The Atheist's Guide to Reality_ Enjoying Life Without Illusions - Alex Rosenberg [124]
People do better most of the time using these imperfect rules that fail to maximize utility or anything else for one reason. It is easier, faster, and cheaper in brain power to go through life using these approximations instead of the more precise, more correct methods of rational choice. It’s only in the weird and uncommon experiments of the social psychologists that these heuristic rules betray us into obvious mistakes. Like the optical illusions that reveal how perception really works (as we saw in Chapter 8), it’s trick questions that produce rationally “wrong” answers in the social psychologist’s experiments. The errors people make reveal what rules of choice people actually use. They reveal to the experimenter how the subjects’ brains are actually solving the problems they face (no surprise there for scientism). Like so much else in our mental lives, the rules that govern our choices and our actions are the results of processes of blind variation and natural selection. In the human struggle to survive in a threatening environment, rules of thumb and shortcuts in reasoning long ago triumphed over pure rules of rational choice. Rational choice is omniscient about what we should do, provided we have all the relevant information. In equipping us for survival, Mother Nature couldn’t wait for the relevant information to come in. Instead she found a lot of quick and dirty solutions to problems that had to be solved immediately.
The way people actually choose reflects implicit rules of reasoning and choice that have probably persisted since the Pleistocene. They are more venerable and more reliable than almost any other pattern in human affairs that social science can uncover. Alas, nothing is forever. It is pretty clear that in at least some areas of modern life in the industrialized West, an arms race has been threatening to unravel the local equilibrium of people interacting with one another using these age-old shortcut methods of choice. That, in a nutshell, is what the financial crisis at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century was about.
Suddenly, in the last 20 years, the environment has changed. The technology for crunching numbers and doing the rational calculation of risk and reward have become orders of magnitude cheaper and faster. By the late 1990s, perfect rational calculation strategies finally began to compete in real time with the imperfect, approximate heuristics that borrowers and lenders, investors and savers, consumers and producers have been using since time immemorial. In this competition, cheap and fast rational choice will take heuristic reasoning to the cleaners every time. For example, canny rational choice investment banks will help their heuristic reasoning customers buy mortgage-backed securities and then go out and sell the same securities short. The exploitation will become so effective that heuristic reasoners will either lose everything or be forced switch to rational choice in self-defense. The result has been to destroy many of the local equilibria of the financial markets in the West. How much of these equilibria in human relations will be unraveled by this arms race is anyone’s guess.
Even if everyone becomes perfectly rational by the lights of the strictest Chicago school standard, human affairs will become increasingly unpredictable and therefore harder to steer into preferred directions. The reason is obvious. Since the scientific revolution began, technological advance and the science that produces it have been the most important source of the variations that break up society’s local equilibria and trigger its arms races. They have increased