The Limits of Rationality
pursuingreality.com
pursuingreality.com
In small amounts, self-deception and avoidance of discomfort are necessary coping mechanisms. Reality is daunting, mysterious, and random; staring into the abyss can cause despair. It's a better strategy to be slightly optimistic, even if there isn't a strong rational basis for that outlook. Taken too far, you get total self delusion, the people who live in their own reality distortion fields, but there are benefits to a modicum of irrational self confidence.
The vast extrapolation of this into "depressive realism" has always struck me as misguided. The test favors depressed people's instincts because they tend to have less belief in self-agency in general. If the light was influenced by the button you might have seen the opposite gap, with the non-depressed being more accurate.
A scientist looking at a rainbow can enjoy the thought that their eye is at the apex of a cone of light - looking parallel along the side of the cone - and that the projected cone looks like an arc. A field of rays which your eyes only see a fraction of. A scientist can wonder about the infrared and ultraviolet colours that are not visible. A scientist can appreciate that there is no colour magenta in the rainbow - a rainbow does not contain "all" colours. A scientist can wonder about how discrete drops dashing through the air can create a continuous looking rainbow - Monet or Esher would appreciate that. A scientist can delight in creating a rainbow by construction, not only by discovery. A scientist can search for rainbows in unobvious places that they might expect one.
Adding those facets to an artist doesn't take anything away from an artistic appreciation. It is additive to the wonder.
Given this is HN, I read that comment as assuming an entrepreneurial disposition, one wants to "change the world". It's easy to imagine how one might want things to be, imagine steps to achieve that, and then crash hard into reality. Regardless of intelligence or diligence, the future is fundamentally unpredictable. I take the GPs point to be that you'll do better in your goals if you are able to pursue them with a measure of naivete versus dwelling on your best expected probabilistic outcomes which are likely to become more pessimistic as you gain experience. This is reflected in the common story from successful entrepreneurs: "if we knew how hard it was going to be we never would have started".
That said, I also appreciate your point about perspective. The ideal is to be able to leverage all your knowledge, instinct and willful drive, but without an emotional attachment to an outcome. Walking the tightrope between apathy and frustration as it were.
Regarding the abyss and reality (I’m taking liberties):
- “I am wiser than this man, for neither of us appears to know anything great and good; but he fancies he knows something although he knows nothing; whereas I, as I do not know anything, so I do not fancy I do.”
- “I myself I am only a child playing on the beach, while vast oceans of truth lie undiscovered before me”
What you do when “enlightened” is personal, but I don’t think everyone is prepared to handle it in a healthy fashion.
Curiosity and discovery, even when reality is difficult? Or fall into despair?
Rather than trying to find bliss in ignorance or aversion, there are practices for holding all of it in your head in a way that doesn’t destroy you.
Many people who see a lot of death find it useful, I find I need it just for everyday life :).
If you desire control or influence then the world can become a daunting and depressing place. You learn to feel trapped and impotent. If you let it be and learn to focus your energy on your own realm of control, it’s much easier to be at peace (though still challenging at times). If there’s nothing you can do and you aren’t responsible for the awful things you see in the world, should it really consume you? Shouldn’t you focus more on what’s good, and the limited good you can do? Perhaps we should save most of our energy for exactly that.
Fundamentally the act of being disturbed by bad things in the world seems to indicate or require that it should be some other way, or that one should be able to change it. If both aren’t true, it seems futile to be so deeply bothered by it. If both are true, we should devote as much as we can to resolving it. As individuals it seems this is rarely the case, though.
I don’t eat animals. I don’t think other people should, generally speaking, and I think the systems turning them into food are beyond deplorable. If I focus on that I can become pretty upset. If I dwelled on I could easily become depressed. But for what? What can I do but not eat the animals? Encourage my family to eat more vegetables without annoying them? Beyond these small acts, I’m virtually powerless to make a difference. I have to accept that.
There are countless examples like that. The wars ongoing today are make some of the best examples. Fears that global recession will cause mass starvation while I experience what could be summarized as financial inconvenience. Existential questions about meaning and purpose. Personal problems caused by external forces (arguably most of them?). The list is endless and each item, if examined in depth, can make someone extremely sad.
Certainly don’t ignore these things, but don’t become obsessed and engrossed. Don’t feel personally responsible to make substantial changes. Just do the best within your means, and be glad you did.
Without that, I would be so miserable. Before I learned this I was. The world seemed impossibly dark and sad. Today I hold on to the belief that to overcome these things, my perspective needs to be one of positive action and intent. Anything else seems to amount mostly to self-harm, and no one wins.
We can ask ourselves what makes people depressed and postulate:
I would point at a lack of realized agency as the main culprit. Now if one capable of operating via a realistic fictional narrative it's probable they could simply narrate that whatever happens was intended (internal), or perhaps is for the best (external), or is a challenge for the best (combined). And these modalities can be divided, perhaps unnecessarily, into various different subcategories... I think I could find this comfortable, and I think history has a lot of elements to reinforce this reasoning, one obvious and predominate one being religion, but I would suggest that some biographical works would equally point towards internal and combined narratives.
But what if we imagine someone who can not or does not subscribe to these narratives? There's a huge degree of reduction in their agency automatically. For instance, it's pretty easy to brazenly rationalize some success as a gut feeling, an instinct, an unconscious will - but what if it's just... Luck? As for external: from my perspective it would be fairly comforting to think that some predestiny has been concocted for me, this is just some experiential ride for some greater purpose and I'm an element affecting a much greater end. Or a combined version wherein I am both an agent, and a choice one, being pressed into ascension of spirit by some greater force, again for some greater end...
Or we're a mortal meatsocks who will live some relatively short life and have a very limited effect on the outcomes of the greater picture (except by extremely limited and fixed chance), highly constrained by innumerable forces impeding our ability to enact our wishes regardless of their actual magnitudes.
Personally I feel obliged to exist in the lattermost space, because I hope to seek truth - but I don't discount the other approaches either. But as TFA indicates, and I will corroborate, there is a balance to be struck.
One example is short term gain vs long term gain.
Yes I can steal a candy from this baby, resulting in me having a candy I didn't have. Longer term thinking? Maybe not such a good tradeoff.
Criminals are often ridiculed for making bad behavioral tradeoffs.
When opportunists are held accountable for behavior that has given them some long term benefit (like the "breakup" of Microsoft or Amazon federal fines) there is a cultural tendency to celebrate. This is despite the tradeoff having benefitted the opportunist greatly in comparison to the penalty.
I feel like these imbalanced punishment valuations are being depressed by a fear of injustice or economic disaster.
There are ways to be optimistic without being irrational, as well. Simply looking at the world and deciding that there is something minor that you can do is both true and an act of optimism.
Obviously some Bias here, where I am sure most of the people that live like this are just complete losers and that makes them even more of a jerk, but there does seem to be something to it, it certainly seems to multiply your success if you can actually get some.
Similarly “realists” in foreign policy aren’t actually realistic, “effective altruists” aren’t necessarily either, “fast” programs aren’t necessarily fast.
That’s why you should name your identities with more humility.
For example, the Buddhists have developed an effectively rationalist response to your example. But a rationalist may still often find that learning the rationalist response to a given situation is too time consuming and it is more effective to do something irrational. Eg, very high risk tolerance in young males as a strategy - if they survive they'll learn to do things the sensible way later on.
This is the insight of Stoics and Bhuddists.
Easier said than done, though. So in practice you could be right.
Uh? That's a totally irrational behaviour. Whatever the state of the world is, everybody has a finite life, so the rational behaviour is to make the best of it.
This seems like a lovecraftian argument that humans aren't capable of rational thought without succumbing to the depths of the void, but it doesn't suggest that rationality is suboptimal but rather that too much information is. Like if the world is mostly horrible, perhaps don't read all the news of the horrible stuff - only enough to reduce the potential error in your priors to an acceptable level.
The title (limits of rationality) suggests that perhaps we should give irrationality a try. That's not going to be right though, disordered thinking is never called for. If you reach diminishing returns on time spent thinking, stop thinking and pick. If you need unpredictability, roll a die. There are places where more rationality is not the winning move, but none where irrationality is.
These rules are not themselves rationally born. They are born from habit, tradition, convention, aesthetics, consensus, utility, authority... Lots of possible sources for rules.
Logical consistency is one good rule. Puts the rational in rationality.
It's just a game. A dream. Ungrounded. That may be obvious, but it's easy to lose yourself in a dream. (Forever even.) That's important to keep in mind.
But yes, tradition. That's a big one.
The reason we value the games of rationality and science over the games of religion and mythology is that the former games produce significantly more power.
And that's the ultimate game of life. Crudely, might makes right. Those individuals or groups that can most effectively harness various forms of power to first defend, and then extend, their claim of limited resources win the game, by simple virtue of the fact that they remain while their competition fades away.
But even games like religion have been, and continue to be valuable frameworks for this ultimate game. There's a strong argument to be made that religion binds large groups of people together towards a common goal and incentivizes individuals to sacrifice the entirety of their life because they believe their rewards will come in the non existent afterlife. That's a powerful game, if you can keep the fantasy alive.
That could spell the difference between sane rational games and crazy rational games right there. That presence or absence of empirical grounding.
And on the flipside, we are all familiar with games that are rigorous, with good logical consistency, but founded on thin air. Dogmatic religion, videogames, fiction...
This is probably wrong. We know from the stats that power belong to those who show up. The religious are showing up from a demographic standpoint due to above-replacement-rate fertility. Rationality can’t choose when a child should exist with much confidence; the delay causes the slow degradation of the ‘rations’ institute.
Our archaeology and history have had trouble grasping this, since the idea that power is its own end is so deeply ingrained in our (western) civilization. But it has not always been the case. David Graeber and David Wengrow's "The Dawn of Everything" illustrates this with evidence.
"We have to realise that rationality, particularly in the form of scientific thought, cannot provide us with a value system." Yeah, that's true, but it's not the point of rationality - rationality is a system of thinking and decision making designed to optimize for the best outcome, but you have to define what's best and thus what you want to optimize for.
Rationality won't provide you with a value system, but I don't think anyone who understands it would claim that it does. This is sort of like saying culinary school will teach you how to cook, but it won't pick what's for dinner.
Someone's belief and value system is the difference between being shunned or supported, like a gay teenager being disowned by their parent.
We should definitely examine our value system.
If you're not trying to make a lot of money or be traditionally successful, you're still optimizing for something. You could be optimizing for the most relaxing life, or the life in which you do the most to help others. You can also go for more specific optimizations - maybe you want to help others but don't want to get investment banking and live like a pauper while donating every cent you can (which is generally going to be a more effective way to help others than, say, volunteering), then you might be optimizing for helping others while achieving some minimal level of enjoyment in your life.
This is all to say that I would argue that you can't pursue optimality in and of itself, because you have to be optimizing for something.
Any chance you’d be up for providing a few examples? I read it but I can’t remember that.
This rhymes with what The Tao Te Ching says that you can't be taught - you have to experience it in your own way.
One of my big takeaways from the book is that the main character actually managed to literally drive himself insane through hyper-rationality and over-thinking.
Rationality is not thinking like a robot; it's asking the question: if I have a vaguely-defined utility function f, how would a rational optimiser optimise for f? Would you march towards a local optima, or try to look for other better local optima? You see an optima in the distance, what's the shortest path that will lead you there? Other rational agents have function y that conflict with your function; how best to resolve/navigate said conflict? What path traverses along high-value areas such that the expected utility of your path over time is highest?
As OP points out, our utility functions are poorly defined. That doesn't mean, however, that we cannot apply mathematical/rational techniques to it. A big part is explicitly acknowledging our own biases and trying to restructure our thinking in a way that best avoids them.
A good heuristic, for example, is that having a more accurate view of reality generally allows for more efficient searches of your utility space. Thus, updating your view of the world to better conform to reality is a positive EV investment.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtue_ethics
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deontology
You can reason about what brings you pleasure, and make rational decisions to pursue it. The size of the entertainment industry shows the way society is structured can value art. Many big cities still have big green parks. Many strawmen arguments by the author.
The author just finally realized that emotions aren't rational relative to the circumstances. That doesn't mean they are beyond rational reasoning.
It also doesn't mean society doesn't value them. There's no such thing as society valuing something, there are individual humans making individual decisions. If some of those humans value something, their decisions will reflect that.
No such thing as intrinsic value. There's individual humans and their individual decisions in individual situations. Their decisions might not even be consistent, and different humans will make different decisions.
This is just kicking the can down the road. Why would you want to make a decision to pursue this thing that you decided brings you pleasure? Is pleasure in and of itself reason enough?
We know that all logical systems contain true statements that cannot be proven. This is a fundamental feature of all logical systems, so why should we expect that this restriction does not apply to our own internal logical systems?
I have recently had a similar realization as the author, and so this resonates with me. No matter what, you are engaging in some sort of ontology, some sort of idea that decides what is and is not, and what defines value. You can either engage with this ontology and critically reflect upon it, or you can pretend that you don't have one and therefore miss things that may otherwise have been evident to you.
This is similar to how a person born blind accepts the reality of the visible world without ever experiencing or being able to rationalize it.
Or perhaps a better analogy would be ants and other insects who only think/see in 2d (or so I heard, correct me if this is wrong).
"Finding our intrinsic values is no trivial task, but something that forces us to stare into the core of our humanity."
I think it misses a critical topical conclusion which is that "intrinsic values" means little or nothing to many, and many folks are fairly incapable of competently doing the kind of contemplative meditating required to arrive at some set of rules like that, and so they look to others.
And here's the crux of the missed point:
To really resonate with our intrinsic values, we need to drop the myth that a rational economic system exists, and build one with the value of present and future human life explicitly built in.
We already have a massive framework for understanding individual intrinsic values in terms of the sanctity of human life and that's the great mystery religions that have birth to our modern age. What's needed now is a planetary ethos where intrinsic human value is put in the proper context of the ecological reality of the biological and geological systems and processes that sustain us. Building that culture requires myth and magic, but also is an intensely rational project. There is really no way around it, and any philosophical text intended to shift the cultural landscape is incomplete without it.
We're in the Yosemite park bear era of AI: there is considerable overlap between the capabilities of the most intelligent AI and the most stupid humans
... And that's very generous to humans
what's so sacrosanct about life? life is common, many argue too common. (see the overpopulation hysteria.)
I'd argue there are better things that we should hold dear, like empathy and cooperation, the resilience of getting up after devastating events, our ability to cooperate in even the most abstract frameworks.
How can you value something and not the thing that it cannot exist without ?
It makes no sense to value (human) empathy and cooperation without valuing (human) life. You can argue about first principles, excrement and the universe, but this will still be true.
Without valuing human life, all sorts of things start to unravel in our society. Of course, just life is not enough! Empathy, cooperation, kindness, curiosity, etc: all things that make the human experience worthy.
That's why we usually don't keep braindead people alive just because we could.
I would argue that someone in permanent vegetative state is not much of a "human", mind you.
You can't hold those things dear without first believing in the sanctity of human life. If human life has no value above the value of human endeavor neither do empathy, cooperation or resilience, human life becomes just another resource to exploit and consume.
I disagree religion is the only possible framework through which this can be expressed, however. It's entirely possible to hold human life sacrosanct in its own liminal terms without invoking the supernatural.
If we discount life altogether, there is perhaps a greater hidden element of value which goes unseen.
Instead, if we acknowledge that all life is meaningless, that we're on some infinitesimal little body floating around a star whose life is slowly ticking away set to vaporize everything ever known - if we really acknowledge that desperation, certainly the closest to universal value we might have, then we can engage with reality and work together. Real egalitarianism, and trans-species as well, because at least within the scope of our limited knowledge we're the only advanced life known, and correct me if I'm wrong, but the only planet with confirmed life.
The sanctity of life shit is just a means to defer the ultimate end that we're all fraught to look into, our inevitable deaths. It's a write off. Chris's life was sacrosanct, he died delivering Pizza Hut for $8.50/h, he died painfully and left behind a mangled corpse. We make a big, superficial guffaw about it. That's fucking tragic! We, collectively, should all be fucking horrified that someone was relegated to that, horrified that someone could possibly die like that - but it's sacred by default - that's bullshit though, we let Chris fall into a swirling oblivion that carried him to a rock bottom and put him in a position that made it really likely he'd die doing the shameful shit of delivering a pizza.
Sanctity of life is what allows us to justify the egregious, not the lack thereof.
Delivering a pizza is not "shameful shit".
It brings warmth, sustenance, and comfort to those Chris delivered it to.
What's shameful is being paid tens or hundreds of times Chris's annual salary to manipulate people into clicking on ads or continuing to doomscroll.
... is worthless if you don't value life. Who cares about egalitarism for motes of dust?
While valuation is not the task of empirical science per se (and indeed, even the choice to pursue science is itself a result of valuation), the view that value and ends aren't rationally knowable, that they are somehow "pre-rational" or "extra-rational" or even "irrational" (Hume famously said that rationality serves the passions) only holds if you reject telos, and this is something the materialist metaphysical doctrine does axiomatically. But if human beings have a nature, then the end or ends of human nature are a defining part of that nature. Human nature is then what determines what is good for human beings and what furthers human flourishing; in short, what results in human happiness. Indeed, it is human nature that is the foundation for any truly defensible objective morality, because without it, we are left with nihilism or relativism or subjectivism or whatever. To reduce rationality to the methods empirical science is not only incoherent, but it is to take a narrow, castrated view of rationality that condemns whole swathes of reality (such as the axiological) to unintelligibility. If the author were to revise his metaphysical views to include telos, I think he would be in a position to make sense of value rather than consigning it to some realm of unintelligible priors.
This is where the blog post becomes confusing. On the one hand, value seems to be construed as something outside of rationality. Then we speak of "intrinsic" values which frankly begins to sound like the beginning of an awareness that human nature is a determiner of such things, though still mired in a subjectivist perspective. Then the author speaks of things as if they were objectively valuable which seems to contradict what he said earlier. How can you criticize the hamster wheel of productivity on subjective grounds? Maybe the workaholic loves the hamster wheel. You need human nature to show that workaholism is bad for human beings.
It is important here to recognize that telos is not a matter of conscious intent. This is a common misconception (though telos is involves here as well). Telos that toward which something is ordered, especially causally. Indeed, without telos, efficient causality itself becomes unintelligible and scientific explanation itself becomes impossible. You could not explain why striking a match, for instance, predictably results in fire and not something else like confetti falling from the ceiling or the sudden appearance of an elephant.
I always thought Bazarov from Turgenev's "Fathers and Sons" was a caricature nihilist/rationalist, with his "Nature is just a back wall in a worker's workshop, no need to admire its so called 'beauty'" attitude... but apparently not.
The (rational) mind is just another sense. As such, it has limits like the rest of the senses. For example our vision struggles with very close objects (we do not see our own eyelashes) or very distant objects. Similarly, very low or very high sound frequencies are outside the audible range of the human ear. Our rationality must also be limited in that sense.
Nietzsche believed that the best decisions weren’t the most rationale ones but the ones that were “life furthering.”
However he believed rationality is preferable to idealism. Therefore, best to first deal with reality, learn rationality, then make decisions with your feet on the ground
A better introduction: https://metarationality.com/reasonableness-aspects
It is obvious that nobody can be 100% rational. It is not even rational to think that one can be rational all the time.
I've also been in sales a long time, and it is a given that people make decisions irrationally and then use rationality to justify their irrational decisions.
If you are a hyper rational person and are tasked to make a decision on what product or service to buy, but this product or service is a key purchase that a lot of people and business units will depend on, you may TRY to act rationally. In reality, many other irrational fears come into play. What if you make the wrong decision, despite all the rationality in the world, you don't KNOW if the product or service will work in your business, despite testimonials from other customers of the vendors. And, if it IS a colossal failure, are you going to have hour job if you make a bad decision? Then, will you be forced to move? Will you have to pull your children out of a school where they seem to be excelling? Will your wife want to move if you get fired? Will you be demoted? Will you be kept there, but transferred to a do-nothing job?
All of these issues and more are not rational, and can effect a decision. Lots of people, back in the day, would just buy IBM, because as the saying went, "Nobody gets fired for buying from IBM." Nobody gets fired, because it is the safe choice. Not the best choice, necessarily, but the safest. Because then all you have to do is say, "Hey, it's IBM boss. Everyone buys from them, they have a stellar reputation. This has to be THEIR fault, not mine." And that is true and exactly how it went. Now it is the same for stuff like buying SAP ERP system. Buy another one at the risk of your career.
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And in the Scientific Method itself, it acknowledges irrationality. The double-blind experiments are specifically designed to eliminate bias as much as possible. Bias meaning irrationality, at least in my books. Another way to eliminate irrationality is reproducability. By having reproducability, it is impossible to be irrational in an argument if the results cannot be duplicated by someone else doing the exact same experiments using the exact same procedures. This has happened many times when someone has tried to duplicate an experiment, only to find out the original was wrong, and someone didn't irrationally publish their results without others being able to double-check.
The biggest change I’ve ever had living my life was the XKCD’s 1 of today’s 10,000. https://xkcd.com/1053/
To boil it down: “let people enjoy things”. If you like something and it doesn’t have a negative affect on your life or someone else’s, go for.
Not everything you do needs to analyzed.
However, I think you can (and should) try to at least maintain awareness of your behaviour and its effects, but only because if you don't, you may actually end up acting in ways that contradict your values; or if your values are ill-defined or vague, you might end up not understanding what it is that really matters to you. I think rationality is a necessary part of having a well-defined value system, even if the axioms are arbitrary. "Letting people enjoy things that aren't harming anyone" is a rational decision based on my value system.
What I can use rationality for, really, is figuring out if there's something I'm doing that's actually in conflict with my own values, or if there's something I can do to nudge the world (or at least my own life) to have more of the things I value.
Rational thought arises out living, it is not mechanical. I would say the triumph of our rationality has been the ability to deal with this irrationality, something which is on the decline.
I would say that we won't be able to build true AI till we understand and reconcile this conflict and find a way to express it.