Oh, it's just another example of irrationality now isn't it?
I mean, rationality as system certainly is something a fair number of people can master as a series of arguments that they can have down-pat and are able to recite at a moments notice. Actually applying these to subset of a person's behaviors is a harder trick, mastered by a smaller number of people. Applying the implications of irrational behavior of the population at large to one's own world is an even harder trick.
The thing is that "rationality" isn't actually a coherent overall guide to anyone's behavior.
Specifically, if everyone was "homo-economicus", the neoclassical concept of the risk-neutral actor, society itself would collapse in fairly short order.
I'd recommend Herbert Gintis, Game Theory Evolving, for more background on this.
For instance, you seem to conflate "right" and "rational" here: «the "right" choice, the "rational" choice».
If "rational" means to you the maximal beneficial choice (the "right" choice), then of course any group that gets stuck in a local maximum seems irrational in that light.
You may also be conflating "rational" with "normal/not strange/unexpected". Such as here: « believe that human culture is irrational / arbitrary »
But if "rational" is simply supposed to mean "has thought behind it", as it generally gets defined in science, such as your Anthropology example, then that example does show rationality (people noticed that eating pork resulted in unhealthy diseases, so they thought to stop eating pork and went to pass the word around). Whether or not the means were strange (evangelization, for instance) is orthogonal to whether or not thought was put into it. Whether or not the outcome was the maximal option (say, early invention of germ theory rather than pork abstinence), is orthogonal to whether or not thought was put into it (and even orthogonal to whether or not the outcome was simply a local maximum).
I wouldn't be surprised by an empathy-intelligence correlation but I don't think it's relevant here anyway; You don't have to be intellectually driven if you're not emotionally driven.
I think this highlights the concerns from "unemotional" types:
>One should plan for irrationality.
When we say that, what are we inviting them to do exactly? I think we're asking them to be more forgiving and less judgmental when people act irresponsibly.
People who aren't emotionally driven don't see the intrinsic value in that. We're asking them to do something they'd rather not do, and the typical unemotional person would decline the request.
Totally unrelated, but which religion is that?
Not Judaism since they don't evangelize, and not Christianity because they do eat pork, not Islam because they didn't exist during the dark ages.
"Irrationality" comes down to the ability to accurately decide that we have considered all relative data points and determine what is the best decision, and then prove that this decision hasn't been made.
Consider game theory, the best example of "look how illogical all these humans are lol!" Every game is created with a very specific set of rules, most of which are very clean and specific. The pirate game doesn't consider how many children a pirate has to feed. The prisoner's dilemma doesn't account for social factors that might cause the prisoner in question to feel the system is already intentionally rigged to harm them no matter what their choice. All the "proof" of how illogical humans are in their choices has to be extrapolated away from all the life that humans have to live.
TL;DR- I agree. People are "irrational" in the sense that nobody is ever really able to consider all the factors contributing to a real human's decision tree, but we all love to tell someone else that they're doing it wrong and we know better. Look at all this proof I have that you're being irrational (read: stupid) and you should be doing it better.
Articles detailing the utterly ridiculous behavior or trends of SV make the rounds here on HN regularly so I can't agree that even the smartest individuals on this planet can claim total rationality.
Spending $20,000 on a chicken coop when I see folks on BackyardChickens building beautiful chicken coops for $250 and labor?!?
And your theory about "smart people" being super aliens compared to "normies" seems to me like more of that weird sort of thinking emanating out of places with smart people in bubbles.
the tldr? Smart people get as high on their own supply of wacky theories and "irrational" emotional connections as "normal" people.
edit In fact, my personal idea of a true alien genius is Isaac Newton who of course was obsessed with alchemy and esoteric religious practices. Very smart but crazy as a sh-thouse rat.
Some modern physicians wrote a book about this called 'None of these diseases'
https://www.amazon.com/None-These-Diseases-S-McMillen/dp/080...
To me the rational conclusion given the information above is that those laws really did come from a source of knowledge higher than the totality of human knowledge at the time.
Can you clarify what you believe the source is?
>It seems that the grandparent comment is starting from the premise that god exists and looking for evidence to support the conclusion they already hold.
it seems that you are assuming anything affirming God must be irrational and therefore state that I must be approaching this irrationally.
I encourage anyone who finds the concept interesting to check out this book:
https://www.amazon.com/None-These-Diseases-McMillen-MD/dp/05...
It sounds very condescending to describe people with a different cost function to optimize than yours as irrational and instinctual.
The whole point of the article is that, for some people, not moving away when the rent is high is rational, in spite of the obvious drawbacks (and that's assuming it's feasible - which, for many, it is not).
>I made such a dumb long post because I want to be challenged on this. If you take the time to reply with why you disagree with me I will be very grateful.
OK, first step:
do you realize that "irrational reason" is, literally, an oxymoron?[1][2]
There is no such thing as irrational reason, by the very definition of the words.
There are, however, reasons that you do not understand. Maybe, as you said, it's a problem with empathy.
Not to say that there is no irrational behavior - people do irrational things. It's just that when we are talking about system patterns - like people not moving out of places they can barely afford - often, there are good reasons why it makes sense for them.
When you see something that looks irrational, it's important to assume ignorance on your part. Otherwise, you won't find out the rationale!
Case in point: you might think that it's irrational for poor people - especially, say, pimps in a poor neighborhood - to buy a lot of gold jewellery instead of investing in something worthwhile.
But then you find out that in their life, it is a very worthwhile investment[3]
TL;DR: never assume something is without reason; assume there is one - and you'll often find it.
[1]https://www.etymonline.com/word/irrational
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxymoron
[3]https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/2szqe9/til_p...
Nassim Taleb writes on this a lot, and I've seen some similar thoughts from Steve Keen [1]. We expect to be able to take individual behaviors and basically linearly combine them into population behaviors, because it's easy to think that way, and it's easy to model in both computers and our heads. When that turns out not to work, we tend to...
... just...
... sorta ignore that, and keep pretending we can linearly combine these things.
"I strongly believe, and have horded anthropological evidence to support this belief, that humans at scale are completely irrational, and to expect otherwise is foolish and irrational."
Per your comment about anthropology, I think people in general are actually often surprisingly rational. In fact, humans will often act quite rationally if you seriously and carefully look at what they are doing when the people using the aforementioned linear models confidently proclaim the irrationality of the humans involved, because the local humans are more capable of understanding the nuances of the non-linear landscapes they are in that the models don't even acknowledge the existence of, and the local humans are constrained in their behaviors by the need to survive and reproduce whereas linear models will tend only to look at groups ("well, in this plan, this one person died literally 15 times but the group overall is doing great numerically, so that's rational behavior" - really easy to write that sort of crap in to a linear model and hide it in the aggregation).
But two things mitigate that in this case. First, in general, humans are just unspeakably awful, unbelievably atrocious, almost impossible to overestimate how bad they are at explaining their actions in rational terms. This is where you get the cynical, possibly to the point of misanthropic, view of the world that everyone is just some sort of raving psychopathic lunatic with as much connection to the real world as a bad surrealist movie. The problem is, that model fails to describe reality; if people were actually that disconnected, society would not be as bad as it is now, it would be worse, to the point of non-existent. There would be no technological society as we know it. So people are not as irrational as all that. One of the major keys to understanding human behavior, and I am 100% serious and using no sarcasm here, is to assign a very low priority to people's stated motivations or reasons. (Simultaneously, there is little to no evolutionary need for people's beliefs about their own reasons to be accurate and we've actively evolved deception, including deception about our stated motivations and goals. So we end up successfully deceiving everyone, even ourselves.)
And second, specific in this case, I think humans have a significant activation energy to do things like "move", for both rational and perhaps irrational reasons, so you see a lot of stickiness as to where people live as a result. I think people also have a hard time visualizing what it would be really like to pick up and completely change their life, which makes it difficult for the "change everything" option to be analyzed properly. Our rationality is much more optimized for the second, minute, day, week, and maybe month time scale. When it comes to making decisions that will be bad for us today but probably be very good for us in five years, we're not terribly well equipped for that. And one can observe that with a simple time-value-of-money calculation there is even a sense in which that is not entirely irrational. You can get stuck in traps where the locally rational thing to do at any given time leads to a long-term suboptimal outcome, and even from a purely rational point of view it can be difficult to escape such traps.
[1]: https://smile.amazon.com/Debunking-Economics-Revised-Expande... - if you want this in intimate mathematical detail this is a good one
smile.amazon.com itself is a general charity program, but you have to set it up for your account. I have a plugin that autoredirects me there, since Amazon won't do it for you. I'm going to leave that; probably some people don't know about it.
How do people predict other people? The natural way is to imagine yourself being in their situation. For example, if you know that if you hit your head you will be in pain, it is easy to predict that when another person hits their head, they will be in pain. If you know that you would be scared of something, it is easy to predict that other people would be scared of the same thing.
The problem with this natural heuristic is that it only works when the other people are sufficiently similar to you in the relevant aspect. When they differ, the strategy stops working. For example, being hugged makes one person feel happy, but another person hates it; this makes it difficult for them to predict each other's reactions.
I believe this is what causes big problems to many highly intelligent people. They naturally (when they do not think explicitly about what they are doing) assume that other people are just as highly intelligent. They assume other people would see the "obvious" connections, and would avoid doing "obviously" stupid things; when in fact the "obvious" thing may actually require IQ 150 to notice. So they constantly predict people wrong.
Of course, there is also another way of predicting people, by looking from outside. Instead of imagining yourself in their situation, you just use your knowledge about how people in given situation behave. It may be your experience, or prejudice, or something you read in a book; the important thing is that you are NOT imagining yourself, but rather trying to construct the answer in a way that feels impersonal.
This other method has a few disadvantages. First, it takes more attention and time, so you may forget to do it, or you may do it too slowly. Second, because it is more complicated, you will probably learn it at later age (so it is specifically difficult to use for highly intelligent kids). Third, there is a cultural taboo against using it; it will be called manipulative. (There are some good reasons for this taboo in general, but sometimes it just hurts some innocent people.) Fourth, to use this method, you need to have the data.
This was one of the most important lessons in my life that took me too long to learn. Mostly because the society was always explicitly and implicitly telling me to do the opposite: to use the natural strategy, and avoid explicit modeling. This may work for an average person, for whom the natural strategy mostly provides good results. In my case, when I treated people the way I wanted to be treated, it mostly pissed them off. (For example, if I am wrong about something, I prefer when other people tell me about it. Coincidentally, telling other people that they are wrong, especially when they actually are wrong, is a very effective way to make enemies.) In contrast, using even very simplistic and very cynical models provided much better results. (Tell people what they want to hear, which mostly means that they are the best and perfect, and they will classify you as a wise and good person.) I feel bad about using this method, but it works, and it makes the other people happy. There are also a few people with whom the natural method works for me; but they are very rare.
I struggle to understand why people who argue for rationality, i.e., people who I know are very very smart and extremely rational, turn around and expect rationality from populations.
I've talked to highly intelligent bankers who are surprised when a market turns volatile/irrational, doctors who can't comprehend why their patients make irrational/poor health decisions, teachers who have difficulty accepting the disconnected nature of students whose very future depends on them doing well in a given class. Politicians who have this expectation that people will not break the law, or pull themselves up by their bootstraps, or whatever other things that require rigid rationality.
Maybe it's a problem with empathy? Of "putting yourself in someone else's shoes?" Maybe it's not even possible for extremely intelligent, relatively rational people, to adopt the mindset of people who (by choice, culture, or means well outside their control) live more emotional, instinctual lives. Even more insidious is when these exact people fail to recognize the irrationality present in themselves, inherent to the fact that they're human.
When I studied Anthropology, I'd even come across professors that didn't necessarily believe that human culture is irrational / arbitrary. There may be traits that continue to exist because natural selection promoted them (a religion that resisted the eating of pork and promoted evangalising happens to survive through dark ages because nobody is getting stomach parasites and because it replicates), but there's nothing inherently rational about that.
TLDR my big word-salad rant -> I strongly believe, and have horded anthropological evidence to support this belief, that humans at scale are completely irrational, and to expect otherwise is foolish and irrational. One should plan for irrationality.
Obviously moving away when rent is too high is the "right" choice, the "rational" choice, but being human is just too messy for something as simple as that. Like the article says, there are just so many reasons that get all tripped up, some rational, some not, all just as powerful an influence on a human "decision tree" (again, too logical a structure to describe human choice-making).
I made such a dumb long post because I want to be challenged on this. If you take the time to reply with why you disagree with me I will be very grateful.