Home
Todd Suomela's Library tagged → View Popular, Search in Google
"What makes this set of assumptions a "pragmatist" approach? Fundamentally, because it understands the actor as situated within a field of assumptions, modes of behavior, ways of perceiving; and as being stimulated to action by "problem situations". So action is understood as the actor's creative use of scripts, habits, and cognitive frameworks to solve particular problems. (Gross refers to this as an A-P-H-R chain: actor, problem situation, habit, and response; 343.)"
"Astrologists didn't discover the cosmic microwave background radiation...ufologists didn't discover extrasolar planets...cryptozoologists didn't find these insects...just a friendly reminder of who's doing all the damn work."
"The bottom line is that I was much less willing to engage my relative’s cuckoo beliefs than I normally am with strangers, even though I think I did manage to make her/him doubt or even reconsider part of the nonsense s/he apparently so readily accepts. The question is: should I not have done more? After all, I subscribe to virtue ethics, an approach to morality according to which your friends and relatives are actually more important (to you) than strangers because you have a relationship with and duties toward them. Do these duties not include steering them away from falsehoods, some of which (e.g., the ones concerning alternative medicine) can actually be directly deleterious to them?"
"Although Herbert Simon's work is often cited by political scientists, it has not generated a large research program in the discipline. This is a waste of a major intellectual resource. The main challenge to the rational choice research program—now the most important research program in political science—can be developed by building on Simon's ideas on bounded rationality. The essay defends this assertion by examining how the work of both the early Simon (primarily satisficing-and-search models) and the later Simon (on problem solving) can shed light on important topics in our discipline such as budgeting, turnout, and party competition."
"In the review piece, Bendon notes that there are two main branches of BR approaches – that pioneered by Simon (and March), and that associated with Kahneman and Tversky (K&T). These two approaches are compatible, but different in focus. K&T focus on universal or nearly universal errors in judgment (prospect theory) or perception (framing effects, where the description of otherwise identical choices can influence decisions). Simon, on the other hand, was more interested in processes of decision-making in light of the impossibility of by-the-book rationality."
"Starting off in political science and then moving through several disciplinary domains such as management theory, psychology, sociology, economics, organization and institutional theory, March’s academic career has been focused on understanding and analyzing human decision making and behavior. The basic thesis that he has pursued is that human action is neither optimal (or unboundedly rational) nor random, but nevertheless reasonably comprehensible (March, 1978, 1994, 1999). The ideas that were developed to understand human behavior in organizations in March’s early work in the analysis of how people deal with an uncertain and ambiguous world included, among other things, the concepts of bounded rationality and satisficing "
-
As March mentions in the following interview, a key theme in his later work (and a theme underlying his recent movie on leadership) is examining the problems of achieving a balance between exploration and exploitation (see, in particular, March, 1991, 1996a). Exploiting existing capabilities is full of rewards in the short run, but doesn’t prepare people for changes in technologies, capabilities, desires, tastes, and identities. For such preparation, exploration is necessary. Exploration involves searching for things that might come to be known, experimenting with doing things that are not warranted by experience or expectations. In all areas (in research as well as in life) we need both sides; illustrating, perhaps, a variation of Milan Kundera’s discussion of the ambiguous issue of the lightness-weight opposition, the combination of which is the source of numerous contradictions and difficulties; yet also the essence of being (Kundera, 1984).
-
So what does this have to do with leadership? In March’s most recent academic venture–a movie produced with filmmaker Steven Schecter on this theme, titled Passion and Discipline: Don Quixote’s Lessons for Leadership–March provides an intellectually stimulating interpretation of the contemporary meaning of Don Quixote, using interviews with modern leaders, wine drinking in Spain, and numerous episodes drawn from the novel to demonstrate the significance of joy, commitment, and imagination.(n2)
In keeping with this message, March, sees teaching "as a calling of faith, not a consequential act." As elaborated in the interview below, Don Quixote’s basic message remains important to teachers, leaders, and the rest of us. As March says, "Quixote reminds us that if we trust only when trust is warranted, love only when love is returned, learn only when learning is valuable, we abandon an essential feature of our humanness."
I’m not saying that arguments based on rationality are necessarily wrong in particular cases. (I can’t very well say that, given that I wrote an article on why it can be rational to vote.) I’m just trying to understand how pop-economics can so rapidly swing back and forth between opposing positions. And I think it’s coming from the comforting presence of rationality and efficiency in both formulations. It’s ok to distinguish economists from ordinary people (economists are rational and think the unthinkable, ordinary people don’t) and it’s also ok to distinguish economists from other social scientists (economists think ordinary people are rational, other social scientists believe in “culture”). You just have to be careful not to make both arguments in the same paragraph.
-
OK, now to return to the puzzle that got us started. How is it that economics-writers such as Levitt are so comfortable flipping back and forth between argument 1 (people are rational) and argument 2 (economists are rational, most people are not)?
The key, I believe, is that “rationality” is a good thing. We all like to associate with good things, right? Argument 1 has a populist feel (people are rational!) and argument 2 has an elitist feel (economists are special!). But both are ways of associating oneself with rationality. It’s almost like the important thing is to be in the same room with rationality; it hardly matters whether you yourself are the exemplar of rationality, or whether you’re celebrating the rationality of others.
"I love this quote for its twisted logic. It’s Russell’s paradox all over again. Economists are different from everybody else, because . . . economists “assume everyone is fundamentally alike”! But if everyone is fundamentally alike, how is it that economists are different “from almost anyone else in society”? All we can say for sure is that it’s “circumstances, not culture.” It’s certainly not “differences in how entire groups of people think and act”—er, unless these groups are economists, anthropologists, etc."
"In addition to ambiguity, Age of Fracture exudes ambivalence, a moral position neither for nor against our age. Like the modernists, Rodgers sees no point pretending we can go back to the way it was. But like the antimodernists, Rodgers is unsettled by the present condition."
-
Coase’s Noble-prize winning argument went as follows: since social efficiency is best achieved when two parties are left alone to bargain their way out of their conflicting positions, civil litigation need not be weighed down by such quaint considerations as justice. Rodgers’s concise critique then follows as such: “The social good was a maximization problem in aggregate market value: crops and cattle, property values and pollution-abatement costs, not, he had been candid enough to say, any close assessment of who stood best to bear the pain of the compromise or how unequally matched their resources might have been at the outset.” The precision with which Rodgers implicitly unmasks the most significant problem with Coase’s crude brand of utilitarianism, that in failing to account for historically-rooted power imbalances it empowers those best positioned to benefit from the “free market,” works in microcosm as an argument against the microeconomic impulses that define the age of fracture: the seemingly neutral application of microeconomics, the prototypical weak reading of society, to theretofore macro-problems, is anything but neutral.
-
In making his devastating critique of conservative anti-structuralist thought, Rodgers shows that structural notions of power mattered where weak readings of society led to conservative conclusions. Coarse could only make the case that aggregate social efficiency should be the judicial system’s core objective by deflecting structural inequality, the consideration of which required giving thought to concepts infused with history, such as justice. Murray could only argue that welfare destroyed incentives for poor people to find jobs by ignoring the structural causes of unemployment, such as the trade policies that decimated the urban-industrial job sector, thus impoverishing large pockets of inhabitants in cities across the nation. Hand could only contend that the Constitution did not stipulate for incorporation by thinking of the document as devoid of history, by erasing two centuries of American jurisprudence that had ineluctably given constitutional law new meaning.
"After a hard look, I realized that they had bombed on the questions that challenged their position. A full tabulation of all 17 questions showed that no group clearly out-stupids the others. They appear about equally stupid when faced with proper challenges to their position. "
-
Shouldn’t a college professor have known better? Perhaps. But adjusting for bias and groupthink is not so easy, as indicated by one of the major conclusions developed by Buturovic and sustained in our joint papers. Education had very little impact on responses, we found; survey respondents who’d gone to college did only slightly less badly than those who hadn’t. Among members of less-educated groups, brighter people tend to respond more frequently to online surveys, so it’s likely that our sample of non-college-educated respondents is more enlightened than the larger group they represent. Still, the fact that a college education showed almost no effect—at least for those inclined to take such a survey—strongly suggests that the classroom is no great corrective for myside bias. At least when it comes to public-policy issues, the corrective value of professional academic experience might be doubted as well.
Discourse affords some opportunity to challenge the judgments of others and to revise our own. Yet inevitably, somewhere in the process, we place what faith we have.
-
Rationality Lesson: Be especially suspicious of rationalizations for not obeying the empiricist rules "try it and see what happens" or "test yourself to see what happens" or "get some concrete experience on the ground". Think of the cost of time happening as a result of rationalizing. Consider the opportunities you are missing if you don't just realize you're wrong right now and change course. How many months or years will your life be less awesome as a result? How many opportunities will you miss while you're still (kinda) young?
"What has happened to rationality? Not that it is necessarily in shorter supply than in the past, but rationality seems to be valued significantly less."
"And that’s a big part of why I’m not an economist. And I think it’s a really helpful scope condition – in cases where it makes the most sense to think of an individual (or, importantly, a firm) as a unified actor with stable preferences, economics has a lot of insight. But I think it can also lead to either frustration (why are these people so irrational?!) or prescriptive rather than descriptive findings (here’s how they should be rational!). In other words, economists, and economic thought, try to make the world more like the one they assume it to be by helping individuals be true to themselves, and by ignoring how much individuals usually aren’t. "
"But in this context, the vacuum is not an “unrealistic assumption” but an abstraction that eliminates a known condition, air resistance. It is not a feature grafted on to make a construct tidy, but the stripping away of an environmental element to see if getting rid of it exposes an underlying, durable pattern. This procedure is in keeping with how mathematics as a discipline evolved, through the successive whittling away of extraneous elements.
But in economics, core and oft-used assumptions necessary to make many theories work, such as “everyone has perfect information,” are unrealistic not in the sense of stripping out real-world aspects that are noisy, but in adding properties that are not observed or even well-approximated in reality. Yet they are deemed valid and those who protest are referred to Friedman. "
"One thing that has often irked me is the criticism politicians get for making U-turns. What’s wrong with changing your mind if new information comes to light?
A new paper by Armin Falk and Florian Zimmermann of the University of Bonn sheds light on my puzzlement. People, they say, value consistency in themselves and in others as a way of signalling intellectual strength.
And this value is an intrinsic one. We don’t just like consistency because it is a means to better decision-making. We value it even if it gets in the way of rational decisions."
""The article,” Haidt said, "is a review of a puzzle that has bedeviled researchers in cognitive psychology and social cognition for a long time. The puzzle is, why are humans so amazingly bad at reasoning in some contexts, and so amazingly good in others?"
"Reasoning was not designed to pursue the truth. Reasoning was designed by evolution to help us win arguments. That's why they call it The Argumentative Theory of Reasoning. So, as they put it, "The evidence reviewed here shows not only that reasoning falls quite short of reliably delivering rational beliefs and rational decisions. It may even be, in a variety of cases, detrimental to rationality. Reasoning can lead to poor outcomes, not because humans are bad at it, but because they systematically strive for arguments that justify their beliefs or their actions. This explains the confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, and reason-based choice, among other things.""
"Political beliefs, like religious beliefs, are usually based on very weak, and selective, evidence. People tend to have the same political orientation as their parents, which may result from environment, i.e. growing up in their parents’ household, or a genetic predisposition to a particular political orientation, as recent studies have indicated."
"When I stumble on old Star Trek re-runs while channel-surfing, I experience the show as a flickery palimpsest, in media archaeology terms. Meaning: I see the characters -- Spock especially -- through layers of memory and personal meaning. I watch it partly through the eyes of the kid I was when I first tuned in to the show back in the '60s. I think of the episodes where the half-human, half-Vulcan Spock wrestles with his irrational, emotional human side (his Inner Feminine, in '60s terms), episodes that taught me lessons about another, more fluid masculinity, cerebral yet strong, sensitive yet drily funny, at a time when every dad I knew was a blustering, because-I-said-so Authority Figure.
Listening to the jagged, atonal music of my parents' arguments late at night, when they thought I'd fallen asleep -- the inevitable drawn-out prelude to the inevitable divorce -- I clung to Spock's fundamentalist faith in reason, fervently trying to believe that an arched eyebrow and a Puckish aloofness could be my heat shield against the firefight on the other side of my bedroom wall.
Like Obama, I believe in the final frontier. But like Prince Keon, I believe it's inside us."
Selected Tags
Related Tags
Top Contributors
Groups interested in rational...
-
Less Wrong 3 - How to Actually Change Your Mind
Less Wrong Sequence 3
Items: 93 | Visits: 46
Created by: Matt McAlister
-
Less Wrong 2 - A Human's Guide to Words
Sequence 2
Items: 29 | Visits: 22
Created by: Matt McAlister
-
Less Wrong 1 - Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions
Sequence 1
Items: 20 | Visits: 24
Created by: Matt McAlister
Diigo is about better ways to research, share and collaborate on information. Learn more »
Join Diigo