Aaah! No, no. I originally used “picking one charity” as a metaphor for following any real-world goal concertedly and monomanically. Foolishly thought it would be transparent to everyone. Sorry.
Yes, incentives do work, and utility-based models do have predictive and explanatory power. Many local areas of human activity are well modeled by utility, but it’s different utilities in different situations, not a One True Utility innate to the person. And I’m very wary of shoehorning stuff into utility theory when it’s an obviously poor fit, like moral judgements or instinctive actions.
My theory doesn’t consider rational behavior impossible—it’s just exceptional. A typical day will contain one rationally optimized decision (if you’re really good; otherwise zero) and thousands of decisions made for you by your tendencies.
At least that’s been my experience; maybe there are super-people who can do better. People who really do shut up and multiply with world-states. I’d be really scared of such people because (warning, Mind-Killer ahead) my country was once drowned in blood by revolutionaries wishing to build a rational, atheistic, goal-directed society. Precisely the kind of calculating altruists who’d never play chess while there was a kid starving anywhere. Of course they ultimately failed. If they’d succeeded, you’d now be living in the happiest utopia that was imaginable in the 19th century: world communism. Let that stand as a kind of “genetic” explanation for my beliefs.
My theory doesn’t consider rational behavior impossible—it’s just exceptional. A typical day will contain one rationally optimized decision (if you’re really good; otherwise zero) and thousands of decisions made for you by your tendencies.
This relates to my earlier comment about ignoring the computational limits on rationality. It wouldn’t be rational to put a lot of effort into rationally optimizing every decision you make during the day. In my opinion any attempts to improve human rationality have to recognize that resource limitations and computational limits are an important constraint. Having an imperfect but reasonable heuristic for most decisions is a rational solution to the problem of making decisions given limited resources. It would be great to figure out how to do better given the constraints but theories that start from an assumption of unlimited resources are going to be of limited practical use.
my country was once drowned in blood by revolutionaries wishing to build a rational, atheistic, goal-directed society.
I can see how conflating communism with rationality would lead you to be distrustful of rationality. I personally think the greatest intellectual failure of communism was failing to recognize the importance of individual incentives and utility maximization or to acknowledge the gap between people’s stated intentions and their actual motivations which means in my view it was never rational. Hayek’s economic calculation problem criticism of socialism is an example of recognizing the importance of computational constraints when trying to improve decisions. I’d agree that there is a danger of people with a naive view of rationality and utility thinking that communism is a good idea though.
Aaah! No, no. I originally used “picking one charity” as a metaphor for following any real-world goal concertedly and monomanically. Foolishly thought it would be transparent to everyone. Sorry.
Yes, incentives do work, and utility-based models do have predictive and explanatory power. Many local areas of human activity are well modeled by utility, but it’s different utilities in different situations, not a One True Utility innate to the person. And I’m very wary of shoehorning stuff into utility theory when it’s an obviously poor fit, like moral judgements or instinctive actions.
My theory doesn’t consider rational behavior impossible—it’s just exceptional. A typical day will contain one rationally optimized decision (if you’re really good; otherwise zero) and thousands of decisions made for you by your tendencies.
At least that’s been my experience; maybe there are super-people who can do better. People who really do shut up and multiply with world-states. I’d be really scared of such people because (warning, Mind-Killer ahead) my country was once drowned in blood by revolutionaries wishing to build a rational, atheistic, goal-directed society. Precisely the kind of calculating altruists who’d never play chess while there was a kid starving anywhere. Of course they ultimately failed. If they’d succeeded, you’d now be living in the happiest utopia that was imaginable in the 19th century: world communism. Let that stand as a kind of “genetic” explanation for my beliefs.
This relates to my earlier comment about ignoring the computational limits on rationality. It wouldn’t be rational to put a lot of effort into rationally optimizing every decision you make during the day. In my opinion any attempts to improve human rationality have to recognize that resource limitations and computational limits are an important constraint. Having an imperfect but reasonable heuristic for most decisions is a rational solution to the problem of making decisions given limited resources. It would be great to figure out how to do better given the constraints but theories that start from an assumption of unlimited resources are going to be of limited practical use.
I can see how conflating communism with rationality would lead you to be distrustful of rationality. I personally think the greatest intellectual failure of communism was failing to recognize the importance of individual incentives and utility maximization or to acknowledge the gap between people’s stated intentions and their actual motivations which means in my view it was never rational. Hayek’s economic calculation problem criticism of socialism is an example of recognizing the importance of computational constraints when trying to improve decisions. I’d agree that there is a danger of people with a naive view of rationality and utility thinking that communism is a good idea though.