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Why is it so hard to be rational?

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Re: Why is it so hard to be rational?

#241

Post by Tenoke »

nicoburns wrote: post #226
Tenoke wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody is disputing this. You can, however, clearly be more or less 'rational', adopt better or worse heuristics, etc. which is what you attempt to get from reading LessWrong or Kahneman.

But what constitutes a better heuristic is context dependent. In particular, if I must make a decision in a time-constrained manner then any heuristic that blows the time budget is going to be worse even if it would be better given more time. And one can't really know in advance how much time spent thinking is optimal. So one has to pick a strategy. The fact that humans have evolved to use a variety of strategies fas…

Sure, but I doubt you actually think that everyone is already operating as well as they can within the contexts they are placed. There's definitely room for improvement. There are all sorts of scenarios where even knowing nearly optimal techniques outcomes can be improved by going the TimSort way due to the context you most often find yourself in.

Re: Why is it so hard to be rational?

#242

Post by lisper »

btilly wrote: post #215
lisper wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To late to edit the above comment, but just for the record, this is my actual response to the many-worlders: http://blog.rongarret.info/2019/07/the-trouble-with-many-wor...

I read it, but from it you seem to be making three points. 1. Many worlds is indeed what QM predicts should happen. 2. Popular descriptions are oversimplified and the full explanation is very complicated. 3. Even if many worlds is true, it doesn't change my experience and should not rationally change how I act when faced with quantum uncertainty. If I am correct, then I'm in violent agreement with all three points. A…

> Many worlds is indeed what QM predicts should happen.

No. Many-worlds is what the SE predicts should happen. But the SE != QM. MW does not explain the Born rule, which is part of QM's predictions. MW is also violently at odds with subjective experience. So MW is not a good explanation of what is observed.

Re: Why is it so hard to be rational?

#243

Post by UnFleshedOne »

kazinator wrote: post #229
UnFleshedOne wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't say values are irrational -- they just are. If you really like paperclips, no amount of logic can tell you otherwise. What logic can tell you (and other people could), is that your values conflict with each other and you have to balance one against another. Turning whole universe into paperclips is counterproductive if you also value pins. If you literally have no value the other person is basing their argu…

> You can't say values are irrational People basically do say that, though. (Values can be contradictory/inconsistent. E.g. you say you value self-preservation, but you also enjoy whacking your head with a hammer. That would be a kind of irrational. That's not what I'm referring to though.)

I think they make a category mistake when they do then. Values tell you where you want to be, rationality is a most accurate process to get where you want to go and maybe to check if you want to be there before actually getting there and checking out personally. (I think we basically agree btw btw, it is all those other people who are wrong :))

Re: Why is it so hard to be rational?

#244

Post by btilly »

strulovich wrote: post #124
btilly wrote: post #14

I 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…

You are correct. For example the worst and average cases for the Simplex Method are dramatically different.

However, in practice, complex Bayesian nets do wind up being computationally intractable. Therefore attempts to build real world machine learning systems consistently find themselves going to computationally tractable heuristic methods with rather obvious failure modes.

Re: Why is it so hard to be rational?

#245

Post by tunesmith »

not2b wrote: post #53
polote wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it depends on the topic. Choosing rationally between the most green of two tomatoes is easy. You are limited by your ability to distinguish colors but you can still decide rationally. Not all questions have answers, if you want to be rational when you are asked to answer those question, you can just say "I dont know" At the beginning of the pandemic, when politics were saying mask dont work. You could just say,…

A rationalist would recognize that we update our beliefs as new evidence is available and not attack people for having erroneous beliefs before that evidence was available. The "masks don't work" advice was active for a short time in March 2020 and almost immediately dumped. They thought at the time that only n95 masks would be good enough, these masks were in short supply and health care workers needed them, this wa…

What a lot of people have forgotten is that in March 2020, they thought COVID was droplets, not aerosol - remember all the emphasis on washing hands and hand sanitizer? - and as such, masks would be overkill for most. Combine that with the worry that people would hoard masks when PPE was in short supply for people would be interacting directly with patients, then the initial discouragement on masks seems more understandable.

As the science changed to suggest that COVID was aerosol, scientific opinions on masks got updated as well.

It also didn't help that some hyper-rational people got hung up on ranting about how masks weren't perfect, and how the virus could still get through if you wore a mask. It was as if they imagined they heard someone said "masks are 100% effective" and really really wanted to register their counterpoints. So they said "they don't work!" when they meant "they're not 100% effective!", and other people heard "they don't work!" and took it to mean "they're 0% effective!" That's one of those patterns you start to see all over the place when you know to look for it - people confusing "there exists" and "forall".

Re: Why is it so hard to be rational?

#246

Post by yibg »

btilly wrote: post #14

I 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…

Being NP-hard doesn't make it computationally impossible in all cases though. So while it might be computationally impossible to be rational in ALL cases, it could be computationally possible to be rational in some (or even many) cases. I think that's the goal to strive for.

Re: Why is it so hard to be rational?

#247

Post by ret2plt »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #228
lalaithion wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why it's called "less wrong". The goal isn't to be perfect, the goal is to do better. To be less wrong.

I think this misses the point. Even being "less" wrong requires an amount of work that even the best/smartest etc... cannot consistently apply. I do believe this is zero-sum in that improving on one set of decisions means no applying the same rigor to others. This is often seen in the form of very smart people also believing conspiracy theories or throwing their hands up around other massive issues. As an example, th…

> This is often seen in the form of very smart people also believing conspiracy theories or throwing their hands up around other massive issues. As an example, the "Rationalist crowd" has de-emphasized work on climate change mitigation in favor of more abstract work on AI safety.

To be clear, the argument (in rationalist circles) is not that climate change is no big deal, it's that there's already a ton of people worrying about it, so it is better to allocate some extra resources to underfunded problems.

Re: Why is it so hard to be rational?

#248

Post by _y5hn »

WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #129
_y5hn wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a fact many people believe themselves rational and use models expecting rational actors. Proof lacks that it actually works that way. The opposite is often most probable since you rarely have perfect knowledge in practice. Exceptions can be games like tic-tac-toe and chess.

> Proof lacks that it actually works that way I mean everyone know it doesn't really work that way. The actual question is: does viewing the average actor as trying to perfectly optimise their utility function using all the information available constitute a good estimation of how actors work in aggregate and does it yield accurate and interesting predictions? The real insight of Simon in Models of Man is not that ac…

Sure, but such models are hackable / breakable, just by breaking the rules or reinventing the game.

Re: Why is it so hard to be rational?

#249

Post by analog31 »

voxic11 wrote: post #36
wombatmobile wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the goal is to do better Why is that "the" goal? Who sets "the" goal?

Its the goal of the LessWrong/Rationalist community.

Less Wrong seems to be a manifestation of a thing that comes in cycles: Something triggers the rise of a "rationalist" movement, including possibly a new evangelist or a new medium. Eventually, rationalism and rational people end up at a standoff. Then the whole thing repeats itself after a period of time.

I'm probably rational enough but also can't make sense of much of the rationalist literature, so I simply follow my own compass and hope for the best. I'm skeptical of Bayes Theater.

Re: Why is it so hard to be rational?

#250

Post by johnwheeler »

raldi wrote: post #235
johnwheeler wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But then you're not being perfectly rational. You're calculating the odds, which is what my second sentence says. Being perfectly rational is impossible. See: perfect rationality vs bounded rationality

Maybe I don't understand what you mean by "perfectly rational". I'm using the definition from the article: A perfectly calibrated individual will be right X% of the time about statements in which they are X% confident. Are you using a different definition?

Perfectly rational means just what it sounds like. Making the correct decision because you have all available data.

Being perfectly rational is impossible.

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