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I have literally have people tell me that this is still rationality because it's the rational thing "for them". Like, the weirdest one was a cognitive psycholog

I have literally have people tell me that this is still rationality because it's the rational thing "for them". Like, the weirdest one was a cognitive psychology doctoral student. I mean, okay, if you can redefine rationality to be completely subjective, then sure, rationality is flargikriggendurf.

jimbokun 11y ago
It is rational to realize human psychology is empirically real and take it into account, including our own. If anything, perhaps we should be even more skeptical of our own reasoning when we believe we are being purely objective and free of bias. Optimizing the likelihood of consistently following through with a plan is very rational.
adrianN 11y ago
Rationality is about which objective function you want to optimize. If it's money, then the snowball is not rational. If something else bothers you more, it might be.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
throwawaymsft 11y ago
Isn't it rational to use the strategy you know you will follow? Logic depends on a subjective choice of axioms, and an unstated one is "a plan that motivates permanent improvment is better than a temporary one".
Jtsummers 11y ago
You're conflating rational and optimal. It is rational and optimal to pay off the highest rate debt first. It is rational and suboptimal to pay off the lowest debts first if you know you'll achieve success through this route. When presented with a $100k debt at 6% interest plus several $5k debts at 1-5% interest, the number of debts and the size of the large debt are overwhelming, psychologically, and people stop behaving rationally (and therefore also behave sub-optimally). The snowball method gets them to act more rationally (paying off their debts successfully), but still sub-optimally. It's closer to optimal, less debt, than the path of not paying. EDIT: This is similar to any other sort of debt that people find themselves in. I weighed 220lbs, couldn't bench 100lbs (maybe 2 reps), and could barely run 1/4 mile at a 12-minute mile pace before wanting to pass out. So I was in a health/fitness-debt. Optimally, I could've set aside 2 hours a day to some combination of aerobic and strength training to achieve my goals in a short period of time. But that required a massive change of habits that was unlikely to stick. Instead, I ran 3 days a week (well, walk/ran at the start), learned to set aside my time for fitness activities, and improved my cardio. As I managed my time more effectively, I added in other fitness activities that got me to my strength goals as well. Adding it all at once would have (for me) been overwhelming and I likely would have failed (again) to make a routine of it. Adding in each part piece-by-piece was the far better strategy, and entirely rational, bypassing the normal anxieties of my mind by making the large change occur over several smaller changes.
jerf 11y ago
In addition to the other fine replies, let me point out that "humans are irrational" is the negation of a very small point. It allows us to think we know something, when in fact what that statement tells us is only that we don't know something about human behavior. It is logically much like saying "Humans are not 7-year-old bulldogs named Fido living in New Jersey on the second floor of a shared house." It's a true statement, but carries virtually no information because it only identifies an incredible small, precise part of the possibility space and negates it; it does not, on it's own, tell you much about what humans are. Humans are not merely "irrational", they positively behave and think in very specific ways. No human is immune to this. It is, therefore, perfectly rational to discuss rational ways of managing the specific human behaviors that lead to irrational behaviors. This is also while ritual denunciations of "homo economicus" are really quite sophomoric... the nonexistence of rational economic actors does not mean that you can simply model humans in whatever way you please to make your preconceived notions work. It means that you've got to go learn what humans actually do, which is going to be very challenging, and take that into account, which is almost certainly going to shock anyone who tries it. It means the problem is suddenly immensely harder, not easier.
- eli_gottlieb 11y ago
  >This is also while ritual denunciations of "homo economicus" are really quite sophomoric... Admittedly, this is because "homo economicus" is sophomoric in the first place: it proposes an actor who has no computational or informational bounds and sees the world only in terms of a single real-valued variable called "utility", which is generally constrained only to be any monotonic, continuous function of their monetary net worth. This actor then optimizes expected utility with no regards to modeling causal structure or to which observables are actually ergodic. No such creature ever has, or in fact ever can, exist in the real world. In limited domains where ergodicity holds, computational needs are few, and small sample sizes can yield very good inferences, we can do thought experiments about what such a creature would do, and act according to those if we please. But holding that such behavior is the normatively correct way to act when it's actually impossible is the kind of religious thinking one gets when composing "normative theories" without experimental basis.
phamilton 11y ago
To be more mathy: Option A (snowball): Total Cost if successful: $X Likelihood of success: 90% (just making stuff up here) Option B : Total Cost if successful: $Y Likelihood of success: 80% (again, making stuff up) If 80% * Y + cost of failure > 90% * X plus cost of failure, even if X > Y, then a rational actor will choose Option A. Sure, the "chance of success" is subjective, but ignoring it doesn't make the likelihood of failure go away.

jimbokun 11y ago

It is rational to realize human psychology is empirically real and take it into account, including our own. If anything, perhaps we should be even more skeptical of our own reasoning when we believe we are being purely objective and free of bias. Optimizing the likelihood of consistently following through with a plan is very rational.

adrianN 11y ago

Rationality is about which objective function you want to optimize. If it's money, then the snowball is not rational. If something else bothers you more, it might be.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

throwawaymsft 11y ago

Isn't it rational to use the strategy you know you will follow? Logic depends on a subjective choice of axioms, and an unstated one is "a plan that motivates permanent improvment is better than a temporary one".

Jtsummers 11y ago

You're conflating rational and optimal. It is rational and optimal to pay off the highest rate debt first. It is rational and suboptimal to pay off the lowest debts first if you know you'll achieve success through this route. When presented with a $100k debt at 6% interest plus several $5k debts at 1-5% interest, the number of debts and the size of the large debt are overwhelming, psychologically, and people stop behaving rationally (and therefore also behave sub-optimally). The snowball method gets them to act more rationally (paying off their debts successfully), but still sub-optimally. It's closer to optimal, less debt, than the path of not paying. EDIT: This is similar to any other sort of debt that people find themselves in. I weighed 220lbs, couldn't bench 100lbs (maybe 2 reps), and could barely run 1/4 mile at a 12-minute mile pace before wanting to pass out. So I was in a health/fitness-debt. Optimally, I could've set aside 2 hours a day to some combination of aerobic and strength training to achieve my goals in a short period of time. But that required a massive change of habits that was unlikely to stick. Instead, I ran 3 days a week (well, walk/ran at the start), learned to set aside my time for fitness activities, and improved my cardio. As I managed my time more effectively, I added in other fitness activities that got me to my strength goals as well. Adding it all at once would have (for me) been overwhelming and I likely would have failed (again) to make a routine of it. Adding in each part piece-by-piece was the far better strategy, and entirely rational, bypassing the normal anxieties of my mind by making the large change occur over several smaller changes.

jerf 11y ago

In addition to the other fine replies, let me point out that "humans are irrational" is the negation of a very small point. It allows us to think we know something, when in fact what that statement tells us is only that we don't know something about human behavior. It is logically much like saying "Humans are not 7-year-old bulldogs named Fido living in New Jersey on the second floor of a shared house." It's a true statement, but carries virtually no information because it only identifies an incredible small, precise part of the possibility space and negates it; it does not, on it's own, tell you much about what humans are. Humans are not merely "irrational", they positively behave and think in very specific ways. No human is immune to this. It is, therefore, perfectly rational to discuss rational ways of managing the specific human behaviors that lead to irrational behaviors. This is also while ritual denunciations of "homo economicus" are really quite sophomoric... the nonexistence of rational economic actors does not mean that you can simply model humans in whatever way you please to make your preconceived notions work. It means that you've got to go learn what humans actually do, which is going to be very challenging, and take that into account, which is almost certainly going to shock anyone who tries it. It means the problem is suddenly immensely harder, not easier.

eli_gottlieb 11y ago
>This is also while ritual denunciations of "homo economicus" are really quite sophomoric... Admittedly, this is because "homo economicus" is sophomoric in the first place: it proposes an actor who has no computational or informational bounds and sees the world only in terms of a single real-valued variable called "utility", which is generally constrained only to be any monotonic, continuous function of their monetary net worth. This actor then optimizes expected utility with no regards to modeling causal structure or to which observables are actually ergodic. No such creature ever has, or in fact ever can, exist in the real world. In limited domains where ergodicity holds, computational needs are few, and small sample sizes can yield very good inferences, we can do thought experiments about what such a creature would do, and act according to those if we please. But holding that such behavior is the normatively correct way to act when it's actually impossible is the kind of religious thinking one gets when composing "normative theories" without experimental basis.

phamilton 11y ago

To be more mathy: Option A (snowball): Total Cost if successful: $X Likelihood of success: 90% (just making stuff up here) Option B : Total Cost if successful: $Y Likelihood of success: 80% (again, making stuff up) If 80% * Y + cost of failure > 90% * X plus cost of failure, even if X > Y, then a rational actor will choose Option A. Sure, the "chance of success" is subjective, but ignoring it doesn't make the likelihood of failure go away.