Heuristics of Sanity Pt 2
August 15th, 2009
(Yesterday I posted about history implying a strong heuristic that radical claims about the future shouldn’t be believed. This heurstic is valid, and has to be worked against to lead a person to set it aside and actually look at the evidence on a particular issue.)
If you’re a person with a radical claim about the future to make, you’ve got serious work cut out for you. If the heuristic suggests that claims about the end of the world and massive global change are not worth considering and are something put forth by irrational and unconventional weirdoes, then hopefully you can lead people to set aside the heuristic by displaying rationality and being as conventional as possible. It helps if instead of being a smelly person who stands on street corners all day, you’re the head of an Oxford institute, an MIT graduate with at least a half dozen successful companies, or a computer pioneer and one of the founders of the industry’s leading companies. It helps at least a little if you did such things first, before you put much weight in the possibility of humanity going extinct by the end of our lifetimes. The long and the short of it is that it helps if by all other accounts you are rational, intelligent, and not terribly strange. None of that is good reason to unquestioningly believe what you’re saying, but it is a good reason to actually look at the evidence on those claims.
There are two ways to be strange with respect to world-changing future developments. The first and most salient way is to simply assign significant probability to such things. The conventional opinion does not, and those who assigned high probability in the past seldom even seem justified in retrospect. The second way is: given that you assign a non-negligible probability, what are you doing about it? Here both conventional opinion and a rational analysis might agree that we should be doing quite a bit. That is, if you seriously assign significant probability, we should ”be serious about” the possibility.
I think this is generally conflated with the oddity of assigning the non-negligible probability in the first place, so that doing a great deal about these claims makes the claim itself seem less believable. Maybe it’s because it draws more attention to the belief, or because it makes a person more nervous to have someone actually acting on such ideas, or because it makes the association with prior doomsayers stronger and calls the heuristic back into play. So then to try and convince others of the possibilities we just mention them as an interesting bit of arm-chair speculation, put them forward as a strictly academic discussion, avoid expressing great emotion, and don’t factor them into decisions on whether to spend a day watching a LotR marathon. Then our friends can say “Sally sure has some weird ideas about the future, but at least she’s cool about them. At least she doesn’t get too worked up about the possible death of 7 billion people.”
I’m not suggesting we go the route of Sarah Conner, for a variety of reasons (BTW I’ve only seen the films). But what I do suggest is that if we rationally think there is a significant chance of existential disaster or a massive global development that we’ll regret not preparing for, then we rationally out to do something significant about it (I’ll leave utilitarian calculus to a later post). Maybe that actually means we should apply limited effort in order to bypass a common heuristic about credibility, but that’s something we should come to through rational decision-making, not assumption.
Tags: Bias, Persuasion