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C00002 00002	A RATIONAL VIEW OF HUMAN RATIONALITY AND IRRATIONALITY
C00009 00003	ADVICE ON RATIONALITY
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A RATIONAL VIEW OF HUMAN RATIONALITY AND IRRATIONALITY

A RATIONAL VIEW OF HUMAN MOTIVATION

THE DESIRE FOR RATIONALITY

ADVICE ON RATIONALITY

Here are some of the points:

1. The mathematically most tractable rationality is the optimization
of a transferable utility in a single transaction.  Often we wish to
behave this way, but often neither our wishes nor our actual behavior
can be described in this way.

2. Rationality is an approximate theory in the sense of MENTAL.

3. We want to be rational at least in the sense of transitivity of
preference, but often we want total ordering.  That is a person
wants his own preferences to be totally ordered.

4. Rationality is most feasible in the short run.  It is not easy to
define what humanity wants between now and the heat death
of the universe.  It is also difficult to say what a person
wants over his whole life.

5. Consider an animal that has certain drives.  When it is hungry,
it tries to eat; when it is sleepy, it tries to sleep.  It is not
plausible to ascribe a utility function to the life of a dog let
alone a bacterium.  This raises some questions:

What does it mean to do good to a dog?  How is the welfare of
a dog defined?

7. One of our human desires is to be rational.  We also have other
desires about our desires.

8. The simplest model of rationality occurs when one has a linear
utility such that the utility of a sequence of events is the sum
of the utilities of their individual outcomes and the events and
the actions affecting them are independent.  Then we can be sure
that a person who adopts the strategy of maximizing the expected
return from each event will with probability as close to one as
desired end up with more utility than someone who adopts any significantly
different strategy.  When used as a betting model it requires
infinite borrowing capability, because if losses can drive one
out of the game, the outcomes of the events are no longer independent.

9. When each independent event is a distribution of one's wealth
among investments with different probabilities of payoff but where
there is no limit (upper or lower) on the amount that can be put
into each investment, then one should maximize the expected value
of the logarithm of one's wealth.  A person adopting this strategy
will end up wealthier than someone adopting a significantly
different strategy.

10. A person sometimes can regard himself as being like an animal.  He
forms desires and seeks to satisfy them without fitting them
into an overall life plan or measuring them numerically.  Some
people suppose that in principle, all desires should be numerically
measurable, but this may not be true.

11. There is a view that one's lifetime utility is an integral
over one's life experience.  This seems very unlikely to me.
In the first place people often form purposes whose achievement
extends beyond their lifetimes.

12. John Rawls in his %2Theory of Justice%1 suggests that a person
should lead his life so that at its end, he will approve of
what he has done.  What do I care what that senile old
codger (me not Rawls) will think?

13. An empiricist attempts to reduce all reality to experience.
We will adopt a more general view in which a person's desires
(or utility function if there is one) can be formulated in
terms of events that occur in the world and not just in his
experience.  Thus, when we discuss a soldier who wants his country to win,
we will not try to reduce this to his desire for certain experience,
e.g. the experience of believing that his actions will contribute
to the victory.  We will take his willingness to sacrifice his
life for this goal at face value - not as a construct in terms
of the experience involved in making the decision to take the
risky action.
ADVICE ON RATIONALITY


	Most humans want to behave rationally, and that's good.  
Rational people do more good and less harm than others even with
a limited understanding of rationality and its limits.  Most likely
they are also happier.

	However, it is important to understand the varieties of
rational behavior and their limitations.  Sometimes rational
behavior is very well defined, and everyone can agree.  In other
cases, it is very subjective and murky.

	An excessive confidence in one's own rationality and in
one's model of the world can lead to great harm.  The political
fanaticism that has killed millions in the twentieth century is
characterized by overconfidence in oversimplified views of the
world.

	In ascribing the bad actions of some people who claim rationality
to error rather than to rationality, I am disagreeing with a prominent
school of thought that attacks rationality itself.  A common
example given, is that  of generals who believed computer output
of enemy deaths in Vietnam and thought we were winning when we
weren't.  Believing the output of computers was taken as the essence
of rationality, and so rationality was discredited by their failure.
My point of view is that if the generals wrongly believed in the computer
programs or the significance and reliability of the input to the
computers or in a wrong model of the war that was embodied
in the computer programs, then they were unsuccesfully rational.  

	We must make one concession to the critics of rationality.
A person or group wanting to be rational and scientific may be
inclined to wishful thinking about it.  He may believe that he
can has a correct scientific theory when he doesn't.  He may
believe in the results of long chains of reasoning within a
theory even when the results counter common sense and have
immediate bad consequences.  This may
cause him to act worse than a person without a theory who may
refrain from an action on the basis of its immediate and apparent
bad consequences.  Proper rationality requires a certain modesty
about one's theories.

	Not to be coy about it, the theories that come to my
my mind as having led to
the most bad actions recently have been variants of Marxism,
although religious theories have had similar bad results in
the past.  Thus the Inquisition developed a theory of demonic
posession which justified torturing a person to drive the devils
out.  Further, since any earthly tortures were infinitesimal
compared to those of hell, forcing a confession and repentance
by torture was doing the victim a favor.  Likewise the Stalinist
and Maoist theories of the "increasing intensity of the class
struggle under socialism", justified widespread arrests and
imprisonments without evidence.  This was supported by the concept
of "revolutionary justice" which didn't require definite charges
or proof of guilt.  Closer to home, Bruce Franklin's theory of
the "revolutionary potential of the lumpenproletariat" justified
associations of radical youth and violent criminals that caused
dozens of deaths.  I don't mind if the reader who is so inclined,
makes up his own examples of the bad consequences of other wrong
theories based on the crimes that are most salient in his own mind.