Smart people can rationalize anything | Hacker News Reader

Smart people can rationalize anything

thefarmers.org

79 pointsvaksel27 comments

To add onto the title point... yes, smart people can rationalise and explain anything.

This is why I rarely ever change my mind during a conversation. There's two parts to that.

1) I am usually able to construct a convincing counter-argument to whatever the other person is arguing, and so it is difficult to "win" the argument, so to speak.

2) I am aware of this, and also aware that a smart person I'm talking to will be equally able to construct a convincing argument - irrespective of the merits of what they're arguing.

So, to me, a good heated argument is just a good device to bring out pro and con arguments and clash them "in the field", so to speak. But a heated argument is not the place to come to a conclusion about which side of the argument is more correct. That needs to be done after the argument, in the peace and quiet of your own head, over the following days.

The funny thing is, often, I do change my mind after the argument (even though I was making a strong case for the opposing view during the argument), and it can be quite surprising for people to overhear me, 2 days later, arguing the very opposite of my previous point with equal vehemence.

Regarding your last point I suffer from that too.

Well I say suffer: it comes from experience. In the past I used to change minds mid-argument - which just caused confusion and I ended up looking like a complete train wreck. Your right: argue your position hard but dont be scared to change it after the fact (after weighing the evidence). It's the classic Gut (instant feeling) vs. Head (rationale decision) theory.

Rationale and rational are different words. Just in case that wasn't a typo. :)

rationale is what I meant. "rationale based decisions" would be a better way of putting it (there is an important distinction between that and a "rational decision")

I think this is an age thing.

I used to say that I'll probably change most of my opinions in the coming decade, but it is probably not true anymore; less than 50% will be changed in 2019, if I still live.

That is because the (few) opinions I have are quite well tested.

(There is also a distinction between my opinions and my more numerous "working hypotheses".)

I think this is a personality thing (as well, perhaps). Some people seem very able to process new information in a discussion / argument, and either evolve their viewpoint or completely change their mind.

Others, me included, do need the time afterwards to process that information.

I've found that it pays to argue all sides of a discussion. Provide arguments in favor of the other's opinion, provide arguments against your own position, counter-arguments against your arguments, etc., all the while providing context and relative valuations of the arguments. When the other party is not capable of arguing their case or they need to be convinced that your case is superior, then this will not only broaden your view on the subject, but it will also give you a good chance of steering the outcome towards the solution you prefer.

Of course, if you are just discussing matters with smart colleagues to flesh out dis(advantages), then you don't have to do that much work and can just ride the waves.

When I read a lot of comments on HN, I am reminded of this. People place all their faith in rationality, yet fail to see that they have the ability to rationalize anything.

This is a powerful yet profound lesson. It doesn't mean that argument itself serves no purpose, rather it means that collective discussion in search of common understanding is about a million times better than point-counterpoint. 'Cause we can play that game all day long.

It also means that varying up your sources of input is critical for growth. We need extremes, both in personalities and in opinions, for creative progress to happen.

Unfortunately all of the trends I see on the net are more in line with hanging out with people you agree with and talking past one another (in an effort to score points) rather than trying to find answers.

* talking past one another (in an effort to score points) rather than trying to find answers.*

Amen. This is something that I see rear its ugly head most often in the political and economic philosophy threads here, to my chagrin. Those exchanges become incredibly tedious and dogmatic in short order. In an almost inverse heuristic, the longer the posts in these arguments, the less informative, and dare I sare, more idiotic, they tend to be.

Oddly, it seems the younger posters seem to be the most completely convinced that their vision of the planet and how it should be run from those perspectives is perfect, which feeds into the point-scoring sagas.

I especially like it when you're making a case for something and make some generalization as part of it, like so "And just as the sky is blue, we know that X"

Then somebody replies with something like "But at night time the sky is black"

So you're either playing "let's find the nit" or ignoring the troll.

If you ignore, they feel vindicated (!) that they've corrected you. After all, critical parts of your argument are based on falsehoods!

I'm getting better at ignoring.

I can deal with long posts, as long as the tone is "Is this what you said? If so, I don't understand how you would account for X"

Two thoughts:

1. It helps to define your terms. My definitions, and what I think most people unconsciously mean, are that "smart" is all about making the best decisions and "intelligence" is all about pattern recognition. When you break it down like that it's obvious why "more intelligent" doesn't imply "smarter". The benefit of intelligence is that you can recognize patterns that other people don't, which can make you smarter. The downside is: the pattern might not be real, the pattern might not matter, analysis paralysis, etc. All of which can make you dumber. There's always a trade off. The post sums it up pretty well with:

"Less sophisticated developers would not have gone down this blind alley because they wouldn't have a clue that such a thing was even possible, let allow be able to figure out how to do it."

2. Intelligence has very little to do with the ability to think rationally. Rational thought is a skill that has to be studied and practiced. It's also crazy hard. Really really insanely hard. It's hardness is massively unappreciated. Intelligent people who think they have it down because they're better at it then most people are just fooling themselves. Most people haven't even tried to become good at it, so being better then them isn't that hard.

"How convenient does it prove to be a rational animal, that knows how to find or invent a plausible pretext for whatever it has an inclination so to do." - Benjamin Franklin

(Sometimes quoted as the punchier, "Man is a rational animal. He can think up a reason for anything he wants to believe." That's probably just a paraphrase, though.)

Several philosophers have quotes like "Man is not a rational animal, but a rationalizing animal." and "People don't want things because they have reasons, they find reasons for things because they want them."

I think Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard both have quotes along those lines. Not sure how many others.

One problem with orthogonal persistence is that the mechanisms it replaces (e.g. databases) are not purely for persistence but also for communication with other applications. But persistence is the only thing orthogonal persistence can do. If you don't examine how it is used, a database appears to be for persistence.

Don't look for the definition; look for the use.

You can't solve a problem unless you understand it. An important purpose of a prototype is to help understand the problem, not solve it.

I read an interesting study recently (maybe on HN) about an experiment where they swapped people's groceries (or something to that effect) without them knowing. Afterward they were asked to justify their choices and most of them (or a large proportion of them) had no problem in doing so, even though they didn't even choose the item in the first place.

"Smart" in this context means "engineering smart", sounds like they lacked some business smarts... There's more than one way to be smart.

EC was chock-full of smart engineers but suffered from the "too many mad scientists, not enough hunchbacks" problem and had a management team grafted on from Creative Labs (which seemed like a smart move at the time since they had brought SoundBlaster to market dominance.) The real tragedy is that the company founders were fixated on the idea that they were creating a mall-like "virtual world" and remainded completely oblivious to the fact that they were sitting on a working scalable, secure MMORPG engine at least five years before anyone else was even close.

This quote summed up my job:

"Smart people can invent solutions to problems folks actually do have but don't know it yet. These solutions are usually doomed. ... It is nearly impossible to solve a problem for someone if they don't believe they have the problem, even if they really, really do."

I've long thought that to succeed in technology you need to do the clever stuff behind closed doors and deliver something tangible and understandable to the common man.

For example Google's map-reduce algorithms and idiosyncratic server setups. No one is going to buy into stuff as "crazy" as that, but if you do it internally you can deliver search results (and ads) that they'll appreciate without having to worry about the unorthodox manner in which they were produced.

What an appropriate article for some thoughts I've been having recently around a 'founder's syndrome' I've experienced in two consumer tech startups. I've found myself saying this a lot lately, "consumers are not rational" and "you're over-thinking it".

"Intellectual ballast". I like it!

Maybe it's a bias but I'm usually underwhelmed by people who call themselves "smart".

I just wanted to point out this tangential comment from the article, which contains a really good point about data persistence:

"But in an orthogonal scheme you save it all, indiscriminately. The problem is not so much that it's bulky, though it is, but that the volume of semantic meaning that you are now committed to maintain in near-perpetuity is vastly increased. That turns out to be very expensive. The problem of schema migration as new versions of objects were developed (due to bug fixes or feature enhancements) proved effectively intractable."

On the other hand, I find that oftentimes I will try to discuss a programming topic in an online forum and people will say "Oh, just do x, that is the best practice." And then I will say "but it doesn't completely solve the problem, I'm trying to get this behavior as well, so the problem isn't so simple, it's just pushing the full solution into some ad-hoc mess later..." yet they will be unable to understand. It is disheartening.

I'd say it's almost 50/50. I'll go down more blind alleys, but I can also see more "cunning solutions" too.

I've always been entertained by the juxtaposition of Rationalism and rationalization.

How many rations could a rationalist rationalize, if a rationalist could rationalize rations?

Would it help to make a orthogonal persistence infrastructure using Git? Or should I say 'can anyone rationalize making an orthogonal persistence infrastructure using Git?'

Perhaps the folks at etherpad could use some incarnation of something like this ( if I understand these things correctly )

I think salesman are often aware of this, and think they're smarter than they really are. They pitch a completely illogical argument to you, you don't fall for it, but they still still think they can explain why buying their product is a good decision.

If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you. --Oscar Wilde

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