#postrationality

A while ago, somebody asked me on this blog if I was a postrationalist. At the time I wasn’t really familiar enough with what this meant to be able to answer. However, I’m now fairly sure that I am not a postrationalist.

First of all, if all the label refers to is “fucking around incomprehensibly”, then it’s content-free and there’s no point identifying with it.

Some people have tried to give more concrete descriptions, e.g. Darcey Riley and Ashley Yakeley (@polyaletheia). I’ll go through some of these attributes of postrationalists that have been described, and explain how I don’t share them.

System 1 and System 2

Darcey talks about a difference between rationalists and postrationalists in their attitudes towards Kahneman’s System 1 and System 2 (basically, intuition and analytical reasoning). According to her, rationalists see System 1 as a straightforwardly worse system than System 2 in terms of accuracy, which exists only because by trading off accuracy, it manages to be able to work more quickly than System 2. Important decisions where accuracy is more important than speed should always be made using System 2. Postrationalists, on the other hand, believe that System 1 can be just as accurate or more so under certain circumstances; the picture of the advantages and disadvantages is more complicated than just “System 1 fast but inaccurate, System 2 accurate but slow”. 

I don’t have a particularly strong opinion in this. It does seem plausible that System 1 could be more accurate with regards to things that humans have always had to deal with as a species, that our instincts have evolved to deal with. But that is a limited set of things, and getting more limited over time as modernity advances. Much of the things people have to deal with today are novel on an evolutionary timescale, and I don’t see any reason to expect System 1 to be effective with dealing with these things.

Moreover, I think the vast majority of people do already largely rely on System 1, especially with regard to the sort of instinct-driven things that it would be expected to be good for. It’s only a very small, peculiar set of people that need to hear the pro-System 1 side of the bravery debate; most people are much more in need of some System 2 evangelization. It’s also plausible that people vary in how effective their System 1 thinking is. In particular, I think autistic people, who make up a large part of the people who read about rationalism and postrationalism on the Internet, are likely to have poor intuitionistic thinking capabilities, and need to rely on System 2 more than ordinary people.

It’s worth noting that System 1, in addition to being fast, is also low effort in comparison to System 2, so there is a great temptation to use it even in circumstances where one has the time to do a proper System 2 analysis. There could be an element of wishful thinking in the postrationalist advocacy for System 1.

Darcey does mention that postrationalists are interested in ways to make System 1 more effective, such as “magick, ritual and meditation”. This is something I haven’t heard a lot about--if any postrationalists have made any progress in this area, I’d be interested to hear. I am aware of people who have claimed to have become “enlightened” through extensive meditation, but these people consistently fail to convincingly show that they have actually learned anything of significance.

Scientific realism

Darcey says that postrationalists are “more likely to reject scientific realism”. I’m not familiar with this term, so I did a skim-read of the SEP article.

Although I can’t be confident that I’ve understood the article properly, it does look like I reject scientific realism, and thus agree with the postrationalists

Scientific realism is described as construing claims about both observable and unobservable things as having truth values, while "instrumentalists” deny that claims about unobservable things are meaningful. I think that my definition of “meaningful” inherently involves the idea that unobservable things are not meaningful; if I believed that claims about unobservable things were meaningful, I would have to be using a different definition of “meaningful”. Therefore I do seem to agree with the “instrumentalists”, unless they use a different definition of “meaningful”.

Likewise, realism is said to be committed to “the idea that theoretical claims (interpreted literally as describing a mind-independent reality) constitute knowledge of the world”. Now if somebody asked me whether I believe that theoretical claims constitute knowledge of the world, I’d definitely say yes; however, I don’t think I interpret these claims literally as describing a mind-independent reality in the way the SEP author is getting at. I think that claims can only be made as part of models of the world, and reality is what is reflected in the situation that some models make better predictions---as verified by empiricial observations, coming from the mind, and with regards to particular purposes, also coming from the mind---than others. There is no single “ultimately true” model (after all, such “ultimate truth” is unobservable---we will never know whether we have the perfect model, because there is always the chance that new evidence will falsify the current one), but the concept of reality is meaningful, otherwise there would be nothing to guide the choice of models. So I think it is possible to conceive of more strongly anti-realist positions than mine (such as one where one simply chooses arbitrary models) but my position is still on the anti-realist side.

Exploring new worldviews and conceptual frameworks

Postrationalists tend to enjoy this, according to Darcey. Well, I enjoy it too, but I think most ordinary rationalists enjoy it just as much?

Attitudes to forces of nature

This is one of the biggest disagreements I have---I definitely do think death and suffering, and the forces of nature insofar as they cause death and suffering, are cosmic evils that must be destroyed.

I think this stems from my acceptance of the existence of forces of nature other than those that cause death and suffering. In particular, it seems to me that part of the nature of being human is that one should regard death and suffering as evils, and work to prevent them from happening. I think this is a more permanent and indestructible part of the experience of being human than the experience of death and suffering, which can be (and has been) made less of an inevitability.

Some degree of acceptance that death and suffering will happen is necessary---it’s counterproductive if your efforts to avoid these things cause you more suffering than if you simply lived without concern---but this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to destroy these things as far as possible.

Spirituality, rituals and magick

Postrationalists are interested in these things, according to Darcey. Well, I wouldn’t say I’m totally uninterested, but I am pretty unfamiliar with these things, and I don’t know much about what somebody would get out of them.

Qualitative over quantitative improvements

Postrationalists apparently are especially interested in helping people with things like existential angst, as well as more quantifiable things like money or food. I’m not sure if there is actually that much of a difference between rationalists and postrationalists in this regard.

Obviously, helping people deal with things like existential angst is also an important part of improving the state of the world. But the more quantifiable measures are a lot easier to help people with. If people were to avoid providing help with regards to quantitative measures that they were in a position to help with because they regarded this as somehow against their ideology, that would be a great shame.

Surrealism

I think I like surrealist art and fiction, but I wouldn’t say I’m like, massively into it. This probably isn’t one of the most important distinguishing factors of postrationalists.

Ashley Yakeley’s perspectivism

In Ashley Yakeley’s blogpost, he describes an attitude to truth he calls “perspectivism”. It looks like this is the same as or at least similar to my position that reality is a measure of goodness of fit on models together with purposes, so I basically agree with this. (Although I’m pretty skeptical that believing the Sun is a god is useful.)

Ashley considers this the core of his postrationalty, so I guess I could be regarded as a postrationalist as a result, if this one point of agreement is enough to outweight my disagreements on other points. Nevertheless, I’m still going to avoid identifying with the postrationalist label.

Lack of actionability

There is one other thing about postrationality that concerns me, which is the tangible results or advice that one can act on. Postrationalist writers have a tendency to not explain things fully, or to advocate for something as helpful, like intuitionistic reasoning, or David Chapman’s “meta-rationality”, without ever properly explaining why or how. It could be argued that this is part of the nature of what postrationalists are interested in---intuitionistic, illegible things that aren’t amenable to analytical reasoning. But even if these things do pay off, the fact that postrationalists can’t convincingly convey that they do makes them unattractive as a movement to take any interest in. What’s the point, if you aren’t going to learn anything?

Sufficiently advanced post-rationality is indistinguishable from actual belief.

I’ve never been baptized, so in that sense I’m not “actually” Christian. I do engage in Christian rituals; I go to church (not every week, but at least once a month), fast on the prescribed fasting days, pray.

********** Liberalism seemed so obviously ethical. Liberals marched for peace, workers’ rights, civil rights, and secularism. The Republican Party was (as we saw it) the party of war, big business, racism, and evangelical Christianity. I could not understand how any thinking person would voluntarily embrace the party of evil, and so I and my fellow liberals looked for psychological explanations of conservatism, but not liberalism. We supported liberal policies because we saw the world clearly and wanted to help people, but they supported conservative policies out of pure self-interest (lower my taxes!) or thinly veiled racism (stop funding welfare programs for minorities!). We never considered the possibility that there were alternative moral worlds in which reducing harm (by helping victims) and increasing fairness (by pursuing group-based equality) were not the main goals. And if we could not imagine other moralities, then we could not believe that conservatives were as sincere in their moral beliefs as we were in ours.

When I moved from Yale to Penn, and then from Penn to the University of Chicago, the matrix stayed pretty much the same. It was only in India that I had to stand alone. Had I been there as a tourist it would have been easy to maintain my matrix membership for three months; I’d have met up now and then with other Western tourists, and we would have swapped stories about the sexism, poverty, and oppression we had seen. But because I was there to study cultural psychology I did everything I could to fit into another matrix, one woven mostly from the ethics of community and divinity.

When I returned to America, social conservatives no longer seemed so crazy. I could listen to leaders of the “religious right” such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson with a kind of clinical detachment. They want more prayer and spanking in schools, and less sex education and access to abortion? I didn’t think those steps would reduce AIDS and teen pregnancy, but I could see why Christian conservatives wanted to “thicken up” the moral climate of schools and discourage the view that children should be as free as possible to act on their desires. Social conservatives think that welfare programs and feminism increase rates of single motherhood and weaken the traditional social structures that compel men to support their own children? Well, now that I was no longer on the defensive, I could see that those arguments made sense, even if there are also many good effects of liberating women from dependence on men. I had escaped from my prior partisan mind-set (reject first, ask rhetorical questions later) and began to think about liberal and conservative policies as manifestations of deeply conflicting but equally heartfelt visions of the good society.

It felt good to be released from partisan anger. And once I was no longer angry, I was no longer committed to reaching the conclusion that righteous anger demands: we are right, they are wrong. I was able to explore new moral matrices, each one supported by its own intellectual traditions. It felt like a kind of awakening.

In 1991, Shweder wrote about the power of cultural psychology to cause such awakenings:

“Yet the conceptions held by others are available to us, in the sense that when we truly understand their conception of things we come to recognize possibilities latent within our own rationality … and those ways of conceiving of things become salient for us for the first time, or once again. In other words, there is no homogeneous “backcloth” to our world. We are multiple from the start.”

I cannot overstate the importance of this quotation for moral and political psychology. We are multiple from the start. Our minds have the potential to become righteous about many different concerns, and only a few of these concerns are activated during childhood. Other potential concerns are left undeveloped and unconnected to the web of shared meanings and values that become our adult moral matrix. If you grow up in a WEIRD society, you become so well educated in the ethic of autonomy that you can detect oppression and inequality even where the apparent victims see nothing wrong. But years later, when you travel, or become a parent, or perhaps just read a good novel about a traditional society, you might find some other moral intuitions latent within yourself. You might find yourself responding to dilemmas involving authority, sexuality, or the human body in ways that are hard to explain.

Conversely, if you are raised in a more traditional society, or within an evangelical Christian household in the United States, you become so well educated in the ethics of community and divinity that you can detect disrespect and degradation even where the apparent victims see nothing wrong. But if you then face discrimination yourself (as conservatives and Christians sometimes do in the academic world), or if you simply listen to Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, you may find a new resonance in moral arguments about oppression and equality.

On IRC this morning, we tried once again to chase down the definition of “postrationality”.  (Which remains elusive even to me, although I have a few more ideas, and may eventually blog about them.  I’m honestly somewhat inclined towards the Feyerabendy definition of “postrationality is what postrationalists believe and do”.)

But anyway, during this conversation, rivershavewings​ suggested "the scientific-rationalist paradigm is not the source of all truth, also System 2 is not the source of all truth”.  And this sounded good to me, except that it focused too much on the idea of “truth”, when “truth” is not the be-all or end-all of what I seek.  A long time ago I wrote the following:

Some people say they’re on a quest for truth – as if truth were an object you could hold in your mind – some mystical formula, some key unlocking the secrets of reality, some objective representation, free from the vagaries (and vagueries) of human thought. As if a human being could ever grasp the nature of the universe, unfettered by the limits of our perception!

Since I consider the “quest for truth” misleading, I prefer to say that I’m on a journey towards understanding: both logical, rational understanding, and deep, resonant intuition.

I stand by this.  I’m an academic; I devote my days to intellectual pursuits; my life is devoted to the expansion of knowledge.  But I am not searching for truth, I am searching for understanding.

“Truth” seems like such a narrow category: direct correspondence between model and reality; faithful representation of the universe.  But there are so many things that contribute to understanding without being true: stories, metaphors, and so on.  A piece of fiction is obviously not true, but it still may teach us valuable lessons about reality.  A metaphor is also not literally true, but it can highlight common structure between two disparate domains, and let us draw conclusions about one domain based on what we know about another.