Lenny Rachitsky: preference

Transcript context

…Psychologic and psychological. In other words, there's a different mechanism for logic and decision-making within the evolved human brain, which is actually quite a lot more nuanced and more sophisticated than the mechanisms for decision-making that economists theorize because it has to account for imperfect information, it has to account for variance in outcome. It has to account for asymmetrical information, and it has to account for imperfect trust. So we've evolved to effectively operate in decision-making under uncertainty as Herbert Simon called it. And yet most of the actual design of procedures that we encounter are designed for effectively information decision-making under certainty. And that's a very special case, which actually never applies completely, I would argue, or certainly very rarely actually occurs in the real world. It mainly actually is found in economic models. You have a really good insight into why we think in this irrational, illogical way, which I love. You talk about how if we were evolving in the savanna, if an animal's very predictable and very logical, they're a lot easier to catch. Can you just talk a bit about that because I think- No, things like the ability to behave irrationally, okay, there's a claim, and by the way, of all the negative reviews I get, they weren't where I expected at all. There's about three pages in the book where I basically say, "Being a bit Donald Trump has its virtues," which is that no one's going to dick with you because they're not entirely sure what you're going to do. Now, bear in mind this does not mean I'm absolutely an uncritical admirer of the Donald, far from it. But the guy has operated in the new real estate scene for quite a long time, and one of the things you've got to learn in that business is no one's going to survive in New York real estate if they can actually predict what you're going to do. I imagine that is not a world where being completely, consistently logical, never losing your temper, never walking away from a deal, et cetera. You have to be able to play those game theoretic kind of moves. And there were people who basically encountered this thing. Maybe I shouldn't put it right at the end of the book, and I put it somewhere early on who were then driven practically insane by this assertion. But the fact remains that there are certain circumstances in which the ability to behave irrationally is actually at the meta level, highly rational. The fact that, okay, if I'm never going to fight back against anybody who's slightly taller than me, it's very rational, but I'm going to spend my whole life being dicked around by people who are quarter of an inch taller than I. Very rational, they're bigger, stronger than me, never do anything to retaliate. But no, okay, we have to have some degree of, and Darwin spotted this, some degree of kind of random number generator in our maker. And the most classy example of this, which is I learned from Robert Trivers, the evolutionary biologist, is that when a hare is being chased by a dog, it goes into this incredibly random pattern of movement where it will zoop straight up in the air. It will suddenly do a 90 degree turn to the right, it will then suddenly double back on itself at huge speed. And it appears, I don't know how they find this out, that it doesn't actually know what it's doing, that there's a random number generator and the hairs, I think it's called in submarine warfare, it's called doing a crazy Ivan, where you just execute crazy maneuvers. It was Russian submarines when being pursued by American submarines would do something called a crazy Ivan. And the hare has the equivalent thing, which is basically it just enters this random movement, high-speed mode. And the point is, it can't consciously know what it's going to do next because the dog would then learn to anticipate what it was doing. It has to be random, and it almost has to be unconscious because the hare cannot give away any telltale signs of what its next move might be.…

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