#keith stanovich

[maaarine]

MBTI & Ideas

Rationality and the Reflective Mind (Keith Stanovich, 2011)

“Damasio argued that individuals with ventromedial prefrontal damage seem to lack emotional systems 

that mark positive and negative outcomes with evaluative valence and that regenerate these valences the next time a similar situation arises.

Damasio’s famous case of Elliot is an instance of what we will call here the Mr. Spock problem, naming it after the Star Trek character depicted as having attenuated emotions.

Elliot had a problem in decision making because of a lack of regulatory signals from emotion subsystems in the autonomous mind. (…)

Behavioral regulation is not aided by crude but effective autonomous signals that help to prioritize goals for subsequent action. (…)

Likewise, neuropsychological research has demonstrated a variety of mental disabilities—for example, alexithymia (difficulty in identifying feelings) and schizophrenia—

that implicate defects in various types of autonomous monitoring activities that are independent of intelligence.”

[transientpetersen]

Keith Stanovich is one of my favorite academics. I cannot recommend him highly enough. Everything that I've gotten out of this whole "rational mind" hobby, I would have gotten quicker and cleaner by simply reading his works. So his most recent book went on my list the moment it was published. It took me two years to carve out quality time to read it but here I am now and it was worth taking the time.

In "Rationality and the Reflective Mind", Stanovich expands upon the popular System 1/System 2 model of mind that might be familiar to some of you from Kahneman's book. The popular model is bipartite, it splits mental processes into those quick judgements made in a heuristic manner and those more deliberate, calculated judgements thst we tend to associate more closely with our sense of agency. There is more to it, of course, but thst should suffice for broad strokes. 

Those who haven't read Kahmeman may think you've got a vague idea of where we're going from that clumsy description. Perhaps toward some ego/id style divide and I want to take a moment to be sure we're really all together. Historically, there are three types of rationality debates by way of bipartite division of the mind. 

  - the cluster that roughly maps to human/animal, thinking/unthinking, rational/arational

  - the cluster that maps to rational/irrational, model accepting/model rejecting

  - the cluster that maps to inefficient/efficient processing

System 1/System 2 buckets most neatly in that last category. This book regards the first as answering the wrong question, the second as a good start, and in my mind targets a combination of the second and the third.

Stanovich proposes a tripartite model of mind. These three parts are not meant to be exhaustive but they are distinct.

The first part of mind is the System 1 of prior literature. For those like me who are annoyed with that name and its lack of prompting markers, Stanovich has created a new term for this cluster, "The Autonomous Set of Systems" (TASS). This strikes me as the correct distinguishing term for this system as its elements are exactly those mental processes that trigger on their own. At best we can suppress them or activate them on command but we do not get them to *not* activate when they receive their environmental cue. Items in this category share certain traits. They are cheap, rapid, parallel, online, associative, heuristic, and reflexive. Examples include threat assessment, emotion, and our social reasoning. These processes are crafted to take an environment and quickly generate a judgement from it. As such, they are vulnerable to malign environments and one of the reasons they have fallen from favor (the folk archetype of the wise farmer) is increasingly we see social contexts designed to exploit them.

Not everything in this part of mind is evolutionary or genetic in origin. Much of it is trained/trainable. Some of it is memetically induced.

The second and third parts form strict subsets of System 2.

Part two is the algorithmic cluster. This encompasses offline reasoning and symbolic logic and receives outsized attention in our current culture. When explicit math is involved, it is in this part of mind. The processes here are slow in functioning but easily captured as logos, making them both amenable to recording/communicating and deterministic replication. Invoking these processes takes a measure of concentration and can feel as if it is taking place externally.

The last part Stanovich calls the reflective system. It performs belief regulation, simulation, and (most importantly) overrides TASS on demand. I suppose daydreaming belongs here and those moments where you go "that doesn't sound right". It's a truth seeking part of mind. Like the algorithmic, it is slow and deliberate in comparison to TASS. This part of mind deserves more attention because, as you see:

Rationality, as commonly defined, is not seated in the algorithmic part of the mind but in the reflective portion. Rationality is about adaption to the present environment and not about abstract first principles. Consider the lemma of the cognitive miser - we are as stupid as our environment allows. This does not mean we are stupid at our peak performance but in the average case, humans don't engage their critical thinking unless something in their environment feels out of place or threatening or unpredictable. The better your epistemic rationality, the less time you spend unprotected by your critical thinking.

A brief taxonomy of problems that arise in the pursuit of rational action:

- default to TASS, reflective mind is never alerted and no override is issued (where we spend most our time) 

- shallow validation of TASS (e.g. eyes passing over a code bug every time despite it being obvious once pointed out)

- override failure, possible causes are being tired, hungry, powerfully emotional, and self-control issues

- the "mindware gap", the lack of certain rational models. This cluster can be trained and is the focus of most of those looking to improve their epistemic rationality. Some techniques include: 

  1) knowledge of probability

  2) importance of generating alternate hypotheses, challenging received ideas promptly

  3) causal/scientific reasoning

  4) actual problem-domain specific knowledge

- "contaminated mindware", maladaptive reasoning. Could be an unexamined folk belief or psychological issue.

Improvement in performance in any of these categories will improve your rationality writ large. Part of the "post rationalist" schism was propelled by a recognition that some of these categories were underserved in the original, narrower subculture. 

The money right now is in reforming the intelligence test market. The spirit of the time is turning against the old model and it's ripe for a new paradigm. Stanovich's research is marketed under this spirit of reform.

Essentially, IQ tests are poor measures of rationality. By design, they attempt to remove all ambiguity from the questions in order to better isolate the calculating abilities of the algorithmic mind. In doing so, they completely neglect the reflective mind. By contrast, a test of rationality would incorporate high levels of ambiguity and categorize the respondent's thinking style based on how they resolved that ambiguity. IQ tests are already starting to adjust to new ideas, for exanple, distinguishing fluid from crystal intelligence (stateless/procedural from precomputation/studied knowledge).

No conceptual barrier exists to creating a test for rationality and indeed one could start by scraping the existing research literature on bias. Personally, I expect that we'll see a few such tests popularized in the next half-decade. 

"Rationality and the Reflective Mind" is fascinating and I do recommend it. Spend four to five hours on it and focus on the first few chapters where Stanovich lays out the tripartite theory. It does not feel perfect but it does strike me as a better model than any other I've been offered.

Personal Errata:

- Consider meditation as offering perceptual access to the workings of TASS and as such, opening up the possibility of a more efficient override mechanism.

- The great rationality debate has many participants arguing. Take a step back from the front lines and look at some of the areas where people are not actively disagreeing.

- Stanovich speculates that reflective mind was originally an offshoot of the theory of mind module required to navigate the complexities of social life. Were this true, one technique we could expect to increase the belief coherence of our responses is to recast abstract problems in social terms and leverage the insights generated by that framing.

[maaarine]

What Intelligence Tests Miss (Keith Stanovich, 2009)

“In fact, his case shows how important are the intellectual qualities that IQ tests leave out.

There are published and well-investigated scales or tasks for most of the thinking dispositions suggested in the characterizations of George Bush’s thinking.

The technology of rationality assessment is so far advanced that we could imagine, for example, testing President Bush (long before his presidency) and in fact predicting exactly the thinking attributes that are now known to be so tellingly characteristic of the him.

Using the terms for the actual scales and tasks in the literature, formal tests of rational thinking might have revealed that the president is:

overconfident; low in typical intellectual engagement; low in openness to experience; high in belief perseverance; high in confirmation bias; high in faith in intuition; high in impulsiveness; high in one-sided thinking;

low in need for cognition; low in openness to experience; does not engage in counterfactual thinking; treats beliefs as possessions (has high belief identification); is high in need for closure, and low in thought flexibility.

The directions of Bush’s score on all of these thinking dispositions is in the direction associated with lower rationality.

Fluid intelligence provided no inoculation against a confluence of problematic intellectual traits.

President Bush is an intelligent person—consistent with his test scores and consistent with what many people close to him insist. But he is not a very rational person.”

[maaarine]

What Intelligence Tests Miss (Keith Stanovich, 2009)

“Although most people would say that the ability to think rationally is a clear sign of a superior intellect, standard IQ tests devote no section to rational thinking as cognitive scientists would define the term.

To think rationally means adopting appropriate goals, taking the appropriate action given one’s goals and beliefs, and holding beliefs that are commensurate with available evidence.

Although IQ tests do assess the ability to focus on an immediate goal in the face of distraction, they do not assess at all whether a person has the tendency to develop goals that are rational in the first place.

Likewise, IQ tests are good measures of how well a person can hold beliefs in short-term memory and manipulate those beliefs, but they do not assess at all whether a person has the tendency to form beliefs rationally when presented with evidence.

And again, similarly, IQ tests are good measures of how efficiently a person processes information that has been provided, but they do not at all assess whether the person is a critical assessor of information as it is gathered in the natural environment.”

[maaarine]

What Intelligence Tests Miss (Keith Stanovich, 2009)

“Being a cognitive miser makes us vulnerable to exploitation.

We give up our thinking to those who manipulate our environments, and we let our actions be determined by those who can create the stimuli that best trigger our shallow automatic processing tendencies. (…)

In discussing the mechanisms causing framing effects, Daniel Kahneman has stated that “the basic principle of framing is the passive acceptance of the formulation given”.

The frame presented to the subject is taken as focal, and all subsequent thought derives from it rather than from alternative framings because the latter would require more thought. (…)

For example, in the tax example above they would be shown both the “reduction for children” and the “penalty for the childless” version.

It is almost uniformly the case that, after being debriefed, subjects recognize the equivalence of the two versions, 

and also they realize that it is a mistake (an incoherence in people’s political attitudes) to respond differently to the two versions simply because they have been framed differently.

This finding suggests that what people need to learn to do is to think from more than one perspective—to learn to habitually reframe things for themselves.

The debriefing results show that once they do so, people will detect discrepancies in their responses to a problem posed from different perspectives and will take steps to resolve the discrepancies.

People seem to recognize that consistency is an intellectual value. What they do not do, however, is habitually generate the perspective shifts that would highlight the inconsistencies in their thinking.

Their inability to do so makes them subject to framing effects—a violation of descriptive invariance signaling a basic irrationality in people’s choice patterns.”

[minnesotafollower]

The Six Principles of Stupidity  

That is the title of a fascinating column by David Brooks.[1]Here is what he said. Preamble “This was the week in which the Chinese made incredible gains in artificial intelligence and the Americans made incredible gains in human stupidity. I’m sorry, but I look at the Trump administration’s behavior over the last week and the only word that accurately describes it is: stupid.” “I am not saying…

[redshift-13]

dysrationalia

Dysrationalia is the inability to think and behave rationally despite adequate intelligence.  It is a general term that refers to a heterogeneous group of disorders manifested by significant difficulties in belief formation, in the assessment of belief consistency, and/or in the determination of action to achieve one's goals.  Although dysrationalia may occur concomitantly with other handicapping conditions (e.g., sensory impairment), dyrationalia is a level of rationality, as demonstrated in thinking and behavior, that is significantly below the level of the individual's intellectual capacity (as determined by an individually administered IQ test).

-Keith Stanovich, What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought

[redshift-13]

Reason in the present historical time

What is the status of reason in the world?  

The question is unusably broad put that way.  But you could break it down into various categories of measurable performance like whether public policy adheres to the best scientific evidence or not, or what’s the statistical distribution of reasoning ability within a given population.

Although I haven’t looked in a while, I’ve yet to see any published proposal or research in the human development literature (e.g., the UN’s annual Human Development Reports) that includes reasoning ability in as a human well-being indicator.

This is a gravely serious oversight given the profound implications critical thinking ability for, well, almost anything of consequence that we do.  However, progressive, lefty, and socialist forces seem largely absent from this grand problem.  Aside from the secular humanist, atheist and critical thinking communities, I don’t see a lot of action on this front.

Below are two quotes that attempt to size up this problem.  If it is the case that only a relatively small minority in society reason at a high level, that would seem to be a major, if not the major factor that explains why the world is the way it is.  -Which makes it all the more puzzling why there isn’t a sense of extraordinary urgency around improving this vital skill and inculcating values that support it.

"The lavish attention devoted to intelligence (raising it, praising it, worrying when it is low, etc.) seems wasteful in light of the fact that we choose to virtually ignore another set of mental skills with just as much social consequence--rational thinking mindware and procedures.  Popular books tell parents how to raise more intelligent children, educational psychology textbooks discuss the raising of students' intelligence, and we fell reassured when hearing that a particular disability does not impair intelligence.  There is no corresponding concern on the part of parents that their children grow into rational beings, no corresponding concern on the part of schools that their students reason judiciously, and no corresponding recognition that intelligence is useless to a child unable to adapt to the world.

I simply do not think that society has weighted the consequences of its failure to focus on irrationality as a real social problem.  These skills and dispositions profoundly affect the world in which we live.  Because of inadequately developed rational thinking abilities--because of the processing biases and mindware problems discussed in this book--physicians choose less effective medical treatments; people fail to accurately assess risks in their environment; information is misused in legal proceedings; millions of dollars are spent on unneeded projects by government and private industry; parents fail to vaccinate their children; unnecessary surgery is performed; animals are hunted to extinction; billions of dollars are wasted on quack medical remedies; costly financial misjudgments are made.  Distorted processes of belief formation are also implicated in various forms of ethnocentric, racist, sexist, and homophobic hatred.  It is thus clear that widespread societal effects result from inadequately developed rational thinking dispositions and knowledge."

-Keith Stanovich, What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought

“A backdrop of this paper is the arguable observation that insofar as the critical thinking movement is viewed against the conditions of a worldwide historical struggle of “force versus reason,” force has been dominant in the struggle.”

-Richard Paul, Reflections on the Nature of Critical Thinking, Its History, Politics, and Barriers, and on Its Status across the College/University Curriculum Part II