homo irrationalis - the dance of instincts and science
“The real purpose of the scientific method is to make sure Nature hasn’t misled you into thinking you know something you don’t actually know.”
““The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.”
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For a very long time, we thought that the sky was a solid dome. The Sun, Moon, and all the other shiny objects would be plugged into it, like bulbs and lights on a Christmas tree. This belief was shared by everyone from Aristotle to Judaism believers, and it stayed with us as the dominant model through the Classical and Medieval times. Consequently, for many (hello my Christian ancestors) it was a no-brainer to deduct that stars were merely holes in the dark firmament of the final celestial sphere. They let us glimpse the divine light of God and his Heavens – the light leaking out from Paradise.
It took Copernicus, Bruno (condemned by both the Roman Catholic and Reformed Churches and burnt alive in Rome in 1600 for heresy), Kepler, Newton and a few others – in other words: it took science – to show us that we got it all backwards. And as a result, it threw us into an existential abyss. We were no longer the centre of it all. Rather, we had to confront ourselves with an infinite universe in which the stars are actually suns with their own planetary systems. Now we know that these tiny lights are in fact huge, glowing celestial giants, located incomprehensibly far from us, and powered by the nuclear fusion taking place in their cores. Hoo-ha!
Many early cultures developed their own versions of elaborate stories and myths pointing to the firmament model. It seems we shared it across all tribes and civilizations for hundreds of thousands of years, until just a few hundred years ago. Oops. And here is the million-dollar question: what are today’s firmaments we believe in that will turn out to be something completely else tomorrow?
There are plenty of other areas where we have been getting it all wrong in the past. Take the notion that humans are somehow distinctive from animals (many religions taught that humans were “created” separately). And yet, we share 70% of human genes with zebrafish, to give just one example.
And how about this “fun” fact: still in the 18th-century, doctors routinely prescribed bloodletting and poison to cure a common cold.
The perils of intuition
Why we’ve been getting so many things amiss? Is there something wrong with the reality in how it doesn’t correspond to our expectations and intellectual capacities?
What about our intuition and gut feeling, shouldn’t we be tuning in to it more?
The more we learn about ourselves and the world, the more we discover that the reality is utterly counterintuitive to us. And counterintuitive is still a euphemism when I think about impossibly sounding concepts from quantum theory. Why, matter exists in a state of wave and particle at once. Or take quantum entanglement: multiple particles are linked together and a change to one particle will induce an instant reaction to the other - even if it is separated by billions of kilometres.
Hunters, gatherers and socializers
“Our intellect didn’t evolve to solve abstract, logical problems in a complex and multifaceted world. It developed to resolve the challenges posed by living in collaborative groups. ”
Here is why we are being constantly fooled by our reason: in the course of evolution, our intellect didn’t evolve to solve abstract, logical problems in a complex and multifaceted world. It developed to resolve the challenges posed by living in collaborative groups.
We call those groups hunters and gatherers. Prehistoric H&G lived in groups that consisted of several families, i.e. a few dozen people. Some were larger but usually no more than 100 people. In other words – the size of an average wedding party (now imagine if you had to spend your whole life with those wedding guests).
And well, H&G hunted (animals) and gathered (plants, honey and the likes) to feed themselves. But there was one more central thing to their life: they had to be dead serious about their social status. This is because literally, their life depended on it. At that time, being part of the tribe was the best survival strategy. It meant food and protection. Being annoying, eccentric or too selfish could breed conflict. Today, at worst, you can stop talking to your family or friends and continue with your life without them. In ancient times, you risked being kicked out of the tribe, which would be the end of it for you.
Social standing was also key to your success as a future parent. And after all, reproductive success is one of the main drivers of everything that moves. If you were weird or got rejected by a girl for any reason, the word could get out quickly about you being a loser or whatever, and this would blow your chances at having kids at all. It’s not like you could just move to another city and start all over (or reinstall Tinder with a refurbished identity – it was a niche app back then).
What others in your clan thought of you was really, really important. In fact, there was nothing more important than being socially accepted and fitting in.
Likewise, our grand grand grand (and a few more grands) fathers and mothers needed a solid bullshit-detector so that they wouldn’t get screwed by other members of the tribe. After all, gravitational, magnetic and freeloading forces are among the most universal principles known in the observable Universe. You wouldn’t want to risk your life on the hunt while others enjoyed cave rave parties, high on some local mushrooms.
Nature takes its time
“Evolution is a painstakingly slow process and our human system continues to be tailor-made for tribes. We remain extremely social creatures and we are optimized to cooperate with each other ”
Evolution is a painstakingly slow process and our human system continues to be tailor-made for tribes. We remain extremely social creatures and we are optimized to cooperate with each other (that’s what gave us a huge evolutionary advantage). Our minds and intuition have been carefully crafted to read faces and other bodily expressions or detect pheromones that are subconsciously affecting our attitudes.
To really grasp how much we are tribe-wired, let’s look at timelines. Wikipedia tells us that hunting and gathering was the subsistence strategy employed by human societies beginning some 1.8 million years ago, by Homo erectus, and from its appearance some 0.2 million years ago, by Homo sapiens. It remained the only mode of subsistence until the end of the Mesolithic period some 10,000 years ago, and after this was gradually replaced with the spread of the Neolithic Revolution, which is a fancy way of saying that agriculture kicked in. We started to settle in one place and, as such, modern societies started to emerge through villages and towns.
Quick maths: 1.8 million years until 10,000 years ago = 1.790,000 years of H&G. What remains is 12022 years, four months and 24 days of the modern societies. Boom, that’s 0,67% of our history as species, i.e. our brain and body evolution.
Even if we only double-click on Homo sapiens part of the story, that is still 95% of our time spent in purely tribal settings. Only a super tiny fraction of our history is sciency and digital. We call ourselves modern humans but this is just a cover. Underneath, we are social animals largely run by evolutionary software optimized to thrive in a tribe, even though in present times a social survival is no longer any issue at all. This programming has huge repercussions for us today.
Unpacking the consequences
The evolutionary legacy of our esteemed ancestors leaves us with some distinct cognitive traits. One of them is propensity to stick to our existing beliefs. No matter how outlandish they may be.
H&G lived in the surroundings that never changed much, and their outlook on life was simple and static. Whatever religious beliefs, traditions, rites or family models you were raised in, you’d keep them. Any disloyalty or divergence was a dangerous game.
In the modern age, we retain this strong instinct to stick with our pre-existing beliefs and convictions. They were passed on to us by our modern clans: our families, close communities and societies we grew up in. They make us feel belonging to a group that should provide safety and protection. They keep us anchored in the world, cement our group status and reinforce our identity against perceived enemies (a neighbouring country, pharma companies, liberals, Christians, in short - THEM). For better or worse, being faithful to this pre-installed software is how we understand integrity. And so, our ego will fight with ferocity every threat to this integrity. It will be planting scenarios of disasters if we dare to be different and risk being ostracized. That’s because to our evolutionary wiring it means being kicked out from the tribe and becoming a dinner to whatever wild pair of eyes looming in the darkness.
The most powerful mix is when the instinct to belong is combined with a low self-esteem. It can take our cognitive inflexibility to new highs.
All this makes us naturally resistant to changing our core beliefs. These beliefs can include the religion we grew up in or our leanings towards conservative/liberal world-view. Often, in our everyday life, those ideological distinctions don’t even matter much. Still, we might defend them forcefully and only accept in our lives people who have similar convictions to ours.
Cognitive biases and what Putin and God have in common
“The Sodom and Gomorrah story sounds like a Heavenly nuclear strike, which makes Vladimir Putin look like a pathetic amateur. ”
A curious thing happens when we are confronted with facts that contradict our beliefs. It’s called cognitive dissonance - a discomforting feeling of holding inconsistent beliefs. When this happens, most of us would rather ignore or downplay the new, incongruent information than change our world-view to accommodate it. This will happen by default and with little input from our consciousness.
Our psyche developed adaptive mechanisms to diminish this psychological discomfort and to “protect” us from changing our beliefs. These are things like blind spots or biases.
The most common one is called confirmation bias. It is the tendency we all share to embrace information that supports our beliefs and reject information that contradicts them. It doesn’t help an intellectual honesty that we experience a genuine pleasure—a rush of dopamine—when our beliefs are supported.
That’s why it will be possible for many Christians to believe in a caring God who sent a global Flood to punish (kill) all humankind (saving only Noah’s family). Or else, a loving God who destroyed two sinful cities by killing all its dwellers: “the Lord rained on Sodom and Gomorrah sulphur and fire from the Lord out of heaven. And he overthrew those cities, and all the valley and all the inhabitants of the cities, and what grew on the ground ... behold, the smoke of the land went up like the smoke of a furnace”. Because it’s common knowledge that there are only two kinds of folks: good folks or bad folks. And the Sodom and Gomorrah story sounds like a Heavenly nuclear strike, which makes Vladimir Putin look like a pathetic amateur.
Another common bias is called a hindsight bias, aka “I knew-it-all-along” reaction. It is the tendency to perceive past events as having been more predictable than they actually were. We retroactively revise our own predictions when new information is available and claim that we always saw it coming. Surely sounds familiar to me.
Our mind is working around the clock to maintain those delusory tendencies. They are as important as the automatic self-preservation processes of the body. When you want to hold your breath for too long, your body will ignore your decision and force you to breathe to prevent damage. The psyche employs similar tricks in an attempt to make us stay consistent with our beliefs. All this to make sure we don’t do anything stupid that would decrease our tribal ranking.
Knowing more and seeing less
There is another mechanism at play that can blind us to facts. It’s called, well… experience. Remember doing something for the first time, like catching a plane or your first day in the office? With time, there are fewer and fewer completely new things in our lives. Getting older renders the world more predictable. Mostly this is useful and helps us to navigate life fluently. But, as the grooves of habit deepen, this can also have a desensitizing effect.
This is why, in the words of developmental psychologist and philosopher Alison Gopnik, childhood is the R&D stage of the species, concerned exclusively with learning and exploring. We, adults, are production and marketing. Maybe children won’t invent a new generation of smartphones but they build the kind of brain that can best thrive in every circumstance.
And so by middle age, we become a mature product of evolution and the habitual thinking establishes a despotic dominance over open-minded exploration. It is tremendously helpful, no doubt about that. We can count on our life-long experience, which makes it easier and faster to deal with the messiness of life. We can come up with quick, practical answers and fixes to any mundane problem like consoling a friend, gluing together something that broke or masking our ignorance. We are extremely opinionated politically and even have ideas on what is wrong with the world and how to fix it.
The side effect of falling into those well-worn grooves of mental habits is that our beliefs and patterns become more and more calcified and rigid. We know more but we see less. Our field of perception narrows as we get older. It can become so narrow that it nearly blinds us to reality. And so, we mostly operate on an autopilot which is more tuned in to the internal model of reality rather than to the outside world.
This internal model of the outside world is the best guess and it often diverges from reality. This explains things like optical illusions when our brain makes us see what it thinks we should see rather than what’s really in front of our eyes – here’s an example. Or, even better, what if what we see is up to us – remember the Spinning Dancer? And here’s another classic – the Necker Cube. When we hear accounts of people who claim to have seen the Virgin Mary or an alien, it doesn’t have to mean that they are lying. They might have really seen it, just like I see these letters, as I type. How we decode reality can be also a perfect breeding ground for disagreements like this one.
Smart people tell us that vision occurs neither in the eyes nor in the brain but emerges from the collaboration of the eyes and the rest of the brain. And ultimately, we see whatever our brains think we should.
Making something out of nothing
One last trait that is both critical to survival and also deceptive is that we are prolific pattern seekers. We have an innate ability to make something out of nothing. We construct coherent and meaningful narratives out of random elements. We see shapes in the clouds and Jesus in a toast (which is an example of a very curious phenomenon called face pareidolia - we have evolved to extract social content from human faces and so we tend to see them even where they don’t exist).
Creating patterns helps us to feel more secure in a world that is inherently chaotic and unpredictable. It makes us believe that there are no coincidences and blind forces of nature. We find orderliness in everything that happens to us and we assign meaning to events.
What does this all mean?
Take the evolutionary legacy of hunters and gatherers, add to it the compounding power of our mental habits and cognitive flows, and you’ve got yourself a perfect storm for faulty thinking. Clearly, we are not exactly rational beings, despite the proud Homo sapiens badge that we all so nonchalantly wear.
Yes, we are a clever species. And we are also powered by biases, misguided intuition and instincts, inaccurate predictions, outlandish beliefs, cognitive illusions - a parallel to optical ones - and blind spots (this is a super fun short video showing experientially what your blind spot literally is and how our sneaky brains cheat us all the time!).
Here comes the science
“A scientific method is a tool that prevents us from being misled by our atomized experiences and prejudices. ”
The pervasiveness of our cognitive shortcomings cuts to the core of why we do science and why we developed strict methods surrounding research. A scientific method is a tool that prevents us from being misled by our atomized experiences and prejudices. This is why one way to look at science is that it’s a system that corrects our natural inclinations, instincts and intuition. In a well-designed scientific study, there’s no room for personal biases and convictions.
And how it all started? For centuries (if not millennia) the knowledge was being established by implicit assumptions and ferocious theoretical debates. For instance, religions dominated the narrative about the origins of humans, with all kinds of preposterous stories and myths. There were endless debates and treaties about how there is something innately wrong with human nature and how divine interventions can fix it. And then came Darwin, and we still have not fully digested what evolution really means (otherwise we wouldn’t be asking so many “whys” about the human life). Or take debates about properties of matter that were always consuming leading thinkers. Then a man named Galileo suggested that instead of theorizing about objects’ behaviours, we could just drop something from a place that is really high and observe what happens next.
Ever since, the scientific, experiential method has successfully competed with an attitude: I am right because I represent the authority or have power, or I’m stronger than you are. It has been a compelling alternative to endless debates and hypotheses, which only get us more entrenched in our ideas.
This reminds me of someone sharing an experience from living in a community a few decades ago. Guess what was one of the most difficult aspects of it? It was challenges related to a shared decision-making process. Decisions about everything from how they ate to what constituted good behaviour among children. Community members would end up having extensively long meetings about how much cheese can each child eat, or if dogs were allowed. And these debates would just go on forever and ever. We are really difficult, specious when our mind is unleashed.
Double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trial
“You calculate the real effect of a drug by subtracting the placebo response from the overall response. It’s like taring a scale.”
At present times, a good example of the scientific method is the golden standard of health research called a double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trial. Quite a mouthful, but the bottom line is that there is nothing extraordinary, mysterious, authoritarian or complicated here. It’s about mercilessly testing a hypothesis.
Let’s say you came up with a unique mixture of herbs that seems to do miracles to your mood, and you think it could help others too. Here’s how to test your assumption in simplified terms:
Find a few thousand people (different races, geographies and age groups). Then divide them into two equal groups. One half will get your experimental brew – it’s your treatment arm. The other half will be a control group getting the placebo.
Both groups are treated in exactly the same way and get equally looking brew – you want to minimize as much as possible any differences so that no one has a clue which group (s)he is in. It’s just that at the last moment – secretly, shrewdly and with a mischievous smile – you switch your magic brew for a placebo brew in a control group. It might have a similar taste, but will be missing those secret ingredients that only you know about. You will make the controls think that what they drink is your original thing. Then you compare the two groups to see how many of the treated subjects in each group got better to see if your brew really works. This is the “control” part of the double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trial. It is done to isolate the thing that you are studying – the hypothesized effect of the brew.
Dividing people into groups has to be completely random so that you, say, don’t unconsciously pick up for your treatment group people who look healthier. So now we have the “randomized” part covered too.
Now on to the placebo effect. It is an absolutely phenomenal, well, phenomenon. The mere fact of seeing a doctor, dressed in a white coat, can improve the malady we come with. Two sugar pills will make us feel better than one. A placebo injection will work much better than a placebo pill (because it’s’ more dramatic). When you tell someone that a milkshake he is drinking is a diet drink, his gut will actually respond as if the drink were low fat. When you take a placebo and know what the side effects are of a real drug you think you are taking, you might experience those side effects (that’s actually called the nocebo effect).
So you calculate the real effect of a drug by subtracting the placebo response from the overall response. It’s like taring a scale: you put a bowl on, then subtract its weight, and then put in your flour or cocaine or whatever. And, by the way, that’s where we say hello and goodbye to things like homoeopathy which has been proven time and again in numerous trials and meta-analysis (more on this a little later) not to perform any better than placebo.
A really important principle is that neither patient nor clinician can know who is getting the active drug and who the placebo. So this applies not only to people who get the treatment, but also to people who administer it. If a doctor knew she is giving a placebo treatment, this could change how she interacts with a patient (remember subtle clues about other people we are so good at reading as a result of our hunters and gathers wiring?). So, the doctor’s prior knowledge would likely affect the therapeutic process and distort the final results of a trial. That’s where the “double-blinding” comes from. No one should know.
Et voilà, this covers the whole shebang: the double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled clinical trial which is usually the last stage of testing new drugs (Phase III clinical trial). It shows what science is so good at: i) reducing the noise so that the important signal can be heard more clearly, and ii) making sure humans don’t distort the results because of our cognitive flaws.
But all this is still not enough. The results should be published in full and then are up for – often ferocious - criticism from other scientists. This is another thing at the core of doing science. Science is about critically appraising the evidence for other people's ideas, it's about disproving hypotheses. Or, in Karl Popper’s words: “it's about taking the piss of other people's ideas".
Another indispensable tool in the scientific toolkit is reproducibility. Important research has to be reproduced in other laboratories, by researchers who have no motive to confirm them. And this is one of the many reasons why the system has proved so successful. At any given moment, there might be confusion and quarrels, but, in the end, the methodology prevails and science moves forward.
“Science is about taking the piss of other people’s ideas.”
The most robust evidence comes from meta-analyses and systematic reviews that pull together data from many studies/trials on a given topic.
“At each level, we distil away more and more of the human element, until - in theory - at the top, any trace of humanity has been purged away entirely.”
And that’s how we arrive at a pyramid of scientific evidence. At the bottom, we have personal, expert opinions (ah, personal convictions, people kill for them). One expert is, well, just one expert. No matter how many decades she or he has been studying something, we are all just humans. Close to the bottom, there is also anecdotal evidence: casual stuff based on isolated personal observations, like someone feeling unwell after getting a vaccine. Then there are case studies - observational studies involving an intervention and outcome in a single patient or a small group. We are slowly moving out of people’s heads, but here it’s still possible for the content of our heads to influence which cases we pay attention to. At each level, we distill away more and more of the human element, until - in theory - at the top, any trace of humanity has been purged away entirely. We end up with pure, unadulterated reality (or so we think!).
Limitations
“True science points us towards the vastness of our ignorance. ”
Of course, the more we zoom in, the more we discover that it’s not all that straightforward.
Again, medical research is a good example.
A 2015 editorial in The Lancet hinted that "much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue."
In yet another editorial, the former editor of the British Medical Journal asks if it's "time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise because of untrustworthy data or, so-called "zombie" trials whose results are animated by false data.
A significant proportion of scientific studies are generating false-positive results that could not be replicated by other researchers (a false positive occurs when there is statistically significant evidence for something that isn't real, like a drug curing an illness when it actually does not).
All this happens for many reasons. There are conflicts of interest that can lead to dishonesty and fraud. There is commercial greed. There is ego-driven research. There are poor qualifications that can lead to mediocre standards. There are intentional questionable research practices and scientific misconduct, such as hiding flaws in research design or selectively citing literature. Standard statistical methods of science are still weak and flawed; that’s why areas like parapsychology can sneak past the scientific standards and make an appearance of science.
Unfortunately, many say that mediocre science and research misconduct are a systemic problem. The system provides incentives to publish fraudulent or weak research and does not have adequate regulatory processes to verify the results.
And all this doesn’t even touch upon a fact that science can only help us understand a fraction of reality. We only begin to grasp how our brain works and we are not very good at healing the mind. We have no idea what 95% of the cosmos consists of. There are a lot of things that are still beyond the toolbox of science like wrapping our heads around the concept of consciousness, what’s the origin of life, and many more. If anything, true science points us towards the vastness of our ignorance.
Make up your mind?
“Science is the best thing that has happened to us”
F. Scott Fitzgerald said that “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function”.
Science is not perfect but it does work. It changed everything for us (especially in the 20th century). We discovered viruses and bacteria. We cured polio and smallpox (500 million people died from it in the last century). We more than doubled the lifespan in the 20th century. We sent a man to the Moon. We discovered DNA and mapped the human genome. We understood some of the most fundamental forces in the Universe, like gravity and evolution. We invented the internet. It is mainly school and books and knowledge that takes us out of extreme poverty. Here’s much more to be grateful for when it comes to how science made our lives better.
I believe that science is the best thing that has happened to us. It makes our lives better in ways that are unparalleled to anything else. It diminishes our ignorance. It puts us in a state of appreciation and wonder.
And yet, it’s still us vs. them
“We keep on reducing the absolutely amazing reality to our minuscule minds and cheap, man-made theories. ”
In spite of that, we continue with our fetish for reductionist explanations. Science can be complex (just like life is). It often asks us to be in a place of uncertainty or hold multiple hypotheses at the same time. But hey, it feels good when the world is simple and there are clear enemies (pharma, rich people, the devil – you name it). And so we keep on reducing the absolutely amazing reality to our minuscule minds and cheap, man-made theories. We prefer to stick to our tribes and biases. We are blinded by strong instincts that are leftovers from the hunting and gathering period.
We go even further by ignoring the facts that can save us. Our persistent beliefs are often not only false but also potentially deadly, like the conviction that vaccines are dangerous. Of course, what’s dangerous is not being vaccinated - that’s why vaccines were created in the first place. Immunization is one of the biggest achievements of medicine. Thanks to them, we are no longer afraid if a child will make it past the 5 years mark (before the achievements of modern science, half of the children died before that age). In Covid times, we have an incredibly safe and effective vaccine, which is perceived by many people as dangerous. And it doesn’t matter that millions of people died from the virus and tens of millions have been suffering long term damage to their health, including children!
Conspiracy theories: a deficit of trust
“Conspiracy theories are about values and not information.”
No matter how many scientific studies conclude that things like vaccines are safe, many of us remain unmoved. Our biases navigate the ship. Our hunters and gatherers’ legacy makes us persistently prioritize tribe over reason. This deepens our susceptibility to conspiracy theories, which are of course about values and NOT information. The root cause of such theories lay in societal structures, injustice, alienation, and – more broadly – in cultural and historical contexts. Conspiracy theories amplify existing fears about our place in the world and concerns over global power struggles. They make us see scientific advances as a threat to humanity before they become a new norm.
Perhaps most importantly, we resort to them because we were mistreated by other people like medics, by institutions, or we live in corrupted political systems. I didn’t get vaccinated because of my understanding of immunology, but because I’m lucky enough to have a general trust in science and the healthcare system where I live. But if I was a woman who has experienced an oppressive reproductive regime in Romania during the times of Nicolae Ceauşescu, I would have a very different approach to immunization. Conspiracy theories are not about a deficit of knowledge, but of trust.
We are beautifully flawed
“Our minds deserve much more love than trust.”
We are social creatures with extraordinary capacities to read other people and navigate nuanced societal clues. At the same time, our reason is often fooling us into thinking we can understand the complex reality around us. Truth is that our minds deserve much more love than trust.
Understanding what really drives our beliefs and behaviours can make us more compassionate and forgiving towards ourselves and others. As much as we wished to think of humans as beings driven by reason, rationality is only a small part of our cognitive apparatus. The majority of it consists of instincts and conditioning. For better or worse, this is what being a human is. It’s being beautifully flawed. And if we want, we now have tools to balance our flaws with something that defies our human instincts: science. So far, this alliance has yielded high dividends. So why not make friends with science.
This post flows with: Etcha - Stephen Hawking
