Skepsis #40: Less wrong

Rationality, optionality, sexuality, and morality. You're not gonna want to miss this one.

Apr 19, 2021

As usual, a collection of books, articles, podcasts, and videos I’ve enjoyed or found interesting from the past few weeks, now in a slightly different format. I hope you find something that piques your interest.

What is rationality?

Map and Territory is the first book in the series called "Rationality: From AI to Zombies" by Eliezer Yudkowsky. A slightly technical but rather quick read on biases and human misjudgment, and an account of what rationality really is. The books are a collection of blog posts and are difficult to summarize easily. But the core theme is about how to be more right and less wrong about the world by "systematically improving the accuracy of your beliefs".

The criticisms I come across of having a “purely” rational worldview are often based on a strawman of rationality. Rationality is equated with being emotionless, robotic, or even rude. People claim that being rational about something means that you're foregoing an emotive or personal understanding of some phenomenon (i.e. phenomenology). But this - in my opinion - is based on a bastardization of the rationalistic mindset.

I suspect this view comes from people's personal experiences with so-called rationalists/skeptics/know-it-alls that tend to be further out on the autistic spectrum, don't pick up on social cues, and probably don't care much about others’ feelings. The rationalist stereotype many people imagine is someone like Spock. Consequently, being "rational" becomes the same as being disagreeable, or in other words, a douchebag.

The lacking social skills of rationalist-types notwithstanding, I believe a true account of rationality understands it as a way of consistently trying to believe true things about ourselves and the world around us. Nothing more and nothing less.

Eliezer Yudkowsky defines rationality in two ways:

Epistemic rationality - systematically trying to have more accurate beliefs. Trying to get your beliefs (the map) to align as closely as possible with reality (the territory).
Instrumental rationality - systematically improving your ability to reach your goals. Maneuvering through reality such that future outcomes better match your preferences.

Being rational doesn’t mean you have to be certain about everything or have a lot of knowledge. In fact, certainty is antithetical to a truly rational approach because our beliefs are probabilistic:

Probability theory is the set of laws underlying rational belief. The mathematics of probability applies equally to “figuring out where your bookcase is” and “estimating how many hairs were on Julius Caesars head,” even though our evidence for the claim “Julius Caesar was bald” is likely to be more complicated and indirect than our evidence for the claim “theres a bookcase in my room.” It’s all the same problem of how to process the evidence and observations to update one’s beliefs.

Mundians and Modians

Many differences in opinion ultimately come down to different ways of understanding what's true or not - that is, in differing epistemologies. Much like I argued in an earlier edition of Skepsis on Systems Bias vs Agency Bias, the author here explains this difference in terms of a Mundian vs a Modian world view.

The Mundians understand the world through a naturalistic and "rational" epistemic framework. The Modians understand the world in terms of social relationships, hierarchies, and power dynamics.

All human institutions tend to become Modian over time, for the simple reason that they are made up of people. The more subjective the criteria for success, the more Modian the organization will become. Those institutions that have little or no exogenous criteria for success, like government, academia, or the non-profit sector, will inevitably come to be dominated by Modians, whatever their explicit goals may be. Businesses, which must make a profit to survive, are not immune to this tendency. Though they have exogenous criteria for success, it is a difficult task to propagate the objective criteria for success down through the ranks – at each level of decision making there will be some degree of subjectivity, and by the time we reach the bottom rank, decisions might be completely Modian. But in the business world, there is some good news for Mundians: those businesses that become too Modian will fail.

Asymmetric Opportunities and the Cult of Optionality

The idea of “optionality” has become increasingly popular on the back of similar ideas like Antifragility. Although there's a lot to the idea it often gets oversimplified and stupified once it reaches "the masses" (and I'd put myself in that category).

To have optionality means that you try to position yourself such that you have more options for what to do in the future, and that you "cap your downside". Not only is the downside risk capped in terms of potential losses, but the potential for gains is unlimited.

I wrote in my last newsletter on Antifragility that "Going to cocktail parties is antifragile – you can only lose a bit of time (limited downside) but you could meet someone who will change your life (unlimited upside).". And while this sounds really smart, in reality, it's not much easier to achieve good outcomes through this approach than “regular” investment or risk mitigation tactics. Whether you're literally buying financial options that give you the right to buy or sell at a future price or you're going to cocktail parties, you're not alone on the market.

To start out, understand that asymmetric opportunities are always still part of a larger market. If you’re buying, that means someone else is selling, and you should assume they know at least as much as you do. The more hyped these opportunities become, the more demand there is, and the worse the deal becomes.

There's also a kind of survivorship bias at play when it comes to optionality. You never hear about all the thousands of small failures for every huge win. A few startups make it big, most aren't even heard of and most of those don't do very well. So while taking a shotgun approach to investing in startups might sound like a great financial strategy for angel investors, your odds might be worse than you'd think based on the successes you've heard about. And just because there’s an unlimited upside if you hit the jackpot, it doesn’t mean you’re any more likely to do so than most others.

What's more, the downside is not always capped in real life. You could end up in a car accident on your way home from the cocktail party or end up in a fight and get badly injured, or worse.

Where morality comes from

We tend to think that moral behavior like reciprocity and fairness are strictly human constructs, but moral behavior is deep. In this 2011 TED Talk, primatologist Frans de Waal recounts a series of experiments that demonstrated how monkeys will recognize and get deeply offended by the fact that a friend gets more treats than they do. Apes like Chimpanzees may even refuse to accept a grape until one of their mates gets one too.

Of course, this isn't really all that surprising when you see it, we are after all quite similar to monkeys and other mammals that display this behavior. Yet as a society, we often imagine that our moral behaviors are strictly cultural, religious, or traditional when in reality they are rooted deeply in our biology as mammals.

Mating in Captivity - or why married people stop having sex

It's almost cliché to say that we always want what we can't have. But there's truth to it. Nowhere is this more apparent than with sex and relationships.

According to psychotherapist Esther Perel, much of the confusion and frustration that exists around sex in long-term monogamous relationships like marriages stems from the dichotomy between intimacy and eroticism (sexual attraction), or security and freedom. A dichotomy that's rarely recognized. Perel argues that the reason so many couples struggle in their sex lives (even though they love each other) is that they don’t recognize this tension and its origins.

As people get closer and closer to each other in committed relationships and as they share more and more of their lives together - as they get more intimate - they expect sexual desire and the erotic aspects of their relationship to strengthen along a similar trajectory. But sexual attraction also requires separation, not just security and familiarity.

It is in recognizing the other person as an agent, a person with a will of their own, a person capable of desiring other things and of being desired by others that we desire them back. You're intrigued by a person that you don't know everything about, that is mysterious. It is when we see our partners in such a circumstance that we can rekindle a dwindling sexual attraction to them. Intimacy, in so far as it inhibits this separation, undercuts the foundation of sexual desire because we can no longer see and appreciate the other as a fully separate and mysterious person. It is this tension between the "domestic and the erotic" that needs reconciling.

In other words, the love we feel towards our partners, in general, is the thing that gets in the way of a fruitful sex life over the long term. What to do? To keep the spark alive, we need separation as well as unification. Not an easy problem to solve by any means. If it were, over half of all marriages wouldn’t result in divorce.

You can also check out her TED talk for the abbreviated version of the ideas in this book.

A song I'm enjoying

...Baby one more time by Britney Spears must be one of the most played pop songs in history, and with good reason. Max Martin created an iconic and funky beat that most people underestimate because of the song’s teenagey appeal.

As always, stay safe out there.

/Phil