From: Robin Hanson (rhanson@gmu.edu)
Date: Tue Jun 17 2003 - 14:59:35 MDT
On 6/17/2003, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote:
>>>... I think you're overlooking the incremental nature of striving for
>>>rationality. ...
>>I agree our actual choices tend to be piecemeal, but unfortunately this
>>mostly raises the costs of being rational.
>
>Why? It looks to me like the costs are lowered, because you acquire both
>costs and benefits incrementally, rather than acquiring all the costs at
>once, as you seemed to assume earlier. You get coping skills along with
>any new challenges, and it takes a while to get good enough that there are
>significant challenges arising from the debiasing of self-deception.
>
> > ... Most people pay sincere lip service to rationality, ... But .. we
> each usually manage to avoid believing that a particular bias applies to
> us in a particular situation. ...
>
>According to your theory, wouldn't this *reduce* the cost of adhering to
>rationality during the early stages?
Yes, humans are naturally moderately rational, and naturally use and
improve that rationality as long as doing so does not threaten our
cherished self-deceptions. The extra cost I had in mind was having to deal
with an "enemy" (our subconscious) that knows us very well and has had long
evolution-embodied experience in fooling us into thinking we have made
progress when we have not. My estimate that this cost is very high is in
part based on the very small fraction of people that seem to incur this
cost and successfully overcome their biases.
As an aside, I actually have high hopes that we can improve people's
incentives to be rational in their contributions to collective consensus
via wider use of betting markets. People are more rational when they bet,
for obvious reasons.
Robin Hanson rhanson@gmu.edu http://hanson.gmu.edu
Assistant Professor of Economics, George Mason University
MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030-4444
703-993-2326 FAX: 703-993-2323
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