as a substitute for economics, and among cranks in physics.
Intellectual laziness
“Not accepting the light” is masochism. “Not seeking the light” is laziness.
I tangented in my post on logic on putting only the minimal effort to make sure that when called out on it, you can sneer “that’s completely different!”
Frequentist statistics
Like saying “we can’t say the hypothesis is unlikely, only that the data would be unlikely if the hypothesis were true!”
At the end of the day you need to make a decision. By declining to talk about the relevant probabilities, you are not absolved of this responsibility — rather, either your knowledge is meaningless because it does not afford you a capacity to act or you have just pointlessly censored your thoughts.
Traditional medicine
Traditional medicine theories are incoherent nonsense. But when asked “is xx herb good for you?”, replying “xx herb is from Ayurveda, which is pseudo-science” is just ad hominem, even if a technical truth.
I lack time/expertise, so just listen to the experts
If you lack the expertise to make the serious arguments, let the experts do it for themselves rather than be their dumb attack dogs; it’s ok to lack the time and expertise to investigate a question seriously. But if you find time to go to protests, and judge yourself as possessed of sufficient expertise to add worthwhile things to the conversation, this becomes suspect as an excuse.
Often when you avoid investigating a question, it’s because you’re afraid of what you’ll find — there are costs to changing your mind, most prominently the fear of losing one’s friends/fans/heroes.
[In fact, one may observe that people speak with much more confidence the things they’ve been told than the things they’ve discovered for themselves.]
Sacred inefficiency
The worship of bias extends beyond oneself — to other people. Those who draw incorrect conclusions from basic thinking are viewed as virtuous for their “simplicity”.
Children
My five-year-old asked me today: “If the problem with solar panels is that they’re expensive, why couldn’t the guys making solar panels just make them for free?” “Well, because they need to pay for the raw materials.” “Why can’t those guys give it for free?” And I sobbed, because he was right: it’s greed all the way down.
What kind of terrible story is that? The villain just convinces the heroine with a garbage argument, and the heroine doesn’t even attempt to explain that resources are scarce, there are competing demands for those raw materials, and the labour that goes into assembling them, and that “money”/“the price system” is just a way of keeping track of all these competing demands, and that shitty takes like this is why his Dad left?
It’s like the heroine was a strawman working for the villain the whole time.
Capitalism is “impersonal”
The “impersonality” of capitalism — not knowing who grows your food, etc. — is exactly its point.
Your farmer shouldn’t need to impress you with amazing social skills to sell his produce. He shouldn’t need to make sure his political beliefs are unobjectionable to you, or attend to all the dumb problems in your life, just to make his living.
Instead, the farmer’s work should be valued for — hold your breath — how good the work is. His social skills can be valued by his friends, but there is literally no reason to oblige him to befriend you, no reason to tie his reward for his farming work to his friendship with you.
Efficient capitalism (real free markets, as in without cartels such as the “cultural cartels” that are boycotts) is the ultimate antidote to cancel culture.
The Sacred Personal
Decisions taken for emotional reasons are seen as above scrutiny, because those emotions are seen as valid “in their own right”. Thus the “instinctive” sexual selection of mates based on is acceptable, while designer babies are controversial.
[Alternative explanations may be given: that engineering embryos asserts that some have no right to life while selecting mates only asserts that some have no right to a mate — but these explanations are dumb, because in this sense the decision to not have a child also asserts that some, in fact all, have no right to life.]
The Noble Savage
The pretense that non-Western cultures are somehow “otherwordly”, reject reason/capitalism/anthropocentrism, and have “wisdom” to impart.
Particularly absurd is when this is applied to Indian philosophy, which is unique among ancient cultures for including a precursor to modern analytical philosophy. “Otherworldly” treatments of Indian philosophy seem to be entirely ignorant of the Kautilyan school that was politically dominant for the 900 years of Indian peak (322 BC — 545), of the Purushartha, of the discussions over the Pramanas, of the Gita’s worship of work, or the fact that even all the metaphysics about Brahman, Atman and meditation was an attempt to understand cognitive science and embedded agency.
Despite what ERB might have told you, “Western” and “Eastern” philosophy aren’t uniform entities. Every civilization in its zenith accommodated intellectual diversity — a culture seeing itself as a monolith usually correlates with decline
, as it is a sign of insecurity (that you see internal disagreements, competition, any goals pursued besides defence as a threat).
Nature-worship
What is the distinction between natural and man-made? What cause is there to classify a dung beetle’s dung house “natural” and a man’s skyscraper “artificial”.
The fundamental difference is this: the natural is not efficient — it is not fit for human purposes, and man exceeds all other manifestations of nature at optimizing.
This was the great insight of the Agricultural Revolution, but here we are 13,000 years later, and some are yet to catch on.
[I don’t really buy the argument that environmentalists are motivated by some “eco-fundamentalism” that animal purposes matter equally, because (1) most of them are not vegans, when that is the lowest-hanging fruit of such ideology, with least costs and (2) The Singularity will make Animal Uplift possible, so their priority should then be AI alignment — AI alignment is an instrumentally convergent strategy.]
Bonus: list of selected (hehe) cognitive biases
Thoughtcrime ethics
If you ask the average Joe about the Johnstown flood (which was, at least in part, caused by the development of a private resort lake for Henry Clay Frick), he would decry it to be the result of “greed”.
And technically this would be true. But greed is also responsible for all human achievement and for the world that you have the pleasure of inhabiting today. “Greed” is not the efficient point of intervention — you cannot actually remove greed, and it would not be desirable to do so.
Trying to ban greed for the harm it could cause is like banning lust to stop sexual assault. I’m sure Harvey Weinstein “respected women”, just not the ones he raped. The problem with reducing ethics to feelings is that feelings are volatile (you stop acting morally the moment you have the wrong feeling) — you need firm moral principles, not platitudes about respect and compassion.
Common cause doesn’t make an efficient abstraction. Amazon should not be punished for the crimes of Henry Clay Frick, and a generic hatred for “corporations” for the crimes of one is a poor heuristic.
A related fallacy I see is that of assuming a single “emotional” cause or intent for an act. This shows up in corruption cases, and in people who cry about “gold-diggers”.
The privileging of easy-to-check facts
“Facts vs opinions” is the most annoying pop-epistemological classification. “Fact” can mean “easily-verifiable statement” or “officially-verified statement”. “Opinion” can mean “hard-to-verify statement”, “statement of morals”, “statement of personal taste”, or recursively “combination of a fact and opinion” (e.g. “xyx should be president” follows from “xyx will optimize GDP” and “optimizing GDP is good”)
In any case, lying is for amateurs, smart people manipulate people by tossing a coin 10 times and only reporting the number of heads.
Fact-checkers bad. PSA: all politics occurs over disagreement over what the truth is; elevating particular facets of the truth (usually the easiest-to-verify, and irrelevant to serious political questions) as “facts” and elevating particular people as ultimate arbiters of these facts doesn’t help us reach truth
Low-dimensional spectrum heuristic
“Even Adam Smith supported public schools!” “Even Karl Marx supported gun rights!” The cognitive heuristic is “Clearly the truth is to the left of Reagan. Thus any opinion to the right of Reagan is wrong”. Even if the premise were true, the conclusion would not follow, because x1 > x2 but x1 + y1 < x2 + y2 is possible
The good and bad heuristic
Scott Alexander’s post: The Trouble with Good
A particular example: superficial libertarianism.
Politicians bad, so when a kid and a politician disagree, side with a kid
Government bad, so government shutdowns good
Corporations good, politicians bad, so Twitter censoring politicians good
Government sucks at everything, so it can’t do conspiracies [the government is not particularly incompetent compared to any individual private corporation, it is incompetent compared to the market at large, but secret-keeping is easier than large-scale economic co-ordinations, and both governments and private corporations do it routinely, e.g. the Manhattan project, secret formulas]
The five-more-minutes fallacy
If lazing around for only five more minutes in bed won’t cost you much, it will not benefit you much either. The same applies to plastic straws and social spending.
Bias selection bias
Similar to the “fallacy fallacy”. Some biases (e.g. bias from financial interest) receive undue scrutiny compared to others (e.g. bias from social acceptability). This applies e.g. to claims that academic experts are unscrutable compared to industry experts.
From the Mitchell and Webb’s Train Safety:
“Can I ask what your response is to today’s announcement, that Rail North-East will not be funding the Laser-assisted Train Early Warning System?”
“Well, I personally think it’s a shame.”
“So it’s shame on the management — shame on the government.”
“Well, I suppose, but can I just say, I’m really not the best person to talk to about this — you see, by spooky coincidence, I actually lost my wife in a train crash.”
“Yes, we know.”
“One that exactly this kind of system could have prevented.”
“That’s why we’re in touch with you, Tom. It’s because you have personal experience with a rail tragedy that your views are so important.”
“I would’ve thought that it was because I have personal experience with a rail tragedy that my views should be dismissed out of hand.”
“No — no, look — would you say that to you, safety is by far the most important issue facing the rail network?”
“Of course I would, my wife just died in a train crash! But you really should talk to someone else — it’s impossible for me to have any objectivity at all.”
“But if spending the £3 billion on the system would bring back your wife, that would be worth it?”
“Well, obviously! Although I must stress — I lack any objectivity!”
“Nevertheless, what would you say to the minister? What would your message be to him?”
“My message would be: good luck in judging how to allocate your finite resources, given the many competing demands you face.”
From Remy Munasifi’s People will die! for ReasonTV:
“These cuts are blood money. People will die. Let's be very clear: Senate Republicans are paying for tax cuts for the wealthy with American lives.”
“People need kidneys. It's sad but decreed. Yet this Senator's hoarding one more than she needs. I offer this bill and I hope you'll vote, unless of course you just want people to die.”
“Traffic deaths have many crying with fear. Over thirty thousand people are dying each year. This modest change I propose must be applied unless of course you just want people to die.”
“Alcohol deaths are exceeding comparisons, black people, white people, native American. We need to ban alcohol, it can't be denied, unless of course you just want people to die.”
“Murders are bad, they have no defenders. Yet many are committed by repeat offenders. I say lifetime in prison whatever the crime, unless of course you just want people to die.”
“I don't have a bill, or a groan to detail, I just need a short clip for my donor email. Tim there's blood on your hands! You want people to die! That good? Cool. Tim, dinner at five? Yeah.”
“The car deaths I mentioned are terrible stuff. Doesn't seem one seat-belt is ever enough. You must vote for my act so that fewer will cry, unless of course you just want people to die.”
“The carbs, the container, we cannot ignore whipped cream's killing more people than ever before. This bill would be passed and be ratified if those people that didn't want people to die.”
“Why not weigh all the costs? the effects, the results. Empathize with each other as if we were adults. Use our brains to craft arguments not vilify. See that freedom's a trade-off—”
“You want people to die!”
“I tried.”
Harry Potter had then presented the idea that scientists watched ideas fight to see which ones won, and you couldn’t fight without an opponent, so Draco needed to figure out opponents for the blood purist hypothesis to fight so that blood purism could win—
…
Harry Potter had then proceeded to claim that all the opponents Draco was inventing were too weak, so blood purism wouldn’t get credit for defeating them because the battle wouldn’t be impressive enough. Draco had understood that too. Wizards have gotten weaker because house elves are stealing our magic hadn’t sounded impressive to him either.
…
Even having seen the point, Draco hadn’t been able to invent any “plausible alternatives”, as Harry Potter put it, to the idea that wizards were getting less powerful because they were mixing their blood with mud. It was too obviously true.
It was then that Harry Potter had said, rather frustrated, that he couldn’t imagine Draco was really this bad at considering different viewpoints, surely there’d been Death Eaters who’d posed as enemies of blood purism and had come up with much more plausible-sounding arguments against their own side than Draco was offering.
—Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, Ch 22: The Scientific Method.
r/PoliticalCompassMemes comment by DescriptionThis2272:
The whole thing is the world's biggest political pissing contest and I'm fucking sick of it.
Leftists will reduce legitimate but incredibly complex issues to phrases like “black lives matter” and rightists will play this endless game of trying to sidestep it by pointing out obvious, undisputable opinions and acting like we disagree.
No-one fucking wins, as usual.
Twitter thread by Shrikanth Krish:
Western civilization is a complex animal. It has contributed significantly to world civilization. But the zenith of that civilization (18th and 19th cen) was in a period when the civilization encouraged these conflicting currents, and was not conscious as a "single entity".
Same is true for many other civilizations. The zenith of Indian civilization was arguably the period between 2nd cen AD and 7th cen AD (North India) and from 8th to 16th cen AD (South India). But the greatness of even that civilization stemmed from a diversity of currents.
Once civilizations become more "tribal" and start consciously thinking of themselves as a single homogeneous identity, the creative potential of that civilization declines.
That happened in India starting with the many foreign incursions starting in 7th cen AD. With the loss of political sovereignty, Hindus developed a "Hindu identity" against the other. This was inevitable and also perhaps essential. But in the process the creative potential waned. We no longer had new darshanas emerging as they did in 3rd cen BC to 5th cen AD period.
The West is facing a similar predicament today. When it is increasingly becoming "tribal". There is a conscious valorization of the "West" - something that people like Edmund Burke or Gibbon or Hume or Smith never engaged in.
This Tribalism seen in the West lately is a sign of a civilization in decline. A civilization which is slghtly past its peak. No wonder there is an attempt to create a homogenenous "Western" narrative ignoring the intellectual diversity which made the West great
Post script : Wanted to add that the "tribalism" I am referring to in this thread is "ideological tribalism" and a certain urge to create a homogeneous and monolithic "western" identity. Not ethnic tribalism.