Thomas J. Webb’s Ecology Blog

Open Source » Blog Archive » Dan Ariely: Confronting Irrationality

Here’s a good talk on radio open source (an island of interestingness in a vast sea of trying to make a routine election sound like an earth-shaking event - it’s not, people!!!) Ariely talks about how we should take into account limits of human rationality when deciding public policy and dealing with disputes. This is a pretty obvious idea, yet no one seems to be willing to accept it. Why? Is it creepy to think of our brains as somehow flawed? His analogy of how we make mittens for hands prone to cold to how we should adjust policy to how brains really work (not outmoded models about how they work) is quite apt.

This science of studying human irrationality (psychology, heh), combined with recent advances in game theory, represent a new frontier in bringing about positive social change. Social philosophies are no longer bounded to primitive psychology and sociology that is just-almost-right-but-not-quite. Marx’s logic was quite sound, but he missed important points about human nature. Now that we are understanding more and more where people make solid decisions and where they don’t, and we have models for how games are played rationally with competing interests, we can develop theories of history that are for once accurate! We can harness the same forces that make Americans obese and put them to positive use (like making Americans thin).

The flip side is that these sciences also represent new frontiers in controlling people. It’s no secret that businesses use consumer irrationality to derive profit (supersize for 50 cents.. you don’t really want all that extra food and yet…) and missionaries utilize the fact that a vast distance between carrot and stick convinces absolutely, even without a shred of evidence for the carrot nor the stick (there I go knocking on missionaries again. I’m on a roll!) and so on… People are pretty immune to these things once the trick is discovered, but I can’t help but fear for what will happen when the tyrannical entities of the world (like the “People’s” Republic of China) become all the more sophisticated…

I was talking to a Japanese friend of mine, and she gave some good advice to me, using this idiom:

遠くの親族より近くの他人
tooku no shinzoku yori, chikaku no tanin

It renders awkwardly into English. The best translation I can come up with is “hold more important the stranger who is near than your relatives who are far away.” I destroyed the delicious succinctness of the original, but at least it sounds all proverb-y, right?

I won’t reveal the context of the conversation, lest I reveal awkward personal details, but it got me thinking. It is a good saying. You should give more heed to those close to you, since they are your new family in a sense. But why is it? The answer leads to my main point of disagreement with Peter Singer…

I owe it to myself to help myself, of course. And I owe it to other people to do what is in their best interests or at least not harm them (I extend this to anything that feels, but let’s not go there right now). The easiest people to help will generally be those the closest to me. Meaning, I can enhance their lives greatly with less effort than it takes to only slightly help those far away.

This is the problem with Singer’s utilitarian scheme: I don’t know enough about the situation to know when
what I’m doing is equivalent to pulling a lever and letting the train hit a Bangladeshi child instead of my 2nd home in Vancouver (note: I don’t have a 2nd home in VC, but that would be awesome!) And yes, I should do what I can to learn and understand more often and help more than those close to me. HOWEVER, my intuition, granted by millions of years (at least) of social evolution, that it’s more efficient to help those near me, those whose problems I am made most aware and understand most intricately, will tend to be correct on more often than not. I’m not wrong for wanting to help my neighbor, and placing more energy into that than to donating to Bill & Melinda Gates (not that I shouldn’t donate anything whatsoever).

The second main thing is this: emphasize connections that do exist over those you think should. Don’t forget those you spend the most time with, those who you’ve formed real bonds with and influence (and be influenced by) every day. This is a good point to raise to any left-wing racialist (i.e., the type found in Black communities, as well as Eurocentrist neo-pagan circles) - you may deem some man you truly have nothing to do with in Zimbabwe your “brudda”, but just maybe whity me is much more truly your brudda.

</rant>

Oh yes, enjoy…

Wise men sing, the praise of largess,
As do kind men say, but surely they jest!

I can only save one bloated African,
I durst not save the unattractive one!

In my day, I have only so much time,
Woe would be I, if I just analyzed a dime!

Christ boasts oft about his love for all
But love is a heart cut out of a sheet
Am I the heart, or am I the sheet?

Can I Jesus a thousand women,
when one exhausts my money, and 5, my semen?

For to belong, you see, is to be included,
While the universe of others is excluded

(for I desire not, but a sip of your wine,
Unless I can have a goblet that’s mine)

Nature, too, is a masterful miser,
from great bear to wily spider

No creature takes shape that fills all space,
nor all of time, beyond its own race

Look around, and see:
Much enters, but none leaves the sea
and
The three toes of the sloth,
The dull colour of the moth,
The useless eyes of the mole,
The numbered days of the tail on the tadpole,
The small size of a chigger?
Realize, my friend, that God is a niggard

[Wo]men of reason bitch oft about the destroyers of reason - people who pay scientists to fudge their reports in disfavor of human impact on climate change, people who try to downplay evolution’s importance in shaping life on this planet, holocaust deniers and so on.

The end result, however, is ultimately a deeper understanding. Those who strain to come up with any minute flaw in generally accepted ideas will actually contribute to it as a very passionate and crazed devil’s advocate. In this way, our understanding of climate, biology and history will only deepen. Indeed, last year saw strides in evolution and biology and I can’t help but think evolution “skeptics” had a role to play in this.

Why is the idealist so frustrated? Why can’t she find reasonable compromise with the rest of the world? Because her fetus, animal, starving child, tree is like a family member. But, consider this (read if you are an idealist!):

You are camping in the woods with your family, when suddenly a hungry Grizzly Bear storms into camp. He comes to YOU and says, “I am very hungry and I crave delicious human flesh. But, I am fair, so I will let you choose who I will eat. I’m only hungry enough for one person. But, if you try to stop me or don’t select who I shall eat, I will eat someone at random and kill one more out of spite. God help you if you are one of the survivors”.

And what does the idealist choose time and time again? “You are a monster bear! You have no right to eat us! We are outraged.” And we all know the obvious answer is to choose yourself or, the jerk of the family everyone hates *evil grin*.

Refusal to talk with the “enemy”, refusal to prioritize with that which is most treasured, and refusal compromise get the idealist and the very thing they are fighting for time after time.

When you speak of ethics, please don’t delude yourself into thinking ethics exist in the most literal sense. Remember that what you are doing is coming up with good rules for you to follow, not discovering universal ethical principles. I have no doubt that making a solid set of ethics for you to follow is the right thing to do, but it is only because it is the right thing to do.

Everyone has her own crazy ideas
And most of them are wrong
But they all contribute in their own way
Their own part of the song

Every fallacy they had,
Is one more we shall not,
And every detail they found, however stupid,
Is the foundation from which we build atop

Some may push fallacious ideas,
But these will always fall to the ideas that work
For you cannot build a building with snake oil
Nor plow fields with “intelligent design”

You are not standing on the shoulders of giants, Messrs. Newton. No, you are a midget standing on the shoulders of another midget standing on the shoulders of another midget and so on.. all the way back to the first half-wit that thought it made sense to beat rocks together and make sparks. (We’re all links in a chain. Promote yoursef, Mr. Scientist! Or get lost in history.)

When computers get smart enough, the efficient, but limiting occam’s razor will no longer be necessary. We will be able to exhaust every single possibility because sometimes, midget lepers do win a million dollars.

Attacks of moral philosophies usually involve drawing up a scenario in which the philosophy allows “unconscionable” things. What makes something “unconscionable”? It seems really as if we are just trying to derive a formula that approximates best the curve that we all already built - culture.