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Basically, governments are rational actors. Not really surprising but many people seem to assume the government will be either irrationally benevolent or irrati

Basically, governments are rational actors. Not really surprising but many people seem to assume the government will be either irrationally benevolent or irrationally evil.

lutusp 12y ago
> Basically, governments are rational actors. Citation needed. :) There are two schemes that assure irrational governmental behavior -- dictatorship, and democracy. For different reasons, of course. > Not really surprising but many people seem to assume the government will be either irrationally benevolent or irrationally evil. There's plenty of historical support for those views -- you know, evidence?
- andyjdavis 12y ago
  What might appear to be irrational behavior to you is just due to people making decisions based on different information, differing priorities and a different decision making process informed by different life experience. If someone's decisions appear irrational to you, you just don't possess enough data about the information they have access to, their priorities and the world model in their head.
  - ordinary 12y ago
    Why is the assumption "governments are rational" more reasonable than "governments are irrational"? Both seem equally possible to me, given the fact that we don't have the information to tell, either way. In any case, that's a false dichotomy. Governments are not uniform entities, and there's no point talking about them as if they are. Governments, like people, do some rational and some irrational things.
    - afarrell 12y ago
      Because it takes quite a lot of work and training for individual humans to act rational. Therefore, without other information, it is a better default assumption that any given human or system-of-humans is non-rational.
  - kelnos 12y ago
    So basically what you're saying is the word "irrational" has no meaning whatsoever, and that every act is rational, just perhaps not to your point of view or level of information. In the theoretical sense, I agree with that, but in a world of social interconnections, we need a meaningful framework and vocabulary for judging these sorts of things. While I believe that true objectivity is hard (and maybe impossible), I think there's a lot of social value in coming up with widely accepted definitions of rational vs. irrational, at least on a case-by-case basis.
    - afarrell 12y ago
      I think you are mixing up "rational" and "reasonable". It is not rational to flinch away from that puff of air you get at the optometrist, but it is reasonable.
      - kelnos 12y ago
        Rational and reasonable are actually somewhat synonyms (the first definition of rational on dictionary.com includes "reasonable").
    - andyjdavis 12y ago
      >what you're saying is the word "irrational" has no meaning whatsoever It has meaning. It means "we have insufficient information" or "something is going on here that we don't know about or understand."
- Alex_MJ 12y ago
  I would say that rather than "the government behaves rationally" - that every individual behaves in their best interest. High-ranking intelligence officials will push for more power, more capabilities, and will scrap things if they become risky. If there's somebody sufficiently powerful whose career would be threatened from some risk of exploiting the bug, that risk will be taken seriously. If there's somebody sufficiently powerful whose career would benefit from the government letting people know about that bug, it'll happen. This sounds unlikely, but this isn't my area of expertise and if somebody wants to correct me please do so. Congress will largely ignore it because it has nothing to do with their constituency, they're mostly technically illiterate, and because they're being lied to anyways. ...and so on.
  - gbog 12y ago
    > every individual behaves in their best interest Daniel Kahneman says this has been proven false in his book Thinking Fast and Slow. It think it is wrong on two levels. First individual's "perceived best interest" is often very far off of their real interest. Second, individual, and not only a few edge cases, are often not behaving in their best interest, even if we consider it to be their "perceived best interest". Kahneman listed the three attributes of humans modelized as "econs" in the most common economic model: They are rational, selfish and their taste do not change over time. All three are obviously wrong.
    - Alex_MJ 12y ago
      You're right - I should have phrased it "perceived self-interest mixed with doses of human volatility/irrationality"
wlievens 12y ago
I think nl (sibling post) is more accurate: "governments" don't exist as such. You have lots of agencies with conflicting interests, and they're eventually all made of people.
PeterisP 12y ago
If 100% all components of government behave rationally, it doesn't neccessarily mean that the government behaves rationally. A collection of rational actors may, as a whole, behave irrationally - as defined as 'against their own best interest'. Tragedy of the commons is but one example. Organized systems may easily have structures that create irrational and destructive behavior, and those structures can be stable enough so that for each separate employee attempting to change the system would be risky, disadvantageous and irrational.

Basically, governments are rational actors. Not really surprising but many people seem to assume the government will be either irrationally benevolent or irrationally evil.

lutusp 12y ago

> Basically, governments are rational actors. Citation needed. :) There are two schemes that assure irrational governmental behavior -- dictatorship, and democracy. For different reasons, of course. > Not really surprising but many people seem to assume the government will be either irrationally benevolent or irrationally evil. There's plenty of historical support for those views -- you know, evidence?

andyjdavis 12y ago
What might appear to be irrational behavior to you is just due to people making decisions based on different information, differing priorities and a different decision making process informed by different life experience. If someone's decisions appear irrational to you, you just don't possess enough data about the information they have access to, their priorities and the world model in their head.
- ordinary 12y ago
  Why is the assumption "governments are rational" more reasonable than "governments are irrational"? Both seem equally possible to me, given the fact that we don't have the information to tell, either way. In any case, that's a false dichotomy. Governments are not uniform entities, and there's no point talking about them as if they are. Governments, like people, do some rational and some irrational things.
  - afarrell 12y ago
    Because it takes quite a lot of work and training for individual humans to act rational. Therefore, without other information, it is a better default assumption that any given human or system-of-humans is non-rational.
- kelnos 12y ago
  So basically what you're saying is the word "irrational" has no meaning whatsoever, and that every act is rational, just perhaps not to your point of view or level of information. In the theoretical sense, I agree with that, but in a world of social interconnections, we need a meaningful framework and vocabulary for judging these sorts of things. While I believe that true objectivity is hard (and maybe impossible), I think there's a lot of social value in coming up with widely accepted definitions of rational vs. irrational, at least on a case-by-case basis.
  - afarrell 12y ago
    I think you are mixing up "rational" and "reasonable". It is not rational to flinch away from that puff of air you get at the optometrist, but it is reasonable.
    - kelnos 12y ago
      Rational and reasonable are actually somewhat synonyms (the first definition of rational on dictionary.com includes "reasonable").
  - andyjdavis 12y ago
    >what you're saying is the word "irrational" has no meaning whatsoever It has meaning. It means "we have insufficient information" or "something is going on here that we don't know about or understand."
Alex_MJ 12y ago
I would say that rather than "the government behaves rationally" - that every individual behaves in their best interest. High-ranking intelligence officials will push for more power, more capabilities, and will scrap things if they become risky. If there's somebody sufficiently powerful whose career would be threatened from some risk of exploiting the bug, that risk will be taken seriously. If there's somebody sufficiently powerful whose career would benefit from the government letting people know about that bug, it'll happen. This sounds unlikely, but this isn't my area of expertise and if somebody wants to correct me please do so. Congress will largely ignore it because it has nothing to do with their constituency, they're mostly technically illiterate, and because they're being lied to anyways. ...and so on.
- gbog 12y ago
  > every individual behaves in their best interest Daniel Kahneman says this has been proven false in his book Thinking Fast and Slow. It think it is wrong on two levels. First individual's "perceived best interest" is often very far off of their real interest. Second, individual, and not only a few edge cases, are often not behaving in their best interest, even if we consider it to be their "perceived best interest". Kahneman listed the three attributes of humans modelized as "econs" in the most common economic model: They are rational, selfish and their taste do not change over time. All three are obviously wrong.
  - Alex_MJ 12y ago
    You're right - I should have phrased it "perceived self-interest mixed with doses of human volatility/irrationality"

wlievens 12y ago

I think nl (sibling post) is more accurate: "governments" don't exist as such. You have lots of agencies with conflicting interests, and they're eventually all made of people.

PeterisP 12y ago

If 100% all components of government behave rationally, it doesn't neccessarily mean that the government behaves rationally. A collection of rational actors may, as a whole, behave irrationally - as defined as 'against their own best interest'. Tragedy of the commons is but one example. Organized systems may easily have structures that create irrational and destructive behavior, and those structures can be stable enough so that for each separate employee attempting to change the system would be risky, disadvantageous and irrational.