Does irrationality fuel innovation?
juliagalef.com
juliagalef.com
-George Bernard Shaw.
A bit of craziness can create very unexpected results, with a destabalization wave having many orders of effects. The strong become weak, the weak strong, the poor rich, the stupid "smart".
So much of the status quo relies on people willing to play games. The stability of a game is its degree of belief. That is, it is sustained by cooperative delusion.
Another example is that salaries are maintained by collective willing agreement on what is fair. A union, if it amasses enough believers can disrupt this game.
Every game you tear down brings you closer to reality and raw possibility. Often it is necessary because of the limited attention for games. Of course, touching reality for the self is insanely hard, nevermind established institutions. Single individuals however can amass a following, seedingargwr waves of energy tha re-evaluate the status quo, swapping what is profane and sacred.
This wave of energy is what gives us temporary clarity on reality. Like earthquakes destroying a city, reminding us that the universe doesn't particularly care about our games.
One of the biggest games that is currently unravelling is the West as a beacon of innovation and morality. The response to 9/11 was exactly what terrorists wanted. And things like brexit and trump don't particularly help. From a GDP perspectice, each citizen in the US is worth many times a citizen from China or India, but this is only the result of a long historical game that impoverished these former world powers.
The natural order of things is that each human provides the same value, the reason this doesnt happen is due to resource flown restriction along lines of military strength.
Each human doesn't provide the 'same value'. However, I believe value creation is much more chaotic than what economic praxis will try to make it appear. Any person has the potential to create value - under very peculiar circumstances that are not very well understood.
In today's society one person may end up creating more value than a thousand others, by inventing something, by being lucky or just by having the right combination of values, connections and friends at the right time and at the right place. Then again, effort still counts, but it's just one of many factors.
People in poorer countries often work harder for much less as if they were less intelligent, less creative, less deserving etc.. In the U.S., lines were drawn on the basis of innate intelligence to deny slaves rights and wealth, and even internally to their own people, lines are drawn based on "deserving-ness", like hard-work, despite, as previously mentioned, you can be working harder but making less.
To use an analogy, a point may move in many directions on a piece of paper. The distance from the origin would be knowledge and ability in that direction. Some points may spiral around only increase this distance very slowly, some may go in a straight line, increasing ability at the most rapid pace possible.
I don't mean that each point is equidistant from the origin, but that certain "ink colors" have advantages and disadvantages in certain directions and that these advantages and disadvantages are actually man-made. That is, it's not the innate troughs and valleys of the paper, but the other ink paths that impede/boost other ink paths. To use slavery as an example, an lot of effort was spent by white ink to encircle black ink so the max potential of a black point was very low. So many years later, the descendants of the black ink are still struggling and working harder (with some become jaded at the unfairness and rebelling) while the white ink can cruise with the momentum amassed by their ancestors. The situation is unfair because both white ink and black ink have the same "value". The environment has shifted to value one ink color above another despite the equal value at the beginning.
Affirmative action says "This is unfair, we need to manually take steps to address this." While libertarianism says "It is what it is, the troughs and valleys may have been dug by man but there is not point in reverting them, just pretend they are natural."
Therefore, a particular level of investment can simultaneously be irrational from the perspective of an individual but rational from the perspective of society.
Overall, I'm not sure if this is a debate with an answer that will help people move forward. Everyone probably agrees that have accurate beliefs is good, all else equal. And everyone probably agrees that living a good life doesn't require you to maximize your belief accuracy at the expense of all else.
Maybe the central idea nugget is that a high degree of self-doubt will improve belief accuracy but hurt other aspects of your life, such as speed of idea generation or speed of work output. I suppose that's a trade off that we all must navigate, consciously or otherwise.
For the kind of long-term emotional investment it takes to do research or develop something new, one (typically) needs to have "buy-in" at an emotional level (aka irrationality). Few humans can invest a lot of their time/effort/resources on things they believe are probably not worth the trouble; sustained dissonance would probably cause burnout.
Or religion.
I think the "cost" entirely depends on the frame in which the truth is held. It is my belief/hypothesis, that internally visualized truths are cheap to be "rational" in the internal frame. Out here, in reality, those "truths" become irrational, i.e. a lot of expensive work must go into manifesting those truths in the "hardness" of reality.
Irrational truths can manifest "on the cheap" here, I think, if they don't involve speaking for other's truths. Sticking to your own vision, for yourself (or a god), seems to be a common teaching across multiple religions and philosophies. Maybe groups can manifest things cheaply here if it is a common truth for a large amount of the group (and only one or two groups).
I appreciate someone else knows about dissonance. It's a powerful force, when involved in complexity.
"Best practices" and "state-of-the-art" are usually appallingly bad, but conformity is the norm https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments
https://sivers.org/book/Antifragile
More irrationality -> more trouble -> more innovation ?
Fools often rush in and are successful because they didn't know they shouldn’t have been able to do something. But more often than not, I think they’re met with disaster simply because the skillset they lack is the same one they need to be successful.
Conversely, sometimes competent people are restrained by existing opinion structures.
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke's_three_laws (The first of his three laws, the third of which is the magic-tech one)
"Even if it turns out that time travel is impossible, it is important that we understand why it is impossible." - Stephen Hawking
This article made me think of this line from Does irrationality fuel innovation? "A lot of important truths come from v. irrational ppl."
You guys are smarter than I am. Any correlation? Is there any hope that his irrationality might just be what the world needed? Crazy like a fox? Didn't he gain most of his support from people's desire to shake things up? People didn't necessarily like him. They had an overwhelming desire that maybe a force from the outside traditional government could bring a change.
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/04/08/us/politics/trump-doct...
Perhaps when things get stuck it is in fact rational to be irrational-- to strategically adopt odd heterodox modes of thought or even employ a bit of randomness (Monte Carlo methods) to shake yourself free of a local maximum.
However, the bigger impact is the effect of their marketing on the public.
It should worry you about the more complicated things that are being marketed by the financial industry.
For example, many people versed in networking were using the early internet to make voice communications circumventing long distance telecom bills. It just seems obvious to them then (and many more people now) that if you can send data through the internet, why not encode audio in that data?
Well, it is. There are so many easier ways to dodge taxes.
Translated: if you don't try crazy ideas sometimes, you're not accurately modeling the chances an idea is crazy.