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Comment by trabant00 | Hacker News Reader

> Would you like to be more rational? Of course you would.

Personally I'm not jumping on that "of course". Rational thinking only works for clearly limited scope problems where you have all the data. Otherwise even perfect rational thinking - an unattainable ideal - fails because of "garbage in garbage out". Life in general being far from a clearly defined set of problems where you have all the data.

> By “mindfulness”—a feature of Buddhism for thousands of years, and a subject of scientific investigation for a few decades—most people mean a mental state you can be in.

What/where are the results from those thousands years of mindfulness? If the practice has an impact surely we should be able to see some things at a society level, or at least in some individuals who are particularly good at it.

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> Rational thinking only works for clearly limited scope problems where you have all the data. Otherwise even perfect rational thinking - an unattainable ideal - fails because of "garbage in garbage out". Life in general being far from a clearly defined set of problems where you have all the data.

Not so. Rationality isn’t just about perfect knowledge situations (e.g. like chess), it’s also about maximising your chances of success — or your expected utility, or whatever your goal is — based on the information you do have (e.g. in poker).

This is different from the GIN=GOUT problem; if you think you’re playing poker but you’re actually hallucinating wildly while negotiating an international trade deal, things will go badly no matter how rational the rest of your thought processes are.

Poker is still a very limited scoped problem with fixed rules. Not having perfect knowledge is not the issue. Think about more "human" problems. Let's start with something very simple as far as life questions go: should you play poker? Try to solve that with rational thinking.

GIN=GOUT can be a lot more subtle than being mad on mushrooms. One simple unknown detail (in that international trade deal the others are secretly working against you, the deck of cards is fixed in that poker game) makes all your rational actions lead you to disaster.

> One simple unknown detail (in that international trade deal the others are secretly working against you, the deck of cards is fixed in that poker game) makes all your rational actions lead you to disaster.

The rational things to do in the trade deal example are:

1: have an intelligence agency so you don’t get surprised by such plans

2: have a backup plan for how to deal with the inevitable time when someone else’s interests are anti-aligned with your own

A rationalist playing poker with a dodgy deck will notice this by virtue of the improbable happening too often.

>should you play poker? Try to solve that with rational thinking

Rational thoughts:

- I've played with these guys before and I know I'm more likely to win than lose. So it would be in my favor to play.

- I've lost more than I've won in the past, but the bets are small and these people are fun to hang around so as long as I don't come out more than $20 behind tonight, its worth the time

- I've lost more than I've won in the past and I have no connections with these people. I shouldn't play

- There's no money involved in this match, and I enjoy poker. So why not?

Irrational thoughts:

- I've lost more than I've won in the past, so I'm sure to win this time so the "luck" in the universe evens out

- Some sort of fortune told me I'd have good luck today, so it would be stupid not to play

- Gambling has put me in severe debt in the past, but I'm just going to push that negative thought out of my mind since its unpleasant to think about. Let's play

Rational thinking doesn’t preclude data gathering. There’s lots of data points to inform that position: who will I be playing against? What is my relative skill compared to them? Is skill a major factor in my poker play? Can I expect to lose money? If I expect to lose money, would I enjoy that anyway because the game itself is fun? Would I have a particular threshold over which my losses would ruin my fun? Can I come up with a sure fire way to prevent my losses breaching the fun threshold?

After data gathering, it’s no longer garbage in and garbage out. You’ll note the questions assumed a randomness to the results, captured the worst case scenario, and minimized it to something I can live with.

You can do this with everything. That’s the beauty of rational thinking. It’s less about knowing the absolute correct solution and more about being conscious of the process of decision, rather than letting intuitive cues be the only deciding factors.

Since we can’t have perfect knowledge in all situations, I took the meaning of “rational” to align more with making the most likely “right” choice under uncertainty. It’s more aligned with Bayesian decisions, where our prior beliefs get modified as more information gets processed. We may still be operating under some degree of uncertainty but there are certain choices that are more rational than others.

>it’s also about maximising your chances of success — or your expected utility, or whatever your goal is — based on the information you do have (e.g. in poker).

Can you explain this with a few examples?

I’ll try :)

Toy example:

You are offered the opportunity to play a game of chance. The house draws one card from a standard, fair, deck. Number cards win their face value in $, jack/queen/king/ace wins $20/$25/$30/$100 respectively. Assuming each dollar you win has the same utility to you, what is the largest amount you should be willing to pay to enter the game?

Expected value = expected win - cost; anything which makes the EV positive is worth playing

Expected win = $(100+2+3+4+5+6+7+8+9+10+20+25+30) * 4 / 52 = $17.61 (and a bit)

But most people get more utility from their first dollar than from their 1000th, so: if your net worth is $100k and the utility of money to you is sqrt(dollars), how does this change? I’m still learning this one on brilliant.org right now; I think it works out as:

EV = mean of EVs of all possible outcomes, each outcome being sqrt(100000 - cost to play + result of that win)

What if you are in a sketchy casino and you’re not confident the game is fair? If there’s a 10% chance the game is rigged and will force you to draw a 2, now what is the fair price to play the game?

Same idea, but now weight the results by the chances; 10% chance of a $2 return, 90% chance of previous result.

I don’t play poker; what little I do know is that it is a hidden information game where in order to win you have to attempt to infer the other player’s hands relative to your own, and that this is a game of skill rather than pure guesswork.

Thanks for the reply! It helps to understand the principle, but I was also curious how you apply Rational thinking to everyday situations. Using math as a tool is great, but that might only work in some situations.

> What/where are the results from those thousands years of mindfulness? If the practice has an impact surely we should be able to see some things at a society level, or at least in some individuals who are particularly good at it.

Oh man, I can't tell you how much it hurts me to hear this. But I get where you're coming from.

It's hard because with mindfulness and meditation there's nothing to sell and nothing to show for it. All you have is your own inner peace. And you can't just give it away, you have to teach how to get there, and it's a long and arduous process that most people just give up on.

So I guess what I'm saying is I take issue with "surely." It's not actually true. The practice has a major impact -- an earth-shattering, mind-expanding impact on one's life -- but because of the inability to "prove" it works or "make" someone do it, people tend to write it off.

If you're more interested in what mindfulness is about you can check out the book The Mind Illuminated. It's an alright book, written for the serious secular meditator, (even though the author isn't secular.) There's also Mindfulness in Plain English.

Here's to hoping that you're able to see past your skepticism and learn a little bit about these potentially life-changing tools. All the best man.

I've seen it argued that the main value is avoiding the failure modes that lead to depression, and the result is much lower rates of depression in those societies.

A few patterns about rationality I have seen a lot recently:

False rationality - People claim to be rational while touting some dogma they learned somewhere. Not even looking at any data. And when given data or counter-examples they just ignore it.

Anti-Rational - People claim that life is uncertain and data is garbage - while in fact there is a lot of good data available - and drawing conclusions is not even difficult.

I don't think the problem is with rationality. It feels more like rationality is going down because psychological pathologies (narcissm, cargo-cults, dogmas) are taking over.

Let's turn the question around then. Would you like to be less rational? I doubt anyone would say yes to that.

Being too rational - over thinking, ruminating, are real things. I think more and more people would answer yes.

"Rational = good" is the opinion of just one philosophy - the Enlightenment. And it has been rightfully criticized by all the other philosophy schools that came after it.

Overthinking can be a problem, though I think this is only because of one of our other biases: we mistake how often we think about something for how likely it is to actually happen, the “availability heuristic”.

I get the impression you’re thinking of and arguing against the sort of pseudo-rationality portrayed on TV and film: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zuJmtSqt3TsnBTYyu/communicat...

"Being too rational - over thinking, ruminating"

Why is overthinking and ruminating an extension of rationality?

Overthinking is a departure from rationality rather than an example of rationality, and ruminating is a psychological problem stemming from anxiety.

>Why is overthinking and ruminating an extension of rationality?

Because it's a trait will all too often see associated with people touting their "rationality"...

>Overthinking is a departure from rationality rather than an example of rationality

If you redifine rationality to exclude overthinking then yes, but you're cheating.

You can be totally rational and overthinking, with perfectly good, all the more elaborate arguments...

Anybody who feels too nerdy/well actually/cold/disconected because of his too much thinking,

everybody who sees that they miss the holistic forest for rationaly thinking about the trees,

everybody who destroyed their life because of their higher IQ given ability to rationalize all kinds of BS with smart arguments,

would answer yes...

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