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 Post subject: On Being
PostPosted: Mon Oct 09, 2017 9:35 am 
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Location: Pearl Harbor, Waukesha, and other things that make no sense
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Anyone else catch this show Sunday mornings on WBEZ? I've been enjoying it. Longform interview show, kind of faith-based but not too much -- it's about as "spiritual" as a public radio show from Minneapolis can be, I guess. I'm sure the Sunday morning timeslot is no accident. But it's good. It seems to be replacing To The Best Of Our Knowledge as my weekend public radio routine now that that show has become This American Lite.

Anyway, the show this week was on behavioral economics and these parts stood out:

Quote:
Ms. Tippett: I like to look at — I like to consider all kinds of questions of our time, with a long view of time, and it’s — starting with the Enlightenment, with this particular intensity, we wanted to insist that we are rational, logical creatures. And it’s fascinating for us to be talking about all the things that happened — and there was much more, especially in the mid-20th century — which bespoke our irrationality. And yet, even this idea of rationality and many of our disciplines formed around that presumption — certainly, economics…

Mr. Kahneman: Well, the concept of rationality is a technical, mathematical concept. It’s illogic. And it is actually completely not possible for a finite human mind to be rational or to obey the axioms of rationality. You’d have to know too much. The difficulty of being consistent in all your beliefs is impossible. And if you are not consistent in all your beliefs, you can be trapped in an inconsistency, and then you are not rational. So the concept of rationality, the technical concept of rationality, is psychologically nonsense. And I don’t think we ever claimed to have demonstrated that people are irrational. I really don’t like that label.

Ms. Tippett: Yeah, well, that’s interesting, because that word is really thrown around in how people write about you. But would you say — I mean it seems to me that what you did in social-scientific terms is, you articulated cognitive rules, not for human irrationality, but perhaps for this, let’s say, this reality that we do contradict ourselves, that we are complicated creatures.

Mr. Kahneman: Well, actually, the cognitive rules are, to a large extent, simplifying rules. They are shortcuts. Our examples were sort of amusing and clever, and they impressed people, because they were highly quotable. They could be summarized in one-liners. So we earned that label of being prophets of irrationality by doing psychology in an amusing way.

Ms. Tippett: I guess what I’m pointing at is — as a non-economist, as a citizen — I think that the economy and that cultural and economic events, especially around 2008, made it very clear — although everybody doesn’t stop to analyze it this way — but made it very clear that we weren’t dealing with a merely rational part of our collective life together, so that behavioral economics had a resonance, if anybody was interested to pay attention to that in the larger culture.

Mr. Kahneman: That’s interesting, because I would say, my view of 2008 is that it didn’t demonstrate irrationality. The bankers, they were acting as rational economic agents in their own self-interest. What 2008 did, in the eyes of the public and, I think, in the eyes of many economists, it reduced the hubris of the economics profession. I mean it was a failure to predict. It was — the failure to predict it is what, I think rightly, impressed many people about the limitations of economics.


Quote:
And notice, in our conversation you are using the word “rational” much more often than I, because, in a way, you are — when people use the word “rational,” I think, what they mean by this is that there is a good reason for what you believe and what you do. If there is a good reason for it, you believe in what you do, then you are rational. But if we accept that in general, our more important beliefs are not rooted in arguments, that there is no good reason for why we have this religion or that religion or this politics or that politics; it’s just something that happened to us — that changes the nature. We shouldn’t be looking for rationality so much, because by using the word, we seem to expect it to happen. And I think that’s just not the way the mind works.

Ms. Tippett: Yeah, I appreciate you pointing that out too, because actually, I also feel like the word “rational” carries a sense of judgment — that I would say what is rational, and somebody else would say what is rational. And I don’t actually know that it’s a word I use — I mean I think I would use the word “logical.” And one of the things I’ve been saying a lot to people in conversations in this last political year is, we’re not logical creatures. And being mad at the other side for not being logical is just not a good use of your rational brain. I don’t know. There I used the word again.

Mr. Kahneman: It is not, because you do not appear rational to them. And the fact that arguments that feel irrefutable come to our mind so easily doesn’t mean that those arguments are the real cause of our beliefs and doesn’t mean much of anything about the validity of the argument. The way that the mind works, very frequently, is that we start from a decision, or we start from a belief, and then the stories that explain it come to our mind. And the sequence that we have when we think about thinking, that arguments come first and conclusions come later, that sequence is often reversed. Conclusions come first, and rationalizations come later.

Ms. Tippett: But isn’t it interesting that the discipline — or, at least, the idealized discipline of politics or political science, the way we think you have a debate, and then, somehow, the best idea will appear right to everyone [laughs] — and that’s not, in fact, the way — as you’re saying, that’s not even the way our brains work.

Mr. Kahneman: Absolutely. I mean certainly, what is happening in the United States in the last six months is — it’s really a testimony to that sort of process. You have people on the left, probably — possibly the majority of the country, certainly the people that Donald Trump calls “elites” — and they cannot believe what they see in the polls every week, which is that behaviors that appear to them to be crazy have absolutely no effect on the popularity of the president among a group of his supporters. You read The New York Times, and you feel that everybody who writes there cannot make their peace with the fact that the support is stable, in spite of things that strike them as —

Ms. Tippett: Right, that’s what I mean — they’re always surprised by the same thing, over and over and over again, shocked.

Mr. Kahneman: Absolutely. “Why don’t they change their mind?” And the reason they don’t change their mind is that facts don’t matter, or they matter much less than people think. And people on both sides believe that there are facts that support them. But those beliefs should not be taken too seriously.


So yeah, archives are https://onbeing.org/, it's a good show, worth checking out.

_________________
Molly Lambert wrote:
The future holds the possibility to be great or terrible, and since it has not yet occurred it remains simultaneously both.


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