3 Ways To Be More Rational This Year According To Harvard Professor Steven Pinker

Many people use the beginning of a new year to turn the page and try to be more rational to seek well-being. However, it must be confessed that it is more difficult than it seems.

Here are three examples of traps of common irrationality that I mention in my series Think with Pinker(“Think with Pinker”) and ways to avoid them.

1. Your future “you”

When people compare what they “think” with what they “feel”often what they have in mind is the difference between immediate and long-term enjoyment.

For example, a feast now and a slim body tomorrow; A trinket today and enough money for when the day comes to pay the rent; a night of passion and what life can bring us nine months later.

This contrast between moments can seem like a struggle with ourselves, as if we had a self that enjoys a television series and another that does so from good grades on an exam.

In an episode of “The Simpsons”, Marge warns her husband that you will regret your behavior, and he responds: “That is a problem for the Homer of the future. I don’t envy that guy. “

This raises a question: should we sacrifice ourselves now to benefit ourselves in the future?

And the answer is: not necessarily.

“Discounting the future,” as economists call it, is up to a rational point.

That is why we insist on bank interest, to compensate us for handing over cash now to have cash later.

After all, we might die and our sacrifice it was in vain. As the sticker on some cars warns: “Life is short. Eat dessert first. “

Maybe the promised reward never come, like when a pension fund goes bankrupt.

And after all, you’re only young once. There is no point saving for decades to buy an expensive sound system at an age when you can no longer tell the difference.

Therefore, our problem is not that we dismiss the future, but that we abruptly dismiss it.

We eat, drink and rejoice as if we are going to die in a few years.

And we discard the future with myopia.

We know that at some point we should start saving for the tough days, but we we win to spend the money what we have.

The struggle between a “me” who prefers a small reward now and a “me” who favors a larger reward later is woven into the human condition. And it has been represented in art and myth for a long time.

There is the biblical story of Eva eating the apple despite God’s warning that she and Adam will be expelled from paradise if she does.

There is the grasshopper of the Aesop’s fable, who spent the summer playing music and singing while the ant works to store food, and is starving in winter.

But mythology has also represented a famous self-control strategy. Odysseus tied himself to the mast so that he could not be lured by the seductive song of the sirens.

That is, our present “I” can be more cunning than a future “me” by narrowing down your options.

When we are satisfied we can get rid of the chocolate so that when we are hungry we do not have it on hand.

When we accept a job, we authorize our employers to tithe part of our salary for retirement, so we don’t have a surplus to spend at the end of the month.

It’s a way that we can use the reason to overcome temptation, without relying on willpower, which is easily overcome at the moment of temptation.

2. “It looks like a weasel”

Hamlet was not the only sky watcher to see things in “those clouds.” It is a hobby of our kind.

We look for patterns in the kaleidoscope of experience because they may be signs of a hidden cause or agent. But this leaves us vulnerable to hallucinations or false causes.

When events happen haphazardly, inevitably they will be grouped in our minds, unless there is some non-random process separating them.

Thus, when we experience fortuitous events in life, we are likely to think that bad things happen in pairs, that some people are born under a bad sign, or that God is testing our faith.

The danger lies in the very idea of “Randomness”, which are actually two ideas.

Randomness can refer to a anarchic process that throws data without rhyme or reason, like the toss of a dice or a coin.

But it can also refer to the data itself, when it is difficult to group them somehow.

For example, if we flip a coin and it gives “heads, stamps, stamps, heads, stamps, heads” it seems random, while “heads, heads, heads, stamps, stamps, stamps” does not, because the second can be compressed into ” three faces, three stamps ”.

People believe that the second sequence is less likely, although the truth is that both are just as likely.

They can even bet that after a long series of heads, the coin will land on seal, as if it had memory and a desire to appear fair. That’s the call gambler’s fallacy.

We often overlook that a random process can generate data from non-random appearance. In fact, that is guaranteed to happen all the time.

We are impressed by coincidences because we forget the number of ways in which they can occur.

For example, if you are at a party with 24 guests, what is the probability that two will have their birthday on the same day?

The answer is “over 50-50”. And with 60 guests, it’s 99%!

The high odds They surprise us because we know that a random guest is unlikely to share our birthday or any other birthdays.

What we forget is how many birthdays there are —366 in some years — and therefore how many opportunities there are for coincidences.

Life is full of these opportunities.

Maybe the license plate on the car in front of me matches part of my phone number backwards. Maybe a dream or a hunch come true; after all, billions of dreams float through people’s minds every day.

The danger of overinterpret coincidences explode when we point them out after an event has occurred, like the psychic who boasts of a correct prediction chosen from a long list of errors that he hopes everyone has forgotten.

This is known as the texas sniper fallacy, referring to whoever shoots a bullet into a wall and then paints a circular target around the hole to make it look like he’s a great shooter.

Detect patterns it is especially tempting when we choose the pattern only after we have looked at it. When we say, like Hamlet with his clouds, if he is a weasel, a camel or a whale.

Overinterpreting randomness is a risk when monitoring the random path of financial markets, whereas resist the temptation provides an opportunity for the cognitively literate investor.

It also provides the opportunity to experience a own life: avoid thinking that everything happens for a reason and avoid guiding your personal choices for reasons that do not exist.

3. Be right or do the right thing

Whenever we participate in an intellectual discussion, our goal should be converge on the truth. But humans are primates, and often the goal is to become the alpha debater.

It can be done in a way non verbal: the arrogant posture, the hard gaze, the deep voice, the peremptory tone, the constant interruptions, and other displays of dominance.

Domination can also be pursued in the content of a discussion, using a series of dirty tricks designed to make an opponent appear weak or foolish.

Some examples:

• To argue to the man: attack the person instead of the argument itself
• Take down one “straw man”: distort the other person’s argument and then attack the distortion
• Guilt by associationRather than exposing the flaws of an argument, draw attention to people of disrepute who sympathize with that argument

The intellectual combatIt can certainly be an exciting sport for spectators. Readers of literary magazines savor the withering retorts between intellectual gladiators.

On YouTube, the type of videos in which a hero “destroys” or “knocks down” a hapless person is popular. question.

But if the point of the debate is to clarify our understanding of an issue, rather than bow to an alpha, we should find ways to control these bad habits.

We can all promote reason by changing the mores of intellectual discussion, so that people treat their beliefs as hypotheses to be tested, instead of slogans that must be defended.