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GALEF_VS_THE_DELUSION_DELUSION

                                             November 12, 2018

Julia Galef wants to defend a reality-based
view of the world, so she goes after two
sources of the idea that irrationality
and self-delusion are somehow beneficial to
us.

   This was some of the better material
   in her Long Now presentation, I thought.
                                                     GALEF

She mentions a debate with
"evolutionary psychologists"
involving whether "irrationality" is
"rational", i.e. is it useful to
be "irrational", did it evolve because         Here, she distinguishes
it serves some function in human               between intrumental vs
survival and (more importantly)                epistemic rationality.
reproduction.

They sometimes argue that false
beliefs make it easier to convince
others, e.g. over-confidence can win
allies.

     She talks for some time--
     occasionally presenting some      She praises the evolutionary psych
     evidence-- about how the          guys for focusing on incentives,
     virtues of overconfidence         however, making the claim that
     are overrated, and at best        people are more often rewarded for
     context dependent.                tribal loyalty (hence the Kahan
                                       data she calls "the graph of despair").



Julia Galef also complains about a popular
result from "positive psychology":
                                               OPTIMAL_MIST
The claim is that self-deception can be
good for you, e.g. the unrealistic
optimist assumes success is possible
and is more likely to achieve it.

She says that there have been hundreds of
papers like this published and nearly all
of them can be traced back to one paper
by Taylor and Brown from 1988, "Illusion
and Well-Being", and comments:

  "There are a lot of problems with the
  'positive illusions' literature,
  probably the biggest problem is that
  it isn't about positive illusions."
                                        
    The standard approach is to compare      
    people's perceptions of themselves       
    compared to averageness-- if you         
    think you're better than average         
    they *presume* you're deluded.           
    They don't make any effort to check.     
                                               
    The simplest hypothesis would be that      
    people who report being "more cheerful"    
    can deal better with stress because        
    they're actually more cheerful.            
                                                 
    There's no no reason to presume an           
    intermediate step, insisting that they're    
    obviously deluding themselves about being    
    more cheerful, and that it's the delusion    
    that helps you deal with stress.             
                                                 
  "If you're thinking I can't believe the       
  psychology literature can be so bad--
  I thought the same thing.  I thought
  I must be missing something.  But no..." 

  She commentst that there are other researchers
  out there making the same point as her,
  "but those papers are not as widely cited ..." 
  



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