Making fools of fools

In one of my previous posts You might have read that irrational thinking is not so badly stupid as it looks like. In current post I will try to show You how easy it is to make it look even dumber.

Irrational thinking works on automatic rules

Previously I did compare rational, conscious thinking to rule based machine learning. I also placed opposite to it the “geometric” systems like neural networks. I will still hold onto that.

What is the problem with “geometric” neural network like thinking?

I suppose that it is the fact, that such a methodology do create “clustering rules” from everything what is around it and later uses them to make a choice. Even facts which, using cold, machine rationality, have nothing to do with the decision to be made are built into them. This type of learning has no ability to distinguish important observations from things which just did happen. For an example, if every time when You were getting hit in a buttock by Your parent a neighbors dog was barking this barking would be get into Your “clustering rule”. Next time You will hear dog barking You will automatically look behind You to check if to cover Your ass.

Of course this is not that simple, but if observation A do frequently happen right before observation B then a rule which will say that A is the cause of B will be built in Your irrational mind.

Is that bad?

No. It is a very efficient way of learning and a good, reasonable method of thinking. Fast, inexpensive and usually accurate enough.

Providing we are aware how does it work.

Local observation == good local decision

Now comes the tricky part.

The set of “clustering rules” You have in Your own mind are built from Your experience. It may be direct experience or in-direct from tells, stories, books end etc. Regardless of how You gathered them they bind together two things:

• Your entire experience and;
• Your entire current input observations.

What does it mean?

That even if You are going to say something about pregnancy and abortion the weather behind the window do take a part in decision making process.

Silly but true. The irrational, “geometric” process of thinking is, what You call it… “holistic”? Taking in account everything. This is good and fast process and is in fact quite rational. A good weather indicates good chances for having food and warm shelter for kids so it is natural to be more inclined for having them than during an ice storm.

There is however one case in which this method of thinking fails miserably. It is politics.

Local observation != good global decision

In past era, especially around the tribal society in Europe, politics was organized in localized and cascaded form. A local village meeting (circle? I don’t know a proper English word here) was used to make local decisions and elected delegates for higher level meetings. This cascaded up-wards up to something what we would call now a “country scale”.

In this process the village members all were using their own “clustering rules”. Those rules did differ from person to person, but the current set of stimulus were the same for all. Thous everyone was making decision based on the same set of conscious information and the same set of subconscious stimulus. There was a little place for side effects which could influence the active set of “clustering rules”. We may even dare to say, the the entire population of a “village” was just a one, large, well trained set of “clustering rules” applied to the same question under the same conditions.

Please remember, that most of those “conditions” are such which we are not consciously aware of.

Current political system moved far away from this cascade. We like a “direct democracy” more and more.

And this is a big problem for our irrational, “geometric” intelligence.

Why?

Because in country wide referendum or election we all act in an irrational way, all using our own set of subconscious “clustering rules” but, what is very different to village meetings, under a totally different set of external stimulus. Some of us do have a sunny day, some rainy. Some are cold, some hot. Some just tired, some freshly out of a healthy nap. If You will mash up all rules of all citizens You will theoretically get a great intellect. But if You will stimulate them with many contradicting side-band information You will get a garbage.

Summary

I am pretty sure I did not made myself clear in this post. Well… my technical English is not best for that kind of stuff. What You should get from it should be the observation that even if information which is reaching our irrational minds has rationally speaking nothing to do with the matter it still influences our irrational decision making process.

The good thing is, that theoretically statistics should help us, and if we would stimulate many minds with many rule-sets with information to which we added random noise that random noise should cancel itself out.

This is both true and false. True, because it looks like it happens and false, because noise is not always random and that the noise cancellation by averaging works only in “linear systems”. Which “geometric” networks are not.

And at the end, imagine what would it be if You would be able to deliver a desired “noise” to appropriate voters? Could You influence their irrational decisions?

Sure. You could. And in fact we are already doing it.

Just think about social media.

P.S. Don’t worry too much. There is something worse than social media manipulating stimulus of irrational mid. This is a nightmare of “wishful thinking”.