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The Science of Irrational Decisions
The Rat Race Trap blog has a look at one aspect of the irrational decision-making process humans employ, based on the book Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely. "Professor Ariely describes some experiments which demonstrated something he calls 'arbitrary coherence.' Basically it means that once you contemplate a decision or actually make a decision, it will heavily influence your subsequent decisions. That's the coherence part. Your brain will try to keep your decisions consistent with previous decisions you have made. I've read about that many times before, but what was surprising in this book was the the 'arbitrary' part. ... [In an experiment] the fact that the students contemplated a decision at a completely arbitrary price, the last two digits of their social security number, very heavily influenced what they were willing to pay for the product. The students denied that the anchor influenced them, but the data shows something totally different. Correlations ranged from 0.33 to 0.52. Those are extremely significant."
In case you were actually curious which I'm sure you are...
Humans are naturally curious, and we have a love for information. These are great things, clearly evolving to strive for greater knowledge and understanding is a good thing. And a certain level of curiousity is also good. So there are mechanisms in our brain that reward us for gaining knowledge... generally you feel good learning something.
That said, the implementation is terrible. We get rewarded (chemically) for ANY information we learn. There is no natural mechanism that filters out useless information. So at our base we feel equally rewarded learning about britney spears' baby as we do about our political system. This results in you feeling good learning the tidbits of information though they may not be very pertinent to your life. If you are good at trivial pursuit you are likely more of an addict and so on.
This is exactly why I never buy anything that is not previously labeled with a price. I will negotiate but not if I have to contemplate a starting value myself.
I disagree. I find watching E-Daily, or Entertainment Tonight, or any other celebrity show physically nauseating. It's literally an assault on my brain.
That's because such trivia is designed for children who never really grew up. Y'know, the ones who have adult bodies. That's why they think someone else's personal life is so much more fascinating than their own, merely because that person can sing or dance or act. They don't seem to notice that the truly famous entertainers are some of the most out-of-touch people who are least worthy of this kind of adoration. The doctor who finally cures cancer will be an anonymous, unknown figure by comparison.
They're impressed with the entertainer's ability to entertain and that's their only real criteria; any critical thinking or other evaluation shuts down at that point. Their appetite for the superficial and insignificant is absolutely endless, even though those same mental faculties could be put towards educating themselves, establishing deep and meaningful connections with people like their neighbors, and finding real purpose and meaning in their own lives. They see nothing wrong with this or the waste that it represents.
It's an assault on your brain because the underlying message is "it's okay to devote so much time and energy to something completely devoid of any real meaning." There's also the implication that it's okay to form grossly asymmetric relationships instead of mutual relationships, that there is anything healthy or nurturing about this, like when a person learns all about the personal and romantic life of an actor when that actor doesn't even know that he or she exists. The message is that you should eagerly do such things merely because it's encouraged by the industry that was built around it. If you have any understanding whatsoever, how could you do anything but reject this notion?
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Yes, we call that generalized anxiety disorder. You probably don't want that.
The land shall stone them with the bread of his son.
Studies have shown that 80-90% of everything that humans talk about is gossip. When you think about this from an evolutionary perspective it makes sense. We're highly social animals and our biggest competitors are other humans. Sharing information about the members of tribe is a HUGE advantage. Unfortunately, today we have the same brains that our tribal ancestors did and these brains seem to include celebrities in our tribes, so we eat up gossip about them. The implementation isn't terrible, it's just legacy :)
Does this sig remind you of Agatha Christie?
How'd rationality lead you to think that "liberal belief" includes the idea that killing an unborn child is "good?"
More objectively stated: "Liberal belief" includes the idea that being allowed to kill an unborn child without legal ramifications is "good", but only if the one making the decision is the mother; for anyone else, it's a crime.
For perspective: from a "Conservative" mindset, this is exactly like saying "being allowed to murder is 'good' as it does not restrict our innate freedom to act." Thus, why many Conservatives oppose legalized abortion.
Mods: Please remember what the definitions for Troll and Flamebait are before moderating. I'm reasonably on topic and continuing a civil dialogue without inflammatory language. If you happen to disagree politically or grammatically, that's what the "reply to this" button is for.
Exactly. The human brain is like a computer program that has constantly been patched for millions of years. The original intent of the program is completely different from how we use it now. And we have never had a version change or rewrite. Oh and we were programmed by inputting code semi-randomly.
When you think of it from that point of the it isn't at all surprising we have a few hundred stupid flaws.
I'll let someone else come up with a car analogy if they like.
For better understanding on Dan Ariely's point, see this video http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_ariely_on_our_buggy_moral_code.html
What's more, I would say it's very unclear that we'd be able to live, let alone become intelligent, without such irrational assumptions. This is something that people miss a lot when they talk about intelligence and AI: irrationality is part of intelligence.
Imagine you didn't generally make basic assumptions that your past actions and beliefs were appropriate. Let's say you wake up in the morning and feel a pain in your belly. Well, yesterday and the day before that, you ate a bowl of cereal with milk in it, and that seemed to make the pain go away. But you're not just going to follow habit or assume that it's a good decision. You're going to wake up every morning from now on and try random things. Maybe you'll try scratching your belly with a stick, or maybe you'll throw yourself out the window. How is intelligence ever going to emerge from that?
People are creatures of habit, and people are mimics. We do what other people around us are doing. We role-play and we follow fads and we talk the way our neighbors talk. We see friends and family and people on TV eating breakfast in the morning, and so we do it too. Our brains then try to tie all of that habit and mimicry up in a nice tidy logical explanation so that we can understand what we're doing, so that we can explain it to ourselves and to others.