Humour

Find your irrational path

T A Balasubramanian on why it is so difficult for human beings to be rational.

So we are back in another memorable session with the mercurial Dr Don Jong as he continues digging into the wobbly world of Bobo Jitter, the curious CIO of Bazooka Company. Dr Jong, a specialist in the art of unravelling technology’s nebulous patterns, is also known as The Oddfather because of the loopy insights he offers. Though sometimes he seems eerily wise, too.

“Doc, I have this suspicion that people keep avoiding me because they see that I am too much of a logician, always insisting on getting all the facts right, always wanting to measure anything and everything. Is that bad? Do I need to become a little more, shall I say—fuzzy and undemanding?” says Bobo, restless as usual.

“Ah, my boy. Fuzzy, as in being utterly confused and nonsensical or fuzzy as in being somewhat irrational?”

“Well, I don’t know Doc. I guess I am too rational to know how else I can be.”

“You see, Bobo, it starts quite early in life, this bias toward the rational way of behaving, if you notice. A child is genetically pre-programmed to accumulate knowledge from figures of authority. The child brain, for very good Darwinian reasons, has to be set up in such a way that it believes what it’s told by its elders, because there just isn’t time for the child to experiment with warnings like “Don’t go too near the cliff edge!” or “Don’t swim in the river, there are crocodiles!” Any child who applied a scientific sceptical questioning attitude to that, would be in deep trouble. So, when a child is told to “Behave, be reasonable,” each time he is throwing a tantrum, then ‘being reasonable—as in being rational’ becomes part of being an adult. You are programmed from a very early age to behave rationally.”

“So that’s what makes me such a stickler for facts and numbers? Anyway, Doc, why do we rational guys have such a rough time adapting to the fuzzy ones?”

“Let me tell you a short story about rational thoughts: ‘Tell me,’ the great twentieth-century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once asked a friend, ‘why do people always say it was rational for man to assume that the sun went round the Earth rather than that the Earth was rotating?’ His friend replied, ‘Well, obviously because it just looks as though the Sun is going round the Earth.’ Wittgenstein responded, ‘Well, what would it have looked like if it had looked as though the Earth was rotating?’ I sometimes quote this remark of Wittgenstein in lectures, expecting the audience to laugh. Instead, they seem stunned into silence, and scratch their heads.”

“Well, Doc, if I understand what you are saying, we can sometimes have rational beliefs that are plain wrong.”

“Exactly, Bobo. Rationality is sometimes very misleading. I have long been a proponent of rationality, yet this important mode of thinking is not the most natural for the human brain. It is our irrationality that distinguishes us from purely computational beings. If we were perfectly rational thinkers, there would be no impulse buys, no procrastination, no stock markets, no casinos, no pleasant diversions and no megalomaniacal dictators.”

“That’s a frightful scenario, Doc.”

“Indeed, being perfectly rational is so far from a good approximation of how humans think, it is amazing that economists ever considered it a reasonable model for human economic behaviour—neoclassical microeconomics assumed this, although lately ideas are becoming more reasonable, since they are willing to accept that we are hugely impulsive creatures. Have you seen some perfectly normal people in a shopping mall just buying whatever their eyes land upon?”

“Yes, of course, Doc. I often accompany such a person in my family.”

“You see? Perfect rationality, or the assumption that someone will always follow the most rational choice given the available information, is at least part of what makes it inherently difficult for computers to solve certain kinds of tasks in the complex world we inhabit—such as driving cars. That is, in order to make an immediate decision, when you have wholly insufficient knowledge about past, present and future, you need something else to drive you toward a particular solution.”

“Ah, Doc, you have my fullest agreement on that. So what is that something else?”

“For monkeys, it is plain impulse. For humans, we use a more dignified model—we say that these driving forces are emotions, bodily needs and a fundamental failure to be completely rational, and they almost always tip the balance of indecision toward some action. In times of crisis, we become, like all other creatures in the wild, purely driven by our feelings. If I were to stop and think when a tiger is charging at me—wondering if I can rationally confuse the beast by standing still or holding up an umbrella—I may not be around to tell the tale to my children.”

“Of course, Doc. But then, we don’t often encounter tigers.”

“True, Bobo. Yet, irrationality serves a greater purpose than simply helping us to quickly make up our minds. It is also what gives us the visceral pleasures of art, music and relaxing afternoons in the park. The particularly pathological ways in which we are irrational are what makes us humans, rather than something else. Perhaps, if we ever encounter an extraterrestrial culture or learn to communicate with dolphins, we will, as a species, come to appreciate the origins of our uniqueness by comparing our irrationalities with theirs.”

“How is it, Doc, that we nerds seem to have missed all the good news about being irrational?”

“Well, Bobo, you guys in the computer business are partly to blame since it has become fashionable to be regarded as reasonable and logical—at least in a civilized forum like a business meeting or a professional club. Yet, being irrational seems to be deeply rooted in the way we operate in the real world. I recall a particularly interesting case study from my psychology course: a successful financial investor had a lesion on the structure of the brain that is associated with emotion. The removal of this structure resulted in a perfectly normal man who happened to also be horrible at investing.”

“Why did that happen, Doc?”

“Because the brain packs information as emotional bundles, previous bad investment memories made him recoil from similar ideas in the present. Emotion is the basis of memory, and, as such, if you see, quite hugely irrational. We have no way to control our memories. We recall anything that has made a huge impact on our emotions. But it is an effort to memorize facts and figures, is it not?”

“That’s right, Doc. Though I do remember some numbers quite well even after decades—like my multiplication tables.”

“What is most interesting to me at this moment is the observation that we are first and foremost irrational beings, and only secondarily rational ones. Indeed, being rational is so difficult that it requires a particularly painful kind of conditioning in order to draw it out of the mental darkness that normally obscures it. That is, it requires forcible education that emphasises the principles of rational inquiry, skepticism and empirical validation. The computer has ensured that natural human irrationality has been eclipsed by logic.”

“Well, Doc, we do have a choice to redeem ourselves if we start behaving irrationally—more impulsively?”

“Voila, you comprehend! It’s good to see you going for the irrational path, my boy. It’s the most natural thing to be fuzzy. And mark my words, you will be popular when you stop crunching numbers so compulsively and start saying a few silly things.”