Do Rational People Exist?

>They behave more like ideal economic actors.

I believe the author is making the mistake of equating the "rational" in "economics' rational actors" to be people who choose wisely. The type of wise choices that most of society would agree to lead to positive outcomes.

My understanding is that formal economics is using "rational" as in "rational choice theory"[1]. It's a specific term-of-art that's different from the everyday usage of "rational." It's not some positive measure to satisfy a global optimum. A "rational actor" is simply someone who reliably arrives at the same consistent choices given the knowledge and preferences he happens to have. If a consumer chooses CocaCola over water even though soda's sugar content causes obesity and teeth decay, the consumer is still classified as "rational" even though it looks like a suboptimal choice within the bigger picture of healthy living. Economics' rational choices satisfy a local optimum (consumer's imperfect preferences) and not a global one.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_actor

From my personal experience: If one is able to dig deeply enough, for what I guess to be something like 90% of the population, there is a level where people just declare "I feel that way" and there is no logic, nor even the barest respect for rationality. What's more, these feelings are very often used to justify the arbitrary bad treatment of others who are deemed to be "wrong" or "inferior."

All of these feelings have some "rationalization" as window dressing, but ultimately, it comes down to irrational feelings of tribal affiliation. This invariably comes out in politics and professional life.

We're goddamned grunting, screaming apes who have the ability to occasionally surpass our primitive nature and are well suited to being organized into groups. The vast majority of us do not have the intellectual integrity to hold consistently to a set of rational principles to the nth degree. In the end, our feelings hold sway, and our empathy often fails.

Prejudice is a part of our very nature, and it comes out all the time. There is no need for it to be attached to race or gender, and our society doesn't equip us with the intellectual tools to recognize it at the substrate level. Rather, our present societies are organized around it.

Okay, so there's a lot to break down here and a lot of conflations taking place.

At a base level we can understand, I know people in my life who seem more "rational" in general than people I know who I would describe as more "emotional". In this sense, you can think of "rational" thinking as any thought-pattern that activates the cortex -- roughly speaking, the region of the the brain associated with higher-order and abstract thinking.

On a more nuanced level, the author seems to be making a case about capital-R "Rationalism", as espoused by communities like Less Wrong, Effective Altruism, capital-L Libertarians, and the singularity wonks. In this, I feel like the author is making a huge conflation that I feel is kind of misleading and rather insulting to people who don't buy into one small communities ideas about cognitive bias and logical fallacies.

Often times, "evidence" of "irrational" behaviors, as displayed for example in the Linda problem and the Wason task, typically fail in that the askers don't understand language or how it's typically used. There are loads of people that have a rational bent that will get these problems wrong, simply because they don't put too much thought into it, or they're trying to answer a question linguistically, rather than purely "Rationally".

I have a lot of theories as to why LessWrong / Libertarian types develop this inflated sense of self importance about their "Rational" outlook of the world, but it's pedagogical, and probably insulting to those involved, so I'll leave it for another day.

A much better question than "do rational people exist" would be "do people generally behave in a rational way?" Who cares if I'm not 100% rational all the time. As long as people in general tend towards rationality then it makes sense to talk about 'rational people.'

downvote me if you wish but honestly the rationality movement seems like it is more interested in being elite than anything meaningful. If all the rationality movement can provide as a measure of success is just higher performance on some silly tests designed by psychologists to essentially trick you with wording then I would want nothing to do with it.

I think the most important thing to consider here is that these logic questions they use to test "rationality" are awkward word puzzles, and the test reveals more about how well people can work out what's being asked than their underlying rationality. The fact that most people would jump onto the "bank teller and feminist" option in the conjunction fallacy test is because the question as posed contains mainly feminist-related ideas, and so the brain's natural tendency is to jump to the answer containing the word feminism. That's less about rationality and more about how attuned are you to the likelihood that the questions you're being asked are worded in a tricky way.

It's unfortunate that, as a person interested in puzzles, I've seen almost all of the common tests for rationality, lack of bias, etc., etc. So I have little to no way to assess whether I would pass these tests, because, for example, I first saw the "A bat and ball together cost $1.10. The bat costs a dollar more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?" puzzle when I was in grade school.

Has anyone published research-level assessments that I didn't see decades ago?

The article has an unstated assumption that being more rational is better. While clearly there are benefits to less biased thinking, there are also drawbacks that are supported by research.

Martin Seligman wrote a book called Learned Optimism that deeply explores the issue of optimistic vs. pessimistic explanatory styles. To oversimplify, when something bad happens to a pessimist they tell themselves it is permanent, personal, and universal, whereas optimists tell themselves it is temporary, impersonal, and specific. When something good happens, the two groups do the opposite.

Here is an excerpt from the book about the unfortunate evidence that depressed people have fewer cognitive biases. Snipped/edited for length:

There is considerable evidence that depressed people, though sadder, are wiser.

Ten years ago Lauren Alloy and Lyn Abramson, then graduate students at the University of Pennsylvania, did an experiment in which people were given differing degrees of control over the lighting of a light. Some were able to control the light perfectly: It went on every time they pressed a button, and it never went on if they didn't press. The other people, however, had no control at all: The light went on regardless of whether they pressed the button.

The people in both groups were asked to judge, as accurately as they could, how much control they had. Depressed people were very accurate, both when they had control and when they didn't. The nondepressed people shocked us. They were accurate when they had control, but when helpless they were undeterred: they still judged that they had a great deal of control.

[...]

These have been consistent findings over the last decade. Depressed people -- most of whom turn out to be pessimists -- accurately judge how much control they have. Nondepressed people -- optimists, for the most part -- believe they have much more control over things than they actually do, particularly when they are helpless and have no control at all.

Another kind of evidence for the thesis that depressed people, though sadder, are wiser involves judgments of skill. Several years ago, Newsweek reported that 80 percent of American men think they are in the top half of social skills. They must have been nondepressed American men, if the results of Peter Lewinsohn, a psychologist at the University of Oregon, and his colleagues are valid. These investigators put depressed and non-depressed patients in a panel discussions and later had the patients judge how well they did. To what extent were they persuasive? Likable? As judged by a panel of observers, depressed patients weren't very persuasive or likable; poor social skills are a symptom of depression. Depressed patients judged their lack of skill accurately. The surprising finding was from the nondepressed group. They markedly overestimated their skills, judging themselves as much more persuasive and appealing than the judges thought they were.

[...]

Overall, then, there is clear evidence that nondepressed people distort reality in a self-serving direction and depressed people tend to see reality accurately. How does this evidence, which is about depression, tie into optimism and pessimism? Statistically, most depressed people score in the pessimistic range of explanatory style, and most nondepressed people score optimistically.

So basically the research is suggesting that unbiased thinkers tend to be more pessimistic and depressed than people who irrationally distort the world into being better than it actually is. What a bummer.

Really not a fan of the current gray font color trend. -_-

"Rationality" is overrated. Our lives are not pure economics, thank goodness. A purely rational person would likely not experience any joy or love. But if they were capable of doing so, they wouldn't opt to pursue those things because they would need to spend time doing research into each economic decision they made.

I suspect people with asperger's are often 'more rational'.

No. Next.