Are Humans Rational? What’s At Stake?

..(we) retained utility theory as a logic of rational choice but abandoned the idea that people are perfectly rational choosers. -- D. Kahneman , (2011) Thinking: Fast and Slow, p.314

Reason is not a Tribe --Circle of Reason

…the growth of organizations themselves may create conflict where no previous consciousness of conflict existed. -- K. Boulding, Conflict and Defense: a general theory. (1963, p. 145)

What’s at stake? The dream of almost every “leader” in the history of mankind: subjugating others without feeling guilt, or without provoking moral opprobrium. Adding to the many god-given missions, we find: cultural superiority, Manifest Destiny, tribal primacy, economic efficiency, saving democracy, mental-physical health, Critical Thinking, beauty, racial purity and school reform. Throughout history these ideas have been used to separate people as worthy or unworthy of respect, social acceptance, or, even of life itself.

Into this crowd of ideological slogans struts Rationality, of ancient and solemn pedigree. Rationality has been recently refurbished as a touchstone of practical and moral dominance for a new crusade, which like many of its predecessors, will identify those to be privileged and those to be subjugated.

Many of Rationality's present enthusiasts pursue the dominance of a “Tribe of Reason.” This tribe is presently a loose confederation that, once achieving dominance, will likely struggle among themselves to createa hierarchy of "professions" -- with the usual assymetrical distributions of privileges and obligations. (A good deal of this sorting out and privileging has been done already in higher education.}

Every organization, every profession in our society has a stake in being perceived as a member of the Tribe of Reason in order to safeguard its economic opportunities, if not its moral status. (See, for example, America’s Interfaith Structure ) Rationality makes intolerance of so-designated Irrationality morally acceptable.

Even the most-focussed human minds encounter major impediments, both psychological and social, to rationality, the optimal pursuit of what they value. And theorists have long hoped to clarify rational action by seeking to mathematize notions of rationality. But they have met with mixed success. (See Kahneman, cited in epigraph and also, Is It Reasonable to Be Logical?)

The ephemerality of thought and the oscillations of taste and mood seem to offer no small reasons why thought processes appear more or less random and why decision appears to decay away from standards of optimality, e.g. utility theory(!) But is apparent randomness really irrational decay? Or, actually, a manifestation of values pluralism? Why must cultural variation or mental vicissitude diminish the status of persons or organizations to the point of being in need of, or open to, subjugation?

For references and to examine these issues further, see Pluralism and Rationality: the Limits of Tolerance


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Institutional Realities vs. "De-Biased" Realities

The limits of your language are the limits of your world. -- Wittgenstein

What is a language? A dialect with an army. -- Old joke among linguists.

Bias is an instrument of institutions to control depictions of reality.
(See Institutionalization) Bias is pervasive. We can’t escape it completely. Even our nervous system biases our perceptions at fundamental levels.

Source: https://goo.gl/images/9xnvjl

Bias is also relative. But this need not be a constant concern. We should only worry about bias when it favors or disfavors those who are making decisions for us. This is why we look to find “disinterested,” “objective,” “unprejudiced” judgments to support our decisions.

Of course, people who are unprejudiced in one situation may be highly biased in another. It is we, ourselves, who need to discriminate when this is so. That is the problem.

Every organization that persists through changes of leadership or mission becomes an “institution.” As an institution it imposes ways of perceiving and thinking on its participants. The benefits of membership, you will be told, outweigh the costs of the conformity expected of you. You may have to subordinate your own judgment to that of the traditions, practices, etc., i.e., residues of former and present leaderships. You will have to learn which “elephants in the room” are to be ignored. Institutions seldom invite the examination, much less the mention, of “de-biased realities.”

An important point: what we imagine to be our "natural" languages are highly institutionally reconstructed means of communication. As we grow out of the sole influence of family and neighborhood, especially as we go through schooling, our languages become refashioned to meet the demands of the institutions we go through. We subordinate our dialects to our institutional languages for the promise of support and protection.

Scientists, even, sometimes fall into the trap of thinking that their professional pursuits purge their working language of institutional biases, that their speech is a neutral medium of communication. This can stifle research by restricting both theory and practice within the boundaries of passing academic or corporate philosophical preferences. (See for example, The Functional Analysis of Human Behavior.)

Just as radical forms of Behaviorism and Empiricism of the last century impeded progress in psychology and economics, (see The Mathematics of Behaviorism: an informal examination), so it is that naive "natural language" notions of conceptualization and abstraction undermine progress in applicational development in AI. To examine this further, see More Related Issues

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Practical Statistics Tend To Be Local: the Bayesian specifics.

edited 11/4/19

A little learning is a dangerous thing;
drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
there shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
and drinking largely sobers us again. -- Alexander Pope (1709)

There are all sorts of ways to waste time, money and other resources in the struggle to make a living. Consider these:

a. putting a new den into a house you want to sell;
b. betting on the “fastest” horse when the weather is uncertain;
c. getting a Ph.D. in French when your dad owns a plumbing business;
d. investing in stocks based on the size of the company.

There is a superstition that some people acquire from studying introductory probability theory. The problem is that they try to apply context-free, universal patterns (axioms) to day-to-day specifics. This superstition can be shown in a variety of examples: the beliefs that

a. members of a larger group are more likely encountered; or
b. the average person is easiest to find; or
c. more is better; or
d. specifics reduce frequency.

But why is it that real estate agents chant, “Location, location, location” and not “New den, new den, new den”?

And does it matter that the horse race is being run in the mud? (If you don’t know, find out what a “mudder” is.)

After twenty-five years, who will have the most money on hand: the French scholar or the plumber? (But don’t “the statistics” tell us that those with more education earn more money?)

If you’re going to study probability and statistics, don’t stop before you get through Bayesian statistics. Adjusting general probability theory to the specific conditions you will be dealing with is a skill that many professionals have difficulty with. (You might be surprised how much unexamined cultural ideology underlies the choosing of "gold standards" or "priors".)

For references and to examine these issues further, see Is The Notion of Conjunctive Fallacy ("Conjunction Fallacy") Based on Fallacy?

 Cordially --- EGR

The “Democratic” Process: an illusion?

It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried. -- Winston Churchill

Talk is just that: talk. When we try to get past it, to get down to “getting things done,” it is our American custom to vote on alternatives. Being “democratic” -- what we have been taught since childhood -- is to “give everyone a voice,” to lay out the alternatives and to vote to award our commitment to the majority choice.

Here we run into the first illusion: we think we agree because we have picked a common word or phrase to identify our goal. But words are notoriously ambiguous and vague. In a situation where we can’t take the vote over again when we change our minds, this becomes a real problem. Majority vote may settle nothing.

Even when we achieve an overwhelming consensus, a landslide vote, we may proceed into butting up against the second illusion: that a common goal has only one path to realization. In fact, the hardest part in achieving anything is, often, to get some kind of agreement on how to work together to reach it. Majority vote on a goal may still mean disagreement on means.

Finally, even if we agree on goals and means, we may yet delude ourselves that obstacles are minor. People have different priorities. There may be a landslide majority vote on a goal, say, higher employment, and even on the means to achieving it. But higher employment many not rank the same for everyone when they consider national defense, clean environment, or education.

It is difficult to put democracy into action with real results. This leads some who tire or distract easily to wish for dictatorship or something similar, for example, a “ruling class.”

But dictatorship or aristocracy does not avoid these dilemmas. It just restricts the power to act to a smaller group. And “power to act” should not be confused with “successful results.”

To examine these issues further, see The Indeterminacy of Consensus: 
masking ambiguity and vagueness in decision


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Hard Wired Choice?

Intelligence, wisdom, circumspection, delay of gratification, strategic skill: it looks like it all might be a matter of neural growth. What, then, about our practices of reward and punishments for the choices people make?

Or, to take it from the other end, what if supporting healthy development in children is crucial? Can we continue to pretend that one person’s poverty is not our general concern?

But maybe we are just mechanisms, generating text and uttering sounds, living in the delusion that we are in control. We do what we do and we don’t what we don’t. End of discussion. Permanently.

To review the article which prompted these conjectures , see Separate Neural Systems Value Immediate and Delayed Monetary Rewards

For practical application, see PAIN VERSUS ANGUISH:
Is There No Need For Corporal Punishment?


Cordially -- EGR