Sunday, October 22, 2017

[riefkroc] Rational terrible behavior

There seems to be growing evidence that people behave rationally more often than commonly believed, or more often than we commonly want to believe.

People also behave terribly, for various subjective measures of terrible.

Put the two together and conclude that terrible behavior is often rational, a depressing conclusion.  Efforts to directly decrease the behavior through morality ("that's bad; don't do it") are doomed to fail, because, in rationality, it's worse not to do it.

Efforts to further understand how the terrible behavior is rational are more likely to be fruitful.  Change the incentives.

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