You Don’t Need Reasons to be Rational
Or, there is no rational or irrational belief, only rational or irrational behaviour
Merry Christmas! 🎄
👋 Hey there! My name is Abhishek. Welcome to a new edition of The Sunday Wisdom! This is the best way to learn new things with the least amount of effort.
It’s a collection of weekly explorations and inquiries into many curiosities, such as business, human nature, society, and life’s big questions. My primary goal is to give you some new perspective to think about things.
Do not confuse effort with results.
Just because you put in the effort does not mean you’ll get the desired result.
A lot of effort gets undone long before results are felt. Going to the gym is undone if you eat poorly. Focusing only on work gets undone by the inevitable health and relationship issues that come from under-investment. When we try to speed up the outcome, our lack of patience undoes the result.
Results are accumulated in drops but lost in buckets.
Make sure you’re not undoing the things you’re trying to accomplish.
Enough talk! On to this week’s essay. It’s about 1,300 words. Thank you for wanting to know more today than you did yesterday.
One more thing. If you find this issue valuable, can you do me a favour and click the little grey heart? It helps get the word out about this budding newsletter. 😍
Q: What is something we can learn from advertisers?
Do you know why you are strongly averted to poo (even when it’s something that isn’t actually poo, but only looks like poo)? It’s because, as a species, you would be more likely to survive and reproduce if you had a strong aversion to poo, and so all of us are descendants of people who disliked it.
What’s interesting is that even before medical bacteriology became a field of study in the 1870s and explained the reason, for about half-million years evolution had provided us with an emotional solution to a rational problem.
In other words, we had adopted the behaviour before we knew the reasons for it.
There is a good reason why evolution worked this way. You see, instincts are heritable, whereas reasons have to be taught. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb remarks, “There is no such thing as a rational or irrational belief — there is only rational or irrational behaviour.”
What is important is how you behave, knowing the reasons behind your behaviour is not important.
Today, let’s talk about rationality. More precisely, let’s try to understand why it’s totally okay to be rational for the wrong reasons.
If advertisers have learnt one thing thing from evolution, it would be that the best way to encourage (or prevent) a behaviour is to attach an emotion to it.
Evolution wants you to avoid poo — simply make it smell disgusting. Evolution wants you to have sex — make it extremely pleasurable. Similarly, advertisers want to you brush your teeth — so they sell it as confidence. Advertises want you to drive their car — they sell it as status.
Behaviours which have a rationally beneficial outcome do not necessarily have to be driven by a rational motivation. Cleaning our teeth is good for dental health even if we do it for reasons of vanity.
As far as evolution is concerned, if a behaviour is beneficial, we can attach any reason to it that we like.
History books are full of examples of public health or social benefits that have been driven by spiritual rather than material reasons. For example, strict dietary law, in both Islam and Judaism is not only comparatively healthy, but also has an additional benefit in the shape of social cohesion, as it forces people to eat together.
While the rule against eating pigs may seem superstitious, it is interesting to note that keeping chickens rather than pigs has several key advantages.
First, they are a more efficient source of protein than pigs; chickens require 3,500 litres of water to produce one kilo of meat, pigs require 6,000.
Secondly, chickens produce eggs, an important secondary product which pigs do not offer.
Third, chickens are much smaller and can thus be consumed within 24 hours — this eliminates the problem of preserving large quantities of meat in a hot climate.
Finally, chickens could be farmed by nomads. While neither chickens nor pigs can be herded in the same way as cattle, chickens are small enough to be transported.
You can also add the risk of infection to this list. Although in Judaism the prohibition against eating pork is described as chok, meaning a rule for which there is no rationale, pigs can spread diseases, and pig farming may pass them on to humans.
Similarly, Islam requires that the dead are buried as soon as possible after death, in order to “reduce the suffering of the deceased in the afterlife and to return them to Allah.”
As a result, throughout the Gallipoli campaign during the First World War in 1915 (where Britain, France and Russia, sought to weaken the Ottoman Empire in present day Turkey), Muslims went to great lengths to bury their dead.
By contrast, allied bodies often lay on the battlefield for days before they were collected. The outcome was further casualties from disease for the allies, and comparatively lower levels of disease among their opponents.
In other words, scientifically unverified beliefs about burial norms drove rational and life-saving behaviour.
Also, if asked why it was a good idea to create a space outside a town for the burial of the dead, a modern commentator might point to the risk of infection or pollution of the water supply. However, did you know that we have only known about germs for a little over a hundred years? So why did towns build cemeteries away from their settlements long before this? Again it was an instinctive behaviour enshrined in a spiritual belief.
In the Middle Ages, Europeans moved cemeteries from inside their fortifications to outside because of a fear that the souls of the bodies of the dead might return to haunt the living. The incidental result of this fear of “revenants” was improved hygiene and protection from disease.
It was a rational decision, but the reasons weren’t important.
Any relatively intelligible person would think that people are motivated to practise health behaviours on the basis of their benefits. However, in reality, we mostly perform the healthy behaviour for reasons altogether peripheral to the health benefit.
For example, the naïve assumption that people understand the reasons for their own behaviour, would both provide very misleading explanations for the use of toothpaste. If you asked people why they cleaned their teeth, they would talk about dental health and avoiding trips to the dentist, probably without mentioning fresh breath and social confidence.
Logic demands a direct connection between reason and action, but human beings, who are run by a more advanced form of logic called psycho-logic don’t.
If you confine yourself to using rational arguments to encourage rational behaviour, you will be using only a tiny proportion of the tools in your armoury.
This is important, because it means that if we wish people to behave in an environmentally conscious way, there are other tools we can use other than an appeal to reason or duty. Similarly, if we wish to discourage people from drunk-driving, we do not have to rely solely on rational arguments. If that approach does not work — and often it doesn’t — there is a whole other set of emotional levers we can pull to achieve the same effect.
For example, did you know that the phrase “Often a bridesmaid, never a bride” has its origins in an advert for Listerine from the 1920s — a hygiene product being sold not on medical benefits but on the fear of social and sexual rejection.
Similarly, a 1930s advert for Lifebuoy soap was headlined “Why I cried after the party” — another product promoted on its romantic rather than its physiological benefits. Colgate’s promise about “the ring of confidence” was ingenious because it was ambiguous: it allowed the brand to talk about the confidence you would feel taking your children to the dentist, but also to imply the emotional confidence the product conferred on the user in a meeting or social situation.
In conclusion, what people actually do with their own money is a better guide to what they really want than their own reported wants and needs. Therefore, consumer behaviour, and an advertiser’s attempt to manipulate it, can be viewed as an immense social experiment, with considerable power to reveal the truth about what people want and what drives them.
The point is, who cares why people clean their teeth, as long as they do it? Who cares why people recycle, as long as they do it? And who cares why people don’t drink and drive, as long as they don’t do it?
For a behaviour to be rational, the reasons behind it aren’t important.
Today I Learned
Michael Crichton’s Velociraptors are depicted in Jurassic Park are the kind of scary, intimidating animal that stands alongside T-Rex and Stegosaurus as among the best-known dinosaurs, even though the actual creatures that lived in the late Cretaceous period some seventy million years ago have almost nothing in common with the velociraptors of our contemporary imagination.
For starters, velociraptors did not live in what is now Montana as Crichton suggested; they lived in what is now Mongolia and China, hence the scientific name, Velociraptor Mongoliensis.
While they were smart for dinosaurs, they were not smarter than dolphins or primates; they were probably closer to chickens or possums. And they were not six feet tall; they were about the size of a contemporary turkey, but with a long tail that could stretch for over three feet.
They are estimated to have weighed less than thirty-five pounds, so it’s difficult to imagine one killing a human. In fact, they were probably mostly scavengers, eating meat from already dead carcasses.
Furthermore, velociraptors were not scaly but feathered. We know this because researchers found quill knobs on a velociraptor’s forearm in 2007. But even in Crichton’s day, most palaeontologists thought velociraptors and other members of the Dromaeosauridae family were feathered.
Although velociraptors are not believed to have flown, their ancestors probably did. The more we learn about these animals, the more we find out that there is basically no difference between birds and their closely related dinosaur ancestors like velociraptor.
Both have wishbones, brooded their nests, possess hollow bones, and were covered in feathers. If animals like velociraptor were alive today, our first impression would be that they were just very unusual looking birds. Indeed, if you think about it, pictures of birds without feathers look a lot like pictures of dinosaurs.
Velociraptors probably did sometimes hunt. A famous fossil discovered in 1971 in Mongolia preserved a velociraptor locked in battle with a pig-sized dinosaur called Protoceratops. The velociraptor appears to have had one of its sickle-shaped claws embedded in the neck of the protoceratops, which was biting down on the velociraptor’s arm when they were both suddenly buried in sand, perhaps due to a collapsing sand dune. But we don’t know how often velociraptors hunted, or how successfully, or whether they hunted in packs.
Crichton based his velociraptors on a different dinosaur, the Deinonychus, which did live in present-day Montana and was the approximate size and shape of Jurassic Park’s velociraptors. Crichton took the name “velociraptor” because he thought it was “more dramatic,” which presumably is also why the theme park is called Jurassic Park even though most of the dinosaurs in the park did not live in the Jurassic age, which ended one hundred and forty-five million years ago, but instead in the Cretaceous age, which ended sixty-six million years ago with the extinction event that resulted in the disappearance of around three-quarters of all plant and animal species on Earth, including all large species of what we now consider dinosaurs.
Timeless Insight
It is perfectly rational to be paranoid about coronavirus and other such events with systemic effects (such as terrorists polluting the water supply) even if all the expert analysts are trying to convince you otherwise.
Consequently, it is perfectly rational to wear a mask even if the mortality rate isn’t alarming.
It doesn’t cost you much even you’re wrong, but all it takes is for your “refined paranoia” to be right once, thereby causing a Black Swan, and it saves your life.
What I’m Reading
Love doesn’t have goals or benchmarks or blueprints, but it does have a purpose. The purpose is not to change the people we love, but to give them what they need to thrive. Love’s purpose is not to shape our beloved’s destiny, but to help them shape their own. It isn’t to show them the way, but to help them find a path for themselves, even if the path they take isn’t one we would choose ourselves, or even one we would choose for them.
— Alison Gopnik, The Gardener and the Carpenter
Tiny Thought
Poor evidence can make a very good story.
Before You Go…
Thanks so much for reading! Send me ideas, questions, reading recs. You can write to abhishek@coffeeandjunk.com, reply to this email, or use the comments.
Until next Sunday,
Abhishek 👋