From Taleb - How to be Rational about Rationality

Excerpts from https://medium.com/incerto/how-to-be-rational-about-rationality-432e96dd4d1a

• "...In real life, belief is an instrument to do things, not the end product. This is similar to vision: the purpose of your eyes is to orient you in the best possible way... (...) Their job description is not to produce the most accurate scientific representation of reality; rather the most useful one for survival.

• "...Our perceptional apparatus makes mistakes –distortions — in order to lead to more precise actions on our parts: ocular deception, it turns out, is a necessary thing..."

• "...The same applies to distortions of beliefs...(...) harboring superstitions is not irrational by any metric: nobody has managed to reinvent a metric for rationality based on process. Actions that harm you are observable..."

• "...Survival comes first, truth, understanding, and science later. In other words, you do not need science to survive, but you need to survive to do science (better safe than sorry)... 'to make money you must first survive' (skin in the game again)... this brings us again to the ergodic property : for the world to be “ergodic”, there needs to be no absorbing barrier, no substantial irreversibilities"

• "Bias-Variance tradeoff. Typically, you cannot reduce one (bias) without increasing the other (variance). When fragile, the (bias) strategy is the best: maintain a distance from ruin..."

• "Herb Simon formulated the notion now known as bounded rationality: we cannot possibly measure and assess everything as if we were a computer; we therefore produce, under evolutionary pressures, some shortcuts and distortions. Our knowledge of the world is fundamentally incomplete, so we need to avoid getting in unanticipated trouble..."

• Ecological Rationality led by Gerd Gigerenzer, maps "how many things we do that appear, on the surface, illogical have deeper reasons"

• Ken Binmore showed "that the concept casually dubbed 'rational' is ill-defined...There is nothing particularly irrational in beliefs per se (given that they can be shortcuts and instrumental to something else): to him everything lies in the notion of 'revealed preferences'"

• Revelation of the preferences:

  • "Judging people on their beliefs is not scientific"
  • "There is no such thing as “rationality” of a belief, there is rationality of action"
  • "The rationality of an action can only be judged by evolutionary considerations"

• "Actually, by a mechanism (more technically called the bias-variance tradeoff), you often get better results making some type of “errors”, as when you aim slightly away from the target when shooting. I have shown in Antifragile that making some types of errors is the most rational thing to do, as, when the errors are of little costs, it leads to gains and discoveries. This is why I have been against the State dictating to us what we “should” be doing: only evolution knows if the “wrong” thing is really wrong, provided there is skin in the game for that"

• Science - "It is unscientific to use science outside its strictly bounded domains... (...) ...Science is mainly rigor"

• "What is Religion About? It is therefore my opinion that religion is here to enforce tail risk management across generations, as its binary and unconditional rules are easy to teach and enforce. We have survived in spite of tail risks; our survival cannot be that random...(...)...I find it incoherent to criticize someone’s superstitions if these are meant to bring some benefits"

• "...we do not have enough grounds to discuss “irrational beliefs”. We do with irrational actions...Let us extend the idea outside of buying and selling to the risk domain: opinions in are cheap unless people take risks for them. Extending such logic, we can show that much of what we call “belief” is some kind of background furniture for the human mind, more metaphorical than real. It may work as therapy"

• "How much you truly “believe” in something can only be manifested through what you are willing to risk for it"

• "The only definition of rationality that I found that is practically, empirically, and mathematically rigorous is that of survival...Anything that hinders one’s survival at an individual, collective, tribal, or general level is deemed irrational"

• "When you consider beliefs do not assess them in how they compete with other beliefs, but consider the survival of the populations that have them"

• "Rationality is not what has conscious verbalistic explanatory factors; it is only what aids survival, avoids ruin. Rationality is risk management, period."

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