People are very good at fooling themselves. However, there are certain traditions which contain knowledge of how to do better, and how to think more rationally. People utilizing this knowledge have made considerable progress. The best example is the scientific tradition. When you want to understand a top-quality scientist, acting as a professional, the first thing you need to understand is the scientific tradition, and you don't need to worry so much about common irrationalities.
We are not doomed to always be irrational. We can create knowledge and, with effort, remove errors from it. Then, when we have supporting knowledge, we can act reasonably rationally.
Very common misconception - science as a process is rational, but scientists are people, and they fall for all the same traps.
There are plenty important scientific discoveries accepted only after the generation change. Bayesian statistics is one example of such process happening right now. Instead of being accepted or rejected based on the merits, the process of acceptance is being dragged along with all sorts of totally human irrationalities.
You seem to be referring to Kuhn's theory of Scientific Revolutions, which is false, as explained in The Fabric of Reality chapter 13.
BTW Bayesian statistics as a replacement for science is not being accepted because it's no good. It's no good because it does not deal in explanations.
And explanations that people care about are just that what the link is all about - rationalization. Or in other words just because there is no good "explanation" for QM doesn't mean it shouldn't be accepted.
I have already seen that. It has the error I mentioned.
As for raw QM, it corresponds to reality, but people are right to also want to know what it means. And we do know. MWI is a good explanation of QM. There's no need to be an instrumentalist, and being one is not a way of overcoming bias. Explanations of what bias is, and how to overcome it, are one of our major tools against it. (See, again, The Fabric of Reality on MWI (chapter 2), instrumentalism (chapter 1), and about explanations in chapters 1,3,4,7 and mixed in throughout.)
The book QED by Feynman also contains very good explanations about QM, but without mention of MWI, so you can see that even with no particular interpretation of QM there is a lot of scope for explanation.
All the explanations you are talking about are very nice, and give you a lot of warm comfort, but they all are just rationalizations. There's not much you can predict about the rest of the world using them.
The cold rationality lies in the math you have to study for 2-3 years to learn how to add up these little amplitude arrows. Using that you can actually model and make predictions.
Another great example is Maxwell, he got all the rationalizations "wrong" but the math survived and is called after him.
Since you believe you are irrational and make decisions based on bias, and Bayesian anti-science positions forgive you for this, whereas I do not (for example, science says the source of an idea is irrelevant, so you are wrong to be concerned with whether the source is a stranger), might it be that you only believe these anti-science ideas because of bias? They offer you comfort, and you revealed earlier that you do think about ideas in terms of which are more comfortable.
While I agree that Kuhn's theory is pretty flawed, and only applicable to very rare cases, I really don't think that you can use "because David Deutsch said so" as an argument.
Somehow this article reminds me of a show on NOVA called "Secrets of the Mind". In one instance, someone had a car accident and been in coma for five weeks.
"V.S. RAMACHANDRAN: He was articulate, he was intelligent, not obviously psychotic or emotionally disturbed. He could read a newspaper. Everything seemed fine except he had one profound delusion. He would look at his mother and he would say, "This woman, Doctor, she looks exactly like my mother but in fact she's not my mother. She's an imposter. She's some other woman pretending to be my mother.
NARRATOR: The injury to David's brain had brought on a very rare condition called the Capgras Delusion"
...
NARRATOR: Whenever we look at an object or a face, the message reaches the temporal lobes, where it's identified, but then it gets relayed to a structure called the "amygdala," which is the gateway to the limbic system that contains the emotional centers of the brain. And it's here that we generate the appropriate emotional response to whatever it is we're looking at.
V.S. RAMACHANDRAN: Now, what I've suggested is that what's going on in this patient is the message gets to the temporal lobe cortex, so the patient recognizes his mother as being his mother and evokes the appropriate memories. But the message doesn't get to the amygdala, because the fibers going from the temporal cortex to the amygdala into the emotional centers are cut, as a result of the accident. Therefore, there is no emotion. There is no warmth. And he says, "If this is really my mother why is it I'm not experiencing any emotions? There's something not quite right here. Maybe she is some other strange woman pretending to be my mother."
An alarm clock's function is to wake you at a specific time. A snooze button's function is to delay that wakening. It's as rational as popping up an "Are You Sure?" dialog box.
For people who don't want to get out of bed as soon as the alarm goes off, but who also don't want to risk sleeping for another hour, a snooze button is perfectly sensible.
Yeah, but it would be nice to force myself to get out of bed each time the alarm goes off, immediately, and without fail. This is somewhat of a tangent, but I think that when I set a bunch of alarms on my phone (for 9:00, 9:30, 10:00, and 10:30, for example), it's actually harmful because I'm training myself to not wake up immediately. I stand up when the first alarm goes off and think "Man, I am super tired.. My legs are like jelly. Hey, I can sleep for a little while longer since more alarms are set." The result is that I'm usually late for whatever it is I have my alarms set for, since by the last alarm I've already trained myself to just jump back in bed. It's totally illogical.
I'm still 20, so maybe this behavior will diminish with age. But I'll probably try some experiments, like only having one alarm set (with snooze disabled).
I can offer anectdotal confirmation: I've never used my snooze button, and I can almost always get out of bed, immediately alert, as soon as my alarm goes off.
It sounds a bit strange and it feels a bit strange too, but you can practice getting up when the alarm goes off.
Before you go to sleep, set an alarm like a minute in the future. Lay down, close your eyes, relax. Then, when the alarm goes off get up immediately, stretch a bit, etc.
Do this a couple of times (3, 5, 10 ;) and your brain will get used to the idea of getting up when the alarm goes off. Works like a charm for me (I tend to fall into the snooze-habit too)
I'm surprised someone like Paul Buchheit only realised this several years ago!
This is the reason I allow myself full latitude in arguing with people, including the freedom to change my mind completely from one argument to the next. After all, whatever your opinion is right now, it's only the best you've come up with so far - a better, truer truth may be just around the corner. This unsettles some people, when they hear my passionately arguing a point one week, and then passionately arguing the opposite point the next week.
This is also why I make a conscious effort to allow opposing viewpoints to exist in my head. After all, both might be true - even together. Just because I've rationalised them to be opposing doesn't mean they're not both true.
An interesting point that's not made in the article is how to train this rationalisation engine. It's a very powerful tool, that brain of ours, and I believe there are ways to feed our subconscious with "good data" that it can use for more effective heuristics. I'd argue that reading good books (particularly classics) does a tremendous job of making our subconscious more effective.
I knew this before reading the article, but I just can't recall where I got it from. I find it kind of ironic how he provides all this scientific theory as a sort of rationalization of the idea...
I found what I think is a flaw in the "picking the attractive" examples mentioned in the article - Why exactly is it not rational to pick/vote people based (among other criteria) on their attractiveness? I am not saying I know the answer, but assuming something is not rational, without rational arguments - even if it looks obvious - is exactly what the article wants to criticize. ;-)
The article doesn't say that hiring attractive persons is wrong The article says, or at least that's what I understood, that people hired attractive persons not knowing why.
Just because pretty people tend to get it easier does not mean that being pretty is what causes them to get it easier. Perhaps it is some other factor that causes both the prettiness and the ability to get preferential treatment. This is very likely if you think about it, because attractiveness is for most people not a matter of luck or genetics but something that people actively put work into achieving.
Humans are born rational, but we teach ourselves and others to loose our rationality through cultures, civilization and traditions.
Conduct the "umbrella" experiment with a child about 3-5 years old. His answer will be " I do not know". Honest, right?
As kids we always expressed our feelings and thoughts properly and truthfully through words and actions. But, somewhere between the age of 4 and 9 we start to have others think for us. We are thought sets of realities that mostly make no sense to us (as children).
By the time we reach 13 we already have all this new man made reality that we are supposed to live and think by without much questioning.
So this creates a massive database of words and actions we go to first to express our thoughts and feelings.
By doing this we ignore our highest truth. We create a conflict between what we put our there and what we really feel and know inside. There begins the war within ourselves.
We almost cannot reverse engineer in months what we have created in millenniums. I do not think this mass change in the way we think is going to happen in our lifetime.
But we can stop stopping our kids to think for themselves. Stop giving them sets of realities that are contradictory to their real honest and pure feelings and thoughts. You would think this would create an anarchy, but we will land far from that.
I get asked about my motives for my actions, probably about as often as everyone else gets asked. I've never been sure; the questioner has invariably regarded this as a sign of dishonesty on my part, while I've thought it to be a failure of introspection. Good to hear I've really just been avoiding the self-deception of conscious rationality.
Good salesman have always known that people buy with emotion and justify with logic.
Functional software that perfectly solves a customer's problem without a good user interface never makes it to the logic step. It was eliminated by the user's subconscious before the game ever began.
Paul's treatment of marketing brought to mind Gladwell's What We Can Learn From Spaghetti Sauce: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/20. The Ockhamist dialectic -- "If we are going to be honest, then we must admit the possibility that everything we know and believe is, in fact, incorrect" -- evokes existentialists e.g. Eckhart Tolle: "The greatest achievement of humanity is not its works of art, science, or technology, but the recognition of its own dysfunction, its own madness."
32 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 80.6 ms ] threadWe are not doomed to always be irrational. We can create knowledge and, with effort, remove errors from it. Then, when we have supporting knowledge, we can act reasonably rationally.
There are plenty important scientific discoveries accepted only after the generation change. Bayesian statistics is one example of such process happening right now. Instead of being accepted or rejected based on the merits, the process of acceptance is being dragged along with all sorts of totally human irrationalities.
BTW Bayesian statistics as a replacement for science is not being accepted because it's no good. It's no good because it does not deal in explanations.
And explanations that people care about are just that what the link is all about - rationalization. Or in other words just because there is no good "explanation" for QM doesn't mean it shouldn't be accepted.
As for raw QM, it corresponds to reality, but people are right to also want to know what it means. And we do know. MWI is a good explanation of QM. There's no need to be an instrumentalist, and being one is not a way of overcoming bias. Explanations of what bias is, and how to overcome it, are one of our major tools against it. (See, again, The Fabric of Reality on MWI (chapter 2), instrumentalism (chapter 1), and about explanations in chapters 1,3,4,7 and mixed in throughout.)
The book QED by Feynman also contains very good explanations about QM, but without mention of MWI, so you can see that even with no particular interpretation of QM there is a lot of scope for explanation.
The cold rationality lies in the math you have to study for 2-3 years to learn how to add up these little amplitude arrows. Using that you can actually model and make predictions.
Another great example is Maxwell, he got all the rationalizations "wrong" but the math survived and is called after him.
Here's the kind of arguments I would find rational - http://www.amazon.com/Probability-Causality-AI/lm/R2GX832Q1M...
"V.S. RAMACHANDRAN: He was articulate, he was intelligent, not obviously psychotic or emotionally disturbed. He could read a newspaper. Everything seemed fine except he had one profound delusion. He would look at his mother and he would say, "This woman, Doctor, she looks exactly like my mother but in fact she's not my mother. She's an imposter. She's some other woman pretending to be my mother.
NARRATOR: The injury to David's brain had brought on a very rare condition called the Capgras Delusion"
...
NARRATOR: Whenever we look at an object or a face, the message reaches the temporal lobes, where it's identified, but then it gets relayed to a structure called the "amygdala," which is the gateway to the limbic system that contains the emotional centers of the brain. And it's here that we generate the appropriate emotional response to whatever it is we're looking at.
V.S. RAMACHANDRAN: Now, what I've suggested is that what's going on in this patient is the message gets to the temporal lobe cortex, so the patient recognizes his mother as being his mother and evokes the appropriate memories. But the message doesn't get to the amygdala, because the fibers going from the temporal cortex to the amygdala into the emotional centers are cut, as a result of the accident. Therefore, there is no emotion. There is no warmth. And he says, "If this is really my mother why is it I'm not experiencing any emotions? There's something not quite right here. Maybe she is some other strange woman pretending to be my mother."
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/2812mind.html
I'm still 20, so maybe this behavior will diminish with age. But I'll probably try some experiments, like only having one alarm set (with snooze disabled).
Before you go to sleep, set an alarm like a minute in the future. Lay down, close your eyes, relax. Then, when the alarm goes off get up immediately, stretch a bit, etc.
Do this a couple of times (3, 5, 10 ;) and your brain will get used to the idea of getting up when the alarm goes off. Works like a charm for me (I tend to fall into the snooze-habit too)
This is not my idea, BTW, I got it from Steve Pavlina (http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/04/how-to-get-up-right...) but I thought I'd summarize the long article for you ;)
This is the reason I allow myself full latitude in arguing with people, including the freedom to change my mind completely from one argument to the next. After all, whatever your opinion is right now, it's only the best you've come up with so far - a better, truer truth may be just around the corner. This unsettles some people, when they hear my passionately arguing a point one week, and then passionately arguing the opposite point the next week.
This is also why I make a conscious effort to allow opposing viewpoints to exist in my head. After all, both might be true - even together. Just because I've rationalised them to be opposing doesn't mean they're not both true.
An interesting point that's not made in the article is how to train this rationalisation engine. It's a very powerful tool, that brain of ours, and I believe there are ways to feed our subconscious with "good data" that it can use for more effective heuristics. I'd argue that reading good books (particularly classics) does a tremendous job of making our subconscious more effective.
great job, few people notice false dichotomies. I constantly refer to a checklist of known cognitive biases to help catch myself.
Just because pretty people tend to get it easier does not mean that being pretty is what causes them to get it easier. Perhaps it is some other factor that causes both the prettiness and the ability to get preferential treatment. This is very likely if you think about it, because attractiveness is for most people not a matter of luck or genetics but something that people actively put work into achieving.
Conduct the "umbrella" experiment with a child about 3-5 years old. His answer will be " I do not know". Honest, right?
As kids we always expressed our feelings and thoughts properly and truthfully through words and actions. But, somewhere between the age of 4 and 9 we start to have others think for us. We are thought sets of realities that mostly make no sense to us (as children).
By the time we reach 13 we already have all this new man made reality that we are supposed to live and think by without much questioning.
So this creates a massive database of words and actions we go to first to express our thoughts and feelings.
By doing this we ignore our highest truth. We create a conflict between what we put our there and what we really feel and know inside. There begins the war within ourselves.
We almost cannot reverse engineer in months what we have created in millenniums. I do not think this mass change in the way we think is going to happen in our lifetime.
But we can stop stopping our kids to think for themselves. Stop giving them sets of realities that are contradictory to their real honest and pure feelings and thoughts. You would think this would create an anarchy, but we will land far from that.
Functional software that perfectly solves a customer's problem without a good user interface never makes it to the logic step. It was eliminated by the user's subconscious before the game ever began.