Comment by achenatx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by achenatx | Hacker News Reader

The ultimate issue is that underpinning every action is a value system. Value systems are opinions and are fundamentally not rational.

Virtually every political disagreement is based on values, though most of the time people dont recognize it.

Values determine priorities and priorities underpin action.

For example some people feel that liberty (e.g. choice) is more important than saving lives when it comes to vaccines.

Some people feel that economic efficiency is less important than reducing suffering.

Some people feel that the life of an unborn child is worth less than the ability to choose whether to have that child

Even in the article, is a stereo that sounds better actually better than a stereo that looks better? That is a value judgement and there is no right or wrong.

No one is actually wrong since everything is value judgements. Many people believe in universal view of ethics/morality. There is almost no universal set of ethics/morality if you look across space and time.

However some values allow a culture to out compete other cultures causing the "inferior" values to disappear. New mutations are constantly being created. Most are neutral and have no impact on societal survival. Some are negative and some are positive.

I came to say something similar, that rational decision making is really a poorly posed problem at some level.

Take money for example. You can create a theoretical decision-making dilemma involving certain sums of money, and work out what the most rational strategy is, but in reality, the differences between different sums of money is going to differ between people depending on different value systems and competing interests. So then you get into this scenario where 1 unit of money means something different to different people (the value you put on 1 € is going to be different from the value I put on it; the exchange rates are sort of an average over all these valuations), which might throw off the relevance of the theoretical scenario for reality, or change the optimal decision scenario.

The other issue beside the one you're relating to -- the subjectivity of the weights assigned to different outcomes, the achille's heel of utility theory -- is uncertainty not just about the values in the model, but whether the model is even correct at all. That is, you can create some idea that some course of action is more rational, but what happens when there's some nontrivial probability that the whole framework is incorrect? Your decision about A and B, then, shouldn't just be modeled in terms of whatever is in your model, but all the other things you're not accounting for. Maybe there are other decisions, C and D, which you're not even aware of, or someone else is, but you have to choose B to get to them.

Just yesterday I read this very well-reasoned, elegant, rational explanation by an epidemiologist about why boosters aren't needed. But about 3/4 of the way through I realized it was all based on an assumption that is very suspect, and which throws everything out the window. There are still other things their arguments were missing. So by the end of it I was convinced of the opposite conclusion.

Rationality as a framework is important, but it's limited and often misleading.

> is a stereo that sounds better actually better than a stereo that looks better? That is a value judgement and there is no right or wrong.

Disagree; value systems are the inputs to rationality. The only constraint is that you do the introspection in order to know what it is that you value. In that sense buying a stereo based on appearance is the right decision if you seek status among peers or appreciate aesthetics. It's the wrong decision if you want sound quality or durability.

I think the real issue is that people don't do the necessary introspection, and instead just glom onto catch-phrases or follow someone else's lead. That's why so many people hold political views that are contrary to their own interests.

Yes, and I think when people claim to be describing what a "rational actor" would do, what they often leave out are the normative assumptions inherent in their rational analysis. Moreover, I suspect the omission at times is not accidental.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com