Any rigorous way to define rationality? Beyond Good and Evil
Posted by: adonis49 on: June 26, 2015
Any rigorous way to define rationality? Beyond Good and Evil
NIETZSCHE wrote in Beyond Good and Evil:
“What prevents you or your species from extinction?”, the foundation of our Precautionary Principle.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb wrote:
I keep saying that there is no rigorous way to define rationality, except a risk-management one:
All other definitions fail under rigorous formalizations and model expansion (for instance, see proofs in Chapter 6 in Silent Risk, most stuff called “irrational” by psychologists shows the psychologists to be Pinker-style verbalistic and ignorant of probability).
” The falseness of an opinion is not for us any objection to it: it is here, perhaps, that our new language sounds most strangely. The question is, how far an opinion is life-furthering, life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps species-rearing, and we are fundamentally inclined to maintain that the falsest opinions (to which the synthetic judgments a priori belong) …” In Beyond Good and Evil, I, 4.
Continuing on the rationality-as-survival point, there is a confusion when it comes to “rationality” of a decision between the *reduced* and the *structural* form, and the *static* and *dynamic* form:
1. A single decision vs. a RULE generating a sequence of decisions. One decision can be rational while the rule is not.
It would be rational for me to eat tuna today but under repetition it would harm the planet so it is OK to keep switching preferences.
We saw that intransitive …preferences or random preferences can be very rational.
2. It may seem irrational to not take the direct route between 2 points, but under convexity of payoffs/nonlinear transformation it becomes so.
You may discover a new direction.
3. Local vs. global rationality. Mental accounting: say husband would not buy a tie by himself but his wife –with a joint checking account –gives it to him as a gift and he is excited.
It could be irrational for a given instance but as a method it prevents people from splurging.
4. Ludic vs. ecological environments.
Some actions show biases in a casino and are irrational but real life is not a casino and these can be really rational. Life is ambiguous, laboratory settings are not.
“I can’t stand moral absolutism. You know, there’s always that guy who wants to point out that Martin Luther King cheated on his wife– as if he obviously couldn’t have been a great person if he did something like that.
Or someone will bring out an inspirational quote, and get you to agree, and then inform you that Hitler said it.
As if a good thought couldn’t come from Hitler. Moral absolutism keeps us from learning from the past.
It’s easy to say: ‘Hitler was a demon. Nazis were all bad seeds.’ That’s simple. It’s much harder to say: ‘Is that humanity? Is that me?'”
We are simply, very bad at knowing what “makes sense” ex ante; only time can do.
So thanks the (survival). This is the pillar behind *SKIN IN THE GAME*.
Excited to see Nietzche got the point!
Why was this burried? Because scholars do believe in such sentence, given the zeitgeist of “rationalization”.
I need to thank an anonymous person on twitter.
Adonis Diaries 
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