The enigma of reason
Reason, we are told, is what makes us human, the source of our knowledge and wisdom. If reason is so useful, why didn't it also evolve in other animals? If reason is that reliable, why do we produce so much thoroughly reasoned nonsense? In their groundbreaking account of the evolution and workings of reason, Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber set out to solve this double enigma. Reason, they argue with a compelling mix of real-life and experimental evidence, is not geared to solitary use, to arriving at better beliefs and decisions on our own. What reason does, rather, is help us justify our beliefs and actions to others, convince them through argumentation, and evaluate the justifications and arguments that others address to us. In other words, reason helps humans better exploit their uniquely rich social environment. This interactionist interpretation explains why reason may have evolved and how it fits with other cognitive mechanisms. It makes sense of strengths and weaknesses that have long puzzled philosophers and psychologists--why reason is biased in favor of what we already believe, why it may lead to terrible ideas and yet is indispensable to spreading good ones.
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What Hacker News says
- > The Enigma of Reason (Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber, 2017): their argumentative theory holds that reasoning evolved for social rather than individual epistemic purposes, to produce and evaluate arguments in group contexts.
Yes! I love that someone wrote this down!
This seems so obvious to me now. I often ask LLMs to cite their sources (they do hallucinate from time to time), and they often give me sources that don't say what is claimed. "How would the LLM know not to give this to me?" I wonder. They're trained to explain but not to convince, so they don't know what's convincing, and they should.
I think humans hallucinate at least as much as LLMs—arguments of any complexity are impossible to formulate without leaping at least a bit—but other humans ground us. That's why when people become socially isolated, they join cults or adopt conspiracy theories or the like.
Conversely, "this is convincing to an expert" converges on “this is true" as our collective expertise grows over time. This is the foundation of the scientific method, of progress in all engineering disciplines, etc.
- I think you'd appreciate some of the more philosophical thoughts behind folks like Robin Hanson or gwern, then. Or even father down that road, books like The Enigma of Reason.
The idea that previous business success only weakly predicts future business success, and that that correlation probably becomes even weaker as one tries things increasingly far from the perimeter, is one I believe in but can't really trace back to any concrete source, which suggests my worldview just dynamically generates it off the dome in response to this story. I probably have imbibing their arguments over a decade plus to thank for that.
I'm still a big fan of patio11 though. Starfighter is maybe best seen these days as watching a man be professionally slightly embarrassed, then dusting himself off and going on to do a bunch of cool stuff afterwards anyway, weak correlations be damned.
- Hey HN, Virang here, founder of Nimrobo AI.
I've always been fascinated by the idea that argumentation, rather than solo reasoning, leads to better outcomes. Inspired by the book "The Enigma of Reason", I started an experiment to see if this holds true for AI.
The result is Nimrobo AI: a platform where you can create AI agents with specific personas (e.g., a cynical historian, an optimistic futurist, a stoic philosopher) and pit them against each other in a debate on any topic you choose.
How it works: Each agent gets a detailed persona outlining its motivations, biases, and thinking style. To make the debates substantive, the agents are equipped with tools for live web searches and Browse to pull in real-time data and cite sources for their arguments.
Our goal is to see if this adversarial process can surface more nuanced insights, reveal hidden biases, and generate a more comprehensive summary of a topic than a single AI ever could.
This is an early version, and I would love for you to try it out and share your thoughts. I'm especially curious about: - Do the personas feel distinct and believable? - What debate matchups would you find most interesting or insightful? - Is the flow of the debate easy to follow?
Looking forward to your feedback!
- The Elephant in the Brain
The Enigma of Reason
The Problem of Political Authority
- I wonder if the reference you are reaching for, if it's not the Jonathan Haidt book suggested by a sibling comment, is The Enigma of Reason by the cognitive psychologists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber (2017).
In that book (quoting here from the abstract), Mercier and Sperber argue that reason 'is not geared to solitary use, to arriving at better beliefs and decisions on our own', but rather to 'help us justify our beliefs and actions to others, convince them through argumentation, and evaluate the justifications and arguments that others address to us'. Reason, they suggest, 'helps humans better exploit their uniquely rich social environment'.
They resist the idea (popularized by Daniel Kahneman) that there is 'a contrast between intuition and reasoning as if these were two quite different forms of inference', proposing instead that 'reasoning is itself a kind of intuitive inference'. For them, reason as a cognitive mechanism is 'much more opportunistic and eclectic' than is implied by the common association with formal systems like logic. 'The main role of logic in reasoning, we suggest, may well be a rhetorical one: logic helps simplify and schematize intuitive arguments, highlighting and often exaggerating their force.'
Their 'interactionist' perspective helps explain how illogical rhetoric can be so socially powerful; it is reason, 'a cognitive mechanism aimed at justifying oneself and convincing others', fulfilling its evolutionary social function.
Highly recommended, if you're not already familiar.
- I've got a whole list of books like this sitting somewhere on my hard drive called "Well-Argued Ideologies Very Different From My Own". Covers the whole gamut, from anti-natalism to Z-theory.
The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life would be my go-to. It's all about how people's motives are a lot more self-serving than you might think, including your own.
If you liked that, and then really want to go off the deep end, try The Enigma of Reason.
