
Paul Buchheit: The first thing that you need to understand about humans - gaika
http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2007/08/first-thing-that-you-need-to-understand.html
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swombat
I'm surprised someone like Paul Buchheit only realised this several years ago!

This is the reason I allow myself full latitude in arguing with people,
including the freedom to change my mind completely from one argument to the
next. After all, whatever your opinion is right now, it's only the best you've
come up with so far - a better, truer truth may be just around the corner.
This unsettles some people, when they hear my passionately arguing a point one
week, and then passionately arguing the opposite point the next week.

This is also why I make a conscious effort to allow opposing viewpoints to
exist in my head. After all, both might be true - even together. Just because
I've rationalised them to be opposing doesn't mean they're not both true.

An interesting point that's not made in the article is how to train this
rationalisation engine. It's a very powerful tool, that brain of ours, and I
believe there are ways to feed our subconscious with "good data" that it can
use for more effective heuristics. I'd argue that reading good books
(particularly classics) does a tremendous job of making our subconscious more
effective.

~~~
chris_l
I knew this before reading the article, but I just can't recall where I got it
from. I find it kind of ironic how he provides all this scientific theory as a
sort of rationalization of the idea...

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wave
Somehow this article reminds me of a show on NOVA called "Secrets of the
Mind". In one instance, someone had a car accident and been in coma for five
weeks.

"V.S. RAMACHANDRAN: He was articulate, he was intelligent, not obviously
psychotic or emotionally disturbed. He could read a newspaper. Everything
seemed fine except he had one profound delusion. He would look at his mother
and he would say, "This woman, Doctor, she looks exactly like my mother but in
fact she's not my mother. She's an imposter. She's some other woman pretending
to be my mother.

NARRATOR: The injury to David's brain had brought on a very rare condition
called the Capgras Delusion"

...

NARRATOR: Whenever we look at an object or a face, the message reaches the
temporal lobes, where it's identified, but then it gets relayed to a structure
called the "amygdala," which is the gateway to the limbic system that contains
the emotional centers of the brain. And it's here that we generate the
appropriate emotional response to whatever it is we're looking at.

V.S. RAMACHANDRAN: Now, what I've suggested is that what's going on in this
patient is the message gets to the temporal lobe cortex, so the patient
recognizes his mother as being his mother and evokes the appropriate memories.
But the message doesn't get to the amygdala, because the fibers going from the
temporal cortex to the amygdala into the emotional centers are cut, as a
result of the accident. Therefore, there is no emotion. There is no warmth.
And he says, "If this is really my mother why is it I'm not experiencing any
emotions? There's something not quite right here. Maybe she is some other
strange woman pretending to be my mother."

<http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/2812mind.html>

~~~
gwniobombux
Dr. Ramachandran relates this case (capgras syndrome) in his TED talk as well.
<http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/184>

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rokhayakebe
Humans are born rational, but we teach ourselves and others to loose our
rationality through cultures, civilization and traditions.

Conduct the "umbrella" experiment with a child about 3-5 years old. His answer
will be " I do not know". Honest, right?

As kids we always expressed our feelings and thoughts properly and truthfully
through words and actions. But, somewhere between the age of 4 and 9 we start
to have others think for us. We are thought sets of realities that mostly make
no sense to us (as children).

By the time we reach 13 we already have all this new man made reality that we
are supposed to live and think by without much questioning.

So this creates a massive database of words and actions we go to first to
express our thoughts and feelings.

By doing this we ignore our highest truth. We create a conflict between what
we put our there and what we really feel and know inside. There begins the war
within ourselves.

We almost cannot reverse engineer in months what we have created in
millenniums. I do not think this mass change in the way we think is going to
happen in our lifetime.

But we can stop stopping our kids to think for themselves. Stop giving them
sets of realities that are contradictory to their real honest and pure
feelings and thoughts. You would think this would create an anarchy, but we
will land far from that.

~~~
khafra
I get asked about my motives for my actions, probably about as often as
everyone else gets asked. I've never been sure; the questioner has invariably
regarded this as a sign of dishonesty on my part, while I've thought it to be
a failure of introspection. Good to hear I've really just been avoiding the
self-deception of conscious rationality.

------
edw519
Good salesman have always known that people buy with emotion and justify with
logic.

Functional software that perfectly solves a customer's problem without a good
user interface never makes it to the logic step. It was eliminated by the
user's subconscious before the game ever began.

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ryanmahoski
Paul's treatment of marketing brought to mind Gladwell's _What We Can Learn
From Spaghetti Sauce_ : <http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/20>. The
Ockhamist dialectic -- "If we are going to be honest, then we must admit the
possibility that everything we know and believe is, in fact, incorrect" --
evokes existentialists e.g. Eckhart Tolle: "The greatest achievement of
humanity is not its works of art, science, or technology, but the recognition
of its own dysfunction, its own madness."

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greyman
I found what I think is a flaw in the "picking the attractive" examples
mentioned in the article - Why exactly is it not rational to pick/vote people
based (among other criteria) on their attractiveness? I am not saying I know
the answer, but assuming something is not rational, without rational arguments
- even if it looks obvious - is exactly what the article wants to criticize.
;-)

~~~
narag
The article doesn't say that hiring attractive persons is wrong The article
says, or at least that's what I understood, that people hired attractive
persons not knowing why.

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prakash
Good examples: Alarm clocks with Snooze functions & people smoking cigarettes

~~~
hugh
What's irrational about having a snooze function?

~~~
khafra
An alarm clock's function is to wake you at a specific time. A snooze button's
function is to delay that wakening. It's as rational as popping up an "Are You
Sure?" dialog box.

~~~
hugh
For people who don't want to get out of bed as soon as the alarm goes off, but
who also don't want to risk sleeping for another hour, a snooze button is
perfectly sensible.

~~~
palish
Yeah, but it would be nice to force myself to get out of bed each time the
alarm goes off, immediately, and without fail. This is somewhat of a tangent,
but I think that when I set a bunch of alarms on my phone (for 9:00, 9:30,
10:00, and 10:30, for example), it's actually harmful because I'm training
myself to not wake up immediately. I stand up when the first alarm goes off
and think "Man, I am _super_ tired.. My legs are like jelly. Hey, I can sleep
for a little while longer since more alarms are set." The result is that I'm
usually late for whatever it is I have my alarms set for, since by the last
alarm I've already trained myself to just jump back in bed. It's totally
illogical.

I'm still 20, so maybe this behavior will diminish with age. But I'll probably
try some experiments, like only having one alarm set (with snooze disabled).

~~~
eelco
It sounds a bit strange and it feels a bit strange too, but you can practice
getting up when the alarm goes off.

Before you go to sleep, set an alarm like a minute in the future. Lay down,
close your eyes, relax. Then, when the alarm goes off get up immediately,
stretch a bit, etc.

Do this a couple of times (3, 5, 10 ;) and your brain will get used to the
idea of getting up when the alarm goes off. Works like a charm for me (I tend
to fall into the snooze-habit too)

This is not my idea, BTW, I got it from Steve Pavlina
([http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/04/how-to-get-up-
right...](http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/04/how-to-get-up-right-away-
when-your-alarm-goes-off/)) but I thought I'd summarize the long article for
you ;)

------
signa11
carl sagan's "dragon's of eden" also touches upon these themes, and is very
cool (imho ofcourse).

------
xlnt
People are very good at fooling themselves. However, there are certain
traditions which contain knowledge of how to do better, and how to think more
rationally. People utilizing this knowledge have made considerable progress.
The best example is the scientific tradition. When you want to understand a
top-quality scientist, acting as a professional, the first thing you need to
understand is the scientific tradition, and you don't need to worry so much
about common irrationalities.

We are not doomed to always be irrational. We can create knowledge and, with
effort, remove errors from it. Then, when we have supporting knowledge, we can
act reasonably rationally.

~~~
gaika
Very common misconception - science as a process is rational, but scientists
are people, and they fall for all the same traps.

There are plenty important scientific discoveries accepted only after the
generation change. Bayesian statistics is one example of such process
happening right now. Instead of being accepted or rejected based on the
merits, the process of acceptance is being dragged along with all sorts of
totally human irrationalities.

~~~
xlnt
You seem to be referring to Kuhn's theory of Scientific Revolutions, which is
false, as explained in _The Fabric of Reality_ chapter 13.

BTW Bayesian statistics as a replacement for science is not being accepted
because it's no good. It's no good because it does not deal in _explanations_.

~~~
gaika
Some very good arguments of Science vs. Bayes:
<http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/05/science-or-baye.html>

And explanations that people care about are just that what the link is all
about - rationalization. Or in other words just because there is no good
"explanation" for QM doesn't mean it shouldn't be accepted.

~~~
xlnt
I have already seen that. It has the error I mentioned.

As for raw QM, it corresponds to reality, but people are right to also want to
know what it means. And we do know. MWI is a good explanation of QM. There's
no need to be an instrumentalist, and being one is not a way of overcoming
bias. Explanations of what bias is, and how to overcome it, are one of our
major tools against it. (See, again, _The Fabric of Reality_ on MWI (chapter
2), instrumentalism (chapter 1), and about explanations in chapters 1,3,4,7
and mixed in throughout.)

The book QED by Feynman also contains very good explanations about QM, but
without mention of MWI, so you can see that even with no particular
interpretation of QM there is a lot of scope for explanation.

~~~
gaika
All the explanations you are talking about are very nice, and give you a lot
of warm comfort, but they all are just rationalizations. There's not much you
can predict about the rest of the world using them.

The cold rationality lies in the math you have to study for 2-3 years to learn
how to add up these little amplitude arrows. Using that you can actually model
and make predictions.

Another great example is Maxwell, he got all the rationalizations "wrong" but
the math survived and is called after him.

~~~
xlnt
You are presenting an explanation of why I should discount explanations in
general. Isn't that a contradiction?

~~~
gaika
Exactly, I'm being irrational here too - I'm addressing your irrational self
that would listen to the arguments of a stranger for no good reason :)

Here's the kind of arguments I would find rational -
[http://www.amazon.com/Probability-Causality-
AI/lm/R2GX832Q1M...](http://www.amazon.com/Probability-Causality-
AI/lm/R2GX832Q1M6CHV/ref=cm_lm_byauthor_full)

~~~
xlnt
Since you believe you are irrational and make decisions based on bias, and
Bayesian anti-science positions forgive you for this, whereas I do not (for
example, science says the source of an idea is irrelevant, so you are wrong to
be concerned with whether the source is a stranger), might it be that you only
believe these anti-science ideas because of bias? They offer you comfort, and
you revealed earlier that you do think about ideas in terms of which are more
comfortable.

