Each year John Brockman of the Edge asks 100 of the “better minds” What Will Change Everything? I found this year’s responses to be fascinating (just click the link in the previous sentence), and thought you might want to take some time to read through them over the next several days.
The responses vary from a few short paragraphs to several paragraphs, and there is great variety in the answers.
One of the responses that particularly caught my attention was David Berreby’s Post-Rational Economic Man (near the bottom of the linked page). In part, he notes that we are not very rational beings, and that this causes difficulty with many of our systems (the markets, for example) that are set up with the assumption that people will act rationally. Consider, for example, whether you believe that the stock markets show rational behavior.
Quoting part of his response:
What’s killing Rational Economic Man is an accumulation of scientific evidence suggesting people have (a) strong built-in biases that make it almost impossible to separate information’s logical essentials from the manner and setting in which the information is presented; and (b) a penchant for changing their beliefs and preferences according to their surroundings, social setting, mood or simply some random fact they happened to have noticed. The notion that “I” can ” know” consistently what my “preferences” are — this is in trouble. (I won’t elaborate the case against the rationalist model as recently made by, among others, Gary Marcus, Dan Ariely, Cass Sunstein, because it has been well covered in the recent Edge colloquium on behavioral economics.)
What changes is everything is not this ongoing intellectual event, but the next one.
In the next 10 or 15 years, after the burial of Rational Economic Man, neuroscientists and people from the behavioral disciplines will converge on a better model of human decision-making. I think it will picture people as inconsistent, unconscious, biased, malleable corks on a sea of fast-changing influences, and the consequences of that will be huge for our sense of personhood (to say nothing of sales tricks and marketer manipulations).
For so much of the earlier part of my life, I considered the rationality of our species to be fantastic and admirable. It seems to me that this is a common perspective of the youthful. In my later years I have realized that we are not nearly so rational as we think.
This conclusion is partly a natural result of the aging process, wherein we look back over our lives and realize in hindsight how many of our decisions were emotionally-based (and the same for the decisions of our friends and family). I have also read several articles and books in the past few years that deal with this very subject.
I share it because it is something that has been on my mind a good bit of late, and I thought you might want to reflect on it, too. For example, I ask myself “knowing this, are there ways I can overcome some of the human irrationalities in my remaining years?”
Recent research is confirming the age-old advice for making good decisions: sleep on it. That is, research is confirming that we make better decisions when our subconscious makes them. Interesting, huh? Update: I’ve also seen recent research results that suggest the opposite: that not sleeping on it is the best thing to do. Hum … wonder which is right?
Anyway, I thought the answers to Brockman’s question might interest some of you. I’d love to hear your answers to the question of “what will change everything?” Personally, I tend to agree with a lot of Brockman’s respondents that it will involve artificial intelligence.
I’m looking forward to reading this article (or at least part of it as time allows).
What does the Rugby line out have to do with this article?
Hi Inner Prop,
Only that Rugby and Life are both games, in a sense. And with life, things can happen that totally change “the game.”