Self and others

 This evening's penultimate (already!) Rationality class looks first at the persistent trouble humans have discerning meaningful "signals" amidst so much distracting "noise," what's true from what we wish were true, bombers on the radar screen from flocks of seagulls, killer cancer cells on the scan from harmless cysts, pharmacological efficacy from a placebo effect, damning testimony from witness confusion, and so on.  

"All we mortals see are our observations," which is plenty to start with but no guarantee of signal veracity. For that we must place new observational information in context with previously observed hits and misses, correct for our biases, check with other observers, arrive at a suitable response criterion in the light of common sense and "expected utility," and (if we're a certain sort of rational calculator and homo economicus) try to assign numeric values to the projected costs and benefits. It'a a lot to try and think about.

And still we're liable to tragic error, if we misperceive our observations and miss or mis-atribute (say) a cancer diagnosis. Pinker gives us lots of graphs and charts and bell curves to illustrate all this, but the straightforward applied upshot is on the order, for example, of Blackstone's Rule: "It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer." The rational objective is to "make our practices consistent with our values."

And further, if we gaze through that wider Jamesian Sentiment of Rationality lens, it's to make our values consistent with our whole humanity. When we do that, we'll not be casual or complacent about "the grim necessity that some innocents will be punished." Not acceptable, particularly if you or someone you love is the unfortunate innocent caught in the snares of that calculus. In that case, "statistical significance" is a lot less compelling than simple human compassion combined with holistic ratiocination. Again,

Pretend what we may, the whole man within us is at work when we form our philosophical opinions. Intellect, will, taste, and passion co-operate just as they do in practical affairs; and lucky it is if the passion be not something as petty as a love of personal conquest over the philosopher across the way. The absurd abstraction of an intellect verbally formulating all its evidence and carefully estimating the probability thereof by a vulgar fraction by the size of whose denominator and numerator alone it is swayed, is ideally as inept as it is actually impossible.

Then in chapter 8 we'll look at game theory and its implications for the great challenges that face us, climate change among the most urgent of them. "Only if everyone eliminated their emissions would anyone benefit," Pinker overstates, to make the point that from a certain self-interested conception of rationality it's rational "to ruin the planet."

But of course it's not. And it's not rational to do the things we know contribute to ruin and exemplify ruinous behavior that can only spread the contagion of same to our fellow meme-imbibing mimetics. We really shouldn't be playing rock-paper-scissors and Chicken with the fate of the earth. 

"Many of the dramas of political and economic life may be explained as Prisoner's Dilemmas," wherein we imprison ourselves within a blinkered failure to grasp how intimately our personal and communal interests must ultimately converge. That's the Tragedy of the Carbon Commons, when individuals and nations misconceive their interests to lie in consuming more and more fossil fuels and emitting extinction-inducing greenhouse gasses rather than cooperating to conserve and sustain life by switching to non-carbon alternatives like solar and wind, and maybe nuclear energy.

"There ought to be a law" against such tragically self-destructive behavior, in the form of a social contract that teaches us the importance of public goods and shared mutual sacrifice towards common ends and benefits. What kind of social contract? Not Hobbesian, surely, but one that preserves a like liberty for all and that makes it our reflexive first impulse always to ask not what's in it for me but what must we do.  We'll discuss.