8 ms·

Checklist of Rationality Habits

111 points by tokenadult 12y ago

analog31 12y ago
I tend to think of myself as rational, but the degree of introspection suggested by this checklist seems bizarre to me.
- pokpokpok 12y ago
  Just remember that the human brain is basically not set up for objectivity. Plenty of people who consider themselves rational are capable of making decisions that you would call unrational. Doesn't mean you need to live your life through a checklist, but it helps to be critical of thoughts like "I am a very rational person"
  - xpda 12y ago
    Sometimes I rationally realize that I am making an irrational decision, but I still prefer the "wrong" decision. For example, I may pick up a dirty penny in a street. The risk/reward is negative because the very slight possibility or disease or accident outweighs the very slight financial reward, but I prefer to pick up the penny anyway. Am I rational because of the analysis, or irrational because I make the wrong choice?
    - zzzcpan 12y ago
      I think you got it wrong. We are irrational no matter what. And we are blind to our own blindness, so we cannot even comprehend, that we are very irrational, unless, of course, we study it. If this is something you are interested in, check out Daniel Kahneman's book. EDIT: I would like to know the reason behind the downvote. Thanks.
      - JadeNB 12y ago
        > I think you got it wrong. We are irrational no matter what. And we are blind to our own blindness, so we cannot even comprehend, that we are very irrational, unless, of course, we study it. I was the (or a) downvoter. While your point is certainly correct that humans are irrational animals and there is no way around it, that seemed essentially irrelevant to the specific question of whether performing a rational analysis, and then acting against it, should count as a rational or an irrational action. (To be fair, it is highly relevant to the discussion as a whole, just not, I think, to this thread.)
    - evmar 12y ago
      If it takes five seconds to pick up the penny (that's maybe high but it's including time to notice, bend, put it in your pocket), you're valuing your time at $7.20 an hour. (To be clear, there are other plausible rewards to picking up a penny, such as feeling lucky from the superstition. But you only mentioned a financial reward, and the financial impact is negative.)
      - scarmig 12y ago
        The biggest reward is the emotion that you're maintaining your sense of order. Everything has a place, and the sidewalk is certainly no place for a penny.
    - mason55 12y ago
      You should try to figure out why you make the decision to pick up the penny even though you know it's "irrational". Is it because you think pennies are good luck? Do you like having a penny in your pocket to mindlessly play with? Once you figure out why you're still picking up pennies even though you know the financial reward is less than the risk then you can determine if it's rational or, if it's irrational, convince yourself not to do it.
    - pokpokpok 12y ago
      I think the key thing is that being a perfectly rational actor is a strange and twisting pursuit. Measuring your actions against another scale is more useful IMO. Being humane/considerate/farsighted (or any set of subjective values that you believe are important) make a better measuring stick than rationality
      - brerlapn 12y ago
        This is a good point--I would phrase it as whatever over-arching organizing value set or decision-making framework you choose to use (whether it be "go with your gut", Rationality Uber Alles, WWJD?, "don't be a dick", or whatever) does not absolve you of responsibility for the actions you take according to that framework. Using rationality or moral values or whatever as a means to develop self-awareness and maturity is a valid and useful exercise IMO, but I know too many people who feel like "I'm just doing what XXXXX says I should do" excuses their actions even though it was still their choice in the first place to do what XXXXX says. Also, Antonio Damasio's work is an interesting complement/counterpoint to the overemphasis of cognitive rational thinking, and I'd highly recommend it. Descarte's Error is a good place to start, and makes the strong case that rationality is part of an embodied (literally) process upon which it depends.
      - Hasu 12y ago
        Why does one have to focus on being humane/considerate/farsighted instead of being rational, rather than focus on both? We don't have to pick one measuring stick. I certainly hope you don't think that being irrational will help you to be more humane/considerate/farsighted, or that being humane/considerate/farsighted means that one can't be rational.
    - JadeNB 12y ago
      > Am I rational because of the analysis, or irrational because I make the wrong choice? I think (to repeat others' points in different language) that to think of rational / irrational as a binary switch is bound to lead to trouble. In other words, I think that the question is whether an action, not a person, is rational or irrational. (Compare with questions of morality, where it is near-meaningless to ask "is this person good / bad?") Why not just "the analysis was rational, and the resulting 'wrong' choice was irrational?"
    - tlholaday 12y ago
      My detestation of observing penny-litter is of sufficient intensity that I would pay you a penny to pick up a penny. I dread that the fury-induced hand-tremor would cause me to drop the penny, leading to a catastrophic loop terminating with cupric entombment.
    - analog31 12y ago
      Maybe you get some nice pleasure chemicals in your brain, or recall a pleasant experience from your past, which may outweigh the possibility of disease and accident. I sometimes take a stick with horse hair stretched over its length, and pull it along steel cables stretched along a large wooden box. The risks are many, including getting chased out of the house, blisters on my fingers, etc. Am I irrational because I made the wrong choice?
  - analog31 12y ago
    That's fair. While I called myself rational, I would never claim to make exclusively rational decisions. I would not want to go down the rabbit hole of trying to define rationality, or force myself into the Procrustean bed of a specific definition. If rationalism turns into some sort of utopian or self consistent ideology, then I'll remain aloof from it. At the same time, while the human brain isn't set up for objectivity, it is set up for survival -- including survival in a social milieu. Some non-rational behaviors such as emotion and stubbornness may be valuable survival traits. If I were to put anything on my own checklist, it would be: "Did I give myself enough time to think about this?" I can be persuaded by reason, but on my own timeline, and I'm a terrible debater, so I don't change my opinions based on debate.
    - skybrian 12y ago
      Someone learning to play the piano (an unnatural task) needs to monitor their behavior and look for good habits to reinforce and bad habits to unlearn. But you do that during practice, not performance. By the time you're ready to perform, playing the right way should seem "natural" even though it's still a highly artificial task. I think there's something like that here. Thinking rationally is an unnatural act and some folks are interested in figuring out how to better train for it. Maybe it's a bit of a weird hobby, but I'm happy there are people investigating it. However, it's still early days for figuring out which training techniques are effective. This checklist is a sketch of bad habits to look for, but how best to use it isn't settled yet. (There are places for checklists in production. They're useful in high-risk situations where error has to be eliminated. Pilots rely extensively on checklists, and they're starting to be used more in hospitals.)
- jjmason 12y ago
  I feel as though most of the psychological issues and poor decision making I experienced when I was younger were because I thought of myself as a fundamentally rational person, and refused to examine the irrational things my brain was doing. This made it more or less impossible for me to address harmful emotions (because emotions are irrational) or problematic behaviours (because I don't make irrational decisions), which led to some bad times, to say the least. Our brains are basically not wired to be objective or rational. While the human brain has developed the ability to think rationally, there is a considerable amount of the kind of "gut level" machinery that kept us alive before we developed this ability lying around. Without careful introspection and a willingness to admit that many of our thoughts and behaviours are, without careful examination, going to be deeply irrational no matter how much we believe in rationalism, we tend to act on our irrationality to our own detriment, and often to the detriment of others as well (remember when Colbert trolled Bush by saying they were both "guys who think with [their] guts"?)
- Jach 12y ago
  A lot of irrational behavior stems from simple biases in our brains' usually good-enough-for-daily-life heuristics. Attempts to avoid those biases seem to include training to turn off (or at least notice and interrupt) your heuristics altogether as much as possible, resulting in a much slower (and more introspective) way of going through the world.
JadeNB 12y ago
As a mathematician, rationality is very important to me. (It is sufficiently important that I believe in determining my own criteria for rationality, rather than using someone else's list.) In this spirit, I have an infuriating (to others) habit of reflexively arguing against someone else's position. (It was originally born out of the "search for counterexamples" mindset of a mathematician, but now it's an unconscious behaviour.) This habit is so comically ingrained that, if the person to whom I make this argument switches his or her position, then I will in turn switch to arguing for the original position. I don't know whether this counts as highly rational, highly contrarian, or just annoying.
- wdewind 12y ago
  Read the list... > I notice when my mind is arguing for a side (instead of evaluating which side to choose), and flag this as an error mode. (Recent example from Anna: Noticed myself explaining to myself why outsourcing my clothes shopping does make sense, rather than evaluating whether to do it.)
  - JadeNB 12y ago
    > Read the list... I did (although, as I noted, I think that part of being rational is critically creating your own criteria for rationality, rather than using someone else's). I also was not claiming that this was not on the list—but: > I notice when my mind is arguing for a side (instead of evaluating which side to choose), and flag this as an error mode. Although logically—well, in classical logic, anyway—every argument against something is an argument for its opposite, I think that there is nonetheless a meaningful difference between making a contrarian argument (as I do; it is an essentially negative process) and arguing for the opposite position (an essentially positive process).
    - scarmig 12y ago
      Careful there, your constructivism is showing.
- tlholaday 12y ago
themodelplumber 12y ago
I'd be very interested to see the results of their ongoing research. And I'd like to know how the debiasing process compares to e.g. CBT.
- davidgerard 12y ago
  They're selling seminars; there doesn't appear to be actual research going on.
ajross 12y ago
I'm distressed by how unscientific a lot of this stuff is. It's all good advice, but some of it seems to come from some pretty naive perceptions of how consciousness and the brain work. The example in 3.1, for example: > Recent example from Anna: Jumping off the Stratosphere Hotel in Las Vegas in a wire-guided fall. I knew it was safe based on 40,000 data points of people doing it without significant injury, but to persuade my brain I had to visualize 2 times the population of my college jumping off and surviving. Also, my brain sometimes seems much more pessimistic, especially about social things, than I am, and is almost always wrong. Fear of heights is a very primal, very understandable and even reasonably well understood response. Our brains have specific hardware for this kind of circumstance, and it exists for good (even "rational") reasons. Sweeping it into the same generic bucket with all other "irrationality" is just silly.
- Suryc011 12y ago
  I think you missed the point. It's not that the fear is itself intrinsically wrong, it's that the fear is leading to an irrational belief: that I will likely die if I do this wire-guided fall. That's just not a belief that comports with reality.
  - ajross 12y ago
    I, uh, rather think that you missed the point. "Rationality", when expressed in this kind of technicolor paint brush way, is a poorly-defined, fundamentally unscientific concept. Belief in it is itself irrational. Basically: this is just self-help hippie nonsense to me. My irony detector is off the charts, and I was expecting to be more impressed.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
- MichaelGG 12y ago
  Fear of heights was developed without wire guided falls. It's irrational to be afraid of that vs say, being unafraid of taking a car ride. It's exactly because we've got this corrupted evolved hardware that we must actively seek out all irrationality in our minds. After all, things like availability bias were also developed for good reasons. No sense being afraid of tigers and not going into the forest for good if no one you know has ever seen a tiger. That's just as good heuristic as "be scared when going to high places".
dschiptsov 12y ago
Who told them that we have any kind of "parallel threads of consciousness" to run "chekers" for these "rational heuristics" or "pattern matchers" on an input stream? Another variety of "multitasking" nonsense. On paper it is all logical and "rational". Now try to run this in your mind in so-called state of "flow". Don't have a flow? That means you don't have your attention focused. All the classic attention experiments, like that one with gorilla, reveal limitations and "single-threadness" of our minds. It seems that the only kind of parallel tasks a human mind could run is one "conscious" with many "subconscious" - 1:N threads, or 0:N ;) Btw, pthreads (and, perhaps, lock-based sharing in general) is a flawed concept in the first place. Imagine a deadlock with breathing or race-condition with heart rate.
- analog31 12y ago
  This is just an amusing aside: Where I work, we sometimes have these sessions conducted by outside consultants. At one such session, after an introduction about how we can be fooled by our expectations, we were shown the gorilla video. When the trainer asked if we noticed something unusual in the video, all but one or two of us raised our hands. We had all seen the gorilla video. So I think the gorilla video actually teaches a new concept, which is that you should assume that the people you are dealing with have the same access to information as you have unless you have a reason to believe that it's a secret.
  - dschiptsov 12y ago
    For me, the concept was that we are filtering out most of what happens in the shared environment (in order to not being overwhelmed), that our mental mechanisms are rather imperfect (most of people are absolutely sure that they have flawless tools, and the entire universe is completely comprehensible) and that different people could have incompatible inner representations of the very same phenomena. Btw, the flawed mental apparatus as a reason to hypothetical inability to comprehend "the true nature of reality" is one of the basic premises of thousands years old Indian philosophy, which emphasizes subjectivity.
    - 12y ago
codingdave 12y ago
Now I know this is not going to sound "rational", but... I saw the example early on the page about evaluating whether or not to outsource their clothes shopping, and just stopped. Anyone for whom this is even a valid concept is so far removed from who I am that I just am not going to value their advice.
- pcl 12y ago
  That comment was an example provided by someone noticing a described behavior, not a recommendation by the author.
nazgulnarsil 12y ago
I used to think this checklist was misguided. My mental model of improving my rationality was something like acquiring lots and lots of impressive and clever tools and then training myself to apply them in context appropriate places. I've come around to a model much more in line with this checklist though. Something like: 1. Noticing behavioral patterns 2. Thinking hard and doing research on the pattern, whether it leads to good or bad outcomes and whether modifying it is cost effective 3. Using habit formation techniques to modify things 4. Reviewing and reflecting on what is and isn't working for things I have modified using the above steps Old me would have considered this very laborious. You only get to make small changes this way and you aren't guaranteed they work. However, it doesn't take that many real improvements in fundamental counter-productive patterns before the benefits start stacking on top of each other. A few weeks of intense focus on one particular pattern is actually fairly high leverage considering that you can instill habits that will last a lifetime.
- themodelplumber 12y ago
  Your comment reminded me of the Meyers-Briggs model's concepts of introverted thinking and extraverted thinking. The extraverted thinker (NTJ) seeks out common, objective methodologies, while the introverted thinker (NTP) finds it easier to become comfortable with a more subjective, philosophical approach. You might then expect an INTJ to learn and hold to rules that seem to have authority or at least some critical thinking behind them, and an INTP could be expected to back off and start poking holes in those rules. An important part of INTJ maturity is accepting that their own approach may fall short and examining the basis of other beliefs regarding the system or framework they instinctively favor. Or just learning why the lack of adherence to such a framework might be acceptable. INTJs, for example, are urged to learn about different personality preferences so they don't grow impatient with just about every other type. It's easy for INTJs to wonder why their ENFP friend just won't act logically. In the case of the INTJ, the role of extraverted thinking, commonly called systems thinking, is crucial: It can replace their instinctive (and at times compulsive or otherwise destructive) emotional response to circumstances that make them feel anxiety. So when a more mature INTJ is feeling anxious about a situation or circumstance, they usually fall back on their extraverted thinking to help them examine rationally and build a model around it. Otherwise they might find themselves falling into compulsive behaviors, losing their grip on the situation.
fcanela 12y ago
What's the book that most influenced you on critical/rational thinking? The website promotes a list (http://rationality.org/reading/ http://rationality.org/reading/). I have only read "Thinking, Fast and Slow" and I am looking for HN users favorites.
- projectileboy 12y ago
  There's a book called Seeking Wisdom be Peter Bevelin that I really enjoyed. He also has useful lists of checklists in the back.
  - fcanela 12y ago
    Thanks. Seems out of print on Amazon [1]. Adding it to my wishlist anyway, maybe I buy a used one. [1] www.amazon.com/Seeking-Wisdom-Darwin-Munger-3rd/dp/1578644283/
- duncanawoods 12y ago
  Out of that list: I found "Predictably Irrational" to repeat a lot of the content about biases from TFTS. Its well written and not a bad book by any means but I regretted the time investment after TFTS. I found "Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work" to be very practical aiming to giving some real tools to use some of which I hadn't come across before.
huntingralphlee 12y ago
Interesting check list. Humans always like to rationalize things which sometimes is not really a good habit.

111 points by tokenadult 12y ago

analog31 12y ago

I tend to think of myself as rational, but the degree of introspection suggested by this checklist seems bizarre to me.

pokpokpok 12y ago
Just remember that the human brain is basically not set up for objectivity. Plenty of people who consider themselves rational are capable of making decisions that you would call unrational. Doesn't mean you need to live your life through a checklist, but it helps to be critical of thoughts like "I am a very rational person"
- xpda 12y ago
  Sometimes I rationally realize that I am making an irrational decision, but I still prefer the "wrong" decision. For example, I may pick up a dirty penny in a street. The risk/reward is negative because the very slight possibility or disease or accident outweighs the very slight financial reward, but I prefer to pick up the penny anyway. Am I rational because of the analysis, or irrational because I make the wrong choice?
  - zzzcpan 12y ago
    I think you got it wrong. We are irrational no matter what. And we are blind to our own blindness, so we cannot even comprehend, that we are very irrational, unless, of course, we study it. If this is something you are interested in, check out Daniel Kahneman's book. EDIT: I would like to know the reason behind the downvote. Thanks.
    - JadeNB 12y ago
      > I think you got it wrong. We are irrational no matter what. And we are blind to our own blindness, so we cannot even comprehend, that we are very irrational, unless, of course, we study it. I was the (or a) downvoter. While your point is certainly correct that humans are irrational animals and there is no way around it, that seemed essentially irrelevant to the specific question of whether performing a rational analysis, and then acting against it, should count as a rational or an irrational action. (To be fair, it is highly relevant to the discussion as a whole, just not, I think, to this thread.)
  - evmar 12y ago
    If it takes five seconds to pick up the penny (that's maybe high but it's including time to notice, bend, put it in your pocket), you're valuing your time at $7.20 an hour. (To be clear, there are other plausible rewards to picking up a penny, such as feeling lucky from the superstition. But you only mentioned a financial reward, and the financial impact is negative.)
    - scarmig 12y ago
      The biggest reward is the emotion that you're maintaining your sense of order. Everything has a place, and the sidewalk is certainly no place for a penny.
  - mason55 12y ago
    You should try to figure out why you make the decision to pick up the penny even though you know it's "irrational". Is it because you think pennies are good luck? Do you like having a penny in your pocket to mindlessly play with? Once you figure out why you're still picking up pennies even though you know the financial reward is less than the risk then you can determine if it's rational or, if it's irrational, convince yourself not to do it.
  - pokpokpok 12y ago
    I think the key thing is that being a perfectly rational actor is a strange and twisting pursuit. Measuring your actions against another scale is more useful IMO. Being humane/considerate/farsighted (or any set of subjective values that you believe are important) make a better measuring stick than rationality
    - brerlapn 12y ago
      This is a good point--I would phrase it as whatever over-arching organizing value set or decision-making framework you choose to use (whether it be "go with your gut", Rationality Uber Alles, WWJD?, "don't be a dick", or whatever) does not absolve you of responsibility for the actions you take according to that framework. Using rationality or moral values or whatever as a means to develop self-awareness and maturity is a valid and useful exercise IMO, but I know too many people who feel like "I'm just doing what XXXXX says I should do" excuses their actions even though it was still their choice in the first place to do what XXXXX says. Also, Antonio Damasio's work is an interesting complement/counterpoint to the overemphasis of cognitive rational thinking, and I'd highly recommend it. Descarte's Error is a good place to start, and makes the strong case that rationality is part of an embodied (literally) process upon which it depends.
    - Hasu 12y ago
      Why does one have to focus on being humane/considerate/farsighted instead of being rational, rather than focus on both? We don't have to pick one measuring stick. I certainly hope you don't think that being irrational will help you to be more humane/considerate/farsighted, or that being humane/considerate/farsighted means that one can't be rational.
  - JadeNB 12y ago
    > Am I rational because of the analysis, or irrational because I make the wrong choice? I think (to repeat others' points in different language) that to think of rational / irrational as a binary switch is bound to lead to trouble. In other words, I think that the question is whether an action, not a person, is rational or irrational. (Compare with questions of morality, where it is near-meaningless to ask "is this person good / bad?") Why not just "the analysis was rational, and the resulting 'wrong' choice was irrational?"
  - tlholaday 12y ago
    My detestation of observing penny-litter is of sufficient intensity that I would pay you a penny to pick up a penny. I dread that the fury-induced hand-tremor would cause me to drop the penny, leading to a catastrophic loop terminating with cupric entombment.
  - analog31 12y ago
    Maybe you get some nice pleasure chemicals in your brain, or recall a pleasant experience from your past, which may outweigh the possibility of disease and accident. I sometimes take a stick with horse hair stretched over its length, and pull it along steel cables stretched along a large wooden box. The risks are many, including getting chased out of the house, blisters on my fingers, etc. Am I irrational because I made the wrong choice?
- analog31 12y ago
  That's fair. While I called myself rational, I would never claim to make exclusively rational decisions. I would not want to go down the rabbit hole of trying to define rationality, or force myself into the Procrustean bed of a specific definition. If rationalism turns into some sort of utopian or self consistent ideology, then I'll remain aloof from it. At the same time, while the human brain isn't set up for objectivity, it is set up for survival -- including survival in a social milieu. Some non-rational behaviors such as emotion and stubbornness may be valuable survival traits. If I were to put anything on my own checklist, it would be: "Did I give myself enough time to think about this?" I can be persuaded by reason, but on my own timeline, and I'm a terrible debater, so I don't change my opinions based on debate.
  - skybrian 12y ago
    Someone learning to play the piano (an unnatural task) needs to monitor their behavior and look for good habits to reinforce and bad habits to unlearn. But you do that during practice, not performance. By the time you're ready to perform, playing the right way should seem "natural" even though it's still a highly artificial task. I think there's something like that here. Thinking rationally is an unnatural act and some folks are interested in figuring out how to better train for it. Maybe it's a bit of a weird hobby, but I'm happy there are people investigating it. However, it's still early days for figuring out which training techniques are effective. This checklist is a sketch of bad habits to look for, but how best to use it isn't settled yet. (There are places for checklists in production. They're useful in high-risk situations where error has to be eliminated. Pilots rely extensively on checklists, and they're starting to be used more in hospitals.)
jjmason 12y ago
I feel as though most of the psychological issues and poor decision making I experienced when I was younger were because I thought of myself as a fundamentally rational person, and refused to examine the irrational things my brain was doing. This made it more or less impossible for me to address harmful emotions (because emotions are irrational) or problematic behaviours (because I don't make irrational decisions), which led to some bad times, to say the least. Our brains are basically not wired to be objective or rational. While the human brain has developed the ability to think rationally, there is a considerable amount of the kind of "gut level" machinery that kept us alive before we developed this ability lying around. Without careful introspection and a willingness to admit that many of our thoughts and behaviours are, without careful examination, going to be deeply irrational no matter how much we believe in rationalism, we tend to act on our irrationality to our own detriment, and often to the detriment of others as well (remember when Colbert trolled Bush by saying they were both "guys who think with [their] guts"?)
Jach 12y ago
A lot of irrational behavior stems from simple biases in our brains' usually good-enough-for-daily-life heuristics. Attempts to avoid those biases seem to include training to turn off (or at least notice and interrupt) your heuristics altogether as much as possible, resulting in a much slower (and more introspective) way of going through the world.

JadeNB 12y ago

As a mathematician, rationality is very important to me. (It is sufficiently important that I believe in determining my own criteria for rationality, rather than using someone else's list.) In this spirit, I have an infuriating (to others) habit of reflexively arguing against someone else's position. (It was originally born out of the "search for counterexamples" mindset of a mathematician, but now it's an unconscious behaviour.) This habit is so comically ingrained that, if the person to whom I make this argument switches his or her position, then I will in turn switch to arguing for the original position. I don't know whether this counts as highly rational, highly contrarian, or just annoying.

wdewind 12y ago
Read the list... > I notice when my mind is arguing for a side (instead of evaluating which side to choose), and flag this as an error mode. (Recent example from Anna: Noticed myself explaining to myself why outsourcing my clothes shopping does make sense, rather than evaluating whether to do it.)
- JadeNB 12y ago
  > Read the list... I did (although, as I noted, I think that part of being rational is critically creating your own criteria for rationality, rather than using someone else's). I also was not claiming that this was not on the list—but: > I notice when my mind is arguing for a side (instead of evaluating which side to choose), and flag this as an error mode. Although logically—well, in classical logic, anyway—every argument against something is an argument for its opposite, I think that there is nonetheless a meaningful difference between making a contrarian argument (as I do; it is an essentially negative process) and arguing for the opposite position (an essentially positive process).
  - scarmig 12y ago
    Careful there, your constructivism is showing.
tlholaday 12y ago

themodelplumber 12y ago

I'd be very interested to see the results of their ongoing research. And I'd like to know how the debiasing process compares to e.g. CBT.

davidgerard 12y ago
They're selling seminars; there doesn't appear to be actual research going on.

ajross 12y ago

I'm distressed by how unscientific a lot of this stuff is. It's all good advice, but some of it seems to come from some pretty naive perceptions of how consciousness and the brain work. The example in 3.1, for example: > Recent example from Anna: Jumping off the Stratosphere Hotel in Las Vegas in a wire-guided fall. I knew it was safe based on 40,000 data points of people doing it without significant injury, but to persuade my brain I had to visualize 2 times the population of my college jumping off and surviving. Also, my brain sometimes seems much more pessimistic, especially about social things, than I am, and is almost always wrong. Fear of heights is a very primal, very understandable and even reasonably well understood response. Our brains have specific hardware for this kind of circumstance, and it exists for good (even "rational") reasons. Sweeping it into the same generic bucket with all other "irrationality" is just silly.

Suryc011 12y ago
I think you missed the point. It's not that the fear is itself intrinsically wrong, it's that the fear is leading to an irrational belief: that I will likely die if I do this wire-guided fall. That's just not a belief that comports with reality.
- ajross 12y ago
  I, uh, rather think that you missed the point. "Rationality", when expressed in this kind of technicolor paint brush way, is a poorly-defined, fundamentally unscientific concept. Belief in it is itself irrational. Basically: this is just self-help hippie nonsense to me. My irony detector is off the charts, and I was expecting to be more impressed.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
MichaelGG 12y ago
Fear of heights was developed without wire guided falls. It's irrational to be afraid of that vs say, being unafraid of taking a car ride. It's exactly because we've got this corrupted evolved hardware that we must actively seek out all irrationality in our minds. After all, things like availability bias were also developed for good reasons. No sense being afraid of tigers and not going into the forest for good if no one you know has ever seen a tiger. That's just as good heuristic as "be scared when going to high places".

dschiptsov 12y ago

Who told them that we have any kind of "parallel threads of consciousness" to run "chekers" for these "rational heuristics" or "pattern matchers" on an input stream? Another variety of "multitasking" nonsense. On paper it is all logical and "rational". Now try to run this in your mind in so-called state of "flow". Don't have a flow? That means you don't have your attention focused. All the classic attention experiments, like that one with gorilla, reveal limitations and "single-threadness" of our minds. It seems that the only kind of parallel tasks a human mind could run is one "conscious" with many "subconscious" - 1:N threads, or 0:N ;) Btw, pthreads (and, perhaps, lock-based sharing in general) is a flawed concept in the first place. Imagine a deadlock with breathing or race-condition with heart rate.

analog31 12y ago
This is just an amusing aside: Where I work, we sometimes have these sessions conducted by outside consultants. At one such session, after an introduction about how we can be fooled by our expectations, we were shown the gorilla video. When the trainer asked if we noticed something unusual in the video, all but one or two of us raised our hands. We had all seen the gorilla video. So I think the gorilla video actually teaches a new concept, which is that you should assume that the people you are dealing with have the same access to information as you have unless you have a reason to believe that it's a secret.
- dschiptsov 12y ago
  For me, the concept was that we are filtering out most of what happens in the shared environment (in order to not being overwhelmed), that our mental mechanisms are rather imperfect (most of people are absolutely sure that they have flawless tools, and the entire universe is completely comprehensible) and that different people could have incompatible inner representations of the very same phenomena. Btw, the flawed mental apparatus as a reason to hypothetical inability to comprehend "the true nature of reality" is one of the basic premises of thousands years old Indian philosophy, which emphasizes subjectivity.
  - 12y ago

codingdave 12y ago

Now I know this is not going to sound "rational", but... I saw the example early on the page about evaluating whether or not to outsource their clothes shopping, and just stopped. Anyone for whom this is even a valid concept is so far removed from who I am that I just am not going to value their advice.

pcl 12y ago
That comment was an example provided by someone noticing a described behavior, not a recommendation by the author.

nazgulnarsil 12y ago

I used to think this checklist was misguided. My mental model of improving my rationality was something like acquiring lots and lots of impressive and clever tools and then training myself to apply them in context appropriate places. I've come around to a model much more in line with this checklist though. Something like: 1. Noticing behavioral patterns 2. Thinking hard and doing research on the pattern, whether it leads to good or bad outcomes and whether modifying it is cost effective 3. Using habit formation techniques to modify things 4. Reviewing and reflecting on what is and isn't working for things I have modified using the above steps Old me would have considered this very laborious. You only get to make small changes this way and you aren't guaranteed they work. However, it doesn't take that many real improvements in fundamental counter-productive patterns before the benefits start stacking on top of each other. A few weeks of intense focus on one particular pattern is actually fairly high leverage considering that you can instill habits that will last a lifetime.

themodelplumber 12y ago
Your comment reminded me of the Meyers-Briggs model's concepts of introverted thinking and extraverted thinking. The extraverted thinker (NTJ) seeks out common, objective methodologies, while the introverted thinker (NTP) finds it easier to become comfortable with a more subjective, philosophical approach. You might then expect an INTJ to learn and hold to rules that seem to have authority or at least some critical thinking behind them, and an INTP could be expected to back off and start poking holes in those rules. An important part of INTJ maturity is accepting that their own approach may fall short and examining the basis of other beliefs regarding the system or framework they instinctively favor. Or just learning why the lack of adherence to such a framework might be acceptable. INTJs, for example, are urged to learn about different personality preferences so they don't grow impatient with just about every other type. It's easy for INTJs to wonder why their ENFP friend just won't act logically. In the case of the INTJ, the role of extraverted thinking, commonly called systems thinking, is crucial: It can replace their instinctive (and at times compulsive or otherwise destructive) emotional response to circumstances that make them feel anxiety. So when a more mature INTJ is feeling anxious about a situation or circumstance, they usually fall back on their extraverted thinking to help them examine rationally and build a model around it. Otherwise they might find themselves falling into compulsive behaviors, losing their grip on the situation.

fcanela 12y ago

What's the book that most influenced you on critical/rational thinking? The website promotes a list (http://rationality.org/reading/ http://rationality.org/reading/). I have only read "Thinking, Fast and Slow" and I am looking for HN users favorites.

projectileboy 12y ago
There's a book called Seeking Wisdom be Peter Bevelin that I really enjoyed. He also has useful lists of checklists in the back.
- fcanela 12y ago
  Thanks. Seems out of print on Amazon [1]. Adding it to my wishlist anyway, maybe I buy a used one. [1] www.amazon.com/Seeking-Wisdom-Darwin-Munger-3rd/dp/1578644283/
duncanawoods 12y ago
Out of that list: I found "Predictably Irrational" to repeat a lot of the content about biases from TFTS. Its well written and not a bad book by any means but I regretted the time investment after TFTS. I found "Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work" to be very practical aiming to giving some real tools to use some of which I hadn't come across before.

huntingralphlee 12y ago

Interesting check list. Humans always like to rationalize things which sometimes is not really a good habit.