Rational Irrationality

 

The economist Bryan Caplan popularised the idea of rational irrationality, based on two types of rationality; epistemic rationality and instrumental rationality. Epistemic rationality means doing your best to seek the truth and assent to facts, and instrumental rationality means adopting a strategy to achieve certain goals (some of which may make truthseeking appear inconvenient). Caplan’s rational irrationality posits the idea that an individual could be epistemologically irrational to achieve instrumental rationality. If holding a particular belief is convenient for your aims - perhaps for tribal, social, or cultural reasons, or for mere personal expedience - and the marginal cost of falsehood is low to you in this case, then you may have an incentive to be irrational on so-called rational grounds.

There is a demand curve for rationality and irrationality, and ascertaining the steepness of the demand curve is like asking whether incurring a cost for being wrong will be sufficiently bad to engender deeper personal negativity. Measuring the slope of the demand curve for irrationality is equivalent to measuring the deterrent effect of the cost of wrongness – and when the cost of wrongness is low, the individual has higher demand for it. If, for whatever personal reason, the cost of being wrong is especially low, then you can find yourself with an absurd demand for irrationality if it provides a social incentive or a cushion for areas of discomfort in your life.

There are many areas of life where rational irrationality is prominent, especially in some political and some religious beliefs. It appears so frequently in political and religious beliefs because they are the beliefs that often come with the most familial, cultural and tribal duress, and that impose the fewest costs on the individual if they lower their truthseeking and cognitive standards in order to minimise conflict and retain favour and acceptance in the in-group.

Let me be clear, I am explaining the cause of rational irrationality – I am certainly not advocating it, nor suggesting we let ourselves off lightly if we compromise truthseeking with decreased cognitive standards. In most cases, it will do us no good in the end.

Perhaps the viewpoint that best appeals to individuals for reasons other than epistemic rationality is socialism. I think it’s principally for three reasons:

1) Economics takes a lot of effort to learn and understand, and not putting in the time and effort to learn it is a much easier path, especially as being ignorant about it does not stem the flow of people’s willingness to opine about it. It is not really possible to become competent at economics, strive to tell the truth, and still say the things most of our politicians say on a daily basis.

2) Socialism enables people to channel their resentment of the rich into a virtue signalling charade to express consternation for the poor, and make themselves feel just, noble and virtuous. I suspect most socialists do not really care deeply about the poor, because if they did, they would not espouse so much ill-informed economics that makes the poor worst off of all (this is one of the big contradictions at the heart of socialism).

3) Being on the left tends to create deeper social bonds than on the right, because the proposed fight for justice and inequality, and being spokespeople for the underdog, is often quite a unifying phenomenon.

Consequently, then, I believe that being a socialist isn't really about championing redistributionist policies for the poor (if it were, the socialists would be espousing more market-friendliness) - it is about tribal affiliations and virtue signalling and envy against those who have qualities that the socialists lack.

It’s also the case, I think, that people don't tend to work out what they believe and join the political party that most closely identifies with those beliefs - the causality is usually the opposite of what people think: that is, the cart of party politics usually gets there before the horse of political beliefs. We do not live in a society full of ultra-rational agents. People prefer to believe what they think will enable them to fit into the particular group that will benefit them most.