7th Day Objectivists

Dan Ariely is a behavioral economist and author of Predictably Irrational. He contends that we make decisions that allow us to think we have more control over our lives than we do. We are essentially irrational beings in the face of a complex and indecipherable world, but he argues that this is not necessarily a self-defeating trait (look at how many of us there are!).

He was recently interviewed by Skeptic Magazine for their official podcast, Skepticality. (See #149 – it’s about one hour long, and so not immediately gratifying). He was asked if he thought we would ever give up our comfortable beliefs, such as correlation being causality, the existence of miracles, or drawing large conclusions based on tiny evidence … no, he said. We will not. Irrationality offers great comfort.

Have you ever encountered the Randian? I have – they haunt the blogs – one guy even calls himself “Ann Rand.” Ayn Rand’s book Atlas Shrugged fed right into our need for self-validation by providing a system of economics that is 1) cannot be tested, and 2) would always yield good outcomes if put into practice. Thus the Randian smugly asserts that s/he has a capsule of answers that, when dropped into Kool Aid, produces a hearty brew that cures the world. Like religion itself, Randianism is comprised of splinter groups and sects, and some like to keep their distance. But it is religious faith, or belief without evidence, and so requires huge doses of confirmation bias to sustain the think tanks and the legions of followers that are invested in it.

It’s an odd turn of language, but Rand’s “objectivism” provides no objective evidence of its value, and so sends its Heavens Gate throngs on futile missions in search of validating evidence. They can only return with empty buckets, and yet are so in need of a fruitful harvest that their mythology is their sustenance.

That’s me, and not Ariely, providing Ayn Rand in a nutshell.

Here’s a snippet from the Ariely interview:

Skepticality: The discussion of “meaning, as you said, either with a big or a little “m”, it shows [that] we put more effort into activities where we’re assured will have the most meaning or impact, because that’s part of what motivates us. But what about people who are motivated by things that are unknowable, trying to find proof of things that may never be proved? How do we get meaning from that?

Ariely: The people who do these tasks do find meaning in that, and you can think about religion on one hand, and economics on the other, in which there’s some things we just can’t prove. I recently had a debate with the guy who runs the Ayn Rand Institute [Yaron Brook], and one of the discussions was about regulations in the market. His statement was that of course you saw all these bank failings, but that it was not that there was not enough regulation, but that there was too much regulation. And he said that if you only avoided every possible regulation, if there was not a single regulation on the banks, then you would see how magnificently they would behave and operate.

And of course nobody can test that. We can’t have a reality in which banks have absolutely no regulation just to see if it really works. It’s an incredibly expensive experiment. But he finds meaning in chasing the ideology. The fact that it’s very hard to test only helps him maintain his ideology.

What we find in those cases is that … people who benefit from believing that the world works a certain way adopt those beliefs and hold them in a strong way. But they are self-serving beliefs. Because they are self-serving, they are even harder to overcome.

Like belief in miracles, ghosts, UFO’s and secret friends, Randians will never go away. (We can only hope that one is never again appointed head of the Federal Reserve.) The Millerites of the 19th century believed that Jesus Christ would return to the earth in 1843. He didn’t show, but Seventh Day Adventists are still with us … 168 years later. In fact, they are the twelfth largest religious body on the planet. That blind belief that they exhibit is either our doom or salvation, or both at once.