Robyn Dawes Quotes

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.

Unfortunately, there are many irrational conclusions and beliefs in our culture from which to choose. Those analyzed at some length—and as precisely as possible—are those with which I am most familiar. With public opinion polls indicating that more people in the United States believe in extrasensory perception than in evolution, it is not surprising that examples abound.

The limitation of the story to a single sequence and the essentially ad hoc nature of causal attributions call into question the whole procedure of using stories as evidence, and of thinking that they establish causality or patterns of reasons.

Again, irrationality can hurt, and here we have evidence that a particular form of it is widespread. The people accused around hurt, and the clients—be they children or grown adults—are hurt. Irrationality is not simply an amusing diversion provided by tarot cards or Ouija boards.

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

As discussed in Chapter 7, we often substitute a good (internally generated) narrative or story for a comparative (“outside”) analysis when we attempt to understand something unusual. We also often substitute pure association for comparison. This reliance on coherent “explanations” provides what is really an illusion of understanding, rather than understanding.
In this chapter, I present the other side of the coin. That is, even when we have a perfectly valid statistical explanation for a phenomenon, we may ignore it because no “good story” accompanies it to persuade us that we should believe it.

The DID problem is an example of arguing from a vacuum. The argument is basically that if one type of procedure (diagnosis, therapy, business venture, or whatever) does not work, then something else will. Well, perhaps nothing will work, or perhaps the only reason we observe that something did not work is that we were ignoring the cases in which it did—often because, for some very compelling social reasons, they never come to our attention.
I have discovered this argument from a vacuum often in the context of various “critiquing” studies of statistical versus clinical prediction. There is one overwhelming result from all the studies: When both predictions are made on the basis of the same information, which is either combined according to a statistical (actuarial) model or combined “in the head” of an experienced clinician, the statistical prediction is superior.

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.

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.

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.

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

Many people operate as if there are two separate and equal sources of information—the self and others, where the number of others is irrelevant. The result is a “truly” false-consensus effect in the context of knowing one’s own plus a certain number of others’ responses.

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.”

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.

At the very least, irrationality per se can be challenged. In contrast, acting irrational because we believe that other people are so irrational that their irrationality cannot be challenged leads to no challenge at all.