
Does irrationality fuel innovation? - dsr12
https://juliagalef.com/2017/04/07/does-irrationality-fuel-innovation/
======
Fricken
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists
in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the
unreasonable man.

-George Bernard Shaw.

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dlwdlw
One of the reasons radicals have amassed so much power in the middle east is
because they were the only ones willing to stand up to the west as the more
reasonable people realized they couldn't do anything.

A bit of craziness can create very unexpected results, with a destabalization
wave having many orders of effects. The strong become weak, the weak strong,
the poor rich, the stupid "smart".

So much of the status quo relies on people willing to play games. The
stability of a game is its degree of belief. That is, it is sustained by
cooperative delusion.

Another example is that salaries are maintained by collective willing
agreement on what is fair. A union, if it amasses enough believers can disrupt
this game.

Every game you tear down brings you closer to reality and raw possibility.
Often it is necessary because of the limited attention for games. Of course,
touching reality for the self is insanely hard, nevermind established
institutions. Single individuals however can amass a following, seedingargwr
waves of energy tha re-evaluate the status quo, swapping what is profane and
sacred.

This wave of energy is what gives us temporary clarity on reality. Like
earthquakes destroying a city, reminding us that the universe doesn't
particularly care about our games.

One of the biggest games that is currently unravelling is the West as a beacon
of innovation and morality. The response to 9/11 was exactly what terrorists
wanted. And things like brexit and trump don't particularly help. From a GDP
perspectice, each citizen in the US is worth many times a citizen from China
or India, but this is only the result of a long historical game that
impoverished these former world powers.

The natural order of things is that each human provides the same value, the
reason this doesnt happen is due to resource flown restriction along lines of
military strength.

~~~
worldsayshi
I agree with another comment that your last sentence goes against most of the
rest and I think it makes an otherwise very poignant comment fall a bit flat.
I'm not saying that there's no truth to it, just that it's flawed and doesn't
explain as much as the rest.

Each human doesn't provide the 'same value'. However, I believe value creation
is much more chaotic than what economic praxis will try to make it appear. Any
person has the potential to create value - under very peculiar circumstances
that are not very well understood.

In today's society one person may end up creating more value than a thousand
others, by inventing something, by being lucky or just by having the right
combination of values, connections and friends at the right time and at the
right place. Then again, effort still counts, but it's just one of many
factors.

~~~
dlwdlw
Thanks for the feedback and praise for the initial thoughts! I'm not sure how
quite to express the last idea yet, but basically I'm trying to say that
people in countries like China/India are worth just as much as people in the
U.S. from a specific perspective (potential?) In reality, the rich kid who
grew up with connection, the best education, and capital is "worth" much more
and janitors should not be CEOs or Nuclear plant managers. The "outward-now"
value and the "innate-past-future" value has a huge disparity because of
leveraged unfairness due to lucky environments and unlucky environments.

People in poorer countries often work harder for much less as if they were
less intelligent, less creative, less deserving etc.. In the U.S., lines were
drawn on the basis of innate intelligence to deny slaves rights and wealth,
and even internally to their own people, lines are drawn based on "deserving-
ness", like hard-work, despite, as previously mentioned, you can be working
harder but making less.

To use an analogy, a point may move in many directions on a piece of paper.
The distance from the origin would be knowledge and ability in that direction.
Some points may spiral around only increase this distance very slowly, some
may go in a straight line, increasing ability at the most rapid pace possible.

I don't mean that each point is equidistant from the origin, but that certain
"ink colors" have advantages and disadvantages in certain directions and that
these advantages and disadvantages are actually man-made. That is, it's not
the innate troughs and valleys of the paper, but the other ink paths that
impede/boost other ink paths. To use slavery as an example, an lot of effort
was spent by white ink to encircle black ink so the max potential of a black
point was very low. So many years later, the descendants of the black ink are
still struggling and working harder (with some become jaded at the unfairness
and rebelling) while the white ink can cruise with the momentum amassed by
their ancestors. The situation is unfair because both white ink and black ink
have the same "value". The environment has shifted to value one ink color
above another despite the equal value at the beginning.

Affirmative action says "This is unfair, we need to manually take steps to
address this." While libertarianism says "It is what it is, the troughs and
valleys may have been dug by man but there is not point in reverting them,
just pretend they are natural."

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tedsanders
Innovation tends to have many positive externalities. Whoever invents a widget
probably only captures a tiny slice of the overall value it delivers to
society.

Therefore, a particular level of investment can simultaneously be irrational
from the perspective of an individual but rational from the perspective of
society.

Overall, I'm not sure if this is a debate with an answer that will help people
move forward. Everyone probably agrees that have accurate beliefs is good, all
else equal. And everyone probably agrees that living a good life doesn't
require you to maximize your belief accuracy at the expense of all else.

Maybe the central idea nugget is that a high degree of self-doubt will improve
belief accuracy but hurt other aspects of your life, such as speed of idea
generation or speed of work output. I suppose that's a trade off that we all
must navigate, consciously or otherwise.

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ssivark
Cognitive dissonance is extremely "expensive". Deliberately suspending one's
beliefs takes very good storytelling and/or resources corresponding to a movie
budget. All that so that each person could suspend their beliefs for a couple
of hours.

For the kind of long-term emotional investment it takes to do research or
develop something new, one (typically) needs to have "buy-in" at an emotional
level (aka irrationality). Few humans can invest a lot of their
time/effort/resources on things they believe are probably not worth the
trouble; sustained dissonance would probably cause burnout.

~~~
iiii_iivii_iiii
"...sustained dissonance would probably cause burnout."

Or religion.

~~~
pmalynin
Or lack thereof.

~~~
iiii_iivii_iiii
Our innate sense of justice, of how things ought to be, clashes with how
things are. Thus we have divine retribution. We ought not die, but we do, so
after we die we live supernaturally. Dissonance can give way to religion,
generally speaking.

~~~
pasquinelli
there's been a lot of religion that doesn't fit with what you're saying, norse
mythology for instance.

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hyperpallium
Non-conformism fuels innovation, in that conformity prevents it.

"Best practices" and "state-of-the-art" are usually appallingly bad, but
conformity is the norm
[https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments](https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments)

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rhizome
"Irrational" is a fundamentally negative term, in that it describes a
subjective judgement of deficiency, so it's not a good choice to derive any
proofs. I would rephrase it as "Does empiricism fuel innovation?"

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pella
_" How do you innovate? First, try to get in trouble. Innovation sparks from
initial situations of necessity, in ways that go far beyond the satisfaction
of such necessity. The excess energy released from overreaction to setbacks is
what innovates!Moderns try today to create inventions from situations of
comfort, safety, and predictability instead of accepting the notion that
“necessity really is the mother of invention.”"_

[https://sivers.org/book/Antifragile](https://sivers.org/book/Antifragile)

More irrationality -> more trouble -> more innovation ?

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oceanghost
Yes but it also fuels failure. The lines that separate what we know is
possible, what is actually possible but we don't know it and what isn’t at
all— are very very fine.

Fools often rush in and are successful because they didn't know they shouldn’t
have been able to do something. But more often than not, I think they’re met
with disaster simply because the skillset they lack is the same one they need
to be successful.

Conversely, sometimes competent people are restrained by existing opinion
structures.

~~~
hyperpallium
"When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible,
he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he
is very probably wrong."

[https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke's_three_laws](https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke's_three_laws)
(The first of his three laws, the third of which is the magic-tech one)

~~~
Ngunyan
Are you implying time travel is certainly possible?

"Even if it turns out that time travel is impossible, it is important that we
understand why it is impossible." \- Stephen Hawking

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digsmahler
Paul Feyerabend argues as much in [Against
Method]([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_Method](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_Method)),
that "science is an anarchic enterprise." Our greatest innovations were
created by people who were claiming "irrational" things against the backdrop
of the knowledge of their time.

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ericcdl
The first article that appeared in my feed after reading this one: The
Emerging Trump Doctrine: Don’t Follow Doctrine.

This article made me think of this line from Does irrationality fuel
innovation? "A lot of important truths come from v. irrational ppl."

You guys are smarter than I am. Any correlation? Is there any hope that his
irrationality might just be what the world needed? Crazy like a fox? Didn't he
gain most of his support from people's desire to shake things up? People
didn't necessarily like him. They had an overwhelming desire that maybe a
force from the outside traditional government could bring a change.

[https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/04/08/us/politics/trump-
doct...](https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/04/08/us/politics/trump-doctrine-
foreign-policy.html)

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iiii_iivii_iiii
Ignorance can fuel innovation. It can help to not know what you can't know or
do.

~~~
jimmaswell
[http://www.snopes.com/college/homework/unsolvable.asp](http://www.snopes.com/college/homework/unsolvable.asp)

~~~
iiii_iivii_iiii
[http://www.openculture.com/2012/04/orson_welles_explains_why...](http://www.openculture.com/2012/04/orson_welles_explains_why_ignorance_was_the_real_genius_of_citizen_kane.html)

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api
There's another thing he doesn't seem to mention: the problem in all learning
systems of converging on and then getting stuck in local maxima.

Perhaps when things get stuck it is in fact rational to be irrational-- to
strategically adopt odd heterodox modes of thought or even employ a bit of
randomness (Monte Carlo methods) to shake yourself free of a local maximum.

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MR4D
This is a great article. I wish more people understood it.

However, the bigger impact is the effect of their marketing on the public.

It should worry you about the more complicated things that are being marketed
by the financial industry.

------
known
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists
in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the
unreasonable man." \--George Bernard Shaw

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jhchen
Creativity and rationality are conventionally seen to be at odds than they
actually are. But often something creative and innovative to one person is
boring and logical to another, particularly when the former is not versed in
the latter's domain.

For example, many people versed in networking were using the early internet to
make voice communications circumventing long distance telecom bills. It just
seems obvious to them then (and many more people now) that if you can send
data through the internet, why not encode audio in that data?

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Animats
_Most people look at a “crazy idea” — like seasteading — and say: “That’s
obviously dumb and not worth trying, lol, you morons.”_

Well, it is. There are so many easier ways to dodge taxes.

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eli_gottlieb
Oh come on, guys. Sure, sampling from the tails of the distribution _means_
you sample points with low probability, but if you sample them with
_disproportionately_ low probability, you're simply failing to accurately
sample the distribution.

Translated: if you don't try crazy ideas sometimes, you're not accurately
modeling the chances an idea is crazy.

