Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[thompson]

The fact so many people seem to hold on to absurd beliefs is something that has always troubled me. But, when you think about it, what’s the biological motivation for rationality? Sure, having an accurate understanding of the world around you will help with your survival, but as a social species surely social cohesion is more important? Thus, if other people in your tribe believe weird shit, your reproductive fitness would increase by adopting those views yourself. The existence and persistence of every religion on Earth seems to support this.

So, believing arbitrary shit because other people believe it too is actually the norm, not the exception. Scientific thinking requires one to overcome these innate limitations of the mind and call BS on your own (socially motivated) instincts. That requires a good deal of self-discipline and meta-cognition.

Where CTs get interesting is where the proponent actually harms their social standing by holding them. Part of that could be due to escalating commitment to an existing idea, part could be to strengthen a sense of identity to some subculture. Part of it could be narcissism. I guess plenty of other pathological thought patterns exist (such as addiction) so it probably shouldn’t be a surprise some instincts start misbehaving and feed themselves in a vicious, self-destructive cycle.

So, in a way, conspiratorial thinking is just a form of mental masturbation where one satisfies their desire for answers by making up their own.

[Il Palazzo]

I would make the first point stronger, and disagree with the last one.
There appears to be a biological motivation >for believing weird shit<. Dawkins is fond of a nice illustrative argument: an early hominid on the savannah would be evolutionarily advantaged if each time they had heard a rustling in the grass he imagined it to be a tiger, even if 99% of the time there was none. A rational hominid would demand proof before acting, and in short order reduce their fitness. All the irrational storytelling of the likes of conspiracy theories or religions would then be a spandrel of that early evolutionary pressure.

And I think identifying with some specific conspiracy theory - as long as it's not completely idiosyncratic - does provide a sense of community, maybe even the strongest one has ever experienced. One might end up shunned by their former social environment, but that only makes being in their new group more satisfying. It's the besieged fortress syndrome.
I would maybe agree about it being isolating if we were still in the pre-information revolution era, but these days it's extremely easy to find like-minded individuals online, and with sufficient membership move on to physical gatherings. Meetings of flat earth societies are a thing, after all. One can find a partner there. Start a family. Homeschool the kids.

[Maximum Spin]

A rational hominid would demand proof before acting, and in short order reduce their fitness.

That's not really what 'rational' means. It's perfectly rational to assume the rustling in the grass could be a tiger and get away from it immediately on a simple cost/benefit calculation: even if you only get eaten 1% of the time, the severity still dominates all the other possibilities. It's irrational to assume the rustling in the grass could be fairies, unless fairies are a common predator in your ecosystem.

And no, rationality doesn't demand you sit there and actually perform the calculation either. You're allowed to make an immediate guess. Basically, this is the "Spock" strawman rationality.

[Reelya]

Maximum Spin is right there. Assuming wrongly that the rustling could be a tiger works out if you do a game theory payoff matrix. Say the rustling could be a rabbit and if you investigate then there's a payoff of +1, but if it's a tiger the payoff is -100. It would make sense to always avoid the rustling grass if the probability of the tiger was 1% or greater.

We can actually view primitive humans as already doing the game theory calculations without knowing it, and of course they must be doing that because the ones who got that right were the ones who survived more often. So, if a tiger jumps out of the grass and mauls your friend that one time then you might be "irrationally" scared of rustling grass in future, but that's not really irrational: the tiger jumping out of the grass was a data-point, and since you don't know the actual probability of a tiger being there, every data point added to the pool is meaningful, and if you've only experienced mysteriously rustling grass a few times then it makes sense to weight that based on past experience. So if the grass rustled three times and one of those times a tiger jumped out, it makes sense to always be scared of rustling grass until further notice since a 1/3 chance of a tiger is pretty major considering how devastating a tiger attack would be.

Hence, why some stimulus being connected with a negative experience makes us more scared of the stimulus and why exposure therapy to the stimulus makes us less scared. The first experience was a data point, and the subsequent experiences were further data points.

[thompson]

The rustling grass argument makes more sense if you’re a rabbit than a human. Early hunters would have known enough about tigers to get it right a damn sight more than 1% of the time. And they absolutely WOULD use their knowledge of tiger behaviour to inform their judgement.

I also think it’s fallacious to assume everything mental pathology confers some evolutionary advantage. Sometimes shit just breaks. The brain is a complex machine, it would be truly astounding if nothing ever went wrong. That things can still work out for some conspiracy theorists is incidental. Many clearly aren’t benefiting from it.

[Reelya]

Whether or not it's rabbits or tigers is entirely not the point.

the point is it's not 'rational' to not act until you have complete information, it's rational to analyze the payoffs and probabilities and choose the best course of action based on that. And the reason it's rational is that this does in fact give the best overall payoff.

The point about evolution is that people and animals naturally do these calculations already.

EDIT: going back to beliefs, consider whether or not it was rational to believe in God or not in the middle ages for example. You could either profess a belief in God, and get by pretty well, or you could proclaim a lack of belief and end up being burnt at the stake. If we based rationality on outcomes, then the rationality of all actions must be based on the actual outcome vs desired outcome.

[thompson]

Edit: Deleted. I may have misread the double negative.

Edit 2: Ninja’d

[Reelya]

I already covered that by specifying that it's dependent on collecting additional data points. If your only data point was that you saw some rustling in long grass one time then a tiger jumped out, that's your only data point so you should logically always be wary of the same phenomena. But I did already specify there can be additional data points that changes that.

[Il Palazzo]

(acting without proof was a poor choice of words, and doing a disservice to the argument - which I'm now going to attempt to salvage)
A rational hominid would say: I ran, because there could be a tiger in the bushes. An irrational one would say: I ran because there was a tiger in the bushes.
Which one do you think ran earlier and faster?
The point is not that one can't act on incomplete information, the point is that certainty where there can be none gives one an edge.

[Maximum Spin]

EDIT: going back to beliefs, consider whether or not it was rational to believe in God or not in the middle ages for example. You could either profess a belief in God, and get by pretty well, or you could proclaim a lack of belief and end up being burnt at the stake. If we based rationality on outcomes, then the rationality of all actions must be based on the actual outcome vs desired outcome.

Well, the flaw in that argument is that it only works for the individual. It does nothing to explain where the belief comes from in the first place - that is, why anyone would start believing in, say, Christianity during the time when it's weird and new and everyone else is worshipping Jupiter Capitolinus.

A rational hominid would say: I ran, because there could be a tiger in the bushes. An irrational one would say: I ran because there was a tiger in the bushes.
Which one do you think ran earlier and faster?
The point is not that one can't act on incomplete information, the point is that certainty where there can be none gives one an edge.

They would both still run immediately after hearing it. Whether you are certain has no effect on the fact that you still have to run immediately in case it is. Certainty gives you no edge here — people who stop and take a moment to argue "well, maybe it's not a tiger, let's wait and see" would also be irrational.

[Reelya]

(acting without proof was a poor choice of words, and doing a disservice to the argument - which I'm now going to attempt to salvage)
A rational hominid would say: I ran, because there could be a tiger in the bushes. An irrational one would say: I ran because there was a tiger in the bushes.
Which one do you think ran earlier and faster?
The point is not that one can't act on incomplete information, the point is that certainty where there can be none gives one an edge.

I don't think that's necessarily rational vs irrational.

If every time you heard rustling there was a tiger, it would be completely rational to say "rustlings means tigers" until you have further evidence. That would at that point have the weight of any scientific theory we have. We say that gravity causes things to fall down because we've never seen the inverse phenomena of them falling up, not because we're more rational.

Where you're probably right is that we collapse probabilities into certainties because it makes the mental computations simpler. I guess that's irrational, but the alternative is not being able to do the needed calculations at all, so it's an approximation of reality. Fun fact: "foolish" and "sensible" don't necessarily map to "irrational" and "rational" in that system.

[thompson]

Ok, we’re using different baselines for “rational”. Correct me if I’m wrong, but you seem to be saying individual decisions are rational. What I’m saying is that the beliefs a person holds don’t need to be rational. There’s no contradiction there, so I guess we mostly agree.

[Maximum Spin]

Ok, we’re using different baselines for “rational”. Correct me if I’m wrong, but you seem to be saying individual decisions are rational. What I’m saying is that the beliefs a person holds don’t need to be rational. There’s no contradiction there, so I guess we mostly agree.

There are no rational beliefs.

[Reelya]

The thing about the tiger got me thinking. How much evidence that there is a tiger is enough evidence?

If you heard rustling then said "there's a tiger there" without further evidence then that may be irrational. But what if a tiger's head popped out, there's always a chance that you're hallucinating or seeing some hitherto unknown animal that just looks like a tiger, or you buddy killed a tiger and put their head on a stick and they poked it out as a joke. Sure, these things are unlikely, but the rustling thing was based on likelihood in the first place. So all we can every really say is that "the preponderance of evidence indicates that there is really a tiger".

[thompson]

The thing about the tiger got me thinking. How much evidence that there is a tiger is enough evidence?

Probability of tiger being there times cost of tiger being there > benefit of being there sans tiger times probability of tiger not being there.

No need for anyone to be sure of anything, really. Now, if you’re asking how much evidence you need to say “there is a tiger there”... well, that depends on your definition of is.