You suggest that the “law of least effort” has been ignored by academic researchers because they disapprove of people associated with it. It looks to me as if something different is going on.
I had a look at some writing about fallacies, heuristics and biases. I didn’t find anything about the LoLE, but I likewise didn’t find any other speculation about particular reasons why our brains tend to prefer low-effort approximate solutions most of the time.
That doesn’t look to me like ignoring the LoLE, it looks like ignoring the question to which it’s an answer: what are the factors that make us mostly avoid effort and hard concentration?
The two most likely reasons for this ignoring seem to me to be
that if what you’re researching is what decisions people tend to make in particular situations, then the details of the underlying mechanisms might be interesting but aren’t directly relevant and one might reasonably leave them for someone else to figure out; and
that it tends to feel like a question whose answer is so obvious (and maybe soe trivial) that it doesn’t need looking into further: of course we conserve effort; what else would any living thing do? If the question were explicitly raised, I suspect many would just mutter something about efficiency and evolution and move on.
Neither of those has anything to do with the perceived skeeviness of the people associated with a particular other view.
Incidentally, in Kahneman’s “Thinking, fast and slow” you will find the following sentence: “This is how the law of least effort comes to be a law”. Kahneman’s LoLE is not the same as yours. He just means that people conserve effort so far as they can. And the “this is how” just amounts to stating that effort is disagreeable. I’m pretty sure this is the second of my reasons above: it simply hasn’t occurred to Kahneman that “why do our brains prefer to conserve effort?” is a question that needs asking at all.
My feeling—which of course I have no concrete evidence for—is that if it’s true that the pickup-artists’ LoLE is ignored by psychologists even when they do consider the actual question it purports to be an answer to—and I have no idea whether that’s true, not having seen much consideration of that actual question—then the more likely explanation is that they haven’t thought of it at all, rather than that they’ve thought of it and dismissed it because they don’t like the people advocating it.
In order to explain the conjunction fallacy (or other biases) LoLE is only any use if it does lead to actually conserving effort. (On the specific matter at hand; of course they may put effort into other things.) The alleged pattern is (unless I’ve badly misunderstood):
You ask me “which of these two things is more likely?”
If I think carefully through the options, I will see that it’s more likely that Linda is a librarian simpliciter than that she’s a feminist librarian.
But I don’t do that, because I want to look like I’m doing everything effortlessly.
Instead I use some simple quick heuristic that lets me look effortless.
Unfortunately that leads me to the wrong answer.
And in this sequence of events, it’s essential that I actually do put in less effort. If instead I had some way of looking as if I’m making no effort while actually doing the careful thinking that would get me the right answer, then I would get the right answer.
What am I missing here?
[EDITED to add:] Also: if the question at hand is why psychologists don’t appeal to the LoLE as an explanation for the conjunction fallacy, and the answer (as I suggest) is that they already have what looks like an obvious explanation in terms of actually conserving effort, then it doesn’t really matter that much whether the LoLE involves actual effort-conservation or merely apparent effort-conservation, no?
FWIW this is not how I learned it in psychology class. It was about humans not wanting to do things that took more energy. Looks like it’s called “principle of least effort” on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_effort
I buy that there’s another thing called Law of Least Effort that’s about signaling, but maybe worth disambiguate by calling it “signaling low effort?”
The similar naming is unfortunate. It’s LoLE in the article I linked explaining it as well as in that author’s book, but I’ll think about disambiguating in the future.
You suggest that the “law of least effort” has been ignored by academic researchers because they disapprove of people associated with it. It looks to me as if something different is going on.
I had a look at some writing about fallacies, heuristics and biases. I didn’t find anything about the LoLE, but I likewise didn’t find any other speculation about particular reasons why our brains tend to prefer low-effort approximate solutions most of the time.
That doesn’t look to me like ignoring the LoLE, it looks like ignoring the question to which it’s an answer: what are the factors that make us mostly avoid effort and hard concentration?
The two most likely reasons for this ignoring seem to me to be
that if what you’re researching is what decisions people tend to make in particular situations, then the details of the underlying mechanisms might be interesting but aren’t directly relevant and one might reasonably leave them for someone else to figure out; and
that it tends to feel like a question whose answer is so obvious (and maybe soe trivial) that it doesn’t need looking into further: of course we conserve effort; what else would any living thing do? If the question were explicitly raised, I suspect many would just mutter something about efficiency and evolution and move on.
Neither of those has anything to do with the perceived skeeviness of the people associated with a particular other view.
Incidentally, in Kahneman’s “Thinking, fast and slow” you will find the following sentence: “This is how the law of least effort comes to be a law”. Kahneman’s LoLE is not the same as yours. He just means that people conserve effort so far as they can. And the “this is how” just amounts to stating that effort is disagreeable. I’m pretty sure this is the second of my reasons above: it simply hasn’t occurred to Kahneman that “why do our brains prefer to conserve effort?” is a question that needs asking at all.
My feeling—which of course I have no concrete evidence for—is that if it’s true that the pickup-artists’ LoLE is ignored by psychologists even when they do consider the actual question it purports to be an answer to—and I have no idea whether that’s true, not having seen much consideration of that actual question—then the more likely explanation is that they haven’t thought of it at all, rather than that they’ve thought of it and dismissed it because they don’t like the people advocating it.
LoLE isn’t about conserving effort. It’s about appearing to conserve effort and social dynamics. So a comment like
shows a lack of understanding of LoLE. E.g. people put a lot of effort into doing their makeup instead of conserving that effort.
In order to explain the conjunction fallacy (or other biases) LoLE is only any use if it does lead to actually conserving effort. (On the specific matter at hand; of course they may put effort into other things.) The alleged pattern is (unless I’ve badly misunderstood):
You ask me “which of these two things is more likely?”
If I think carefully through the options, I will see that it’s more likely that Linda is a librarian simpliciter than that she’s a feminist librarian.
But I don’t do that, because I want to look like I’m doing everything effortlessly.
Instead I use some simple quick heuristic that lets me look effortless.
Unfortunately that leads me to the wrong answer.
And in this sequence of events, it’s essential that I actually do put in less effort. If instead I had some way of looking as if I’m making no effort while actually doing the careful thinking that would get me the right answer, then I would get the right answer.
What am I missing here?
[EDITED to add:] Also: if the question at hand is why psychologists don’t appeal to the LoLE as an explanation for the conjunction fallacy, and the answer (as I suggest) is that they already have what looks like an obvious explanation in terms of actually conserving effort, then it doesn’t really matter that much whether the LoLE involves actual effort-conservation or merely apparent effort-conservation, no?
FWIW this is not how I learned it in psychology class. It was about humans not wanting to do things that took more energy. Looks like it’s called “principle of least effort” on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_effort
I buy that there’s another thing called Law of Least Effort that’s about signaling, but maybe worth disambiguate by calling it “signaling low effort?”
The similar naming is unfortunate. It’s LoLE in the article I linked explaining it as well as in that author’s book, but I’ll think about disambiguating in the future.