

Reevaluating how we reason - cwan
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/08/we-are-all-talk-radio-hosts/

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techiferous
"...that human reason has nothing to do with finding the truth, or locating
the best alternative. Instead, it’s all about argumentation."

I've come to the conclusion that our brain is not trying to produce an
accurate model of reality. It is trying to choose good experiences over bad
experiences. If it ends up constructing an accurate model of some part of
reality, that's a side effect.

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tarkin2
Although not emboldened, this sentence in the abstract best explained the jam
tasting problem: _"Proactively used reasoning also favors decisions that are
easy to justify but not necessarily better."_ That is, the students focused on
the quantity of reasons, not necessarily the most important reasons.

It reminds me of the Bayesian stuff I've been reading about on lesswrong.com.
And in that way, it best describes 'rationalisation': an overemphasis of less
important aspects of a problem domain, often because of bias or because of
difficulty in discovering the more important aspects, as in the jam example.

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msluyter
Why is it so hard to eradicate confirmation bias? Well, for one, even if
you're acutely aware of it, you'll just tend to believe that your beliefs are
that much likely to be correct. "After all, _I've_ taken confirmation bias
into account!"

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isleyaardvark
_This explains the notorious confirmation bias. This bias is apparent not only
when people are actually arguing but also when they are reasoning proactively
with the perspective of having to defend their opinions._

And overcoming bias could also be motivated by wanting to persuade. It's
covering your bases in case the person you're trying to persuade is aware of
confirmation bias.

I'd hate for this paper to become support for the idea that you should just go
by your gut and not by reason. It looked like this study only looked at highly
subjective topics, which jam is better, which poster/car/jelly bean is better.
Those are largely subject to taste, and are much different subjects than
something like economics or science.

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mkr-hn
What bugs me about this story and the conclusions is that it tries to compare
taste--something wholly subjective--to other things. It implies that people
use the same criteria of judgment for everything, which isn't even addressed
by the study.

How we judge our food doesn't necessarily reflect how we judge more important
things like our political and social views. Has a similar study been done for
those subjects?

This is the worst kind of science reporting because it's trying to take a
single study and draw wildly unrelated conclusions.

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Tycho
Reminds me of how some people review music. They start to focus on some things
which were minor decisions by the recording artists, requiring no special
talent (the reviewers themselves think they could have done better), like say
the sequencing of songs on a CD, and then attach the same importance they
would afford the quality of songs themselves. It's sort of like they devise a
number of criteria and then naively give each category equal weighting.
Videogames reviews are also bad for this.

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chc
Videogame reviews are bad for a multitude of reasons.

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DLWormwood
I found the main point of this article to be profoundly depressing...

    
    
        Our rational faculty isn’t a scientist – it’s a talk radio host
    

...what a good way to sap my enthusiasm and hope for the day.

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greenlblue
Objective thinking in any domain is hard. I don't see why pointing out that
people don't get enough practice in actual rational thinking when it comes to
their preferences is depressing?

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swombat
The final sentence is key:

 _Unless we take our innate biases into account, the blessing of human reason
can easily become a curse._

So take your innate biases into account. Familiarise yourself with them. Read
books like "Predictably Irrational". Follow Eliezer Yudkowsky most excellent
articles on <http://www.overcomingbias.com/> (and read his awesome "Harry
Potter and the Methods of Rationality" at
[http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/1/Harry_Potter_and_the_M...](http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/1/Harry_Potter_and_the_Methods_of_Rationality)
). Be aware of those biases.

Your subconscious has biases too. Don't take its answers for granted - test
them out. Practice figuring out what your subconscious is biased about, and
correct for that.

Being a rational thinker is not about explaining/rationalising your
conclusions, it's about using subconscious and conscious reasoning in tandem,
being aware of the shortcomings of both, and building up to valid conclusions
based on whatever evidence you can get your hands on (and acquiring more
evidence where useful).

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radu_floricica
Speaking of Harry Potter's fic, Robert Cialdini's book was much better then I
imagined.

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greenlblue
This is why all my major decisions are based on gut reactions and intuition
and I'm not being sarcastic. As soon as something 'feels' wrong I know it's
time to make a change. This strategy has been working out well for me so far
and I'm happy to see there is research to back it up.

~~~
dan00
I don't think, that your conclusion fits with the article.

Because there's not a big disconnection between feeling and thinking. If you
feel in a direction, then you will certainly also think in this direction.
Because your feelings are colouring your thoughts. It's like you already feel
the conclusion and are only searching for rational arguments.

I think that the article doesn't go far enough, because you shouldn't only
question your thinking, but also your feelings.

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greenlblue
I think the point is to not think too much. Feelings certainly color thoughts
but the article makes the point that if you do too much thinking then the
color provided by your feelings is washed out and you are left with
rationalization which can often work against your interests.

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dan00
But that's not the point of the article. It's about your bias, and to see it,
it's not enough to only look at your thoughts.

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greenlblue
What I got from the article was that too much thinking makes people deviate
from expert opinion. This is a bad thing because experts in general tend to be
more objective in their domain of expertise and are better able to judge
things based on merit instead of some other metric. I think it's less about
bias and more about false rationalization being the default state of thinking
when it comes to non-experts and one way to not fall into this trap is to not
overthink. You could also avoid this trap by becoming an expert but that
requires time and hard work and trusting your initial gut reactions and
intuitions can often lead to better results when you don't have the time to
become an expert in some domain.

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yters
That was the point of the study, the point of the article is that reasoning is
just rationalization of what we already feel.

However, this actually conflicts with the study, which shows reasoning leads
us away from what we already feel.

Obviously, the author spent too much time reasoning about the study.

