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C00002 00002	A RATIONAL VIEW OF HUMAN RATIONALITY AND IRRATIONALITY
C00007 00003	ADVICE ON RATIONALITY
C00009 ENDMK
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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 till the heat death or even over the
life of a person.

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.

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. 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?
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.