13 KiB
When is it rational to irrational?
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Author: u/Ikacprzak *
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/9f1onw/when_is_it_rational_to_irrational/
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Score: 3
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Created: 2018-09-11T21:44:38
Post:
I ask this because people aren't Vulcans or computers. They are fallible no matter how much they try, they will make mistakes and do things that they regret in hindsight, the Ice and Fire books are a saga about how a bad situation becomes progressively worse because people make bad decisions for human reasons such as lust, honor, pride or ambition.
Comments:
u/causalchain [+9] (7 hours later)
Ethical injunctions: Promise to never do something, even if it appears to be the best choice when you're in the situation. Decide beforehand that your apparent rationality is not to be trusted in that scenario and that you should default to a certain choice even if it seems terrible.
u/frostburner [+8] (23 minutes later)
Whenever someone is in a heightened emotional state. If someone is pissed off, they're going to tend towards violence and hurtful things. If someone is scared, they will try to get away from what they're scared of.
u/Kuratius [+4] (34 minutes later)
When your subconscious awareness of a situation and your own goals exceeds your conscious awareness of one or both.
That, or when finding the optimal solution is significantly more costly than finding a mediocre one.
u/Putnam3145 [+7] (2 hours later)
I ask this because people aren't Vulcans or computers. They are fallible no matter how much they try, they will make mistakes and do things that they regret in hindsight
Yeah, that's the point? People are really, really bad at doing the right thing. The entire purpose of "rationality" is to minimize that, to reduce the phenomenon as much as possible.
u/fassina2 [+3] Progressive Overload (2 hours later)
When it's beneficial, or maximizes your utility function.
Simply put, when the rational action moves you away from your goals instead of towards them. Or when the rational options gives you lower returns than the irrational ones.
> If some particular ritual of cognition—even one that you have long cherished as "rational"—systematically gives poorer results relative to some alternative, it is not rational to cling to it. The rational algorithm is to do what works, to get the actual answer—in short, to win, whatever the method, whatever the means. If you can detect a systematic mistake in your thinking, then fix it; if you can see a better method, then adopt it.
u/oliwhail [+9] Omake-Maximizing AGI (5 hours later)
Simply put, when the rational action moves you away from your goals instead of towards them. Or when the rational options gives you lower returns than the irrational ones.
I feel like this needs scare-quotes around “rational” and “irrational” to emphasize the difference between rational (adopting strategies and meta-strategies likely to lead to reaching your goals goals) and the pop-psych/pop-sci idea of “rational” (using lots of sciencey-words and long numbers and then inevitably still being wrong / being shown up by the protagonist who understands what it Really Means to be Human)
E: I know I’m just agreeing with you loudly but phrases like ‘when the rational option gives worse results’ are so frustrating. If one of the options gives worse results, it isn’t rational to fucking pick it! The universe doesn’t give a shit how loudly you shout that you’re being rational!!
u/fassina2 [+1] Progressive Overload (15 hours later)
I agree with you, you should read the example in the link bellow, on the blog posts thing.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/nc/newcombs_problem_and_regret_of_rationality/
EY's point is the same as yours. It's just that in this example the rational choice actually gives you worst results, because the results change if you pick the rational choice. His point is that it'd be rational to pick the "irrational" choice in this case.
u/oliwhail [+1] Omake-Maximizing AGI (a day later)
I know, I’ve read it. I was mostly venting about the annoying confusion in day to day English.
u/dabmg10 [+2] (33 minutes later)
Well, the obvious answer is when people are overwhelmed with emotion. When learning something that elicits a strong change in emotion a person's thoughts shall be skewed by that emotion. Some Art at times could be seen as a manifestation of looking at the world from an 'irrational' view. A somewhat more anecdotal answer is people cling to irrational thoughts when it is more comforting than being rational. To try to change would be to admit to being wrong, and similar to the concept of now one sees themselves as the villain. The desire to be seen as right could be stronger than the desire to be right. its rational to be irrational when its self beneficial whether through mental or physical.
u/turtleswamp [+2] (2 days later)
Assuming you mean when is it Ok for a character in rational fiction to behave irrationally:
When choosing the rational option would be out of character.
Most likely causes would be: they lack the education, time, or emotional stability to analyse the situation adequately to see the rational choice (Can be cause by charcters of limited means or by really complicated/emotional situations that are hard to analyse), they aren't in possession of enough information to make a rational choice (one door leads to freedom the other to certain death, tehre aren't any convenient guards you can ask tricky questions, you juts have to guess), or they juts don't care about the stakes enough to bother making a carefully considered choice (Now that i have begun eating my salad it occurs to me that I like Honey-Mustard dressing slightly more than Cesar and probably should have asked if they had it rather than order the Cesar, oh well).
Often it'll be a combination. Like right now the character is emotional or stressed about something and as a result they care less about some details than the normally would and they miss an obscure connection because they juts didn't pay enough attention. That sort of thing happens to people all the time so it happening sometimes in rational fiction as well would be expected provided the emotional state / stress is not just fabricated out of nowhere for plot convenience but rather is an internally consistent consequence of events in the story leading up to now.
Assuming you mean more genrally when is an irrational choice the rational choice:
Never. By definition an irrational choice cannot be a rational choice.
The closet this comes to being posible is when you actually have one person calling a choice irrational because they don't undertand what it was suppsoed to achieve, and it is in fact rational in context of that goal. For example somone trying to sabotage an organization may appear to be acting irrationally while they're really acting rationally just against the best interests of their employer because they want their employer to fail.
Assuming you mean when is a straw Vulcan irrational choice the real rational choice:
Pretty darn often. Most zero sum games of nontrivial complexity have examples, notably chess. The thing here is straw Vulcan rationality isn't very rational. It's usually an embarrassingly shallow analysis put in the mouth of a 'tell don't show' intelligent character and even when it's not it will often make the mistake of assuming the outcome justifies the decision ("I bet the orphanage's yearly budget on one round of roulette, but I won, so take that mr. i won't shut up about the odds!") which is not ra very rational viewpoint.
u/Nimelennar [+2] (17 hours later)
- When your opponent is someone who knows how you think. For example, in the first season of Elementary, Holmes was up against an opponent who could predict his every move... so he handed the reins to Watson, who was less rational but also less predictable (and had an outsider's protective).
- When trying to use the Theory of Mind. Most people aren't fully rational. To understand how they think, you'll have to simulate irrationality. See also: method acting (which is applying the Theory of Mind to a fictional character whom you're trying to impersonate).
- Leisure activities. It's not rational to pay money to get on a rollercoaster, be yanked around at high g-force, and scream your lungs out, but it's fun.
- Maybe borderline, but I'd say that cognitive behavioral therapy is acting irrationally towards a rational goal: you're trying to replace your existing instinctual emotional reaction to a stimulus with a different one, which can't really be done by reasoning with yourself; you have to condition yourself by exposing yourself to the stimulus and calling forth a different emotional reaction than the usual one. You don't get over a fear of heights by talking yourself out of it; you do so by going someplace high up and causing yourself to be excited by it.
u/MilesSand [+1] (3 days later)
Depends on the character's goals and priorities. It's perfectly fine to have characters whose goal is to maximize their own access to some kind of resource, especially when they believe someone else is going to save the world or whatever. (Long-term you come out ahead with that strategy as long as someone actually does save it because there is nothing to gain from it except loss prevention that affects everyone equally)
Your premise that mere humans are incapable of consistently figuring out their best move when it comes to their own interests is flawed. Mistakes do happen, usually when a situation prevents the person from fully engaging in the moment or when someone is out of their depth, but they aren't the default.
u/None [+1] (3 days later)
I feel like this post misunderstands what rationality is all about. Emotion is the opposite of rationality. Rationality is fundamentally based on emotion; emotion is what helps us actually decide what we want and what we value. Acting emotionally isn't fundamentally irrational, in the same way being cold and calculating isn't always perfectly rational.
Rationality isn't using tons of long words and running calculations and droning on and on about logic. Rationality is simply acting in ways that help you achieve your goals, and that's that. All the stuff about strategies and tactics and cognitive errors, are just ways to do just that; achieve your goals.
It's never rational to be irrational. It is often understandable to be irrational, especially in moments of crisis or heightened emotion, but it's not really rational.
I like the Ice and Fire books precisely because of how it approaches rationality. In the book series, people really do act to get what they want, and to uphold their values, and it is the conflict between those two desires that makes the characterisation so interesting. Sometimes characters are interesting because they want something incredibly important (to protect their family and to win a war, for example), but also highly value things like honour, which prevents them from being entirely pragmatic about it. Still rational however, because rationality allows you to limit your possible actions to what you deem morally acceptable, but not pragmatic. And some characters want similar things, and value almost nothing, and so provide conflict with their terrible actions. I like ASOIAF because it shows us how it's possible to be ignorant, but rational. Or foolish and naive, and yet still rational. To not give away too many spoilers; if you make plans assuming that your followers will be perfectly loyal and wont betray no matter what, those plans can still be rational, even if one of the main beliefs you're working around is wrong. Rationality is about making the best plans you have, with the information you have.
I'd argue that Ned Stark was rational. He was naive to trust Littlefinger, but the plans he made under that assumption were effective and smart, and would have worked if he was dealing with a similar situation in Winterfell. Ned could be taken as a textbook example of a rationalist who failed to update his beliefs to match his new surroundings, and paid the price for it, and the ASOIAF books are full of this; characters who are capable of being smart and clever, but set to many variables to a constant, and get wrecked for it.
To me, ASOIAF is about all the different forms rationality can take in different people, with different goals and values; and it shows that even rationality can look really, really irrational from the outside looking in.