Rationality is a luxury - Part 2

In my previous post, I had attempted an explanation for why rationality isnt as common at all by exploring how people who live like animals can ill afford rationality. In this post, I am going to expound on how people who can afford rationality, fail to do so as often as we expect them to.

Take a look at yourself and ask the question how many times have I done the same thing the same way? Like driving to work, walking to your favourite park/cafe/|fill in the blanks|, mixing coffee, the conversation starters (like the first thing you say on picking up the phone) you use etc. If the answer is "LOTS", read on, this post is about you, and against you.

Man, given a situation, reacts instinctively, ala stimulus-response. Rational man, given a situation, thinks and reacts. At least, he's supposed to think and react. Often, he doesnt. That I claim is the source of much, if not the, irrationality in the world of us rationals.

Lets examine why rational man doesnt think and react as often as he should. Man in general is wired for order, wired to recognize patterns, wired to make sense of even chaos. In our quest to do this, given a situation, we tend to take in as much information as we can, in that span of time and in that brain of space, so that we can guesstimate the pattern that emerges. What we then do is assume that this is all the information I am going to get, and so having received this information, lets think and decide on the best course of action. Having thus decided on the best course of action, we then go ahead and execute it smug in the feeling that all is well with our grey friends up in our heads.

A classic example of this is "Given that my work is in Nungambakkam, and my house is in T.Nagar, what is the best way for me to get there?" People, whether they are computer scientists or not, end up using Djisktra's shortest path routing algorithm and decide on the shortest (optimized for time) way of getting to their destination.

Now comes the punch. The world as we know it is full of randomness, throwing sometimes nasty surprises, changing beneath our feet, changing so subtly that we barely notice. What happens then is that after some time had passed - the purist may say after a mere milli-second, while I say its more like days - the situation that had forced man to think, react and arrive at a course of action is no longer the same. This changed situation could be so different that the "best" course of action we had actually computed is no longer the best given this changed situation.

As men who operate at vastly different time scales to the frequency of change in the chaotic world around us, we tend to often ignore such situational changes and continue to apply the best action we had computed earlier. This is the source for irrationality in us rational beings - the ill-advised application of previously computed answers to new problems where it is not even relevant anymore, let alone be a solution.

Think of it as a scientific experiment that posed to you a question involving 10,000 different parameters each having a certain value and asking you to compute the value for the 10,001-th parameter. After you have computed it, how would you react if one of the parameters was now assigned a different value? How would you feel if about 90% of the parameters were given different values even as you compute the answer to the initial problem? That's (a hint of) the comparison between the time scales man operates on and the time scale at which the world around us changes.

This behavior of ours is what leads to biases and preconceived notions. The example I gave above of computing the time-wise most efficient approach to a problem was an objectively-solvable third-party problem. What if the problem had been "How to deal with your neighbour who keeps asking you for money in return for not letting his dog pee in your compound?", "How to best treat my boss so that I get a promotion during the next review?" etc.? Then, things take an ugly, subjective turn and we have lost the distinction between the situation (the system) and us (the actors).

Having said the above, I am not asking each one of us to do a state reboot every time we are faced with a fresh situation. Such a task is both unnecessary and quite useless since the hallmark of human existence is memory and taking action upon only fresh input is being a memoryless, Markovian automaton.

What I do ask is for us to keep in mind the human time scale, always be cognizant of the changes in the world around us, keep our senses open for changes in environment. Then, once we detect a change, we should start a thread for our thinking process and send that to the background as it starts to churn the new information as it comes up with a new solution. Use the new solution and let not irrationality raise its head.