[please note that as this was an email, it should be considered a draft, not a finished essay.]
Hi, Jeff. Here's the deal. Your email motivated me to write a really long response, which is great, because writing can be hard (I have loads of half-finished essays), but inefficient, because you are an audience of one. So I'd like to stick your response and this email on my webpage, and forward it to a few other people, but I figured I'd ask permission first.
Much of what I say has to do with evolutionary biology/psychology. I've explained some of it along the way, but if this is a field you have not been exposed to before, this may be going a little fast. Some books on the subject are recommended below.
Lets start with the end and then move back to the beginning:
>Well, it strikes me that this might all
be too much on the personal
>tip for an email that's so out of the blue, but it probably
doesn't
>bother you since you post your diary on the web. Anyway,
cool
>article; talk to you later.
Thanks. I get much stranger unsolicited personal emails than yours, I can assure you of that! Feedback from fellow rationals is always welcome.
>Taking a logical, rational view of the
world has always seemed so
>basically necessary to me that I used to be continually surprised
at
>how often people would express contradictory beliefs or patently
>unsupportable assertions in their daily life. After leaving
the
>insular world of Mudd and after being a member of society-at-large
for
>a couple of years going now, it no longer surprises me. I've
come to
>accept it as the way most people are. Placing emotion over
reason (or
>being unwilling to take reason to its necessary ends) seems
to fulfill
>some kind of innate human need, and for a long time I felt
that I was
I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "fulfills some kind of innate human need", but that doesn't sound right to me. Irrationality is not just a weakness or a poor-but-common choice, it is fundamental to the way our brains are built. An SF author who I've been reading a lot of lately (John Brunner) wrote in a novel: "Inside our heads is an ape riding on a dog riding on a lizard". Rational, higher-level thinking is just one part of our brain - and a relatively recent part, at that. The emotional centers are much older and more deeply buried, and try as we might, it is very difficult to ignore them. Its not like they are some kind of aberration - those instincts were, at the beginning, all we had!
There are several good reasons for us to still have all this irrationality. First is that, I suspect, it is much easier to evolve higher level thinking in parallel with the emotional/instinctual system than to just convert the whole brain. Machinery in place is tough to remove (vestigial tail bumps, and I've heard that the histamine system is a relic of a previous version of the immune system). Second is that, even if higher level thinking is a better use for the brain, we are not fully evolved - we are at one point along the path. Third and by far the most telling, IMHO, is that higher-level thinking is just a tool given to us by our genes to make us better at achieving their goals, and emotions are crucial to those goals as well.
All our genes care about is survival and reproduction, the endless probabilistic dance. If our brains were purely higher-level thinking, then we wouldn't have been programmed correctly to carry out that genetic agenda! Emotions like jealousy, sexual desire, and protectiveness towards blood relatives all serve that end. Also there are some "irrational" emotions that serve both our genes and ourselves, such as the set of emotions designed to let humans cooperate for mutual advantage (thus beating the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma game that is Life). For much more on this subject I refer you to The Origins of Virtue, and for a small discussion of one irrational emotion that may act to our advantage check out a draft of a paper by my dad.
An important point that needs to be made here is that our genes are not perfect - far from it. Sometimes they produce thing which are bad for them & bad for us, and sometimes things which are good for us and bad for them. Intelligence can cause both those things. For an example of the latter, take birth control. Birth control is a stunning example of how we have wrested control over an important part of our lives back from our genes. Our genes would probably prefer that we didn't discover birth control. However, note that they still have a partial victory - while we (in the rich countries, at least) now have the choice as to when and with whom we reproduce, we still have a strong biological urge to procreate. The new generations in industrialized countries haven't been stopped, just spaced out and slimmed down. An example of the former is nuclear weapons technology. From all reports, it sounds as though there was some nonzero probability that we could have had a major nuclear war last century - a big setback for our genes. Yet the combination of the intelligence to discover the technology with the primate emotions of intratribal solidarity and intertribal hatred caused that risk. Another example of the former is our desire to eat sugar & fat. We have this desire because it was good in the environment in which we evolved. Now that sugar & fat are readily available and we don't make our living through physical means, this impulse is harmful. Both of these "bad for us & them" things are due to an environmental change which happened too quickly for our genes to adjust, which is a common cause of impulses which seem foolish.
Putting this all together, we end up with a very different picture of the human brain than what I suspect you have, and which comes naturally to smart, rational people. They see the brain as a powerful general-purpose computer, with senses, memory, and perhaps even emotional state as inputs, which the computer takes, processes logically, and then outputs to the body. When they are wrong, or having difficulties thinking about something, they ascribe it to lack of knowledge, or the CPU being too slow, or just the AI being imperfect. Thus they are baffled when other peoples computers consistently produce inconsistent output!
What the brain really looks like is a hodgepodge of different modules with all sorts of wires patching them into each other. One of these modules is higher-level thinking, but the extent to which it sits "above" the other modules is different from person to person. The other modules send irrational impulses and emotions, some of which serve our genes and us ("ouch!", hand pulls back instantly), some serve our genes but not us ([in a whiny voice] "I'm not getting any younger, dear. I want a baaaaby!"), some of which serve neither ("mmm...donuts").
So the basic reason for the behavior you observe is, I believe, that irrationality can often be a reproductive advantage, thus it is no surprise that most peoples actions are often governed by irrationality.
>just missing a gene, or something. Of
course, like you, I realized
>eventually that the single choice to seek truth by rational
means is
>that gene itself; from it (or the absence of it, whatever),
many
>things follow. It's almost mathematical.
But even people like us are sometimes governed by our emotions, and can make mistakes because of them. Logic comes easily when we are making long-term plans (that may be what its designed for) and when we are sitting in our heads and thinking. But when we interact with other people, when we deal with things that are important to our genes (survival, male-female interaction), and when we are in situations which require immediate response, instincts play a big role too.
As you can probably tell, Evolutionary Psychology/Biology has been my fascination lately. It answers a lot of questions about why we are the way we are. Richard Dawkins is one of the giants of the field, I recommend his books, especially _The Selfish Gene_, a seminal work in the field, whose final chapter introduces the concept of "memes". I have just started _The Moral Animal_ by Robert Wright, which came highly recommended by several of the books/webpages I have been reading.
>I say "almost" because it's not
like a whole set of beliefs
>automatically spring from this one choice. You and I may
agree that
>logic and reason is the best way to pursue truth, but we may
still
>reach conclusions that are not identical. There's some leeway
in
>there that is dependent on a lot of things, maybe experience,
or
>background, or the influence of one's parents. And I don't
know about
>you, but this really confuses me. Actually, it bothers me,
that
In the essay, I said "even rational people have biases (tho we fight to minimize their influence) and can reach different conclusions from the same data ('specially when there ain't enough of it!)". So I think the answer is that we are all kinda reaching up towards the goal of rationality from this swamp of instinct and emotion, and that our deviations from rationality are all in different directions. Even though a lot of these irrationalities spring from genetic causes, and so are similar, we are all wired a little differently, and we all have different areas of weakness and strength at being rational. Some of us have clipped the wires from one module, some from another. Also we don't have a perfect AI - it has to learn through experience and gathering knowledge, and as you say, we each have different sets of experience and knowledge. Add to this the fact that some things (religion, philosophy) involve arguing where there is very little evidence, so we have less to go on and our biases are more manifest, and it should (hopefully) seem more reasonable that reasonable people disagree.
So I predict, both from theory and from experience, the following statements:
1) How much/often people deviate from the
rational choice in a situation is highly correlated with how related
that situation is to survival/reproduction in the environment
in which we evolved. [This is a fundamental statement of evolutionary
pyschology which comes straightforwardly from the nature of evolution]
2) How much/often rational people disagree has a high inverse
correlation with how much knowledge/information is available on
the subject.
Remember, though, that rationality is a spectrum and not a dichotomy. Frustratingly irrational people may still make the rational choice if it is also the best evolutionary choice, or if the situation has very little to do with evolutionary matters. Rational people may still do the wrong thing if the right buttons get pressed.
We can derive some interesting things from this. For example:
A) If most people do something the same way, it is probably either because it is the rational choice or the evolutionarily correct choice (or both).
B) When there is very little knowledge about something and most people do it the same way, it is probably due to evolutionary forces.
>there's this inconsistency. So many things
that seem like no-brainers
>-- atheism, for example, or the absurdity of racism -- are
still
Well, atheism was a much less tenable position before Darwin. Now its a no-brainer, but a couple hundred years ago rational people were in a tough spot. Its a case of #2 above - there wasn't enough information available so even rational people disagreed.
>disagreed upon by many other people who
consider themselves to be
>rationalists. (People that profess to be scientists and yet
hope to
>solve personal problems through prayer... what is up with
that?) The
Yeah, I know what you mean. Things like that seem nonintuitive to me, but I think that is because it is hard to understand other people's kind of irrationality. Its easy to put yourself into a rational persons shoes, but modelling other people's irrationalities is tougher. Its like the basic premise of economics (at least, before evolutionary psychology, as my dad's article points out) - you assume people are rational because if they aren't, well, how will you know exactly how they are irrational, so lets hope it all averages out.
The thing about religion is that it can be made internally consistent, since you have an omnipotent being to conjure. Maybe its just my bias, but it seems to me that evaluating things based on internal consistency is a lot easier than picking/figuring out the right axioms. Once a scientist accepts "there is a god" I don't think its hard to build a worldview in which everything makes sense. It is still baffling to me how they can make that initial assumption and never question it.
>best I can understand is that it's just
human nature again, something
>inherent about the brain and the way emotion permeates everything.
>Maybe this gives a glimpse into the way the rest of society
functions.
>Take these little permutations that exist and magnify them
a million
>times through the lens of personal experience and that's how
you get
>the divisive blocs that occur in society, Protestants vs.
Catholics
>and so on.
I think that comes from 1 & 2 above. Why do most people believe in religion? I'm not sure, but by (A) I suspect it has to do with evolutionary psychology. _The Naked Ape_ theorized that god is a replacement for the strong father figure which primates lost when they moved from the forest (where there was a strong dominance heirarchy) to the plains (where the heirarchy flattened because of group hunting and the need for two-people to rear each child). I don't buy that as the whole answer, but it may be a part. _Belief in Magic: The Psychology of Superstition_, which tries to answer the question "Why do people believe these irrational things", observes that superstition is most often invoked in the context of uncertain phenomena. When there is chance, people make up explanations.
As for why there so many different religions, I think its because of #2. This is a situation where everyone is being pushed to believe in something (I'm guessing, I could be wrong) but there is no evidence/information about exactly what to believe, and evolution doesn't specify because it doesn't matter. So you end up with each place picking something different, and conformity (plus imprinting children) spreading it. Unfortunately, this then starts triggering our tribal endophilia/xenophobia and you have Jerusalem and the crusades.
Note that conformity is an essential ingredient of the explanation, because while religions are different in different places they are (mostly) the same in each place. So your explanation of permutations + experience giving rise to different religions would only work by itself if there were lots of religions in each country and people picked their own. I think its the right explanation for how each new religion is different, but you need to add conformity/social pressure/imprinting at a young age to explain the way things are. I read some rational thing about religion that said "The best predictor, which has an extremely high correlation, of a person's religion is the religion of their parents". Yet rational people sometimes still believe for their whole lives - I guess the brainwashing is so effective that even when its obvious, people can't break away.
>By the way, I wonder exactly what you mean
when you say "not normal"
>(or when you refer to yourself as a superfreak). I assume
you mean
>that you are in the minority of the population in being a
rationalist
>-- not, for example, that you have a purple mohawk. I would
doubt
>that one's adhering to rational principles leads to abnormal
social
>behaviors. I imagine that has more to do with personal expression,
>and who knows how that comes about.
I mean both. I made a brief comment at the end on this subject when I said that I have strange tastes, but I think I did a poor job of explaining this in the essay. The reason I feel like a superfreak is because of the combination of rationality and strange tastes. Perhaps another way of putting it is the combination of rationality with a particular set of tastes & irrationalities rarely found in rational people. Partly things like the purple mohawk, my tattoo, and my tongue piercing. These are arbitrary aesthetic choices, so it feels to me that rational people should make them in lots of different ways (not necessarily the same as me, but not the same as each other either). Yet most rational people seem to make a lot of aesthetic choices the same way - to conform, to be normal - and the people who make abnormal aesthetic choices seem to often be irrational.
One response might be "Well, isn't normality just a default choice? Unless you are born with strange tastes, like a penchant for personal expression, you will just stick to the default, and that is how most rational people are." Unfortunately (B) suggests that rational people's adherence to normality is a result of evolutionary forces. Given how little information there is about how people should dress or look, why isn't there a dazzling range of choices made? There are a lot of theories about conforming being an evolutionary strategy, for example that it allows new discoveries to be quickly adopted by everyone. So even "sticking to the default choice" may be obeying evolutionary impulses.
Now, it could be (depending on your social situation) that conforming is also the rational choice - fitting in gains you more than personal expression. Since conformity has rarely been very important for achieving my goals in my surroundings, I don't have a very good feel for whether most people are conforming rationally. Also conforming may just be easier because of economies of scale - its cheapest to buy the same clothes as everyone else. But I am bothered by my observations of how often people with a wide range of interesting ideas achieved by rational thinking rather than intellectual conformity still display social & aesthetic conformity.
Another very complicated, involved topic which makes me feel different than most rational people and which is partly due to tastes is drug use. Drugs cause experiences which people who have had feel that people who haven't can't understand, because they are just so different from normal consciousness. Not only that, but since these experiences have to do with consciousness, cognition, and the chemical nature of the brain, as well as (sometimes) with understanding other people / the world, they can be relevant to intellectual discussions.
I don't claim to seek these experiences solely for their intellectual value - I admit to having a taste for periodic changes in consciousness. I also like to tinker with things, and drugs, diet, nutritional supplements and the like are how we can tinker with the machinery that is the physical substrate to our consciousness. Since I think these experiences have some intellectual value, and since part of the reason I am fascinated by them is that I am fascinated with consciousness and the human brain (which I would expect other rational people to be as well), and since I think that, if you are careful, they can be had fairly safely, I am surprised that so many rational people are teetotalers. Or that, if they do drugs, they choose alcohol, a drug which is harmful in the dosages that many people use (more than a drink or two an hour), makes you stupid while you are on it, and doesn't change consciousness in very interesting ways! It all seems very irrational to me.
So maybe the answer is strange tastes plus rationality which includes rationality in some areas in which other rational people tend to be irrational. Note that I am not claiming perfect rationality - only an abnormal set of failings.
Whew. This is great - I just put "finish one prose piece a week" up on my todo list a few days ago and this is excellent material.
Last Modified: November, 2000
Patri
Friedman / patri@izzy.com