
Does Irrationality Fuel Innovation? - andrewnc
https://juliagalef.com/2017/04/07/does-irrationality-fuel-innovation/
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hvasilev
Rationality is overvalued for day to day life. It works for certain things
like science, where you are lead by the evidence and you constantly adjust
some model of understanding of reality to more accurate standards, but it
really don't seem to work well for everything in one's life. The reason is
that we operate under deeply unscientific environments like partial-
information, uncertainty and unpredictability. In these environments
'intuition' that might not be backed by rational thought is frequently more
valuable. Technically you can try to be always rational in your life and play
the 'risk minimization' game, but you will probably have a very mediocre life
with limited success.

~~~
tgflynn
I don't think rationality _per se_ is overvalued but our capacity to achieve
it consciously may be overestimated while the capacity of our brains to
unconsciously generate reasonably accurate approximations to rational
decisions may be underestimated.

It's clear that there is far more information processing occurring in our
brains than we are ever consciously aware of. We end up being conscious only
of the final result and we tend to call this "intuition". It would be a
mistake to dismiss using intuition as irrational just because we aren't
conscious of the mental activities that generated it. Of course intuition
isn't necessarily right, it needs to be consciously evaluated and we should
also use our conscious minds to train our intuition to increase its accuracy.

~~~
philipov
We don't trust intuition for the same reason we don't trust the output of
neural networks, because the process that generated it is inscrutable. It is
ironic that neural networks, an essentially irrational tool, have become so
popular in a culture obsessed with rationality.

~~~
tgflynn
Yes, that analogy occurred to me as well. But I don't think a blanket policy
of distrust is optimal for either of those "technologies". Both are useful in
the right circumstances and trustworthy alternatives are often not available.

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rstuart4133
A quote from George Bernard Shaw (some would say insisting people use your
middle name is unreasonable):

“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.”

Irrationality is just an extreme form of being unreasonable, is it?

~~~
aaron-lebo
I guess the issue is that it's really difficult to draw the line between being
unreasonable or even momentarily irrational and just being delusional. It's
hard to admit to yourself that you're delusional, so that quote, which gives
lots of people comfort and seems attractive in some ways, probably leads a lot
of people down paths which have no possible return - or delusion, and it can
destroy their lives and others (like this current crisis).

To get back to the article, yeah, some irrationality is probably necessary,
because it takes irrational (unreasonable) people believing they can do things
other people gave up on. But the important thing is probably being aware that
you can be unreasonable and not letting that drive. There's a book, Becoming
Steve Jobs, that is probably my favorite Jobs bio, because it's really about
him learning to mitigate those flaws and becoming better in his second go
around because of it. Steve was certainly delusional at times, and he
shouldn't have been encouraged. You know, like denying the paternity of your
child. Steve really personally hurt himself and others because of that kind of
irrationality and it wasn't a positive in that context.

I think there are a lot of other people that do some really kind of delusional
stuff, but we accept that because they are successful. You know, like Musk
slurring an innocent person (or being really premature on every self-imposed
deadline, or Holmes being a complete fraud. I've got no doubt that given
enough time the latter probably would have figured out enough to pull half of
a rabbit out of a hat to prove to people they had it all figured out, but it
doesn't mean they weren't delusional, and it doesn't mean that that's healthy
for them or us as societies to encourage lying to yourself and others, even if
sometimes you get lucky.

Guess I'm just complaining. I see genuinely crazy stuff posted on HN and other
places and to me irrationality isn't sexy, it's something that we need to do a
better job of being honest about.

~~~
philipov
> _I guess the issue is that it 's really difficult to draw the line between
> being unreasonable or even momentarily irrational and just being
> delusional._

"The distance between insanity and genius is measured only by success." \-
Bruce Feirstein.

The only thing that "unreasonable" means is that when you tried to convince
someone they should stop a certain course of action, you could not convince
them and they did not refute you using logic. Mostly, the term is used as a
polemic device to point out people whose axioms disagree with your own.

A lot of people simply have faith in their abilities, and a priori
argumentation is not even a valid way of testing whether that faith is
misguided. They are irrational because Empiricism is the opposite of
Rationalism.

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georgewsinger
I've heard it rumored that one of Peter Thiel's private beliefs is that tech
bubbles are necessary to fund non-trivial innovation in new industries (when
expected value to investors is largely negative). This is a fascinating
question either way.

~~~
chrisco255
If that's true then why does Peter constantly argue that we haven't seen much
innovation in the last 50 years? We've certainly had plenty of bubbles.

~~~
twic
He has a portfolio of beliefs. All of them are bold, and not all of them have
to be true!

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zuhayeer
"I also like the strategy of temporarily suspending your disbelief and
throwing yourself headlong into something for a while, allowing your emotional
state to be as if you were 100% confident"

All work happens because of this essentially. A result of over-zealousness.
Irrational thoughts that keep you going that extra mile at 2 am because you
really believe in an idea (more than it ought to be believed many times). If
people didn't feel irrationally strong about things, then nothing meaningful
(sometimes low probability of success, but high expected value as the author
mentions) would get done.

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aaron695
I think most people have group think.

To not have group think is considered 'irrationality' since most people don't
think the person is correct. So perhaps you are playing with words.

I wouldn't have thought a large company just ignoring local laws could use
this as a driving tactic to win a world market.

But I think that was my group think over their irrationality.

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nine_k
Indeed, irrationality fuels innovation! Look at the phenomenon called life.

Life evolves by doing random mutations, and throwing away everything that
fails hard enough. No analysis is performed at all, and reams of completely
pointless changes are tried.

This process has produced the most innovative and advanced chemical,
mechanical, and information-processing devices known to date.

The problem of course is that the random-walk approach immensely wasteful. In
our daily lives, we strive to somehow less waste, and tend to avoid being an
unfortunate random mutation destined to fail. Here genetic evolution gives way
to memetic evolution.

But the memetic evolution has many of the same properties: many "random"
things are tried, and a number of most spectacular successes are results of
lucky coincidences and following patently wrong initial ideas. Of course, most
of such crazy ideas just fail, like in biological evolution.

I would compare innovation to stock market: while you can sort of predict some
local movements with a chance better than rolling a dice, you still face a
fundamentally random process, and it's rational to approach it like one. For
one thing, it means to accept its unpredictability and the limited usefulness
of any rational models. Following a hunch may be as good a strategy as careful
analysis. Probably a mix of both would give the best results; it looks like
what some famous innovators did.

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sandwall
Risk aversion is rational behavior. However, it's not irrational concepts that
succeed; rather, rational ideas that are counter-intuitive.

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raleighm
Imagine this is something you know to be true about yourself, or is an
attitude necessary/useful to fuel innovation: “What matters most to me is
doing something daring that plausibly benefits others”.

I suspect many people have deep drives of this nature, featuring multiple
values - in this case, being daring (a matter of character) _and_ benefitting
others (a matter of welfare).

It would be irrational in such case to pursue a project: (1) that isn’t
daring, (2) without regard to whether it’s daring, (3) with exclusive regard
to whether it’s daring, (4) that doesn’t plausibly benefit others, (5) without
regard to whether it plausibly benefits others, or (6) with exclusive regard
to whether it plausibly benefits others.

3 and 5, and 2 and 6, are corollaries.

Is irrationality necessary or helpful to fuel innovation? Of course depends on
what we mean by "rationality" and what value(s) rationality is meant to serve.
My answer would be "no".

~~~
cma
Only seems true if rationality itself can’t feed back into "What matters most
to [you]."

~~~
raleighm
How so? Clearly I view rationality as an adverbial matter. 1 through 6 remain
true even if you add the word "rationally" to the what-matters-most statement.
The list would get longer than six.

------
known
"You are under no obligation to remain the same person you were a year ago, a
month ago, or even a day ago. You are here to create yourself, continuously"
\--Feynman

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BLKNSLVR
I believe that all projects I've been involved in would not have been green-
lighted had the full extent of time, effort, and costs been known up front.

And I think that's part of the game. How much leg do you need to reveal to get
the signature?

They've all been worthwhile projects in the end, however.

~~~
marcosdumay
Looks like the green-lighting procedure is highly irrational.

~~~
BLKNSLVR
Just been thinking about the why of this. I think comes down to the details.
It's those little details, the real weeds, where the complexity lies that
makes system implementations difficult. And, generally, management doesn't
want to know, and often don't have the technical knowledge to understand those
very details, no matter how well or deeply they're explained.

The other side of that coin is the fact that on the technical knowledge side,
if they know the details they have to consider, there's a kind of hubris that
blinds them to the actual effort required to cater to those details. Not
maliciously, but just by the fact it's considered a known rather than unknown
it just may not get the pre-project attention necessary to determine time and
effort required, and so it gets under-estimated.

I think what I'm trying to say is that the tension between good, fast, and
cheap is the fundamental reason, in my experience. Management tends to want
all three, and so that's what's catered to to get the thing kicked off.

Yes, it's irrational. Almost by necessity.

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loopz
Rational deals with knowns.

Innovation deal with unknowns.

The unknown may be known, thus become rational!

Embrace the incompetence to expell it.

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_curious_
Interesting article, really made me think, thank you.

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rayrrr
Yes.

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js8
My belief is yes, and this is just my opinion.

I think startup founders are irrational, crazy optimistic, because the odds of
making it compared to the effort put in are completely off. But they get to do
what they enjoy, perhaps for a while. This is possibly even more true for the
employees in such companies.

Rational people go into corporations, and get an MBA, which is at its core a
course in (economic) rationality. And the result of this rationality is bottom
line is everything, even if it means to suck the soul out of everything or
even shrinking the company, or even destroying the Earth.

I admit, I despise (economic) rationality. Rationality is only ever reactive,
it cannot give you a goal, or a vision. It cannot give society any values. The
values or goals have to be irrational, by definition.

There are some nice examples from game theory underlying this, but probably
the best is Varoufakis' story about students of economics and business he
taught.

When Yanis came to his game theory class, he gave a proposal to students,
instead of them having to work and getting a mark for the course based on
their knowledge, the students would just secretly vote on what mark they
should get and they would all get the minimal mark anybody voted for. But the
proposal would only be implemented if all the students agree. Inevitably,
there were some people against this. Later Yanis asked these students in
private, why did they vote against the proposal, they could certainly save
themselves a lot of effort! They always, and without any hint of irony, told
him that they believe there would be some idiot who would irrationally put in
a bad mark. The irony being, of course, it was them, who was irrational!

I think this story beautifully underlies the futility of the quest for
ultimate rationality.

And I find it hilarious that while free market ideology touts rationality as
the ultimate goal, the reality of capitalism is that it actually requires
people to create startups and small businesses, which is inherently irrational
behavior.

~~~
raleighm
You equivocate, as we all do, on the meaning of "rational".

If "rational people go into corporations" then it can't be the case
rationality serves other values (as you also note) because in that case we'd
need to know the employee's values.

"But they get to do what they enjoy, perhaps for a while." <\-- Then pursuing
a startup is perfectly rational if you prize doing what you enjoy. I don't
think you'd disagree, just noting that multiple meanings we ascribe to
"rational" complicates discussions like this.

~~~
js8
Yeah, but I think the point is, whatever meaning of "rational" do you pick,
then you seemingly always encounter a similar problem, i.e. some clearly
innovative behavior will not fit the bill of being rational.

Money and free market (and economic rationality) is our current best shot at
defining rationality (what makes sense to do) through a mechanism (algorithm).

We can talk about utilons instead of money. But then any theory of decision
making is worthless, because we cannot apply it to groups of people, they have
different units! It pushes the problem one level away.

~~~
raleighm
We all have powerful non-pecuniary motives: friendship, honor, adventure,
etc., and we view ourselves as applying rationality to these pursuits. For
example: "If I'm really a friend to Billy, then what I should do here is ...".
On your view, that would not constitute rational deliberation.

~~~
js8
In a way yes, I think we never apply the rationality to it rigorously, we for
example might not question that relationship. So it is a matter of where do
you draw the line, and that seems to be a personal choice, which defies an
explanation. (And in fact people who try to be rational rigorously seem to
behave like psychopaths.)

Don't take this thread the wrong way, I like rationality, and I like Julia's
writing on the topic. But it seems to have a fundamental limit, so there is a
bit of irrationality always required.

