Contrary to Stephen Pinker’s primary thesis that rational decision making is getting increasingly better, I think one needs to first make a distinction between decision-making as a ‘subject’ a personal subjective self, versus as an ‘object’ so to speak, i.e. your country.
While the Enlightenment is presumed to have given us core concepts regarding, agency, and the values of the mind, with the aim of understanding of the world, ourselves, and ourselves in the world. Most of society has forgotten the part about self-inquiry. For the time being, I will leave the latter for another writer. Here, I will also leave out my critique of the foundational thought of so-called Enlightenment thinkers; who, in order to have gotten the macroeconomic models right, even proximately, they would have had to acknowledge women as the foundation of Capital, much more starkly than they did. Probably in ways that would make everyone slightly uncomfortable, but are strictly necessary to real models of so-called economic progress!
Rationality was a basic tenet of the intellectually validated aspect of the New Deal, one running alongside Keynesian pressures. Rationality is an attribute of decision-making under conditions of certainty. Decision making under conditions of uncertainty requires behaving consistently with your preferences. I make a distinction between this, that is, discovering your norm, and that of appealing to a-priori axioms, ones not specified by you, but said to be rational by the establishment cognoscenti: A la, the Savage axioms, coming from the 1950s.
The assumptions of so called rational utility theory based on the 1950s Savage’s axioms are that:
– Agents must make bets over every choice presented to them.
– One -sided bets, i.e. you do not have to pay if you’re wrong.
Better models would include payment for both sides of a bet.
In other words, what things can be said to be a “norm” for you, appealing to your past behavior, and therefore implicitly betting norms, a la your past record. Furthermore, when presented with evidence that you are behaving irrationally, compared with your preferences, to be a norm for you, you then are willing adjust your bets to update in accordance with your forgotten preferences. In other words, it’s not irrational to make mistakes, only to not change your behavior in light of information, and someone reminding you of your existing preferences.
As an individual, only when you have access to this kind of “self-ledger”, can you attain models of others, which keep you oriented to them in ways which make it possible for you to make valid predictions in line with reality, and to be modeled. Particularly to be well-modeled by other agents who are willing to cooperate. Whether I am an agent with the same norm, a different one, or not an agent at all is an altogether different matter. I would advocate a different decision criteria over each of the three categories, each of which can reasonably be discovered by you, upon reflection, however long and difficult.
[Despite Pinker not doing so] making decisions from the perspective of a person, versus as a nation, must mean very different things. The reader of Pinker’s books will be confused when thinking through Putin’s Mad Man world, and Pinker’s claim that rationality generally has increased or currently prevails. Distinctions should be made.
We went from a world of what I call ‘modernist warfare’ for under a single century, as evidenced in how we used-to [1919-Nixon] make collective decisions. This seems different from today, but mostly has gone thus far unexamined.
During the Great Wars, modernist warfare can be considered by way of an example. For instance, the strategic repurposing of a dead soldier by the British, one holding fake war plans, made to wash up onto the shores of Germany—such a soldier who possessed military plans which the Axis Powers shared “Common Universal Priors” over, with the Allies; i.e. concrete and explicit shared facts about how large land masses are used or blocked.
When you can model situational dynamics in principle, shared models have the attribute of giving an intrinsic probability of information for next steps in a game involving strategy. In principle, concrete aspects of shared realities help to be able to predict events like the Normandy invasion in the first place. Today, my claim is that there is a new kind of economics, and therefore, a new kind of military, one of ‘Post-post-modernity’ but we need a better name. [Post Modernity I will not define and there is a plethora of literature already on the subject].
In fact this ‘Post-post-modernity’ is showing up in how we do war. This new kind of politics shows up for instance in global patterns, but also local ones. On a global scale, e.g. Vladimir Putin denudes-in-the-north of Ukraine, as a response to Ukraine’s leadership, decrying that they are going to attack in the south. Is it appropriate for military strategy to be literal and reactive in response to the exact claims of the underdog?
My claim is that Putin’s seemingly non-strategic behavior shows up locally too, so to speak, over persons today, as well as non-equilibrium defection scenarios, both in business deals and personal interactions: The global Weltschmerz is local.
Have we lost the art of war?
It is as though the public broadcasting of one’s intentions is all one ought to reflexively account for. Perhaps this is all or part of a definition that might be formulated as the way to lose a war, and Russians are poor at war strategy today. I claim that the Rationality Utility Axioms of Savage are an artifact of the Modernists, the architects of modernity after the Second World War, and the New Deal macroeconomics which won the market dominant narrative.
Furthermore, Silicon Valley and social media as primary news sources changed what rationality meant for the public preferring to as the economists told us we do “maximize utility of money”. That thesis failed. The supposed tenet that we all maximize our preference for money was invalidated with the St. Petersburg paradox. Whenever one or more model assumptions are wrong, you will get paradoxes.
Modern Keyesianism; promised work for everyone, and growth for all time, conjoined with the myth of rationality. Furthermore such a myth was already, at the time, invalidated with empirical evidence in the 1950s, via the empirical studies which showed the possibility of preferences for “ambiguity seeking” behavior. That is referred to in Daniel Ellsberg’s PhD thesis, giving people a choice of two urns with the same payoffs, where one of the urns has an ill-specified probability distribution.
Rational utility does not capture any nation’s latest policy on national defense; and Keynesian economics only worked for the boomers. You cannot group the decision making apparatus of nations, with that of persons. Even if you separate the two, as truly different magisteria, models of decision making by persons can indeed–as the failure of Savage’s axioms by Ellsburg and St. Petersburg showed us–be improved upon. Today nation states officially seem to be using an entirely new norm. A new military strategy, post ‘ODDA loops‘ is ripe for description.