Robyn Dawes Quotes

Any of these antecedents could have been connected with different consequences—in particular with many scenarios involving safe landings. What we have done is a creative act, but the problem is that we do not really know what the general relationship is between these antecedents and the important consequence of whether the landing is a crash or a safe one; in fact we cannot do so by observing a single “story” of a crash. At the least, we would have to compare this story to additional stories involving safe landings (again, a nonevent). This comparison is made rather difficult, however, by the decision of the Federal Transportation Department to erase tapes following uneventful landings so that these tapes can be reused. Thus, critical comparisons are lacking in the story model of causality. The story model is compelling, but its compelling nature is essentially illusory.

People treat reason as if it were the most minor and harmful aspect of a whole human being. It is as if a soldier standing guard were to say to himself: “What good would my rifle be I were now to be attacked by a dozen enemies? I shall therefore lay it aside and smoke opium cigarettes until I doze off.”

Again, what cannot be is not, and what is can be regarded as an instance of what can be. Individuals who make pseudodiagnoses on the basis of “typical” characteristics—by attending only to the numerator of the likelihood ratio rather than to both numerator and denominator—will similarly be doomed to failure by making diagnoses that are not empirically supported. Because such a diagnostic procedure is based on irrationality, it cannot in general succeed. And similarly, people who argue that both the evidence and its negation support the same conclusion are arguing irrationally, and hence the conclusions will be empirically flawed. The principle is the same.

Believing you’re good at something just because you do it—without any information that you’re doing it well—is indeed irrational.

Finally, the irrationality resulting from incomplete specification can be affected by emotions in a very simple way. If the conclusion is consistent with our desires or needs, the specification may not be examined in detail—in particular, not examined for its incompleteness. How often, when we conclude what we wish to conclude, do we then decide to subject our conclusion to detailed scrutiny? On the other hand, when the conclusion is one that contradicts our wishes and needs, then clearly there is a motive to examine our logic. Then we reconsider or even restructure the possibilities, question whether we have examined them all, and so on.

Unfortunately, good stories are so compelling to us when we take the role of psychologist or social analyst that we do not realize that at best they constitute just a starting point for analysis.

The realpolitik view of the individual human—that we are slaves to our desires and attitudes and that knowledge and rationality are necessarily secondary to these other factors—is simply wrong. We have the competence to be knowledgeable and rational, especially when we interact freely with each other. We can indeed change our minds. We can “bend over backward to be defense attorneys against our own pet ideas.” We can reconsider. We can be rational.

Thus, even if we accept that the people are deviously neurotic rather than outright irrational, we still must specify exactly how they believe that the rest of us can be fooled by them. Throughout the book, I will assert that they are urging us (and themselves) to “associate, but not compare.” This book is written in partial hope that the readers will end up making appropriate comparisons, rather than simple associations—which generally lead to a deficient specification of the categories necessary to reach a rational conclusion.

Of course, our experience concerning such people also involves exposure to media. The selective-availability problems that arise because the media select interesting (if not sensational) news are well known. Consider the overestimation of murder as a cause of death relative to suicide.

If we reject the idea of the “intrinsic rationality of whatever we do” (at least if we are not some sort of superb expert or monstrous political leader), then we must value scrutiny, which brings me to my final point: the necessity and value of a free society. When we scrutinize arguments, we often do so in a collective way….
If disagreement can lead to the presentation of one’s remains in a body bag to one’s spouse, this type of scrutiny is horribly constrained. Such constraint in turn implies that irrational conclusions will go unchallenged, and again because irrationality implies impossibility, that lack of challenge in turn implies belief in false conclusions. Such belief harms both societies and individuals.

Prediction is not the same thing as understanding, but in the absence of prediction, we can certainly doubt understanding.

Thus, logic and mathematics are important in determining “what is,” though not necessarily implying what is. “What is” must be consistent with logic, namely, with “what could be.”
Why? I don’t know. To me one of the great mysteries of life is that by simply thinking logically we can determine a lot about the universe—or at least conclude what can’t be, which together with empirical observation leads us to some pretty good ideas about what is.

The world as postulated by the recovered-memory theorists is not an impossible one—just an extraordinarily unlikely one.

These people were saying in effect that “I would be rational except that you are so irrational that I can’t be.” This stance makes the person who adopts it just as culpable as anyone who flat-out endorses irrationality.

What causes the lunatic to demand that ideas not be subject to scrutiny—and in particular that they not be contradicted? No one knows. It may be part of a deliberate campaign to maintain power, an implicit admission of some semiconscious fear that the ideas might not be good, or just a common aspect of types of behavior that we associate with historical monsters. At least, the correlation is there.