Alasdair Young

Without rationality, we are unable to know anything.

If we don’t have knowledge, we are unable to act confidently since we do not know what the result is likely to be.

If we are unable to act confidently, we find it hard to do things we have not done before.

If we cannot do things we have not done before, we cannot grow, develop and evolve. Eventually, as the histry of evolution has shown, those that do not adapt to change perish.

If you perish, your opinion on whether or not rationality and logic matters is irrelevant; shut up dead guy!

In my last post, I mentioned that the Monarch Fallacy implies that, assuming we were rational beings who pursued enlightened self interest and had access to good data, we would realize that it is in our own best interest to raise up society as a whole (an increase in absolute power) than to strive for an increase in relative power over others.

But, so far, there is no reason to believe that we should all be rational, self-interested people who have an interest in access to good data. I’ll try to cover why each of these three pillars (self-interest, rationality, good data) is so important below.

First, self-interest. Ayn Rand has a lot of faults – her novels are too long, they are contrived, she is totally wrong about sex and her insistence on moral absolutism is not backed up with a coherent argument; all this being said, she is right about self-interest. My own take on Rand’s arguement for the virtue of self-interest is as follows:

Imagine we were NOT self-interested beings and instead always worked for the betterment of the group. Each day, we would do our utmost to provide things for the group, often at the expense of ourselves, holding ourselves to the creed of “the most good for the most people”. Several points arise:

1. Who is “the group” if not a collection of individuals? If everyone sacrifices for the betterment of others, then NO ONE gets what they want.

2. The moment there is a single person who chooses to act in their own interests rather than the groups, the system falls apart since they can claim a greater and greater need than others and demand that others work to meet those needs.

3. People spend their time trying to demonstrate that their need is greater than the needs of the next person. This leads to a lot of wasted effort and also leads to the best beggars being rewarded rather than those with the most need. This reduces societal output.

4. In order to ensure fairness, we need to have planners to allocate resources and arbitrate between different needs. These planners come at a cost – they consume but do not produce anything, thus the output of society is lower than it could potentially be.

5. Trying to match everything so that everyone gets what they want, based on a prioritization of limited resources is damn near impossible – there is a huge computational complexity here (in many ways it’s a Knapsack Problem and thus NP-hard) nevermind the strange fact that as peoples “needs” are met, they suddenly develop new needs. Without prices for goods, which convey meaningful information about desire for an item versus demand for the item, there is no way to know how much people want one item more than another nor how mucheffort is involved in making this item.

Yes, this is something of a pro-market argument as well as a pro-self-interest argument but the points still stand. These points indicate, to me, that a lack of self-interest would be a bad thing, from the point of view both of the individual AND of society as a whole and thus self-interest is pretty important.

There are a number of other threads to this argument of course: we humans are products of natural selection based on selfishness. Those predators that chose NOT to hunt their prey died out Milena ago. In the words of Neal Stephenson, everything alive today is alive because they  are a “stupendous badass” and so were their ancestors.

Evolution is alive today and this is a good thing. Not just of organisms, but of ideas – over time the best ideas flourish and the less good perish. It’s certainly not a perfect system – there are lots of good ideas that perish as well – but such a system at least has a chance to fix it’s mistakes. Without self-interest, our ancestors would have spend all of our time sacrificing ourselves for the betterment of others and never stayed alive long enough for us to become the supendous badasses that we are today.

I’m writing a novel. It’s a project that has taken years because the novel is simply the vehicle I have chosen to explain some ideas that I’ve had for a long time. The ideas are incomplete, and because of this, the novel is also incomplete. Still, explaining the key concepts should be easy enough.

First up is “the Monarch Fallacy”. Here it is in a nutshell:

Assuming we are rational beings interested in our own self-interest above all else, is it better to try to gain power over others by preventing them using the very tools which we ourselves used to gain power (rationality, access to good data and enlightened self interest) or is it better to promote these tools so that others may obtain them and become more powerful themselves?

In short, if we are perfectly selfish, rational humans, should we act like medieval monarchs and try to set up a society where power is concentrated and strive to be at the top of the hierarchy, or should we seek to give as many people the power that monarchs have, even if it means a decrease in the *relative* power we hold over others?

The Monarch Fallacy says that to do the former is irrational. The reason is simply explained by analogy: compare a medieval European monarch to an average European today, the average European is, in almost every way, better off. The monarch has a lower life expectancy, no access to good healthcare, no aircraft, no Internet,  no ipads, movies or any of the other goods and services which are commonplace in this era.

Furthermore, the monarch is unable to simply demand that his peons create these things because they are simply unable to do so. The ability to invent truly new things requires a certain amount of freedom and openness of thinking that cannot exist in a world where an absolute monarch obtains and holds on to power. The reason for this is that the very act of holding on to power requires the monarch to act to subjugate the thoughts and actions of his peons lest they rebel.

Replace aircraft, movies and the internet with space elevators, life extension drugs and other technologies that haven’t even been conceived and you’ll see why it’s just as important today to reject the idea of aiming for an increase in relative power for an individual rather than an increase in absolute power for society as a whole.

Indeed, we should strive to help as many people become rational, self-interested, informed individuals as possible since not only will an increase in such people bring a direct gain to us (more interesting people to talk and work with, more new inventions and overall a better life for us) but by promoting the virtues of rationality, self interest and access to good, untainted information to make decisions we can protect ourselves from would-be modern-day monarchists using these people as peons in a bid to gain power over us. Without peons (duped into acting against their own self-interest through bad information or flawed reasoning), these mini-tyrants are powerless.

In short: the optimal thing for a perfectly selfish person to do is to help other people as much as possible and work to create a society that exists for the betterment of all. 🙂