Checklist of Rationality Habits
rationality.org
rationality.org
1. Noticing behavioral patterns
2. Thinking hard and doing research on the pattern, whether it leads to good or bad outcomes and whether modifying it is cost effective
3. Using habit formation techniques to modify things
4. Reviewing and reflecting on what is and isn't working for things I have modified using the above steps
Old me would have considered this very laborious. You only get to make small changes this way and you aren't guaranteed they work. However, it doesn't take that many real improvements in fundamental counter-productive patterns before the benefits start stacking on top of each other. A few weeks of intense focus on one particular pattern is actually fairly high leverage considering that you can instill habits that will last a lifetime.
An important part of INTJ maturity is accepting that their own approach may fall short and examining the basis of other beliefs regarding the system or framework they instinctively favor. Or just learning why the lack of adherence to such a framework might be acceptable. INTJs, for example, are urged to learn about different personality preferences so they don't grow impatient with just about every other type. It's easy for INTJs to wonder why their ENFP friend just won't act logically.
In the case of the INTJ, the role of extraverted thinking, commonly called systems thinking, is crucial: It can replace their instinctive (and at times compulsive or otherwise destructive) emotional response to circumstances that make them feel anxiety. So when a more mature INTJ is feeling anxious about a situation or circumstance, they usually fall back on their extraverted thinking to help them examine rationally and build a model around it. Otherwise they might find themselves falling into compulsive behaviors, losing their grip on the situation.
I did not see any peer reviewed journal articles by him on personality in a Google Scholar author search for his name, only books and a single conference paper.
Finally, looking at the most recent CV I saw -- http://www.darionardi.com/webcv.html -- only one of the papers in the "personality" section is actually from a journal, and it is, lo and behold, a Type-centric journal. And half of the conference papers are for the Association for Psychological Type International.
As appeals to authority go, he is a poor one.
It seems like the more appropriate question when discussing these frameworks might be whether they are useful. Many people find the MBTI framework a useful way to think about themselves. Just like many people find GTD useful for being organized, or Paleo useful for choosing what to eat, or Agile useful for coordinating software development, or [system/lens/framework here] useful for [thing that people do], even though they are not demonstrably "correct" (or even superior to competing systems).
Correct and useful aren't necessarily the same thing, especially when we're discussing systems that are more of a descriptive worldview than an actual set of predictions.
The Big 5 is the current standard, and the four MBTI dimensions correlate to 4 of the Big 5. E/I is Extraversion in Big 5, N/S is Openness to Experience, and the other two are less orthogonal, but generally T/F is Agreeableness and J/P is Conscientiousness. Neuroticism in Big 5 is essentially not measured in MBTI and doesn't correlate well with any of the MBTI traits.
http://www.skepdic.com/myersb.html
http://www.psychometric-success.com/personality-tests/person...
"Overall, the review committee concluded that the MBTI has not demonstrated adequate validity although its popularity and use has been steadily increasing. The National Academy of Sciences review committee concluded that: 'at this time, there is not sufficient, well-designed research to justify the use of the MBTI in career counseling programs,' the very thing that it is most often used for."
http://www.indiana.edu/~jobtalk/HRMWebsite/hrm/articles/deve...
http://www.amazon.com/Cult-Personality-Testing-Annie-Murphy/...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-leadership/myers-b...
"Now, 50 years after the first time anyone paid money for the test, the Myers-Briggs legacy is reaching the end of the family line. The youngest heirs don’t want it. And it’s not clear whether organizations should, either.
. . . .
"Yet despite its widespread use and vast financial success, and although it was derived from the work of Carl Jung, one of the most famous psychologists of the 20th century, the test is highly questioned by the scientific community."
> Recent example from Anna: Jumping off the Stratosphere Hotel in Las Vegas in a wire-guided fall. I knew it was safe based on 40,000 data points of people doing it without significant injury, but to persuade my brain I had to visualize 2 times the population of my college jumping off and surviving. Also, my brain sometimes seems much more pessimistic, especially about social things, than I am, and is almost always wrong.
Fear of heights is a very primal, very understandable and even reasonably well understood response. Our brains have specific hardware for this kind of circumstance, and it exists for good (even "rational") reasons. Sweeping it into the same generic bucket with all other "irrationality" is just silly.
Basically: this is just self-help hippie nonsense to me. My irony detector is off the charts, and I was expecting to be more impressed.
It's exactly because we've got this corrupted evolved hardware that we must actively seek out all irrationality in our minds.
After all, things like availability bias were also developed for good reasons. No sense being afraid of tigers and not going into the forest for good if no one you know has ever seen a tiger. That's just as good heuristic as "be scared when going to high places".
Similarly, if you are trying to destroy a small target and you know it lies in a 10 km^2 area, it may be optimal to employ a carpet-bombing strategy over the whole area. This doesn't mean that any of the individual bombs are optimized: most of them will fall nowhere near the target, and they are 'irrational' in support of a broader rationalization strategy.
This has to do with the fact that you only have enough information to narrow the target to such a wide area. With more information, you can optimize the individual bombs and maybe switch strategies away from carpet bombing.
Our fear processing machinery is a carpet bombing strategy that drops specific fears in our way that we have to deal with. Overall it is better than nothing, but since we are trying to _improve_ our strategy, we are forced to conclude that it is not an ideal methodology. We have to collect more information, and we have to ensure that this new information is accounted for in the decision-making process. This means fighting your reflexes. You cannot do better than nature by idolizing it.
The website promotes a list (http://rationality.org/reading/). I have only read "Thinking, Fast and Slow" and I am looking for HN users favorites.
[1] www.amazon.com/Seeking-Wisdom-Darwin-Munger-3rd/dp/1578644283/
I found "Predictably Irrational" to repeat a lot of the content about biases from TFTS. Its well written and not a bad book by any means but I regretted the time investment after TFTS.
I found "Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work" to be very practical aiming to giving some real tools to use some of which I hadn't come across before.
If this is something you are interested in, check out Daniel Kahneman's book.
EDIT: I would like to know the reason behind the downvote. Thanks.
I was the (or a) downvoter. While your point is certainly correct that humans are irrational animals and there is no way around it, that seemed essentially irrelevant to the specific question of whether performing a rational analysis, and then acting against it, should count as a rational or an irrational action. (To be fair, it is highly relevant to the discussion as a whole, just not, I think, to this thread.)
(To be clear, there are other plausible rewards to picking up a penny, such as feeling lucky from the superstition. But you only mentioned a financial reward, and the financial impact is negative.)
Once you figure out why you're still picking up pennies even though you know the financial reward is less than the risk then you can determine if it's rational or, if it's irrational, convince yourself not to do it.
Also, Antonio Damasio's work is an interesting complement/counterpoint to the overemphasis of cognitive rational thinking, and I'd highly recommend it. Descarte's Error is a good place to start, and makes the strong case that rationality is part of an embodied (literally) process upon which it depends.
I certainly hope you don't think that being irrational will help you to be more humane/considerate/farsighted, or that being humane/considerate/farsighted means that one can't be rational.
I think (to repeat others' points in different language) that to think of rational / irrational as a binary switch is bound to lead to trouble. In other words, I think that the question is whether an action, not a person, is rational or irrational. (Compare with questions of morality, where it is near-meaningless to ask "is this person good / bad?") Why not just "the analysis was rational, and the resulting 'wrong' choice was irrational?"
I sometimes take a stick with horse hair stretched over its length, and pull it along steel cables stretched along a large wooden box. The risks are many, including getting chased out of the house, blisters on my fingers, etc. Am I irrational because I made the wrong choice?
At the same time, while the human brain isn't set up for objectivity, it is set up for survival -- including survival in a social milieu. Some non-rational behaviors such as emotion and stubbornness may be valuable survival traits.
If I were to put anything on my own checklist, it would be: "Did I give myself enough time to think about this?" I can be persuaded by reason, but on my own timeline, and I'm a terrible debater, so I don't change my opinions based on debate.
I think there's something like that here. Thinking rationally is an unnatural act and some folks are interested in figuring out how to better train for it. Maybe it's a bit of a weird hobby, but I'm happy there are people investigating it.
However, it's still early days for figuring out which training techniques are effective. This checklist is a sketch of bad habits to look for, but how best to use it isn't settled yet.
(There are places for checklists in production. They're useful in high-risk situations where error has to be eliminated. Pilots rely extensively on checklists, and they're starting to be used more in hospitals.)
This made it more or less impossible for me to address harmful emotions (because emotions are irrational) or problematic behaviours (because I don't make irrational decisions), which led to some bad times, to say the least.
Our brains are basically not wired to be objective or rational. While the human brain has developed the ability to think rationally, there is a considerable amount of the kind of "gut level" machinery that kept us alive before we developed this ability lying around.
Without careful introspection and a willingness to admit that many of our thoughts and behaviours are, without careful examination, going to be deeply irrational no matter how much we believe in rationalism, we tend to act on our irrationality to our own detriment, and often to the detriment of others as well (remember when Colbert trolled Bush by saying they were both "guys who think with [their] guts"?)
In this spirit, I have an infuriating (to others) habit of reflexively arguing against someone else's position. (It was originally born out of the "search for counterexamples" mindset of a mathematician, but now it's an unconscious behaviour.) This habit is so comically ingrained that, if the person to whom I make this argument switches his or her position, then I will in turn switch to arguing for the original position.
I don't know whether this counts as highly rational, highly contrarian, or just annoying.
> I notice when my mind is arguing for a side (instead of evaluating which side to choose), and flag this as an error mode. (Recent example from Anna: Noticed myself explaining to myself why outsourcing my clothes shopping does make sense, rather than evaluating whether to do it.)
I did (although, as I noted, I think that part of being rational is critically creating your own criteria for rationality, rather than using someone else's). I also was not claiming that this was not on the list—but:
> I notice when my mind is arguing for a side (instead of evaluating which side to choose), and flag this as an error mode.
Although logically—well, in classical logic, anyway—every argument against something is an argument for its opposite, I think that there is nonetheless a meaningful difference between making a contrarian argument (as I do; it is an essentially negative process) and arguing for the opposite position (an essentially positive process).
I am confidant that any attempt to rule out the third possibility will fail.
> I am confidant that any attempt to rule out the third possibility will fail.
To be sure, as the highly rational being that I am :-), I recognise that it is annoying; my question is whether it is just annoying, i.e., without any corresponding benefit.
I find De Bono's six thinking hats as a nice way to view how best to work rationally in a team. Contrarians only have one hat and miss the other five.
The problems I have seen include:
dominating discussion (a contrarian has something to argue in every situation, sometimes you need to cover some ground in broad strokes to get some feel of whats involved but a contrarian latches on the first point of uncertainty),
off-topic (to stray from the high priority issue to argue in depth some low priority secondary issue),
arguing from ignorance (they see argument as 'their way of learning' but in a group situation its very selfish, they should take effort to become better informed offline)
negativity (its unrelentingly depressing and critical - picking holes and killing any newborn idea that might need some nurturing before looking at more critically otherwise you can give up on it too soon)
personality clashes (there will be inevitable issues of butting heads with different personality types who feel criticism personally or consider arguments as fights or need negatives presented in a status aware manner etc.)
Something that might concern you is that reflexive contrarians are very predictable and hence exploitable. The manipulator can basically dangle a designed target in front of them and the contrarian will say whatever is wanted. Reflex is not going to be rational at a high level because the frame its operates in is too narrow and shallow.
* that it is just annoying
Of course, Messrs. Carrey and Daniels have a proof by demonstration that the just annoying ( http://www.wavlist.com/movies/032/dumb-annoy.wav ) can get two million views on YouTube; which may be a corresponding benefit.
Applying the method to a verbal argument: "You never listen!" "That's not true, I'm listening now!" Yes, I think it is very annoying. :)
Other causes worth examining: ego (desire to prove one's intelligence), one-up-manship (desire to harm/contradict/take down arguments of others), deficiency (not observing feelings of others or not addressing the end-goal of the task in favour of hair splitting), hedonism (argument gives you pleasure no matter the consequences for the task or others) etc.
Contrarians can be intolerable team members so it requires care to harness and channel an analytical mind and not let it be driven by base and counter-productive motivations. Its very easy not to notice and stick with a seductive virtuous justification for bad behaviour.
Is there an expected useful outcome for challenging every statement? "My favorite dessert is chocolate cake" can be countered with "I've seen you choose apple pie instead of chocolate cake for dessert the last 3 of 5 times". But so what? Why do you think your limited observations trump the speaker's more complete knowledge enough to force an argument at that point?
It doesn't sound like you've used feedback from your previous arguments in order to determine if you indeed have enough information to have a meaningful counter-argument. Doubt fuels empiricism, not rationalism.
There's also an opportunity cost. "The Vikings made it to North America" can be challenged with "but the Norse of Greenland weren't really Vikings", inviting a competitive but ultimately bland argument about various etymological nuances, when the speaker actually wanted to bring up the latest archeological finds on Baffin Island. The speaker may be less likely to talk with you in the future about interesting ideas, to avoid being dragged into inane debates.
There's also the possibility that you are being deliberately distracted. A reflexive challenge means you only really consider the surface arguments, and not the underlying premise. If someone says that Agile is better than Waterfall, your response could be to point out cases where Waterfall is better, without realizing how that discussion tends to assume the creation myth of Agile, constructed on a false narrative of history. (See http://www.infoq.com/articles/bossavit-agile-ten-years-on .)
Statements are data points, not debate points. You may feel like you need to respond to them at once. Or you can collect them, use to them test and refine your hypotheses about what the other person is saying, and estimate if it's useful enough to voice a contrary opinion.
I saw the example early on the page about evaluating whether or not to outsource their clothes shopping, and just stopped. Anyone for whom this is even a valid concept is so far removed from who I am that I just am not going to value their advice.
On paper it is all logical and "rational". Now try to run this in your mind in so-called state of "flow". Don't have a flow? That means you don't have your attention focused.
All the classic attention experiments, like that one with gorilla, reveal limitations and "single-threadness" of our minds.
It seems that the only kind of parallel tasks a human mind could run is one "conscious" with many "subconscious" - 1:N threads, or 0:N ;)
Btw, pthreads (and, perhaps, lock-based sharing in general) is a flawed concept in the first place. Imagine a deadlock with breathing or race-condition with heart rate.
When the trainer asked if we noticed something unusual in the video, all but one or two of us raised our hands.
We had all seen the gorilla video.
So I think the gorilla video actually teaches a new concept, which is that you should assume that the people you are dealing with have the same access to information as you have unless you have a reason to believe that it's a secret.
Btw, the flawed mental apparatus as a reason to hypothetical inability to comprehend "the true nature of reality" is one of the basic premises of thousands years old Indian philosophy, which emphasizes subjectivity.
Of course automatic recognition isn't perfect as the video you're referring to shows. But recognizing something most of the time is far superior to never recognizing it.
And I think a better model for the human brain is a hard core with a single thread embedded in a much larger FPGA fabric that can issue it interrupts. Only a tiny fraction of the sense data that enters our brain actually impinged on our conscious awareness and the directives that our consciousness issues such as "pick up that cup" are multiplied hugely in complexity as they are translated into precisely calibrated exertion rates for dozens of separate muscles over time.
Should I explain how all these rush or "pressure" based sales techniques work and how they are trying exploit and manipulate "too narrow window of attention" of a customer?