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Comment by teddyh | Hacker News Reader

Even humans can’t explain their own reasoning. We can only rationalize our intuitive decisions after the fact, but it’s pure hokum – all decisions are made intuitively using no rational thought whatsoever, only afterward can we make up rationalizations for it.

It follows that it should be perfectly possible for an A.I. to do this, too.

(Edit: I now realize that this rationalization process was theorized by Douglas Adams in Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, as described by Wikipedia:

“The story also mocks the corporate world with [the software] package called Reason, which inverts the idea of a decision-making program. Instead of proceeding from ideas and logic to a decision, it takes a decision that has already been made and creates a reasoned justification for it.”

— https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirk_Gently%27s_Holistic_Detec... )

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Let's say you want as much money as you can get. This is probably not rational. Now let's say you have a choice of being given $5 or $10, which do you choose? Why was that not a rational choice? Because it's predicated on an irrational desire?

It's trivial to brute-force an answer to your question: if I take $5 I'll get $5, if I take $10 I'll get $10. I prefer $10 to $5, so I take the $10.

Intelligence is needed when there are too many possibilities to brute-force. We need to make guesses about which actions may give better results; we have to spot patterns, generalisations and simplifications to allow re-use of previous experience; we need to identify the crucial aspects, in order to narrow down the possibilities; we need to allocate resources efficiently, and know when to give up; and so on.

These are the things we would like machines to do well, but we have no satisfactory theory to explain, measure or compare such things. Introspecting our own thought patterns is not an effective way to reverse-engineer these proceses in humans, as the parent says.

No, that is not what I meant – the choice itself is not made rationally, even though a theoretical rational actor might have made the same choice.

The most we humans can do it to make an intuitive choice, allow the post-hoc rationalization to occur and then check its rationality by analyzing its logic. If the logic is bad, we go back and try another intuitive choice.

By your own logic, you just made an intuitive decision about whether I have a point, and now you're just rationalizing it. Not much point in trying to have a rational conversation.

> By your own logic, you just made an intuitive decision about whether I have a point, and now you're just rationalizing it.

Yes, this is true. At least, it is what I believe to be happening.

> Not much point in trying to have a rational conversation.

What? Why not? We seem to be able to converse quite easily.

Is your belief falsifiable? Wouldn't the experimenter just be rationalizing their intuitive decision about the meaning of their observations regardless?

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