On Rational Deliberation
musings
This is the first piece in the series, so what should it be about? Let’s start with a behavioural test.
You have a box of fruit. It has been sitting there for a month and you only remembered it today. When you open it, more than half of the fruit is close to spoiling, and the rest does not look much better. You have two options (and of course we are thrifty people):
- Eat the ones that are about to spoil. Nothing gets thrown away, but you may spend the next week eating fruit that hovers somewhere between good and bad — because by tomorrow the ones that already looked doubtful will have got worse.
- Eat the good ones first. Some of today’s nearly spoiled fruit will inevitably have to go in the bin tomorrow, but at least the taste is guaranteed.
Which would you choose?
This is a well-known experimental design by the psychologist Fick Teister, and the result, in short, runs like this. Subjects who choose the first option tend to have a higher tolerance for the status quo and are more tenacious in their attachments. But because they may cherish everything they have ever owned a little too much, they never quite reach the summit of their own needs, and carry with them a permanent regret at never having stood on the peak to see all the smaller mountains below. Those who choose the second have far more decisiveness, but may act on impulse and miss opportunities. Who knows — perhaps the fruit that is about to spoil is still beautiful on the inside.
What I actually want to say today is this: it is remarkably easy to fabricate a test that looks like it holds up. To make it feel more real, the author can throw in dates, places, sample sizes, case studies. And most people, given the choice between forwarding and verifying, will — I suspect — lean towards the former, as long as it sounds like it makes a certain amount of sense.
So from this article onward, I sincerely hope we can treat this like a table of players in a game of Werewolf. For anything I discuss here — fiction aside — please argue from pure logic. Let us look together at the causes and the correlations behind an event, and not believe anything simply because an authority or a well-turned principle was invoked. On the same grounds, I have no patience for comments that come without reasons.
Consider this the opening. More will follow, slowly.