June 16, 2026 • 44 mins
In this episode, we begin with Hitler’s supposed Alpine Redoubt and use it to explore a broader question: how do we make sense of irrational decision-making? We discuss why Allied planners expected the Nazis to behave “sensibly” by retreating to Bavaria, when Hitler instead chose a symbolic last stand in Berlin. From there, we look at other examples where leaders appear to act against their own interests, including Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and Trump’s strike on Iran.
We then set out a framework for irrationality, asking whether bad decisions come from strange goals, wanting the wrong thing, misunderstanding the world, choosing tactics that do not work or simply failing to think clearly. We consider how this applies to politics, war, climate denial, government policy and personal choices, before turning to the awkward fact that apparent irrationality can sometimes be strategically useful. Ultimately, we conclude that irrationality is messy, difficult to diagnose and often inseparable from the values and beliefs that drive people in the first place.
Listen
Watch
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Hello and welcome to theCognitive Engineering Podcast brought
to you by Aleph Insights andproduced by me, Fraser McGruer. I'm
here with Nick Hare and PeterCoghill of Aleph Insights. On this
podcast, we look at a widerange of topics from an analytical
viewpoint. And today we'rediscussing Hitler's Alpine Redoubt.
(00:25):
Nick, tell all. Go for it.
Yeah, well, as you know, we'vedecided to pivot to become a history
podcast because we like therest is history so much. So we've
decided to emulate that byjust. By just talking about random
historical topics. Very good,very good. And this one is the Alpen
Festung.
Festung.
No, Alpen Festung, the AlpineFortress. So apparently. So I only
(00:46):
know about this because I'verecently finished reading Berlin
by Anthony Beaver and I highlyrecommend it. Apparently there was
a real set of plans thatHimmler put together in 1943 about
how the government could, inthe event of an invasion, retreat
to southern Bavaria, which isobviously much better defended than
(01:08):
Berlin. So they could, youknow, they could fight on there.
That's the idea. Yeah.
Mountains and stuff. Yeah.
And in fact, after the war,apparently Verwolf, which was the
kind of Nazi resistance movement.
Okay.
Did actually operate for a bitthere. And I think.
Yeah, I don't want to sort ofsidetrack us.
No, we should. This is. Yeah,let's go for it.
(01:28):
But is this the place that.Because he had two places, one of
which I've been to.
So paying when you went onthat pilgrimage to the sites of Nazi.
Yes, exactly, yeah. Saved upfor years. So one was the. The Eagle's
Nest, wasn't it called? Or theEagles. Look out.
The Eagles.
Eerie.
The Eagle's Eyrie or something.
Is that the one?
There's also a Wolf's Lair,which was in Poland. I think so,
(01:51):
yeah, it is.
And I've been there. So it'sthe Wolf's Lair. Wolfstrange.
Definitely an animal's houseof some kind.
Well, when I worked in Poland,it's literally 30 minutes away from
where I lived in Poland, and Itook the family there a couple of
years ago for a lovely dayout. And it was. I mean, a lovely
day out. It's a beautiful forest.
Well, this is nowhere nearthat. This is the mountains of Bavaria.
(02:14):
Yeah. Come on, get on with it.Back to the mountains.
And I think Goebbels actuallydid spread rumours that they were
going to retreat there, Ithink to try and mislead Allied forces
to some extent, but also toproject more strength and durability
than in fact the regime had.So this had quite significant consequences,
it turns out, because had theAllies tried to advance to Berlin
(02:40):
more aggressively, then theymight well have been accepting waves
of surrender from the Germans,who were desperate at that point.
By the time the Russians wereclosing in, they were kind of desperate
to surrender to the WesternAllies because the Russians, they
were perhaps quite rightlyscared of what the Russians would
do to them. It's possiblethat, you know, the US might have
(03:02):
got to Berlin first. Theconsequences for Eastern Europe might
have been very different. Andthe West, I think the, well, Roosevelt
in particular kind of thoughtthat the Nazis would do the sensible
thing and do that, that theywould abandon Berlin, go to Bavaria
(03:23):
and fight on there. So theidea was, well, you know, they didn't
want to just do a big thrustto Berlin, they wanted to do a broad
advance across Germany. AndStalin exploited this because he,
he knew that Berlin would bethe site of an epic battle and exploited
that and tried to, you know,pretend that he wasn't too bothered
about Berlin. And Rooseveltkind of fell for it. And one way
(03:46):
or the other, what it meantwas the, you know, the Nazis had
their epic last stand inBerlin with the Russians. The Russians
got to Berlin and then, youknow, could kind of set the terms
of how that would end.
Are you saying that maybe FDRthought that the Nazis would think
rationally and that maybe theNazis weren't thinking rationally
(04:06):
and they ended up with anunintended consequence?
You've rightly detected wherewe're going. Okay, so for the Nazis
and the Soviets, Berlin hadthis symbolism where they kind of
got that that would be thefinal last stand. This is my reading
here. Hitler, I think by 1945,seems like he was what we might nowadays
(04:28):
call a doomerist. You know, heknew it was all coming to an end.
He wanted there to be thiskind of Wagnerian epic. Gotterdammerung.
Berlin was this sort of mythiccentre of the Reich. You might have
heard of the Nero Decree,which was like, well, if, if, if
the Nazis are going to begone, we just destroy all of Germany,
they're not good enough forus, etc. And, and Lenin was supposed
(04:51):
to have said, there's noevidence that he said this, but I
think it was believed thatLenin said, he who controls Berlin
controls Germany and whocontrols Germany, controls Europe.
So there's this kind ofsymbolic value that I think we underestimated
in the West. We thought, look,the, the Germans are going to want
to fight on. They're not goingto just want to die for no reason.
So they will do the sensible.Didn't they did from our point of
(05:13):
view, a silly thing. AndStephen Ambrose said this must rank
as one of the worstintelligence reports of all time.
That is the report that theGermans were going to move to the
Alpenfestung. But no one knewthat. In the March of 1945, a few
even suspected that that wouldhappen. Even Churchill was afraid
(05:35):
of these developments, thatis, the developments that the Nazis
would choose to effectivelydie in Berlin and Hitler would choose
to die in Berlin instead ofgoing, you know, going and surviving
somewhere. So, anyway, in somesense, we didn't anticipate how irrational
Hitler would be. I think weexpected he would do the sensible
thing, fight on in Bavaria.And actually, this is quite a common
(05:57):
pattern. When we're looking atwhat foreign governments will do
and trying to predict whatforeign governments will do, we often
just assume they will dosomething sensible. And so before
the invasion of Ukraine, therewere quite a lot of pundits who said,
putin's threats is just a loadof saber rattling. Putin's going
to threaten invading, but he'dbe mad to do it. Russia is going
(06:19):
to be so much worse off ifthey do that. He'll never do that.
And of course, he did. Morerecently, Trump's attack on Iran
4D chess, which I don't thinkany analyst could see a way that
there would be an end gamewhere the US kind of straightforwardly
got whatever it wanted out ofthis. You know, it's one of those.
(06:41):
Just one of those things. Wethink. Well, we. What? How can this
possibly make sense? Not, youknow, on your own terms, how can
this make sense? How can thisgive you something that you want?
So I think basically, we wantto talk about what irrational. What
it means to do things that arekind of irrational, that are against
your interests and. Butactually, perhaps more importantly,
(07:05):
for our purposes, what do youdo when you're facing an adversary
who's like that?
Right.
How do you manage fightingagainst someone who. How do you deter
someone or coerce them? How doyou make them surrender or concede
to your demands when theyaren't even going to do things that
are in their own interest? Soit turns out that's quite a big problem,
(07:28):
I think. Yeah.
I mean, how can you predictirrationality, let's say. Yeah, it
might be one way to put it aswell. And presumably foreign ministries,
diplomats, security, you know,ministries of defence, this is what
they spend a lot of timethinking about, I would have thought,
and I would imagine that themodels that they have, there must
be an irrationality factor, I guess.
I think, I think personally inmy experience, we just, we underestimate
(07:50):
it or at least we don't see itcoming. I think there's a tendency
to still think Putin's saberrattling over Ukraine. It's about
the domestic audience, it'sabout, you know, looking strong,
it's about deterring the West.There's some reason for it. I think
there's a lot of analysis ofDonald Trump which tries to impute
a bunch of reasons for hisbehavior which may just not exist.
(08:13):
It's a common intelligencefailure, isn't it? It goes hand in
hand with assuming that theenemy knows more than they, they
know.
Yeah.
Okay, so how are we settingthis up? Where do we go from that?
We've sort of framed the issueand how are we going to go about
having a. So worrying away at this?
How are we going to fix theproblem of irrationality?
How are we going to fix theproblem of irrationality?
(08:33):
Easy.
Right?
How long have we got? We'vegot about another 20, 30 minutes.
Yeah, you got about 20 minutesor so.
Okay. No problems.
Well, what do we do for thelast 10 minutes?
I propose on the basis of theAnna Karenina principle, which is
that, you know, there's allkinds of ways that decisions can
go wrong, is let's start byjust saying, well what does it mean
when you behave rationally?And then we can start looking at
(08:56):
the failure modes and thinkabout how we might fix them. Okay,
sounds sensible.
Sounds very sensible.
Cool. Okay, so to make arational decision, right? And this
is just very bog standarddecision theory. If you want to make
a rational decision, you'vegot to start with our old friend
the utility function.
Oh, brilliant.
Right. That basically tellsyou of all the possible states of
(09:17):
the world, how much you likethem. All in order says this is my
absolute favourite one andthis one I would hate.
It's about what you want, right?
This is just what you want. Itdoesn't care what you can have or
anything, it just says howmuch you want things. Because we're
going to worry about how weget them later. But right now we
need to have some preferenceover the states of the world. Then
(09:39):
you have some set of beliefsabout what the state of the world
is like now. So you've gotsome sense of what is true now. And
now that's, you know, that'snot necessarily straightforward to
get that right. And a lot ofthe mistakes that we will talk about
come from people under youKnow, misestimating where they are
now and then. But then finallyyou've got to have a belief about
(10:01):
your actions, about how youractions affect the state of the world.
And once you've got thosethree things, you can in theory now
just make the optimaldecision. You just look at all your
actions and you find out whatstate of the world they give you
and you go, well, I'll pickthe top one.
Simp.
Easy rationality in anutshell. Yeah, okay, brilliant.
Makes sense.
So all you have to do that andyou will be sorted, all your problems
(10:25):
will disappear.
Yeah, this is going to come inhandy for me because I sometimes
make mistakes about stuff,make bad decisions.
So we can talk about when youmake bad decisions, which thing might
be going wrong. Yeah, yeah,yeah, yeah. So I've actually got
five common failure modes.
Okay, cool.
And we can use that then maybeto think about, well, how do we.
How do we diagnose that? Howdo we see it coming? How do we make
(10:48):
sure we don't fall prey tothat? But also, you know, how do
we. How do we deal withsomeone else who's behaving like
that? Got it. The first one isactually not even quite irrationality
or a failure mode. It's justsomething we need to introduce, which
is weird. Utility functions.
Okay, go on.
Well, for one thing, Hitler,for example, he wanted there to be
(11:09):
a thousand year Reich, right.Which was governed by Nazi doctrine.
So he knew what he wanted.
He knew what he wanted. And,but that, I think that's a bit of
a weird thing to want. I mean,I don't. It doesn't sound like that
much fun to me, to be honest.And there's. But there's all like,
I suppose less significantly,there are people who want to like
do a deca man ultra triathlon.I mean, like that. Again, I wouldn't
(11:36):
want to do that. But someonewho dedicates their life to decide
doing that might still bebehaving rationally. Right. It might
just be. It's in the serviceof something which I think is weird.
Someone who wants to make amassive matchstick model of Chartres
Cathedral or spend their lifeproving Fermat's last theorem.
Or Hume trying to scratch his finger.
Well, exactly. I mean, that'sthe thing. It's like actually you
(11:59):
can kind of want anything you want.
Yeah, I want some wings.Right. That fix to me and.
Yeah, right. And that might beyour big overriding dreams. You're
willing to make much biggersacrifices for those things than,
you know, we you or I'm PeterOr I might think was a sensible degree
of effort.
To put even more tactically inthe Hitler case we're thinking about
(12:26):
is that if he retreats to themountains, that's basically giving
up. They're saying we aregiving up on this dream. Whereas
if he stays in Berlin, even,even if there's a remote chance,
there's still more of a chancethat there might be some radical
turnaround.
Yeah. So it's exactly. Howeversmall it is. Surviving, surviving
(12:47):
in Bavaria, but without yourThousand Year Reich, it's no life
at all if you're here though.
Yeah.
So survival is not actually asimportant as some chance of rescuing
the Thousand Year Reich. Yeah.I mean, there's people like, you
know, Thich Quang Duc, who,who set himself on fire to protest
about the persecution ofBuddhists by the Diem government
(13:09):
in Vietnam. You know, I mean,we all want Buddhists not to be oppressed,
but most of us wouldn'tconsider that that's a very high
price to pay to raiseawareness of something or, you know,
Japanese troops in World WarII refusing to surrender because
honor is more important tothem than personal survival.
Sure.
So just really, just to say,look, the thing is that, yeah, sometimes
(13:32):
people want really weirdthings much more. You or I might
want them.
Yeah.
Okay, so that's like weirdutility functions, that's sort of
thing one then. But the nextone, which I think is probably just
as common, I suspect might bemore common, is actually just wanting
the wrong thing.
But they're not the same then.
They're different.
Go on.
Well, wanting the wrong thingis thinking that some state of the
(13:54):
world will give you utility.But it doesn't. Okay, classic example
might be pursuing fame andwealth. Because you might for some
reason think, once I've gotthat fame and wealth nailed, I'll
be happy. Well, you won't.I've got some bad news. You won't,
Fraser, because wherever yougo, there you are very wise, I think.
You know, in general, peopleoverestimate how good, good things
(14:17):
are and they overestimate howbad, bad things are. They overestimate
things that they have now thatpeople are loss averse, you know,
and people forget abouthedonic adaptation. You know, it
turns out that when you haveyour massive telly, pretty soon you.
It's actually you don't reallyfeel much better off than when you
had a small telly.
(14:38):
You get used to it.
You get used to it, but alsoyou'll be fine.
But I know you like to talk inpersonal terms. I prefer to do this
in Strategic geographicalstuff. Right. But like, it's like
wanting to, you know, land inthe Dardanelles so that you can then
capture Constantinople, whichmeans that's how you're going to
end the First World War.
Right. That's not necessarilythe same thing. Is that not the thing,
(15:01):
let's say. Well, well, no,because wanting to end the First
World War is the thing thatthey want.
That's the overriding thing.
Yeah. And actually that is infact what you know, we wanted. Yeah,
yeah, yeah. It's not like wewere deluded. We didn't think, oh
well, when we win the FirstWorld War, you know, that'll be great.
And it turned out we won theFirst World War and it wasn't. It
was rubbish.
Right.
That's not what this is. Thatwould be. We're coming onto this.
(15:24):
It would be more along thelines of thinking an action will
lead to an outcome and itdoesn't. This is basically being
wrong about your utilityfunction. So, you know, it's, it's
the, the issue about, about asI said, like thinking that you want
something to happen, but whenit does happen, it turns out it wasn't
as good as you thought. Yep.Then we have. Being wrong about.
I find. I find a little. Ifind it a little difficult to differentiate
(15:46):
between the two.
Yeah.
Be able to spot the differenceeven retrospectively between having
a weird utility function. Iwanting the right thing the wrong
way, but. And wanting thewrong thing. I think you might, you
might sort of rationalize itpost hoc quite easily or you might,
(16:08):
you might find just that it'sjust a very difficult one. Pick how
people's state of mind was inany given decision. So. Well, I'm
not, I'm not saying thatthey're necessarily. They're bad
distinctions, but I'm sayingit's. They might be moot because.
Is very difficult to apply.
Well, there is a bigdifference which I guess we'll come
on to when we talk about howyou manage it, which is I might be
(16:29):
persuadable that this thingI'm trying to do won't actually make
me happy. And I think that'sperhaps part of getting old and becoming
wiser is starting to spotthose kinds of things. But there
are some things which, no, Iactually genuinely do want and they
would make me happy. And Ithink there is a difference there
in terms of how you mightrespond to.
(16:50):
I suppose, if you can. Isuppose what it does help is inform
the pre decision analysis sothat you can be more honest with
yourself.
Yeah.
And you can Examine yourutility function knowing that these
are two potential failuremodes that are distinct.
Right? Yeah. And trying toseparate them out.
Yeah.
So that just out of interest,is this your taxonomy?
(17:12):
Kind of, yeah. I mean it'sstill all based on standard decision
theory, but I think I tried tosort of boil it down. Five main failure
modes. You could spin them outby, you know, having, well, your
beliefs are correct but yourbeliefs about your beliefs are wrong
and that kind of thing. But Ithink these more or less capture,
I think most things that gowrong. It's one of these five things.
(17:32):
So the thing number three isbeing wrong about how things are.
So that is you have justmisappreciated the situation. You're
deluded. I'm pretty. Hitlerprobably had a bit of this going
on. Probably thought theWehrmacht was in much better shape
than it was, you know. Butalso if you. Hallucinations, propaganda,
false memories, conspiracytheories might all might all make
(17:55):
you think that the state ofthe world is different to how it
is. And I guess, you know, alot of when you have something like
a war, well, both sides can'tbe right, that they're going to win.
Right. So I mean someone mustbe misunderstanding their strength
more or less. So there's a lotof well studied cognitive biases
about simply being wrong aboutthings. But I mean here again, it's
(18:17):
not necessarily the case thatyou're being irrational all because
you can be justified. Youmight be justified informing that
your incorrect belief. Butanyway, so what I'm saying is you
could be wrong but for theright reasons kind of thing. So that's
being wrong about the state ofthe world. Then we have number four,
which is being wrong aboutwhat works. So this is just you getting
(18:39):
your tactics wrong. So this isincorrect causal beliefs. You think
a particular course of actionwill get you a particular thing and
it doesn't, it doesn't work.But so that's sort of. If you've
got bad models of the systemor you've oversimplified it, or you've
missed out some key variablesor you know, you're kind of doing
magical rituals, you've doingfailures of imagination, you fail
(19:01):
to think of the thing thatwould work. So you're kind of fighting
the last war. I think this isa very common cause of bad policy,
is just pursuing courses ofaction that don't work.
Often repeated as well. Yeah,you see, you see the same bad policies
to do with things like sort oforganizational level, like management
(19:21):
theory, bad practices gettingrepeated over and over, even though
there's literature saying it'snot a good idea doesn't work that
way. Like yeah, performancereviews and things. So they're not.
The evidence for them actuallybeing any good is weak. But it's
still something thatmanagement people think they need
to do or should do.
It is almost magical rituals.
Yeah.
It is like this is what theydo. So we do this, this is what management
people do.
(19:42):
And the other thing likepolitical things like drug prohibition
and certain sanctions and.
Communism because it justhasn't been tried,.
Hasn't been done properly.Yeah, yeah. I mean it's going to
work. They persist. Theypersist and they, and they, and often
they're kind of. They comefrom a sort of conservative oversimplification
of how the world works. Butthe evidence is clear that they don't
(20:05):
work. You know a good policyresearch will say this has been.
There's loads of naturalexperiments already on this, we don't
need to try it.
Well, Western medicine forhundreds of years did things over
and over again that didn'twork. So yeah, I mean you see this
a lot.
Classic fighting the last war.
Yeah. Okay. So yeah. And againthe last category, good old fashioned
(20:26):
just being dumb. Just, justit's too hard to work out what to
do.
Yeah.
So you vibe it, you YOLO it.
Yeah, yeah.
And, and lo and behold itturns out you haven't made the optimal
decision. So. So there you go.What do you reckon? What do you reckon
to my five part taxonomy of irrationality?
I like it, I like it. I meanjust that last bit, it just reminds
(20:49):
me of talking to some climatechange deniers and what I realized
quite quickly is they couldn'tbother be bothered.
Yeah, well let's diagnose thatso that. What are they? They're what
are they? What are they? Ifyou like, what kind of action would
they recommend? What would bethe action that they would recommend
where we could say, well I cansee where this has gone.
(21:10):
Wrong that they wouldrecommend. So I don't understand.
Well, well it's an incorrectbelief is one thing, but presumably
that belief informs an actionsomewhere. You know, presumably they
have a policy in mind or theythink the government should stop
doing something.
Yeah, they just think kind ofinaction actually. Or like no, this
is silly, it needs to stop allthis stuff.
(21:31):
Yeah.
Okay.
Okay. So I mean I woulddiagnose that as being wrong about
the state of the world.
Okay.
Or that, you know.
Well it is, but I think I do,you know what, I do like this taxonomy,
but it's a little bit messierthan and more interconnected than
one might imagine, I wouldsay. So, for example. Yeah. I think
in this case, let's sayclimate change is a thing.
(21:52):
And they said. They deny thatthat's true. So they might say there
is. There's no. The evidenceisn't true. Right. The science.
Correct.
Yeah.
And so what you've. So you cansay, well, they've got the state
of things wrong. But I wouldsay that the reason why they've got
the state of things wrong isthey're not thinking it through very
well, which I think is beingdumb, let's say. So they're all kind
of mixed up to bed togetherand a bit like.
(22:13):
I mean, being dumb will helpyou with all the other ones as well.
You'll def. That will feedthrough. Yeah. Into being wrong about
all kinds of other stuff.
But it's a bit like alsodivisions of subdivisions. Going
back to this point when I wastalking about the Dardanelles and
you saw. No, actually thatthis would go back to point one,
but it's kind of a smallerversion subdivision of, you know,
because it was point one,which was weird utility function,
(22:34):
I think. And I was talkingabout wanting the wrong thing, but.
But anyway, I mean, in thisterms of what I would say they would
need to do to fix this, whichis they need to have the right tools.
I could see that they justcouldn't be bothered to think it
through. And it was much more.It was more pleasing to the more
reason.
Willful ignorance.
Yeah, it's kind of like, youknow, it just. It didn't fit their
world vision.
But anyway, computational constraints.
(22:55):
Computational constraints.
Kindly summarize it as that.
And then the other final thingI would say, and then I want to bring
in Peter, is it reminds me, Imean, I don't know much about the
law, but it's my understandingthat the law. I think in principle,
the idea is that it tries toapply something precise and put in
sort of, you know,definitions, let's say, and draw
(23:17):
lines on what is a naturallymessy world. And the law recognizes
this, but this is what ittries to do. Okay. And that feels
like this in reverse becauseyou. You might go, right, how can
we make some good decisions?And let's, you know, let's. Let's
write some stuff down.
Are we suggesting we mightturn this into a law where it would
become a criminal offense tobe dumb?
Well, I was.
(23:37):
I would be. I would bepotentially quite a fan of that.
Yeah.
I mean, I'm not sure if I.
Would,.
But yeah, it's like, so it'skind of almost the reverse. And so
you're trying to map thingsout but recognizing that, hey, it
is going to get messy becauseit's dealing with stuff like why
people don't. Why do peopleget all this stuff wrong and do these
silly things, let's say. Sowe've set out rational decisions,
(24:00):
but irrational decisions. Andyou've come, you put in place this
taxonomy of rationality,irrationality rather. Where do we
go from here? What's next? Areyou coming in, Peter?
Yeah, I mean, I do like theframework. I think it. Having a framework
before the decision isprobably more useful than after the
decision. I find it verydifficult to necessarily put historical
(24:21):
examples into any one of thesebuckets, I think, but it's useful
as an informative frameworkfor analyzing those. You can say,
well, it's probably a bit ofthis, a bit of this, a bit of this.
I find it difficult todistinguish retrospectively between,
as I said, between 1 and 2,but also between 5 and 4 and 3. So
(24:42):
how do you know what, youknow, was the decision? Was it, you
know, Dom is doing quite a lotof work here, right? So was the decision.
Was it, Was it what. What wentwrong? Was it a lack of cognitive
capacity? Was it, Were theyover. Was a cognitive capacity overloaded?
Was it, Were they subject tocognitive failure such as various
(25:06):
biases, you know, but it'salso like, was it deliberately lazy?
Like in your example of thekind of the climate deniers, maybe
5 needs splitting out asdifferent kind of subcategories.
And 5 isn't really a thingthat is on its own. It's more like
a thing that would occuracross all of the other ones, a causal
(25:26):
factor for the other ones. So,yeah, I like it as a framework, but
I think it needs, it could dowith tidying up.
Yeah, I think you did well,Nick. And you, you know, you've started
it, you know, you started theconversation, got the ball rolling.
We've got the first draft ofthe Rationality Act 2027. Yeah. Which
is going to go to Parliamentnext year. Yeah, okay, good. But
(25:48):
I mean, so how do we deal withit then? Well, this is exactly because
I have this feeling that ifyou. A lot, in fact, a lot of debates
are about applying the wrongtool to the. To or at least trying
to fix a problem which isn'tthe real problem. By which I mean,
you know, we. I think I, I seea lot of people trying to convince
(26:11):
someone of maybe a factualerror where in fact, you know, the
issue is, well, that personhas a You know, actually just has
a weird utility function. Soyou're not going to be able to persuade
them out of wanting somethingby telling them other stuff about
it. Do you know what I mean?Like, let's say, you know, someone
who really loves exercise andthey love running and they just really
(26:34):
enjoy it and you say to them,well, you're going to get arthritis
if you keep running so much.Well, the thing is that they might
know that they might not care.And similar to, you know, advice
about giving up smoking. Oh,do you know it's bad for you? Yeah,
that is not why I do it. I'mnot operating under a delusion that
it's good for me, but you knowwhat I mean? Like, like a lot of,
(26:55):
a lot of the way that peopleapproach think seeing someone who
is behaving irrationally and alot of how we try to fix that is
often just attacking the wrongbit of this.
Yeah, it's like kind of, it ispartly who decides what's right.
Inverted commas, what's thebest thing you, you can't help when
(27:17):
you're judging somebody else'schoices. You are beholden to your
own values. Your valuesdiffer. It might be that the chainsmoker
just really does value theshort term and doesn't want to get
old and so has already made ainternally rational decision that
they will, they will die early.
Right.
But also I was think, what Iwas thinking about is when would
(27:40):
we, as the voice of reason,want to intervene? Okay. And just
thinking about that, I'm justthinking about how we use this, right?
Because this model feelspretty handy for governments, feels
pretty handy for corporationsand like every time we want them
to use this. But also I wasthinking about, you know, democracy
(28:01):
and you know, when you vote ina leader who, God forbid, might do
these irrational decisions andhow do we rationally, how do we make
it so that we, the electorate,make a rational decision about getting
someone rational in power?
Well, I find it veryfrustrating. I mean, it feels to
me that when you get politicaldiscussions, when you get political
debates, people munge togetherall of this stuff. They munch. It's
(28:25):
a mixture of like things thatwe want on one hand and things that
we think will work on theother hand. And they're often just
all squished up together. And,and, and it's, and it's, you know,
so for example, someone whoreally wants, for example, there
to be much more equality isprobably going to support some kind
(28:46):
of forcible redistribution,higher taxes and so on. Well, they
are two different Things youcan want. You can want there to be
more equality, but alsopotentially want there to be, you
know, to do that somehowthrough a liberal market, you know,
that you don't. And yet. Butit's always the same sort of. You
(29:07):
get these. And you'll getdiscussions that. That constantly
dance around this question,well, are we agreed on what we're
trying to achieve but disagreeon how to get there, or do we. Or
do we actually disagree onwhat we're trying to achieve in the
first place? And I said justto see a lot of this and it's frustrating
to watch.
I mean, a good friend of minewho actually listens to this podcast,
(29:27):
and he's American, but he hada proper fallout, maybe not friends
again with a fellow American.
Oh, yeah.
And I would say they're bothon the. They're both on the liberal
sort of spectrum of things.And what they fell out over was the
recent incursion or bombing,whatever you want to call it, of
Iran by the United States andessentially the. Not my mate, the
(29:52):
other guy was angry with mymate for not supporting the strike
or strikes and the reasonbeing that Iran is a horrible dictatorship
or blah, blah, blah, all thatkind of stuff. And so you call yourself
a liberal, then you should besupporting this because it's trying
to take down a horribleregime. Regime. And my mate, who
(30:12):
I think would sit here quitenicely with us, was saying, yeah,
it is a horrible regime, butjust because you don't like something
doesn't mean you have themeans to. You know, there's many
other reasons why you mightnot go ahead and do this, but just
doesn't mean you can do it. Imean, physically is. You're not.
It might not be possible.
Yeah, I think that's a verygood example. I see that a lot. You
know, it's like, oh, you don'tsupport this policy. You must secretly
(30:34):
support terrorists. Whereas itmay just be a disagreement about
the efficacy of the policy.Yeah. You know, and in that case,
it's like, well, what? No one.No one likes the Iranian regime,
but is this going to actuallyhelp? Is it going to work or is it
going to make them stronger? Imean, you know, you might. You might
hate the Iranian regime, butstill think it's not going to help
if we bomb them.
(30:55):
So, yeah, so we're comingclose to needing to wrap up, but
we're talking about how, youknow, how do you use this stuff or
how do you react when you comeacross this irrationality? Peter,
I think you've got a couple ofIdeas around a couple of these, is
that right?
Yeah, well, I think, I meanbroadly the first two, wanting the
wrong thing and having a weirdutility function are probably the
(31:18):
harder two to. To solve.
They can be quite fundamental, those.
Yeah. Fundamentally. Hell, thereason I say that is because being
wrong about the world, beingwrong about how the world works,
three and four and being dumb,they are largely kind of information
availability. Computation availability.
(31:40):
Yeah. Kind of persuasion andeducation basically.
Yeah. So 3 and 4 could besolved by just having more information
and 5 can be solved by havingmore analysts, having better analysts
or thinking more about whatyou're doing. So they kind of, they
fit.
I mean it's still notnecessarily possible to do. I mean
you think about someone who'sindoctrinated into a cult or something,
(32:02):
you know, they just, they.They're immune to you persuading
them it's just not going towork. And I guess, you know, so,
so there is to something. Iwould imagine your climate change
deniers are in a similar boat,you know that it's just there isn't
some things you can say thatwill persuade them.
Yeah.
So it doesn't mean it can bedone, but I know what you mean. Like
it feels like. Well, it'sstill, there's, there is a common
(32:23):
battleground which is. We cantalk about evidence, but with the
first two. Yeah, it's a bit ofa different story.
This question of how to wantthe right thing is harder than how
to find out about how theworld works. And yeah, a useful framework
is, is Harry Frankfurt'ssecond order desires framework, which
(32:44):
is where the first orderdesires. You see a cake, you say
I want to eat that cake. Butyou have a sort of second order desire
is where you. I want not toeat that cake. So it's understood,
knowing that you have this inthe moment when you're making the
decision, know that there arethese sort of second order desires
that can be violated, whichis, I think you can think of it as
(33:07):
like past you, future you.What would future you want to do?
You would. Future you wouldrather you hadn't eaten that cake.
So that's kind of your secondorder desire. And a way, a sort of
mechanism for doing that isperhaps thinking at the moment. It's
like, well, what does, whatwould. Tomorrow's me say to me about
this decision? Would heactually support it or not?
(33:30):
Say who you. How have youtraveled in time? What. What's going
on? Am I going mad? There'svoices in my head. Sorry, go on.
Mad. That's all about Sort ofa meta level understanding of what
you as your actual desiresare. It's not like not just listening
to the, the, the, the, the.Your brain stem desires about eating
the cake. It's like what,what, what is my higher function,
(33:51):
the ultimate desire? And youcan, on a personal level, you can
sort of, you can, you can helpyourself with this sort of thing
by being explicit about whatyour values actually are and maintaining
a sort of a crib sheet of whatyou, what you value in the world
and then basing decisions,informal basic decisions, but informing
decisions based on thosehigher level, non incidental goals.
(34:15):
Yeah, this feels likehappiness versus pleasure.
But.
Yeah, sorry, go on. Yeah,yeah, you're quite right.
Yeah, yeah. And the anotherthing is I think a lot of, a lot
of these sort of wanting thewrong things are caused by what you
could call the adaptivepreference trap. Where I think Nick
alluded to it earlier whenhe's talking about policies where
(34:38):
the debate about which policyis correct is informed by which policy
is feasible. Quite to quite agreat degree. So that you can think
of the. I think it's Aesop'sfable, the sour grapes. Yeah, the
fox desert. The fox sees somegrapes up in the tree and he sort
of initially goes, oh, theylook like good grapes, but then decides
(34:59):
that he doesn't want them andthey're probably sour because he
can't have them. Whereasactually maybe that's a failure of
imagination about imagininghow that policy could come in to
be. So rather than satisficingfor a weaker policy, maybe actually
pursuing the stronger policies,.
You get off his arse and builda ladder or something.
Yeah, yeah. Or go, you know,sort of team up with a bird or something.
(35:23):
I don't know, something thathappens in Aesop's favor.
This is what the world needs.The world needs to know about this
stuff.
We should tell Keir Starmer.
Yeah, Fox Bird basedsolutions. Yeah, yeah, yes.
I mean what that looks like iswhen somebody appears to actually
(35:43):
want something that could be abad outcome, is they in reflection?
They probably wouldn't.
A couple of things. But alsothere's metrics as well, which if
you've got the right thingthat you want to do and then you
might be able to measure that.Yeah, we did that or we didn't.
Right.
But there might be vested in.You might not want to know whether
(36:05):
something worked out or not orhow do you know it went south? How
do you know it went wrong?
Well, this is why I thinkthere's a lot of deliberate vagueness
in government policy thatwe'll say things like. Ministers
will say things like, we wantstronger foundations for a better
Britain. And if you sayprecisely what unemployment rate
are you going to be happywith, then they hate being pinned
(36:28):
down like that because at somepoint they can be called to account
and someone, someone can say,well, that policy you did didn't
work. Right. And it's rightthere in black and white. It's much
easier to say, well, we. We'reall about prosperity directions.
And, and, you know, how do weknow if this policy worked? Well,
we don't really, because wedidn't say what it is we're trying
to achieve. So it's mucheasier to do that. It's much easier
(36:49):
to live your life being vagueabout what it is you want so that
you can't say, oh, this, thisthing I did didn't work.
Yeah. Which is kind of weirdbecause I just feel a lot of education
we have in our lives, youknow, until 21 or whatever, is about,
is exactly the opposite ofthat, which is clarity and analysis
and so on.
Okay, so very briefly, though.
(37:09):
Yeah, go on.
I think it's worth talkingabout when irrationality is actually
beneficial.
Yeah, this is the realproblem. Yeah, yeah.
And we've, yeah, we've alludedto it, like being. Appearing to be
vague is kind of a form ofthis. But a good example of this
is the sort of mutuallyassured destruction situation and
having a, Having a credible deterrent.
(37:31):
Sounds a bit mad to me, though.
Yeah. So it's like being,Being known. Like if you're in a.
If you're locked in conflict,being known to be a bit random, a
bit irrational, like beingout, you know, not responding in
ways that your enemy expectsyou to can be quite beneficial because
they, they don't. It givesthem. No, it gives them less of a
(37:53):
basis for planning againstyou. Another example is during negotiations.
Stubbornness and not acting inyour own interest can actually be
beneficial because it givesyou more freedom in the negotiation.
You sort of get hung up onminor points that you don't actually
care about too much and thenuse those as bargaining chips later
on when you get to the stuffyou do care about.
Yeah. I mean, literally.There's a famous game theory example,
(38:16):
I think, from evolutionarygame theory. I think it's called
stag and dove or something.But you can be. The problem is that
if you're rational, you mightback down when someone challenges
you over your territory orsomething. It might be rational to
do that because you avoid afight. But then, of course, all someone
has to do is step to you andyou run off and you're worse off
(38:38):
because that person's justgrabbed your territory. It's better
to irrationally defend yourterritory, even if you've got a chance
of being killed, because thenyou're less likely to have to do
that because people aredeterred by it. So this idea of having
irrational desires likeHitler, irrationally wanting to defend
(38:58):
the Third Reich rather thanjust going into hiding and living
a nice life pretending to be afarmer or something, you know, he's
got all this pride andloyalty. You think of those Japanese
soldiers who'd rather die thansurrender and, you know, but actually
what a big deterrent that wasto us planners and things. You know,
knowing that these. They justhad a. Put a vastly bigger store
(39:22):
on something that we wouldconsider to be a value you would
sacrifice. You'd go, well,yes, I do kind of care about my honor,
but I'm willing to swallowthat a bit because I'd rather just
surrender and have some hot soup.
Yeah.
And they didn't. Yeah, theydidn't think that, you know, and
so. Yeah, so. And so we havethis problem where being irrational
sometimes works.
Yeah.
(39:42):
And if that's true, then it's.It suggests that the optimal way
to be is a bit irrational.
Yeah. That said, though,these. All these examples seem to
me to be forms of performativeirrationality rather than genuine
irrationality.
Yeah. But then the problem is,Peter, if you're reality distinguish.
Well, if your irrationality isonly performative and people know
(40:04):
that, then they will exploitit. They'll know that you're only
pretending to be.
Yes.
You've got to be only works ifyou actually are irrational.
You got to be consistent.
Well, then the only way to dothat is to actually be irrational.
That's the problem. Which iswhy I think we've evolved all of
these, you know, which is whywe end up with. With the invasion
of Ukraine and the SecondWorld War and Donald Trump's attack
on Iran. I mean, it's like.Well, actually, unfortunately, it
(40:28):
sometimes pays to beirrational. I will, however, say
I don't think it pays off inthe long run. I think the examples
of when it goes wrong vastlyoutnumber the examples of when it
goes right.
But also about theconsequences and who pays those consequences.
Consequences. All right. Ithink that's one of the things as
well. Do you know what?
I think if, like, if Hitlerhad been sensible, if he'd said,
(40:51):
look, you know, actuallythings are going a bit wrong, I'll
settle for that.
Yeah.
Or at Least just sort of said,well, I tell you what, let's not
invade the Soviet Union. Let'sjust be happy with what we've got.
We'll make a go of it and, youknow, we're gonna live out your days
as a nice sort of relativelysuccessful big country. But no, he
(41:12):
just had to go too far.
Would. You know what so muchof. I've quite enjoyed this, actually,
this last half hour or so,because a lot of the time we go at
a subject and we. Let's faceit, nine times out of ten, we fix
it. We wrap it all up. Right.Yeah, you know, this one, not so
much. It's quite messy and itgoes into so many other things.
Well, the crooked timber of humanity.
(41:33):
There we go. And it. But somany. So much of what we've been
talking about reminds me of somany other episodes that we've done.
So we definitely did one onFuture Self and we've done many episodes.
But right at the end there,what you were talking about reminds
me of the episode which we didabout talking to animals, which is,
hey, if only Hitler could havebeen a bit more, you know, sensible
(41:54):
about this. Well, then thatwould not be, you know, the tenants
of, you know, NationalSocialism would. It doesn't kind
of fit that. And it's a bitlike. Which French philosopher. Was
it Sartre or was it the otherbloke, I don't know, who talks about.
The two French philosopherswho talked about,.
You know, if you could talk toa tiger. Well, actually, you're not
talking.
(42:15):
Yeah. If a line could speak,we could not understand. There we
go.
Tiger's line. Germans, French,whatever. But it's that kind of thing
that unfortunately is wrappedup in being a Nazi.
Yeah.
Is there going to be a bit.
I agree, I. I think it's. It'svery. That's. And that can be a bit
headstrong. Well, that comesthrough very strongly from the book.
In fact, there's a passagenear the end.
What's the book again?
Anthony Beaver, Berlin passagenear the end, which I thought was
(42:37):
really interesting, where hesays that the. Just that sadly that
a lot of these Nazicommanders, you know, when even after
they were captured, not eventhe senior ones didn't really have
any remorse for what they didand that their criticisms of what
had gone wrong were based onthat they didn't work. So they said
we shouldn't have invaded theSoviet Union, not because it was
(42:58):
the wrong thing to do, butbecause it turns out we couldn't
actually won and the Sovietswere stronger than we thought, you
know, we shouldn't have. Weshouldn't have attacked France when
we did, you know, because it.Because then that turned the world
against us, not because it wasthe wrong thing to do, you know,
we shouldn't have persecutedthe Jews because it turned international
opinion against us. Yeah.
It turned out to be a bigger,harder problem.
(43:20):
Yeah, exactly. And. And I. Idon't know. I mean, as you say, it's
like. Well, somehow being aNazi and doing stupid things at the
same time appear to go hand inhand. Yeah, Yeah.
I mean, it is. It is prefacedpretty. Pretty potty ideology, really.
So, yeah, it's.
(43:42):
Yeah, you heard it there.
Condemned by Peter Coghill.Nazism, potty. All right, we'll stop
there. You've been listeningto the Cognitive Engineering Podcast
brought to you by AlephInsights and produced by me, Fraser
McGruer. If you haven'talready, please like and subscribe.
We try to release an episodeevery week or two. If there are any
topics you'd like us to cover,please email us at podcast@lephinsights.com
(44:04):
thanks, as always, forlistening. Until next time, goodbye.
Hello and welcome to theCognitive Engineering Podcast brought
to you by Aleph Insights andproduced by me, Fraser McGruer. I'm
here with Nick Hare and PeterCoghill of Aleph Insights. On this
podcast, we look at a widerange of topics from an analytical
viewpoint. And today we'rediscussing Hitler's Alpine Redoubt.
(00:25):
Nick, tell all. Go for it.
Yeah, well, as you know, we'vedecided to pivot to become a history
podcast because we like therest is history so much. So we've
decided to emulate that byjust. By just talking about random
historical topics. Very good,very good. And this one is the Alpen
Festung.
Festung.
No, Alpen Festung, the AlpineFortress. So apparently. So I only
(00:46):
know about this because I'verecently finished reading Berlin
by Anthony Beaver and I highlyrecommend it. Apparently there was
a real set of plans thatHimmler put together in 1943 about
how the government could, inthe event of an invasion, retreat
to southern Bavaria, which isobviously much better defended than
(01:08):
Berlin. So they could, youknow, they could fight on there.
That's the idea. Yeah.
Mountains and stuff. Yeah.
And in fact, after the war,apparently Verwolf, which was the
kind of Nazi resistance movement.
Okay.
Did actually operate for a bitthere. And I think.
Yeah, I don't want to sort ofsidetrack us.
No, we should. This is. Yeah,let's go for it.
(01:28):
But is this the place that.Because he had two places, one of
which I've been to.
So paying when you went onthat pilgrimage to the sites of Nazi.
Yes, exactly, yeah. Saved upfor years. So one was the. The Eagle's
Nest, wasn't it called? Or theEagles. Look out.
The Eagles.
Eerie.
The Eagle's Eyrie or something.
Is that the one?
There's also a Wolf's Lair,which was in Poland. I think so,
(01:51):
yeah, it is.
And I've been there. So it'sthe Wolf's Lair. Wolfstrange.
Definitely an animal's houseof some kind.
Well, when I worked in Poland,it's literally 30 minutes away from
where I lived in Poland, and Itook the family there a couple of
years ago for a lovely dayout. And it was. I mean, a lovely
day out. It's a beautiful forest.
Well, this is nowhere nearthat. This is the mountains of Bavaria.
(02:14):
Yeah. Come on, get on with it.Back to the mountains.
And I think Goebbels actuallydid spread rumours that they were
going to retreat there, Ithink to try and mislead Allied forces
to some extent, but also toproject more strength and durability
than in fact the regime had.So this had quite significant consequences,
it turns out, because had theAllies tried to advance to Berlin
(02:40):
more aggressively, then theymight well have been accepting waves
of surrender from the Germans,who were desperate at that point.
By the time the Russians wereclosing in, they were kind of desperate
to surrender to the WesternAllies because the Russians, they
were perhaps quite rightlyscared of what the Russians would
do to them. It's possiblethat, you know, the US might have
(03:02):
got to Berlin first. Theconsequences for Eastern Europe might
have been very different. Andthe West, I think the, well, Roosevelt
in particular kind of thoughtthat the Nazis would do the sensible
thing and do that, that theywould abandon Berlin, go to Bavaria
(03:23):
and fight on there. So theidea was, well, you know, they didn't
want to just do a big thrustto Berlin, they wanted to do a broad
advance across Germany. AndStalin exploited this because he,
he knew that Berlin would bethe site of an epic battle and exploited
that and tried to, you know,pretend that he wasn't too bothered
about Berlin. And Rooseveltkind of fell for it. And one way
(03:46):
or the other, what it meantwas the, you know, the Nazis had
their epic last stand inBerlin with the Russians. The Russians
got to Berlin and then, youknow, could kind of set the terms
of how that would end.
Are you saying that maybe FDRthought that the Nazis would think
rationally and that maybe theNazis weren't thinking rationally
(04:06):
and they ended up with anunintended consequence?
You've rightly detected wherewe're going. Okay, so for the Nazis
and the Soviets, Berlin hadthis symbolism where they kind of
got that that would be thefinal last stand. This is my reading
here. Hitler, I think by 1945,seems like he was what we might nowadays
(04:28):
call a doomerist. You know, heknew it was all coming to an end.
He wanted there to be thiskind of Wagnerian epic. Gotterdammerung.
Berlin was this sort of mythiccentre of the Reich. You might have
heard of the Nero Decree,which was like, well, if, if, if
the Nazis are going to begone, we just destroy all of Germany,
they're not good enough forus, etc. And, and Lenin was supposed
(04:51):
to have said, there's noevidence that he said this, but I
think it was believed thatLenin said, he who controls Berlin
controls Germany and whocontrols Germany, controls Europe.
So there's this kind ofsymbolic value that I think we underestimated
in the West. We thought, look,the, the Germans are going to want
to fight on. They're not goingto just want to die for no reason.
So they will do the sensible.Didn't they did from our point of
(05:13):
view, a silly thing. AndStephen Ambrose said this must rank
as one of the worstintelligence reports of all time.
That is the report that theGermans were going to move to the
Alpenfestung. But no one knewthat. In the March of 1945, a few
even suspected that that wouldhappen. Even Churchill was afraid
(05:35):
of these developments, thatis, the developments that the Nazis
would choose to effectivelydie in Berlin and Hitler would choose
to die in Berlin instead ofgoing, you know, going and surviving
somewhere. So, anyway, in somesense, we didn't anticipate how irrational
Hitler would be. I think weexpected he would do the sensible
thing, fight on in Bavaria.And actually, this is quite a common
(05:57):
pattern. When we're looking atwhat foreign governments will do
and trying to predict whatforeign governments will do, we often
just assume they will dosomething sensible. And so before
the invasion of Ukraine, therewere quite a lot of pundits who said,
putin's threats is just a loadof saber rattling. Putin's going
to threaten invading, but he'dbe mad to do it. Russia is going
(06:19):
to be so much worse off ifthey do that. He'll never do that.
And of course, he did. Morerecently, Trump's attack on Iran
4D chess, which I don't thinkany analyst could see a way that
there would be an end gamewhere the US kind of straightforwardly
got whatever it wanted out ofthis. You know, it's one of those.
(06:41):
Just one of those things. Wethink. Well, we. What? How can this
possibly make sense? Not, youknow, on your own terms, how can
this make sense? How can thisgive you something that you want?
So I think basically, we wantto talk about what irrational. What
it means to do things that arekind of irrational, that are against
your interests and. Butactually, perhaps more importantly,
(07:05):
for our purposes, what do youdo when you're facing an adversary
who's like that?
Right.
How do you manage fightingagainst someone who. How do you deter
someone or coerce them? How doyou make them surrender or concede
to your demands when theyaren't even going to do things that
are in their own interest? Soit turns out that's quite a big problem,
(07:28):
I think. Yeah.
I mean, how can you predictirrationality, let's say. Yeah, it
might be one way to put it aswell. And presumably foreign ministries,
diplomats, security, you know,ministries of defence, this is what
they spend a lot of timethinking about, I would have thought,
and I would imagine that themodels that they have, there must
be an irrationality factor, I guess.
I think, I think personally inmy experience, we just, we underestimate
(07:50):
it or at least we don't see itcoming. I think there's a tendency
to still think Putin's saberrattling over Ukraine. It's about
the domestic audience, it'sabout, you know, looking strong,
it's about deterring the West.There's some reason for it. I think
there's a lot of analysis ofDonald Trump which tries to impute
a bunch of reasons for hisbehavior which may just not exist.
(08:13):
It's a common intelligencefailure, isn't it? It goes hand in
hand with assuming that theenemy knows more than they, they
know.
Yeah.
Okay, so how are we settingthis up? Where do we go from that?
We've sort of framed the issueand how are we going to go about
having a. So worrying away at this?
How are we going to fix theproblem of irrationality?
How are we going to fix theproblem of irrationality?
(08:33):
Easy.
Right?
How long have we got? We'vegot about another 20, 30 minutes.
Yeah, you got about 20 minutesor so.
Okay. No problems.
Well, what do we do for thelast 10 minutes?
I propose on the basis of theAnna Karenina principle, which is
that, you know, there's allkinds of ways that decisions can
go wrong, is let's start byjust saying, well what does it mean
when you behave rationally?And then we can start looking at
(08:56):
the failure modes and thinkabout how we might fix them. Okay,
sounds sensible.
Sounds very sensible.
Cool. Okay, so to make arational decision, right? And this
is just very bog standarddecision theory. If you want to make
a rational decision, you'vegot to start with our old friend
the utility function.
Oh, brilliant.
Right. That basically tellsyou of all the possible states of
(09:17):
the world, how much you likethem. All in order says this is my
absolute favourite one andthis one I would hate.
It's about what you want, right?
This is just what you want. Itdoesn't care what you can have or
anything, it just says howmuch you want things. Because we're
going to worry about how weget them later. But right now we
need to have some preferenceover the states of the world. Then
(09:39):
you have some set of beliefsabout what the state of the world
is like now. So you've gotsome sense of what is true now. And
now that's, you know, that'snot necessarily straightforward to
get that right. And a lot ofthe mistakes that we will talk about
come from people under youKnow, misestimating where they are
now and then. But then finallyyou've got to have a belief about
(10:01):
your actions, about how youractions affect the state of the world.
And once you've got thosethree things, you can in theory now
just make the optimaldecision. You just look at all your
actions and you find out whatstate of the world they give you
and you go, well, I'll pickthe top one.
Simp.
Easy rationality in anutshell. Yeah, okay, brilliant.
Makes sense.
So all you have to do that andyou will be sorted, all your problems
(10:25):
will disappear.
Yeah, this is going to come inhandy for me because I sometimes
make mistakes about stuff,make bad decisions.
So we can talk about when youmake bad decisions, which thing might
be going wrong. Yeah, yeah,yeah, yeah. So I've actually got
five common failure modes.
Okay, cool.
And we can use that then maybeto think about, well, how do we.
How do we diagnose that? Howdo we see it coming? How do we make
(10:48):
sure we don't fall prey tothat? But also, you know, how do
we. How do we deal withsomeone else who's behaving like
that? Got it. The first one isactually not even quite irrationality
or a failure mode. It's justsomething we need to introduce, which
is weird. Utility functions.
Okay, go on.
Well, for one thing, Hitler,for example, he wanted there to be
(11:09):
a thousand year Reich, right.Which was governed by Nazi doctrine.
So he knew what he wanted.
He knew what he wanted. And,but that, I think that's a bit of
a weird thing to want. I mean,I don't. It doesn't sound like that
much fun to me, to be honest.And there's. But there's all like,
I suppose less significantly,there are people who want to like
do a deca man ultra triathlon.I mean, like that. Again, I wouldn't
(11:36):
want to do that. But someonewho dedicates their life to decide
doing that might still bebehaving rationally. Right. It might
just be. It's in the serviceof something which I think is weird.
Someone who wants to make amassive matchstick model of Chartres
Cathedral or spend their lifeproving Fermat's last theorem.
Or Hume trying to scratch his finger.
Well, exactly. I mean, that'sthe thing. It's like actually you
(11:59):
can kind of want anything you want.
Yeah, I want some wings.Right. That fix to me and.
Yeah, right. And that might beyour big overriding dreams. You're
willing to make much biggersacrifices for those things than,
you know, we you or I'm PeterOr I might think was a sensible degree
of effort.
To put even more tactically inthe Hitler case we're thinking about
(12:26):
is that if he retreats to themountains, that's basically giving
up. They're saying we aregiving up on this dream. Whereas
if he stays in Berlin, even,even if there's a remote chance,
there's still more of a chancethat there might be some radical
turnaround.
Yeah. So it's exactly. Howeversmall it is. Surviving, surviving
(12:47):
in Bavaria, but without yourThousand Year Reich, it's no life
at all if you're here though.
Yeah.
So survival is not actually asimportant as some chance of rescuing
the Thousand Year Reich. Yeah.I mean, there's people like, you
know, Thich Quang Duc, who,who set himself on fire to protest
about the persecution ofBuddhists by the Diem government
(13:09):
in Vietnam. You know, I mean,we all want Buddhists not to be oppressed,
but most of us wouldn'tconsider that that's a very high
price to pay to raiseawareness of something or, you know,
Japanese troops in World WarII refusing to surrender because
honor is more important tothem than personal survival.
Sure.
So just really, just to say,look, the thing is that, yeah, sometimes
(13:32):
people want really weirdthings much more. You or I might
want them.
Yeah.
Okay, so that's like weirdutility functions, that's sort of
thing one then. But the nextone, which I think is probably just
as common, I suspect might bemore common, is actually just wanting
the wrong thing.
But they're not the same then.
They're different.
Go on.
Well, wanting the wrong thingis thinking that some state of the
(13:54):
world will give you utility.But it doesn't. Okay, classic example
might be pursuing fame andwealth. Because you might for some
reason think, once I've gotthat fame and wealth nailed, I'll
be happy. Well, you won't.I've got some bad news. You won't,
Fraser, because wherever yougo, there you are very wise, I think.
You know, in general, peopleoverestimate how good, good things
(14:17):
are and they overestimate howbad, bad things are. They overestimate
things that they have now thatpeople are loss averse, you know,
and people forget abouthedonic adaptation. You know, it
turns out that when you haveyour massive telly, pretty soon you.
It's actually you don't reallyfeel much better off than when you
had a small telly.
(14:38):
You get used to it.
You get used to it, but alsoyou'll be fine.
But I know you like to talk inpersonal terms. I prefer to do this
in Strategic geographicalstuff. Right. But like, it's like
wanting to, you know, land inthe Dardanelles so that you can then
capture Constantinople, whichmeans that's how you're going to
end the First World War.
Right. That's not necessarilythe same thing. Is that not the thing,
(15:01):
let's say. Well, well, no,because wanting to end the First
World War is the thing thatthey want.
That's the overriding thing.
Yeah. And actually that is infact what you know, we wanted. Yeah,
yeah, yeah. It's not like wewere deluded. We didn't think, oh
well, when we win the FirstWorld War, you know, that'll be great.
And it turned out we won theFirst World War and it wasn't. It
was rubbish.
Right.
That's not what this is. Thatwould be. We're coming onto this.
(15:24):
It would be more along thelines of thinking an action will
lead to an outcome and itdoesn't. This is basically being
wrong about your utilityfunction. So, you know, it's, it's
the, the issue about, about asI said, like thinking that you want
something to happen, but whenit does happen, it turns out it wasn't
as good as you thought. Yep.Then we have. Being wrong about.
I find. I find a little. Ifind it a little difficult to differentiate
(15:46):
between the two.
Yeah.
Be able to spot the differenceeven retrospectively between having
a weird utility function. Iwanting the right thing the wrong
way, but. And wanting thewrong thing. I think you might, you
might sort of rationalize itpost hoc quite easily or you might,
(16:08):
you might find just that it'sjust a very difficult one. Pick how
people's state of mind was inany given decision. So. Well, I'm
not, I'm not saying thatthey're necessarily. They're bad
distinctions, but I'm sayingit's. They might be moot because.
Is very difficult to apply.
Well, there is a bigdifference which I guess we'll come
on to when we talk about howyou manage it, which is I might be
(16:29):
persuadable that this thingI'm trying to do won't actually make
me happy. And I think that'sperhaps part of getting old and becoming
wiser is starting to spotthose kinds of things. But there
are some things which, no, Iactually genuinely do want and they
would make me happy. And Ithink there is a difference there
in terms of how you mightrespond to.
(16:50):
I suppose, if you can. Isuppose what it does help is inform
the pre decision analysis sothat you can be more honest with
yourself.
Yeah.
And you can Examine yourutility function knowing that these
are two potential failuremodes that are distinct.
Right? Yeah. And trying toseparate them out.
Yeah.
So that just out of interest,is this your taxonomy?
(17:12):
Kind of, yeah. I mean it'sstill all based on standard decision
theory, but I think I tried tosort of boil it down. Five main failure
modes. You could spin them outby, you know, having, well, your
beliefs are correct but yourbeliefs about your beliefs are wrong
and that kind of thing. But Ithink these more or less capture,
I think most things that gowrong. It's one of these five things.
(17:32):
So the thing number three isbeing wrong about how things are.
So that is you have justmisappreciated the situation. You're
deluded. I'm pretty. Hitlerprobably had a bit of this going
on. Probably thought theWehrmacht was in much better shape
than it was, you know. Butalso if you. Hallucinations, propaganda,
false memories, conspiracytheories might all might all make
(17:55):
you think that the state ofthe world is different to how it
is. And I guess, you know, alot of when you have something like
a war, well, both sides can'tbe right, that they're going to win.
Right. So I mean someone mustbe misunderstanding their strength
more or less. So there's a lotof well studied cognitive biases
about simply being wrong aboutthings. But I mean here again, it's
(18:17):
not necessarily the case thatyou're being irrational all because
you can be justified. Youmight be justified informing that
your incorrect belief. Butanyway, so what I'm saying is you
could be wrong but for theright reasons kind of thing. So that's
being wrong about the state ofthe world. Then we have number four,
which is being wrong aboutwhat works. So this is just you getting
(18:39):
your tactics wrong. So this isincorrect causal beliefs. You think
a particular course of actionwill get you a particular thing and
it doesn't, it doesn't work.But so that's sort of. If you've
got bad models of the systemor you've oversimplified it, or you've
missed out some key variablesor you know, you're kind of doing
magical rituals, you've doingfailures of imagination, you fail
(19:01):
to think of the thing thatwould work. So you're kind of fighting
the last war. I think this isa very common cause of bad policy,
is just pursuing courses ofaction that don't work.
Often repeated as well. Yeah,you see, you see the same bad policies
to do with things like sort oforganizational level, like management
(19:21):
theory, bad practices gettingrepeated over and over, even though
there's literature saying it'snot a good idea doesn't work that
way. Like yeah, performancereviews and things. So they're not.
The evidence for them actuallybeing any good is weak. But it's
still something thatmanagement people think they need
to do or should do.
It is almost magical rituals.
Yeah.
It is like this is what theydo. So we do this, this is what management
people do.
(19:42):
And the other thing likepolitical things like drug prohibition
and certain sanctions and.
Communism because it justhasn't been tried,.
Hasn't been done properly.Yeah, yeah. I mean it's going to
work. They persist. Theypersist and they, and they, and often
they're kind of. They comefrom a sort of conservative oversimplification
of how the world works. Butthe evidence is clear that they don't
(20:05):
work. You know a good policyresearch will say this has been.
There's loads of naturalexperiments already on this, we don't
need to try it.
Well, Western medicine forhundreds of years did things over
and over again that didn'twork. So yeah, I mean you see this
a lot.
Classic fighting the last war.
Yeah. Okay. So yeah. And againthe last category, good old fashioned
(20:26):
just being dumb. Just, justit's too hard to work out what to
do.
Yeah.
So you vibe it, you YOLO it.
Yeah, yeah.
And, and lo and behold itturns out you haven't made the optimal
decision. So. So there you go.What do you reckon? What do you reckon
to my five part taxonomy of irrationality?
I like it, I like it. I meanjust that last bit, it just reminds
(20:49):
me of talking to some climatechange deniers and what I realized
quite quickly is they couldn'tbother be bothered.
Yeah, well let's diagnose thatso that. What are they? They're what
are they? What are they? Ifyou like, what kind of action would
they recommend? What would bethe action that they would recommend
where we could say, well I cansee where this has gone.
(21:10):
Wrong that they wouldrecommend. So I don't understand.
Well, well it's an incorrectbelief is one thing, but presumably
that belief informs an actionsomewhere. You know, presumably they
have a policy in mind or theythink the government should stop
doing something.
Yeah, they just think kind ofinaction actually. Or like no, this
is silly, it needs to stop allthis stuff.
(21:31):
Yeah.
Okay.
Okay. So I mean I woulddiagnose that as being wrong about
the state of the world.
Okay.
Or that, you know.
Well it is, but I think I do,you know what, I do like this taxonomy,
but it's a little bit messierthan and more interconnected than
one might imagine, I wouldsay. So, for example. Yeah. I think
in this case, let's sayclimate change is a thing.
(21:52):
And they said. They deny thatthat's true. So they might say there
is. There's no. The evidenceisn't true. Right. The science.
Correct.
Yeah.
And so what you've. So you cansay, well, they've got the state
of things wrong. But I wouldsay that the reason why they've got
the state of things wrong isthey're not thinking it through very
well, which I think is beingdumb, let's say. So they're all kind
of mixed up to bed togetherand a bit like.
(22:13):
I mean, being dumb will helpyou with all the other ones as well.
You'll def. That will feedthrough. Yeah. Into being wrong about
all kinds of other stuff.
But it's a bit like alsodivisions of subdivisions. Going
back to this point when I wastalking about the Dardanelles and
you saw. No, actually thatthis would go back to point one,
but it's kind of a smallerversion subdivision of, you know,
because it was point one,which was weird utility function,
(22:34):
I think. And I was talkingabout wanting the wrong thing, but.
But anyway, I mean, in thisterms of what I would say they would
need to do to fix this, whichis they need to have the right tools.
I could see that they justcouldn't be bothered to think it
through. And it was much more.It was more pleasing to the more
reason.
Willful ignorance.
Yeah, it's kind of like, youknow, it just. It didn't fit their
world vision.
But anyway, computational constraints.
(22:55):
Computational constraints.
Kindly summarize it as that.
And then the other final thingI would say, and then I want to bring
in Peter, is it reminds me, Imean, I don't know much about the
law, but it's my understandingthat the law. I think in principle,
the idea is that it tries toapply something precise and put in
sort of, you know,definitions, let's say, and draw
(23:17):
lines on what is a naturallymessy world. And the law recognizes
this, but this is what ittries to do. Okay. And that feels
like this in reverse becauseyou. You might go, right, how can
we make some good decisions?And let's, you know, let's. Let's
write some stuff down.
Are we suggesting we mightturn this into a law where it would
become a criminal offense tobe dumb?
Well, I was.
(23:37):
I would be. I would bepotentially quite a fan of that.
Yeah.
I mean, I'm not sure if I.
Would,.
But yeah, it's like, so it'skind of almost the reverse. And so
you're trying to map thingsout but recognizing that, hey, it
is going to get messy becauseit's dealing with stuff like why
people don't. Why do peopleget all this stuff wrong and do these
silly things, let's say. Sowe've set out rational decisions,
(24:00):
but irrational decisions. Andyou've come, you put in place this
taxonomy of rationality,irrationality rather. Where do we
go from here? What's next? Areyou coming in, Peter?
Yeah, I mean, I do like theframework. I think it. Having a framework
before the decision isprobably more useful than after the
decision. I find it verydifficult to necessarily put historical
(24:21):
examples into any one of thesebuckets, I think, but it's useful
as an informative frameworkfor analyzing those. You can say,
well, it's probably a bit ofthis, a bit of this, a bit of this.
I find it difficult todistinguish retrospectively between,
as I said, between 1 and 2,but also between 5 and 4 and 3. So
(24:42):
how do you know what, youknow, was the decision? Was it, you
know, Dom is doing quite a lotof work here, right? So was the decision.
Was it, Was it what. What wentwrong? Was it a lack of cognitive
capacity? Was it, Were theyover. Was a cognitive capacity overloaded?
Was it, Were they subject tocognitive failure such as various
(25:06):
biases, you know, but it'salso like, was it deliberately lazy?
Like in your example of thekind of the climate deniers, maybe
5 needs splitting out asdifferent kind of subcategories.
And 5 isn't really a thingthat is on its own. It's more like
a thing that would occuracross all of the other ones, a causal
(25:26):
factor for the other ones. So,yeah, I like it as a framework, but
I think it needs, it could dowith tidying up.
Yeah, I think you did well,Nick. And you, you know, you've started
it, you know, you started theconversation, got the ball rolling.
We've got the first draft ofthe Rationality Act 2027. Yeah. Which
is going to go to Parliamentnext year. Yeah, okay, good. But
(25:48):
I mean, so how do we deal withit then? Well, this is exactly because
I have this feeling that ifyou. A lot, in fact, a lot of debates
are about applying the wrongtool to the. To or at least trying
to fix a problem which isn'tthe real problem. By which I mean,
you know, we. I think I, I seea lot of people trying to convince
(26:11):
someone of maybe a factualerror where in fact, you know, the
issue is, well, that personhas a You know, actually just has
a weird utility function. Soyou're not going to be able to persuade
them out of wanting somethingby telling them other stuff about
it. Do you know what I mean?Like, let's say, you know, someone
who really loves exercise andthey love running and they just really
(26:34):
enjoy it and you say to them,well, you're going to get arthritis
if you keep running so much.Well, the thing is that they might
know that they might not care.And similar to, you know, advice
about giving up smoking. Oh,do you know it's bad for you? Yeah,
that is not why I do it. I'mnot operating under a delusion that
it's good for me, but you knowwhat I mean? Like, like a lot of,
(26:55):
a lot of the way that peopleapproach think seeing someone who
is behaving irrationally and alot of how we try to fix that is
often just attacking the wrongbit of this.
Yeah, it's like kind of, it ispartly who decides what's right.
Inverted commas, what's thebest thing you, you can't help when
(27:17):
you're judging somebody else'schoices. You are beholden to your
own values. Your valuesdiffer. It might be that the chainsmoker
just really does value theshort term and doesn't want to get
old and so has already made ainternally rational decision that
they will, they will die early.
Right.
But also I was think, what Iwas thinking about is when would
(27:40):
we, as the voice of reason,want to intervene? Okay. And just
thinking about that, I'm justthinking about how we use this, right?
Because this model feelspretty handy for governments, feels
pretty handy for corporationsand like every time we want them
to use this. But also I wasthinking about, you know, democracy
(28:01):
and you know, when you vote ina leader who, God forbid, might do
these irrational decisions andhow do we rationally, how do we make
it so that we, the electorate,make a rational decision about getting
someone rational in power?
Well, I find it veryfrustrating. I mean, it feels to
me that when you get politicaldiscussions, when you get political
debates, people munge togetherall of this stuff. They munch. It's
(28:25):
a mixture of like things thatwe want on one hand and things that
we think will work on theother hand. And they're often just
all squished up together. And,and, and it's, and it's, you know,
so for example, someone whoreally wants, for example, there
to be much more equality isprobably going to support some kind
(28:46):
of forcible redistribution,higher taxes and so on. Well, they
are two different Things youcan want. You can want there to be
more equality, but alsopotentially want there to be, you
know, to do that somehowthrough a liberal market, you know,
that you don't. And yet. Butit's always the same sort of. You
(29:07):
get these. And you'll getdiscussions that. That constantly
dance around this question,well, are we agreed on what we're
trying to achieve but disagreeon how to get there, or do we. Or
do we actually disagree onwhat we're trying to achieve in the
first place? And I said justto see a lot of this and it's frustrating
to watch.
I mean, a good friend of minewho actually listens to this podcast,
(29:27):
and he's American, but he hada proper fallout, maybe not friends
again with a fellow American.
Oh, yeah.
And I would say they're bothon the. They're both on the liberal
sort of spectrum of things.And what they fell out over was the
recent incursion or bombing,whatever you want to call it, of
Iran by the United States andessentially the. Not my mate, the
(29:52):
other guy was angry with mymate for not supporting the strike
or strikes and the reasonbeing that Iran is a horrible dictatorship
or blah, blah, blah, all thatkind of stuff. And so you call yourself
a liberal, then you should besupporting this because it's trying
to take down a horribleregime. Regime. And my mate, who
(30:12):
I think would sit here quitenicely with us, was saying, yeah,
it is a horrible regime, butjust because you don't like something
doesn't mean you have themeans to. You know, there's many
other reasons why you mightnot go ahead and do this, but just
doesn't mean you can do it. Imean, physically is. You're not.
It might not be possible.
Yeah, I think that's a verygood example. I see that a lot. You
know, it's like, oh, you don'tsupport this policy. You must secretly
(30:34):
support terrorists. Whereas itmay just be a disagreement about
the efficacy of the policy.Yeah. You know, and in that case,
it's like, well, what? No one.No one likes the Iranian regime,
but is this going to actuallyhelp? Is it going to work or is it
going to make them stronger? Imean, you know, you might. You might
hate the Iranian regime, butstill think it's not going to help
if we bomb them.
(30:55):
So, yeah, so we're comingclose to needing to wrap up, but
we're talking about how, youknow, how do you use this stuff or
how do you react when you comeacross this irrationality? Peter,
I think you've got a couple ofIdeas around a couple of these, is
that right?
Yeah, well, I think, I meanbroadly the first two, wanting the
wrong thing and having a weirdutility function are probably the
(31:18):
harder two to. To solve.
They can be quite fundamental, those.
Yeah. Fundamentally. Hell, thereason I say that is because being
wrong about the world, beingwrong about how the world works,
three and four and being dumb,they are largely kind of information
availability. Computation availability.
(31:40):
Yeah. Kind of persuasion andeducation basically.
Yeah. So 3 and 4 could besolved by just having more information
and 5 can be solved by havingmore analysts, having better analysts
or thinking more about whatyou're doing. So they kind of, they
fit.
I mean it's still notnecessarily possible to do. I mean
you think about someone who'sindoctrinated into a cult or something,
(32:02):
you know, they just, they.They're immune to you persuading
them it's just not going towork. And I guess, you know, so,
so there is to something. Iwould imagine your climate change
deniers are in a similar boat,you know that it's just there isn't
some things you can say thatwill persuade them.
Yeah.
So it doesn't mean it can bedone, but I know what you mean. Like
it feels like. Well, it'sstill, there's, there is a common
(32:23):
battleground which is. We cantalk about evidence, but with the
first two. Yeah, it's a bit ofa different story.
This question of how to wantthe right thing is harder than how
to find out about how theworld works. And yeah, a useful framework
is, is Harry Frankfurt'ssecond order desires framework, which
(32:44):
is where the first orderdesires. You see a cake, you say
I want to eat that cake. Butyou have a sort of second order desire
is where you. I want not toeat that cake. So it's understood,
knowing that you have this inthe moment when you're making the
decision, know that there arethese sort of second order desires
that can be violated, whichis, I think you can think of it as
(33:07):
like past you, future you.What would future you want to do?
You would. Future you wouldrather you hadn't eaten that cake.
So that's kind of your secondorder desire. And a way, a sort of
mechanism for doing that isperhaps thinking at the moment. It's
like, well, what does, whatwould. Tomorrow's me say to me about
this decision? Would heactually support it or not?
(33:30):
Say who you. How have youtraveled in time? What. What's going
on? Am I going mad? There'svoices in my head. Sorry, go on.
Mad. That's all about Sort ofa meta level understanding of what
you as your actual desiresare. It's not like not just listening
to the, the, the, the, the.Your brain stem desires about eating
the cake. It's like what,what, what is my higher function,
(33:51):
the ultimate desire? And youcan, on a personal level, you can
sort of, you can, you can helpyourself with this sort of thing
by being explicit about whatyour values actually are and maintaining
a sort of a crib sheet of whatyou, what you value in the world
and then basing decisions,informal basic decisions, but informing
decisions based on thosehigher level, non incidental goals.
(34:15):
Yeah, this feels likehappiness versus pleasure.
But.
Yeah, sorry, go on. Yeah,yeah, you're quite right.
Yeah, yeah. And the anotherthing is I think a lot of, a lot
of these sort of wanting thewrong things are caused by what you
could call the adaptivepreference trap. Where I think Nick
alluded to it earlier whenhe's talking about policies where
(34:38):
the debate about which policyis correct is informed by which policy
is feasible. Quite to quite agreat degree. So that you can think
of the. I think it's Aesop'sfable, the sour grapes. Yeah, the
fox desert. The fox sees somegrapes up in the tree and he sort
of initially goes, oh, theylook like good grapes, but then decides
(34:59):
that he doesn't want them andthey're probably sour because he
can't have them. Whereasactually maybe that's a failure of
imagination about imagininghow that policy could come in to
be. So rather than satisficingfor a weaker policy, maybe actually
pursuing the stronger policies,.
You get off his arse and builda ladder or something.
Yeah, yeah. Or go, you know,sort of team up with a bird or something.
(35:23):
I don't know, something thathappens in Aesop's favor.
This is what the world needs.The world needs to know about this
stuff.
We should tell Keir Starmer.
Yeah, Fox Bird basedsolutions. Yeah, yeah, yes.
I mean what that looks like iswhen somebody appears to actually
(35:43):
want something that could be abad outcome, is they in reflection?
They probably wouldn't.
A couple of things. But alsothere's metrics as well, which if
you've got the right thingthat you want to do and then you
might be able to measure that.Yeah, we did that or we didn't.
Right.
But there might be vested in.You might not want to know whether
(36:05):
something worked out or not orhow do you know it went south? How
do you know it went wrong?
Well, this is why I thinkthere's a lot of deliberate vagueness
in government policy thatwe'll say things like. Ministers
will say things like, we wantstronger foundations for a better
Britain. And if you sayprecisely what unemployment rate
are you going to be happywith, then they hate being pinned
(36:28):
down like that because at somepoint they can be called to account
and someone, someone can say,well, that policy you did didn't
work. Right. And it's rightthere in black and white. It's much
easier to say, well, we. We'reall about prosperity directions.
And, and, you know, how do weknow if this policy worked? Well,
we don't really, because wedidn't say what it is we're trying
to achieve. So it's mucheasier to do that. It's much easier
(36:49):
to live your life being vagueabout what it is you want so that
you can't say, oh, this, thisthing I did didn't work.
Yeah. Which is kind of weirdbecause I just feel a lot of education
we have in our lives, youknow, until 21 or whatever, is about,
is exactly the opposite ofthat, which is clarity and analysis
and so on.
Okay, so very briefly, though.
(37:09):
Yeah, go on.
I think it's worth talkingabout when irrationality is actually
beneficial.
Yeah, this is the realproblem. Yeah, yeah.
And we've, yeah, we've alludedto it, like being. Appearing to be
vague is kind of a form ofthis. But a good example of this
is the sort of mutuallyassured destruction situation and
having a, Having a credible deterrent.
(37:31):
Sounds a bit mad to me, though.
Yeah. So it's like being,Being known. Like if you're in a.
If you're locked in conflict,being known to be a bit random, a
bit irrational, like beingout, you know, not responding in
ways that your enemy expectsyou to can be quite beneficial because
they, they don't. It givesthem. No, it gives them less of a
(37:53):
basis for planning againstyou. Another example is during negotiations.
Stubbornness and not acting inyour own interest can actually be
beneficial because it givesyou more freedom in the negotiation.
You sort of get hung up onminor points that you don't actually
care about too much and thenuse those as bargaining chips later
on when you get to the stuffyou do care about.
Yeah. I mean, literally.There's a famous game theory example,
(38:16):
I think, from evolutionarygame theory. I think it's called
stag and dove or something.But you can be. The problem is that
if you're rational, you mightback down when someone challenges
you over your territory orsomething. It might be rational to
do that because you avoid afight. But then, of course, all someone
has to do is step to you andyou run off and you're worse off
(38:38):
because that person's justgrabbed your territory. It's better
to irrationally defend yourterritory, even if you've got a chance
of being killed, because thenyou're less likely to have to do
that because people aredeterred by it. So this idea of having
irrational desires likeHitler, irrationally wanting to defend
(38:58):
the Third Reich rather thanjust going into hiding and living
a nice life pretending to be afarmer or something, you know, he's
got all this pride andloyalty. You think of those Japanese
soldiers who'd rather die thansurrender and, you know, but actually
what a big deterrent that wasto us planners and things. You know,
knowing that these. They justhad a. Put a vastly bigger store
(39:22):
on something that we wouldconsider to be a value you would
sacrifice. You'd go, well,yes, I do kind of care about my honor,
but I'm willing to swallowthat a bit because I'd rather just
surrender and have some hot soup.
Yeah.
And they didn't. Yeah, theydidn't think that, you know, and
so. Yeah, so. And so we havethis problem where being irrational
sometimes works.
Yeah.
(39:42):
And if that's true, then it's.It suggests that the optimal way
to be is a bit irrational.
Yeah. That said, though,these. All these examples seem to
me to be forms of performativeirrationality rather than genuine
irrationality.
Yeah. But then the problem is,Peter, if you're reality distinguish.
Well, if your irrationality isonly performative and people know
(40:04):
that, then they will exploitit. They'll know that you're only
pretending to be.
Yes.
You've got to be only works ifyou actually are irrational.
You got to be consistent.
Well, then the only way to dothat is to actually be irrational.
That's the problem. Which iswhy I think we've evolved all of
these, you know, which is whywe end up with. With the invasion
of Ukraine and the SecondWorld War and Donald Trump's attack
on Iran. I mean, it's like.Well, actually, unfortunately, it
(40:28):
sometimes pays to beirrational. I will, however, say
I don't think it pays off inthe long run. I think the examples
of when it goes wrong vastlyoutnumber the examples of when it
goes right.
But also about theconsequences and who pays those consequences.
Consequences. All right. Ithink that's one of the things as
well. Do you know what?
I think if, like, if Hitlerhad been sensible, if he'd said,
(40:51):
look, you know, actuallythings are going a bit wrong, I'll
settle for that.
Yeah.
Or at Least just sort of said,well, I tell you what, let's not
invade the Soviet Union. Let'sjust be happy with what we've got.
We'll make a go of it and, youknow, we're gonna live out your days
as a nice sort of relativelysuccessful big country. But no, he
(41:12):
just had to go too far.
Would. You know what so muchof. I've quite enjoyed this, actually,
this last half hour or so,because a lot of the time we go at
a subject and we. Let's faceit, nine times out of ten, we fix
it. We wrap it all up. Right.Yeah, you know, this one, not so
much. It's quite messy and itgoes into so many other things.
Well, the crooked timber of humanity.
(41:33):
There we go. And it. But somany. So much of what we've been
talking about reminds me of somany other episodes that we've done.
So we definitely did one onFuture Self and we've done many episodes.
But right at the end there,what you were talking about reminds
me of the episode which we didabout talking to animals, which is,
hey, if only Hitler could havebeen a bit more, you know, sensible
(41:54):
about this. Well, then thatwould not be, you know, the tenants
of, you know, NationalSocialism would. It doesn't kind
of fit that. And it's a bitlike. Which French philosopher. Was
it Sartre or was it the otherbloke, I don't know, who talks about.
The two French philosopherswho talked about,.
You know, if you could talk toa tiger. Well, actually, you're not
talking.
(42:15):
Yeah. If a line could speak,we could not understand. There we
go.
Tiger's line. Germans, French,whatever. But it's that kind of thing
that unfortunately is wrappedup in being a Nazi.
Yeah.
Is there going to be a bit.
I agree, I. I think it's. It'svery. That's. And that can be a bit
headstrong. Well, that comesthrough very strongly from the book.
In fact, there's a passagenear the end.
What's the book again?
Anthony Beaver, Berlin passagenear the end, which I thought was
(42:37):
really interesting, where hesays that the. Just that sadly that
a lot of these Nazicommanders, you know, when even after
they were captured, not eventhe senior ones didn't really have
any remorse for what they didand that their criticisms of what
had gone wrong were based onthat they didn't work. So they said
we shouldn't have invaded theSoviet Union, not because it was
(42:58):
the wrong thing to do, butbecause it turns out we couldn't
actually won and the Sovietswere stronger than we thought, you
know, we shouldn't have. Weshouldn't have attacked France when
we did, you know, because it.Because then that turned the world
against us, not because it wasthe wrong thing to do, you know,
we shouldn't have persecutedthe Jews because it turned international
opinion against us. Yeah.
It turned out to be a bigger,harder problem.
(43:20):
Yeah, exactly. And. And I. Idon't know. I mean, as you say, it's
like. Well, somehow being aNazi and doing stupid things at the
same time appear to go hand inhand. Yeah, Yeah.
I mean, it is. It is prefacedpretty. Pretty potty ideology, really.
So, yeah, it's.
(43:42):
Yeah, you heard it there.
Condemned by Peter Coghill.Nazism, potty. All right, we'll stop
there. You've been listeningto the Cognitive Engineering Podcast
brought to you by AlephInsights and produced by me, Fraser
McGruer. If you haven'talready, please like and subscribe.
We try to release an episodeevery week or two. If there are any
topics you'd like us to cover,please email us at podcast@lephinsights.com
(44:04):
thanks, as always, forlistening. Until next time, goodbye.
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Betrayal Weekly
Betrayal Weekly is back for a new season. Every Thursday, Betrayal Weekly shares first-hand accounts of broken trust, shocking deceptions, and the trail of destruction they leave behind. Hosted by Andrea Gunning, this weekly ongoing series digs into real-life stories of betrayal and the aftermath. From stories of double lives to dark discoveries, these are cautionary tales and accounts of resilience against all odds. From the producers of the critically acclaimed Betrayal series, Betrayal Weekly drops new episodes every Thursday. If you would like to share your story, you can reach out to the Betrayal Team by emailing them at betrayalpod@gmail.com and follow us on Instagram at @betrayalpod and @glasspodcasts. Please join our Substack for additional exclusive content, curated book recommendations, and community discussions. Sign up FREE by clicking this link Beyond Betrayal Substack. Join our community dedicated to truth, resilience, and healing. Your voice matters! Be a part of our Betrayal journey on Substack.