"Useless" https://xkcd.com/55/
Why is it so hard to be rational?
161–170 of 309 posts
Re: Why is it so hard to be rational?
#162There are some good bits in here. I love the subtitle especially: "The real challenge isn’t being right but knowing how wrong you might be." Knowing when not to provide an answer is hard. A big part of my job is communicating statistical findings and giving a good non-answer is much harder than giving a good answer, both technically speaking and socially speaking.
One thing I'll add that drives me nuts is the fetishization of bayesian reasoning I see some times here on HN. There are times that bayesian reasoning is helpful and times that it isn't. Specifically, when you don't trust your model, bayes rule can mislead you badly (frequently when it comes to missing/counterfactual data). It's just a tool. There are others. It makes me crazy when it's someone's only hammer, so everything starts to look like a nail. Sometimes, more appropriate tools leave you without an answer.
Apparently that's not something we're willing to live with.
Re: Why is it so hard to be rational?
#163Studying logical fallacies and behavioral economics biases have been the best ways for me to become more rational. I'm constantly calling myself out for confirmation bias, home country bias, and the recency effect in my internal investment thought process. Learning about logical fallacies and identifying them in conversations is great. Don't tell the counterparty of their logical fallacies in conversations cause that…
“Logical fallacies”
are mostly Boolean/Aristotelian and identifying them is completely useless and/or counterproductive in 99% of real world scenarios. Most of your reasoning should be Bayesian, not Boolean, and under Bayesian reasoning a lot of “fallacies” like sunk cost, slippery slope, etc. are actually powerful heuristics for EV optimization.
Re: Why is it so hard to be rational?
#164I am seeing a lot of "institutions lied to us and are actively keeping information from ourselves" when people try to justify acting irrationaly. I don't agree with this premise at all. What do you mean they keep information from you? This assumes that information can be contained, which in most cases is impossible. There is always leakage.
Now, to be more generous, I will assume that people are actually criticizing how "institutions impose a mainstream view that is difficult to replaced even when facts say it should". To that I say: fine. But even in this case, there should be enough resources to form a rational opinion over the matter (with probabilistic reasoning). Hell, I have a lot of non-orthodox opinions that are so out of Overton Window that I rarely can discuss them. And even in these cases, the internet and Google Scholar/Sci-hub were sources that helped me explore it.
So, I have no sympathy for this "institutions lied to us, let me believe now whatever I want" bullshit.
Re: Why is it so hard to be rational?
#165Re: Why is it so hard to be rational?
#166I think there is a simpler explanation that draws from evolutionary theory: being excessively rational is not a good survival strategy, be it in the distant past or today. If our ancestors would have made the rational assessment that there is unlikely to be a predator hiding behind the bush, that would have worked only as long as it worked, until one day they got eaten. Irrationally overestimating threats and risks i…
This is also captured in the “midwit phenomenon”, where people who are just smart enough to start applying “rationality” make worse decisions than stupid people. This is because stupid people are operating off of hard-earned adaptations (encoded as traditions, folk wisdom, etc.). Midwits are smart enough to realize that the putative justifications for these adaptations are wrong, and therefore they toss out the adaptations. People who think about it even harder realize that these adaptations were mostly there for good reasons, and getting rid of them isn’t a good idea even if the relevant just-so stories explaining them don’t hold up to “rational” scrutiny.
Re: Why is it so hard to be rational?
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, for example, let's say that I can buy from ShoeCo or big, evil Amazon. But big, evil Amazon allows me to donate a portion of their proceeds to a charity of my choice, and furthermore, I am also within my rights as an individual to take the difference between ShoeCo's price and Amazon's and donate it to another cause as well. Some will say that buying from Amazon simply perpetuates Amazon... but Amazon is so lar…
If Amazon is so big that your purchase is meaningless, then the problems of the world are also so big that your donations are probably meaningless. If your donations have some tiny bit of meaning to them, then removing a tiny bit of business from Amazon and paying your local shopkeeper probably also has meaning.
> removing a tiny bit of business from Amazon and paying your local shopkeeper probably also has meaning.
It might be fair to say that removing business from Amazon has no real impact but giving that business to a small business does.
Re: Why is it so hard to be rational?
#168Rational thought is important, but not sufficient. For example, moral conscience is a far more important trait to me. Some people will argue that pure reason is enough to establish a sound moral system; I don't agree but that is a debate for another time. Looking at the end result, Greg is not someone I admire or would want to be:
> Greg...became a director at a hedge fund. His net worth is now several thousand times my own.
Re: Why is it so hard to be rational?
#169I maintain that it isn't just hard, it is computationally impossible. We should all know that given a belief about the world, and evidence, Bayes' Theorem describes how to update our beliefs. But what if we have a network of interrelated beliefs? That's called a Bayesian net, and it turns out that Bayes' Theorem also prescribes a unique answer. However, unfortunately, it turns out that working out that answer is NP-h…
NP hard problems get abused for justifying things they cannot. An NP hard problem, even if it cannot be approximated does not mean the average input cannot be solved efficiently. Examples: - An NP hard problem is not sufficient for building crypto. - Type solving for many programming languages is EXP TIME complete, yet those languages prosper and compile just fine. Beware the idea of taking a mathematical concept and…
And human beings make approximate solutions for the average input all the time. That's what gut feelings, instincts, heuristics, and motivated reasoning are, along with all the other shortcuts we take to function in daily life.
The article is asking why it's so hard to be rational though, i.e. follow a logically-valid set of inferences forward to an unambiguous conclusion. Assuming one of your premises is that correct rationality implies reasoning statistically about a network of interrelated beliefs, the uncomputability of a Bayesian net is relevant to that.
Re: Why is it so hard to be rational?
#170There are some good bits in here. I love the subtitle especially: "The real challenge isn’t being right but knowing how wrong you might be." Knowing when not to provide an answer is hard. A big part of my job is communicating statistical findings and giving a good non-answer is much harder than giving a good answer, both technically speaking and socially speaking. One thing I'll add that drives me nuts is the fetishi…
Thinking Fast and Slow left me with a feeling of despair about the human inability to reason effectively about statistics.
I like to tell people that charts work better for asking questions than answering them. Once people know you look for answers there, the data changes. More so than they do for question asking (people will try to smooth the data to avoid awkward questions).