When You're Too Rational to Be Rational!

Rationality for Mortals: How People Cope with Uncertainty by Gerd Gigerenzer
Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman (on his work with Amos Tversky)
What Darwin Got Wrong by Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini
Inevitable Illusions: How Mistakes of Reason Rule Our Minds by Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini
See a brief sumary of these topics I've written that's worth checking out:

00:00 Rationality for Big-Braned Mortals
3:12 The Heuristics and Biases Program and System 1 and System 2 in Psychology
7:12 Experimentations in Human Irrationality and Cognitive Illusions, the Baseball Bat example
10:05 Nate Silver says 250% chance of someone besides Blormph being elected in 2020 #OrangeManBad
12:16 Priming, framing and making money selling washing machines, how to make e-celeb/e-thot bux
15:27 Biases, risks and the Hard-Easy effect
17:32 A summary of Kahneman and Tversky's program
18:55 I know this model isn't real... implicatures and Linda the feminist bank-teller
25:23 D'nations (about a month's worth)
27:58 tfw when too rational to be rational??? Seeds of doubt
29:05 ACTUALLY everything you see is a lie! The disjunct between the formally rational and real-life rational
31:14 Ecological Rationality and the Adaptive Toolbox
33:51 Formal logic is for autistes and NPCs
37:33 Reconstructing human rationality in the light of uncertainty (also muh black swans)
40:37 Returning to the Hard-Easy effect and regression to the epistemological mean
41:43 The ploy of Heuristics and Biases program
42:39 Richard Dawkins plays rational bugman baseball and the Gaze Heuristic
45:34 The border between Systems 1 and 2 and the Paradox of Choice and overfitting
50:23 Feyerabend BTFOs IYI and intellectual lapdog Stephen Jay Gould epic style
53:11 Core assumptions
54:03 What Darwin Got Wrong in the Heuristics and Biases program (also muh emergence)
58:50 Libertarian Paternalism and Nudgebois, social engineering and inevitable ignorance
1:04:11 Closing

[RudyHill]

151. "In the future, social systems will not be adjusted to suit the needs of human beings. Instead, human being will be adjusted to suit the needs of the system."

[anonl]

Real chads do not make decisions based on facts and logic, but rather, on vibes.

[terminalnudity]

TIL Luke's so sheltered he overestimates the cost of washing machines by 10x

[htth]

>"rationality isn't the best way"
>uses rational arguments to justify that

[richardstallman]

Or as I've taken to calling it GNU plus rationality

[desktorp]

It bugs me that college economics students are quick to lap up these little cognitive number tricks, but when someone tries to discuss numerology, embedded in the media, most of them will instantly ridicule the person. _System 1_ (sounds like a Roland synthesizer) is where these people get their "Can't Happen To Me" internal defense mechanism, which stops them from realizing how easily we are programmed by subliminals; words, numbers, colors, shapes, patterns, frequency of repetition, etc.

[vyankateshmarathe]

I am glad someone who doesn't see the so-called irrational aspect of human mind as problematic and who is smarter than engaging in naive romanticism about rationality.

[wildhomestead]

Prep in the /var/ with Luke Smith and Mike Enoch.

[invadervim]

I've learned more from youtube than all my years in school

[AugusteEden]

Me being a kid explaining to my math teacher why 77 + 33 is a 100

[jaarbahd]

Excellent episode. "Gould's Homunculus" may very well be how I refer to the phenomenon described at 50:23. Then the way Feyerabend's quote diagnoses the issue was so succinct and useful I'm not likely to forget it. Thanks again for the content.

[amavect]

First, I'm surprised that behavioral economics wasn't mentioned. (Maybe I missed it.)
Now for some rambling.

I'm happy that I'm not the first person to think of "rational irrationality", my phrase for formal logic being combined with imperfect information. Human rationally only differs from formal logic simply because the axioms are different. In this view, humans are rational decision makers given limited computation speed and time, which leads to irrationality when compared to formal logic. (An exercise for the reader: prove the theorem of probabilistic decision-making given the axiom of imperfect knowledge.)
In an extreme view, our beliefs reflect the calibration of our decision-making heuristics. Thus, the purpose of rhetoric is not to be formally logical, rather to use the other person's heuristics to make them reach the same decision. In order to do such, more information that leads to the heuristics leading to a certain side (AKA evidence) needs to be given. In this view, heuristics are simply prior knowledge of what works, and swaying a person's beliefs means changing their heuristics.

Interesting take on evolution, that it's simple structures that compound to complex behavior, instead of being change over time and survival of the fittest. However, I don't think that it's "our genes aren't calibrated", rather that the brain is constantly adjusting heuristics as it acquires more information. For example, a neural network+genetic algorithm trying to beat Super Mario Bros struggles because it can only learn when it fails (Mario dying); the human brain constantly adjusts the heuristics on the fly without needing outright failure because it learns constantly.

I like that quote towards the end. Words to live by.
"My assumption when diagnosing culture or diagnosing how people generally act, my assumption is not that people are generally stupid. My assumption is that I don't adequately understand the behavior of people or the reasons behind what they do, or the reasons behind culture, or the reasons behind someone's economic transactions. The guiding assumption should always be 'I don't understand this, maybe I should look into why it happens.' "

[ncruzalayza]

it shows that you're a professor. you're very good

[putinstea]

If you are female and stuck in an elevator with a male stranger. Would you rather be stuck with a black man or a white man?
Try to solve for sytem 1 & 2.

[atticusbeachy]

Re 12:30 Priming doesn't exist. None of the priming studies have replicated.

Edit: This is not to say that priming has zero effect, but it is at least much smaller than "Thinking Fast and Slow" claimed. Daniel Kahneman has publicly admitted this.

[Vodalus]

Listening to this while working out makes me feel extra redpilled

[anima]

21:00 regarding the bankteller problem, I think it's less an issue of a heuristic on probabilities and more that we implicitly rephrase the question in our heads. People will not hear it as "what is more likely X or (X and Y)" they hear it as "what is more likely (not Y, given X) or (Y, given X)". (X being she is a bank teller and Y being she is an active feminist)
Edit: nevermind, this is exactly what you said later on lol

[iamtrash]

I'd like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as "System 1" is, in fact, called GNU/System1, or as I have recently taken to call it, GNU plus System 1...

[Achrononmaster]

Enjoyed all that. On Nudge/Behavioural Econ.... the problem is not the use of behavioural studies, since you'd be a fool not to try to get people doing what you want them to do, (and in this sense I have a soft spot for applied behavioural econ), no, the real problem is most of the neolibs using Nudge economics (which includes both left and right wing neolibs both --- big program in the UK under last few PM's) is not that they are using Nudges, but that they think they know what's good for folks in the bigger picture. So it's about control and power. As I said, you'd be a fool not to use such power, because the alternative --- authoritarianism (of either colour)--- is unstable and tends to rapidly get rejected by people en masse. The ethical use of Nudge economics is to use open transparent governance, not closed door backroom neoliberal wonkery. Sadly, no governments are doing this (open democracy), and they are all neolib infested rat holes. I think that's a point in one of Luke's later episodes --- democracy is not what you think it is, in current "practised" forms it is not democracy, only a sham. To make democracy work for ordinary people you have to open it up, you can't have secrets, you can't have the national security apparatus being run by faceless bureaucrats and unelected officials.

[frankautiwele]

I got like half way through that and trailed off away from it. Gona have to rewatch another day. Or never.