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Comment by bakhy | Hacker News Reader

really interesting read.

the only thing that bugs me, with this text, and the whole rationalist world-view, is how human emotion sometimes becomes a thing to be ashamed of. something beneath a hypothesized "true", "correct" condition. like, the part about recognizing that other people have different minds, different motives, and thus reach different conclusions - on one hand i agree that it is a matter of personal development, and that many people are just plain jerks (sometimes, myself included). but on the other hand, the political examples given in the text seem like a normal emotional response. isn't it simply hard trying to think for everyone, understand everyone all the time? is it even possible? particularly when the issue is something that, for whatever reason, you feel personally. it is not automatically a sign of retarded cognitive development if you just simply got tired.

rationalism sometimes seems so, well, christian - we are all filthy sinners by default.

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> the only thing that bugs me, with this text, and the whole rationalist world-view, is how human emotion sometimes becomes a thing to be ashamed of. something beneath a hypothesized "true", "correct" condition.

The "rationalist world-view" is just noticing that (per #1) what brain tells you and what the world really is are two different things, therefore your emotions may or may not be properly aligned with reality (btw. this is also the primary insight of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy). Emotions are just like opinions, but in different part of the brain - you want to have ones that correspond to reality.

"Contrary to the stereotype, rationality doesn't mean denying emotion. When emotion is appropriate to the reality of the situation, it should be embraced; only when emotion isn't appropriate should it be suppressed." - http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Emotion

OK, but let's take again the political example - there is a confounding social factor there. i think it is common to regard a concession, in the eyes of the public, as defeat. this drives many people to shout their positions, and disregard rational counterarguments, resorting to personal attacks (like the "democrats are pro-crime" claim). even if those people are in fact perfectly reasonable otherwise... the political example is really insufficiently explained by bringing in just cognitive development.

now, generally, from experience, i have the impression that higher mental skills often translate simply into a higher capability of producing more elaborate rationalizations of positions that a person would have held anyway, positions which are rooted in emotions. pointing out rational counterarguments can in many situations only go so far. in fact, i have many times had an easier time discussing with people one might call primitive, since you get to the truth of their motives very quickly, and with respectful approach to people's feelings, a lot can be achieved. with very rational people it's sometimes really difficult to break through the layers of rationalizations.

i'm not saying that rationalism is bad, or that the author (or you) like to go around calling people retards :D i just feels that despite best intentions it can lead to disregard for emotion, even though in many cases emotion is the ultimate relevant "reality of the situation". we can and must make ourselves better, but we can never stop being people.

> now, generally, from experience, i have the impression that higher mental skills often translate simply into a higher capability of producing more elaborate rationalizations of positions that a person would have held anyway, positions which are rooted in emotions. pointing out rational counterarguments can in many situations only go so far. in fact, i have many times had an easier time discussing with people one might call primitive, since you get to the truth of their motives very quickly (...) with very rational people it's sometimes really difficult to break through the layers of rationalizations.

I think that's a potential failure mode of getting too smart. Rationality is supposed to teach you to notice when you're building layers of rationalization instead of updating your opinion to account for new evidence. It's a hard habit to learn, so what you described often happens instead. But if you're aware of this trap I still think learning more is better than not learning :).

> with respectful approach to people's feelings, a lot can be achieved

That's probably the truth about dealing with people, of all kinds of skill, education, smartness, etc. I'd say most of interpersonal conflicts come from one or both sides not groking it.

i absolutely agree that learning more is still better! in fact, meeting a gray area like this one is to me a heuristic indicator that something really worth learning is lurking behind. i think i took it from Zen - path to enlightenment through doubt...

my question is perhaps do we properly acknowledge the difficulty we face? you say, for example, "it's a hard habit to learn" - but can we ever even learn it fully? it should make us humble. we can easily add disclaimers to our speech, but in practice it shows that we don't really mean them. we say it is hard to shake the rationalizing habit, and yet we often ascribe a level of certainty and objectivity to our conclusions which makes it seem like we completely disregard the possibility of our own emotions being behind our thinking. and ultimately, can any thought ever be had without an emotion behind it? Minsky, i think, remarked that he does not believe AI without emotion is possible. i completely agree with that.

The point of rationality is to detect your own cognitive failures and to recognize and exploit those of others. It's pretty explicitly NOT about ignoring them.

So when I observe someone saying "that guy is racist, don't believe his arguments", I can recognize that this is an emotional claim. It's an attempt to demonize a person rather than refute the argument. I can then observe that no one is disputing the actual argument, evaluate that on merit, and have a true belief about the world unbiased by my desire not to affiliate with racists. I can also update my beliefs about the rationality/honesty of the person saying "hey that guy is racist".

Conversely, I can also recognize that a desire not to be racist is strong in people, and exploit it when I want to manipulate the less rational. For example, if I'm arguing against economic protectionism with an emotionally driven person, I might use Jim Crow as an example of protectionism rather than occupational licensing.

i think you missed my point, which was that these so called "cognitive failures" are really integral to what we are. rationalism is not generally wrong. improving your cognitive abilities should be a goal for everyone. but it tends to lead people to a worldview where simple humanity is deemed inferior, wrong, and where a person actually starts believing that they outgrew themselves and their humanity, that they are superior, objective, free of bias. this is an illusion, nobody is free of bias.

in fact, people who believe they successfully suppressed or outgrew any emotion are typically the ones most influenced by it, subconsciously.

The rationalists I know in real life tend to be acutely aware that they are still biased in many ways, and would probably laugh at the sentence fragment "successfully suppressed or outgrew [an] emotion". Maybe we know completely different people who affiliate with the word "rationality".

Much like the Zen ideologies, there is no end state to being a rational human being. You can't just stop at one point and say "That's it, I'm perfectly rational now, therefore..."

Instead, it's more of an ongoing process. The process of identifying your biases and reasoning about them is on-going. You will always have biases, the trick is to make the subconscious influence conscious. To come back to the Zen comparison - the more rational you become, the more you realize you're not rational at all.

well said. i just feel it is something people easily say, but hardly put into practice.

i am being unfair, perhaps, as the other comment here states. i may be identifying some negative aspects in some people with a whole group that did not deserve it. but, OTOH, you two may be resorting to the "No True Scotsman" fallacy.

> you two may be resorting to the "No True Scotsman" fallacy.

That may be a fair statement, since I do not believe there is a perfectly rational person in the real world - just those who are working to fight against their inherit irrationality. All we can ever rationally (oh, the irony) expect is that they do their best.

So your rationality skills give you a lot of advantages in arguments, more or less independently of the actual merits of your position. Rather than compete in that zero-sum game, isn't the best thing for society then to distrust anyone with rationality skills and form social norms against then?

It's not a zero sum. If my opponent is also rational and unpersuaded by emotional pleas, then we converge to truth more rapidly.

I recently got around to reading Scott Aaronson's Complexity of Agreement: http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/agree-econ.pdf

One of the predictions of this paper is that rational Bayesians sharing information will a) rapidly converge to agreement and b) after making arguments, will often switch sides. An individual's position in an argument will look like a convergent random walk rather than a gradual concession in a negotiation. Of course, real life arguments rarely go this way [1].

But when reading this, I was struck by the fact that in some rare cases I have engaged in arguments that move this way. In every case I can think of, the other participant in the conversation was either a mathematician, a philosophers or a lesswrong reader.

[1] One rare exception to this is real life arguments about what a stock price should be. Yay for market transmission of information!

You're right that not everything is zero-sum. But I suspect an overwhelming majority of the issues that come up for argument are very close to zero-sum.

not to attack your position, but just to further illustrate where i'm going with all this.

> ...rational Bayesians sharing information...

setting aside the inherent humor of economics (which is sadly completely lost on economists), have you ever wondered - why would a purely rational actor even participate in the discussion, or, as a matter of fact, in anything? why would a purely logical machine get out of bed in the morning? would it not need to "want" something first? what would an emotionless logical machine "think" about, and why would it think about that and not something else? intellect without emotion is nothing. not figuratively, not poetically, but literally nothing.

P.S. since when does the word "converge" apply to anything going on in a market? :P

Why do you think a rational actor has no goals, or is somehow emotionless?

The word "converge" has always applied to market responses to new info. Find a news event (e.g., WMT Oct 13-14) and look at the second or minute level movements near that event. It's qualitatively quite similar to Aaronson's theorem.

well, i'm definitely not educated on the terminology, particularly when it comes to economics. i guess we could clear out a lot of the misunderstanding here as soon as we sort the terms out ;)

so, just IMO, a perfectly rational actor should be emotionless, at least on the matter at hand. any kind of emotional tendency would skew their reasoning.

to add to what you said more above, about those fruitful discussions: i would bet that the people you had those fruitful discussions with have had another common characteristic. namely, they did not have much personal stake in the issue you were discussing. when people approach a discussion with only a desire to learn and improve their opinions, they can indeed have a quality discussion.

ultimately, i don't believe such neat separation of rational and irrational can ever work (aside from sometimes being a useful approximation). which is why i asked those silly questions - how can a rational actor want something, without wanting it? i find the concept very contradictory, borderline useless.

edit - i think i have to back down a bit, or maybe just clarify, dunno. i maybe get what you meant. people that appreciate rationality will tend to be better discussion partners even if they are personally affected. but it will be much harder...

> a perfectly rational actor should be emotionless.

Nope. A perfectly rational actor should have unskewed reasoning, yes, but you can (in principle) achieve that by making your emotions not skew your reasoning rather than by throwing your emotions away.

> why would a purely logical machine get out of bed in the morning? would it not need to "want" something first?

In a word - huh? An irrational person might wake up one morning with the urge to paint a picture - are you suggesting a purely rational person wouldn't feel such an urge, or that they wouldn't act on it? In either case, why not?

i'm suggesting "purely rational" prohibits the existence of emotion, otherwise we're dealing with a contradiction. sorry, i already replied to the peer comment to yours, maybe you can reply there?..

This discussion is confusing terms. Economic meaning of a rational agent is a bit different than the one we're discussing here.

See: [0] about the definition and [1] about the feelings angle.

[0] - http://lesswrong.com/lw/31/what_do_we_mean_by_rationality/

[1] - http://lesswrong.com/lw/hp/feeling_rational/

Unfortunately, /u/yummyfajitas is severely mischaracterizing the point of "rationality". Viz:

>The point of rationality is to detect your own cognitive failures and to recognize and exploit those of others.

This is false. The point of "rationality" is to achieve greater cognitive success: to have your thoughts yield information about the world by allowing the world to move your thoughts. The people who try to do this (such as, in this case, me) do so because we feel like our thoughts and emotions ought to be about stuff. The more I make my emotions be linked to my thoughts and my thoughts be linked to the real world, the less gnawing self-doubt I have to deal with when things go bad, and the more I can enjoy when things go right.

If all you can do was recognize cognitive failures, you will end up an epistemic relativist, which is useless.

If what you care about is exploiting the cognitive failures of others, you're just a jerk.

You're talking more about epistemic rationality - getting closer to the truth; 'yummyfajitas seems to be talking more about instrumental rationality - doing and thinking stuff that systematically yields success. But generally, you're right, and here:

> If what you care about is exploiting the cognitive failures of others, you're just a jerk.

I totally, 100% agree with you. Rationality is a tool; if you use it to exploit people, you're just a jerk.

Everyone exploits people in this way. Have you ever worn a suit or otherwise altered your appearance to influence the decisions of others? Ever built a landing page using a theme other than default HTML, in order to make people happier when reading? Ever noted an irrelevant shared interest ("hey we both love kale!") to someone you are trying to sell to, or otherwise influence the behavior of?

Is everyone a jerk?

In my view, a big failure of rationalists (coming from the typical mind fallacy, most likely) is that too little effort to manipulations of this sort. It's certainly a failure on mine.

Fair enough. I see what you're getting at, and it's indeed the basic way we communicate - by influencing each other.

I thought long about it and I'm still confused at some points, but I ended up viewing the issue through a lens of intent. Am I exploiting people by building a pretty website? Maybe, in a way that my actions cause them to spend more time on it. But if I do it with intention of helping them accomplish whatever they're looking to accomplish, that will be beneficial to them, then it's ok. If I'm doing it to trick them into wasting more time on my site full of half-assed linkbait content so that I earn money through them viewing ads, then I am a fucking jerk.

So no, not everyone is a jerk. Only those who seek to act to purposefully harm others (usually to gain something at their expense). Which sort of fits the very definition of the world "jerk".

Not everyone sells. Not everyone does any of the things you list. Not everyone's a jerk, at least at a conscious level (and I think people are correct to put more trust in people who will only manipulate unconsciously)

I don't know about you, but calling Democrats "pro-crime" sounds pretty immature to me. I'm embarrassed to belong to a society where the status quo is so uncharitable that you're willing to excuse this slander as "people just being people". You may cringe at the word "retard", but does it not unnerve you just as much that the journalist called half the U.S. literally malicious?

I'm personally of the opinion that people who spout such nonsense are perfectly aware that it's nonsense; they're simply trying to appeal to the radicals: the vocal, irrational minority.

The reason to do so is also perfectly rational - they're easier to get to the voting booths to vote for your candidate with such rhetoric. The moderates, who are unswayed (yet annoyed) by such rhetoric are more likely to be the ones who do not show up at the voting table, because they see the rhetoric from both sides as equally reprehensible, and will either not vote at all (in my case, due to the futility of voting in the US's current two party system), or vote for a third party (making their vote equally irrelevant as if they hadn't voted at all).

So, both sides appeal to those folks who are so easily swayed by irrational comments which make them feel superior to "those dirty left/right-wingers", and the result is power (government positions) and money (PACs, lobbyists, donations).

I think a lot of people really do believe their own non-sense. It's easier to lie when one honestly believes the falsehood. Consider that the same instincts that drive partisan politics are the same instincts that drive spectator sports. Are the fans cheering because of a conscious awareness of political strategy? Or are they cheering because -- gosh darnit -- being on a team is fun. Do you think the children in the Robbers Cave Experiment were masterminds of political intrigue? Or do you think the conflict arose out of instinct. That the strategy happens to turn out super-rational in the field is orthogonal to the question of whether their beliefs bubble up to a level of conscious awareness.

I've met people who honestly have made the "dey must be evil" maneuver. My experience says the sentiment is genuine.

do you realize that you're now going for a very emotional attack on my comment? do you see the problem? :)

you also seem to be putting words into my mouth. i was merely offering an additional explanation for that behavior, to indicate that simply putting it under "poor cognitive development" (i.e. calling people retards, but in bigger words) is insufficient. i never said that we should all accept absolutely anything, and skip across blooming meadows singing kumbaya lol.

And I disagree with your explanation. The journalist isn't simply committing a fallacy or misinterpreting an argument. The journalist went out of their way to accuse a political demographic of malicious intent. Out-group dynamics like this is something people actively shape (as demonstrated by the Robber Caves Experiment). Maybe we ought to classify it under something other than immaturity. But we can't chalk it up to laziness, mental fatigue, or #justPeopleThings as if it were an accident.

> do you realize that you're now going for a very emotional attack on my comment?

Honestly, I don't know what you're trying to prove here. My comment is invalid because I expressed embarrassment? lol?

Errata regarding your other threads. LW members call themselves "aspiring rationalists" to remind themselves that they have not yet "outgrown humanity" [0]. You also seem to confuse logic and rationality. When economists talk about rational agents, they're discussing an agent which employs a decision making algorithm consistent with the VonNeuman Morgenstern Utility Theorem [1].

[0] http://lesswrong.com/lw/h8/tsuyoku_naritai_i_want_to_become_...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann%E2%80%93Morgenster...

no, it's just you keep putting words in my mouth. as i already said above, which you fail to read for the second time - i did not offer it as THE black-and-white explanation. i merely pointed out that going for the retard explanation is insufficient - as you yourself have said, they could just be evil :) so why are you fuming? we seem to actually agree. jeez.

and the reason i asked the "do you realize" question is because we were talking here about rationalism and it's limits. i'm in a kind of mildly anti-rationalism position, and you attack me, all emotional. so i thought, this is kinda funny. get it?

edit - and now, in an edit, you suddenly join the discussion... i'll have to get back to you later.

> as you yourself have said, they could just be evil

This is exactly the opposite of my opinion. Very rarely do people think of themselves as "evil". E.g. I highly doubt Bin Laden thought of himself as an evil man. He probably thought he was doing the Middle East a favor. Same goes for Hitler.

My embarrassment and disappointment is directed towards contemporary society, the decadence of which I find your comment's non-chalance indicative of. And no, you're not as clever as you think you are by distinguishing rationality from emotion as if they were mutually exclusive. That you posit others believe emotions are something to be ashamed of is a straw man. Or better yet, a Straw Vulcan [0] (it looks like temporal covered this topic already).

[0] http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StrawVulcan

your perception of society's "decadence", whatever the hell that's supposed to mean, is your problem. i was trying to have a discussion here, but you're apparently deliberately misreading everything i write because you have some battle to fight against society... wow.

must be hard being so superior to everyone around you, huh? ;)

I'm not trying to fight a battle against society. I was trying to express exasperation at your explanation.

A thought experiment. Imagine that everyone in the 18th century (including 60 year old men and women) jokingly called each other "retard". Would this strike you as immature? What if I expressed this sentiment aloud, and someone responded "There's a confounding social factor. If one were to object to such a social norm, he or she might be called a square and thus ridiculed! Maybe it's not right, but we can never stop being people."

This response bothers me. To call it a "confounding" rather than "additional" factor implies that risk of reputation somehow funges against the immaturity of the social norm. I would argue that calling people "retards" is immature regardless of the mechanism driving the social norm. On top of this, you seem to be implying that I think myself "superior" to those calling other people retards.

(Now replace every instance of "retard" with "evil democrats". That is my original argument.)

(By the way, your comment frames things as if you're 100% the good guy, and I'm obviously a villain. This is the exact behavior the Robinson article criticizes.)

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