Hacker News Reader

Comment by analog31 | Hacker News Reader

I tend to think of myself as rational, but the degree of introspection suggested by this checklist seems bizarre to me.

I feel as though most of the psychological issues and poor decision making I experienced when I was younger were because I thought of myself as a fundamentally rational person, and refused to examine the irrational things my brain was doing.

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"?)

Just remember that the human brain is basically not set up for objectivity. Plenty of people who consider themselves rational are capable of making decisions that you would call unrational. Doesn't mean you need to live your life through a checklist, but it helps to be critical of thoughts like "I am a very rational person"

Sometimes I rationally realize that I am making an irrational decision, but I still prefer the "wrong" decision. For example, I may pick up a dirty penny in a street. The risk/reward is negative because the very slight possibility or disease or accident outweighs the very slight financial reward, but I prefer to pick up the penny anyway. Am I rational because of the analysis, or irrational because I make the wrong choice?

I think you got it wrong. We are irrational no matter what. And we are blind to our own blindness, so we cannot even comprehend, that we are very irrational, unless, of course, we study it.

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 think you got it wrong. We are irrational no matter what. And we are blind to our own blindness, so we cannot even comprehend, that we are very irrational, unless, of course, we study it.

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.)

If it takes five seconds to pick up the penny (that's maybe high but it's including time to notice, bend, put it in your pocket), you're valuing your time at $7.20 an hour.

(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.)

The biggest reward is the emotion that you're maintaining your sense of order. Everything has a place, and the sidewalk is certainly no place for a penny.

You should try to figure out why you make the decision to pick up the penny even though you know it's "irrational". Is it because you think pennies are good luck? Do you like having a penny in your pocket to mindlessly play with?

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.

I think the key thing is that being a perfectly rational actor is a strange and twisting pursuit. Measuring your actions against another scale is more useful IMO. Being humane/considerate/farsighted (or any set of subjective values that you believe are important) make a better measuring stick than rationality

This is a good point--I would phrase it as whatever over-arching organizing value set or decision-making framework you choose to use (whether it be "go with your gut", Rationality Uber Alles, WWJD?, "don't be a dick", or whatever) does not absolve you of responsibility for the actions you take according to that framework. Using rationality or moral values or whatever as a means to develop self-awareness and maturity is a valid and useful exercise IMO, but I know too many people who feel like "I'm just doing what XXXXX says I should do" excuses their actions even though it was still their choice in the first place to do what XXXXX says.

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.

Why does one have to focus on being humane/considerate/farsighted instead of being rational, rather than focus on both? We don't have to pick one measuring stick.

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.

> Am I rational because of the analysis, or irrational because I make the wrong choice?

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?"

My detestation of observing penny-litter is of sufficient intensity that I would pay you a penny to pick up a penny. I dread that the fury-induced hand-tremor would cause me to drop the penny, leading to a catastrophic loop terminating with cupric entombment.

Maybe you get some nice pleasure chemicals in your brain, or recall a pleasant experience from your past, which may outweigh the possibility of disease and accident.

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?

That's fair. While I called myself rational, I would never claim to make exclusively rational decisions. I would not want to go down the rabbit hole of trying to define rationality, or force myself into the Procrustean bed of a specific definition. If rationalism turns into some sort of utopian or self consistent ideology, then I'll remain aloof from it.

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.

Someone learning to play the piano (an unnatural task) needs to monitor their behavior and look for good habits to reinforce and bad habits to unlearn. But you do that during practice, not performance. By the time you're ready to perform, playing the right way should seem "natural" even though it's still a highly artificial task.

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.)

A lot of irrational behavior stems from simple biases in our brains' usually good-enough-for-daily-life heuristics. Attempts to avoid those biases seem to include training to turn off (or at least notice and interrupt) your heuristics altogether as much as possible, resulting in a much slower (and more introspective) way of going through the world.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com