<story><title>The Bias Bias in Behavioral Economics</title><url>https://www.nowpublishers.com/article/Details/RBE-0092</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ggm</author><text>I think &amp;quot;rational&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;irrational&amp;quot; have taken on domain-specific meaning in economics. This is not unusual. Ontologies and DSL are kind-of a way of life now, in any information-theoretic field.&lt;p&gt;In my space, we refer to some things as &amp;quot;portable&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;non-portable&amp;quot; which has very specific intent, which doesn&amp;#x27;t relate to if you can pick them up or not. I think loan-words which have close analogies in a few minds rapidly diverge.&lt;p&gt;So a &amp;quot;rational&amp;quot; actor in economics seem (to me at least) to mean the typical selfish bastard who only acts to maximise their own profit outcome, no matter how its defined, and excludes a green warrior buying a good or chattel to NOT use it, or somebody buying it to give to charity, or buying it to round up another charge to get north of a shipping fee but its a nonce purchase and has no intent or purpose..&lt;p&gt;its a narrow, domain-specific meaning. I think that word doesn&amp;#x27;t mean what you think it means &lt;i&gt;inconceivable&lt;/i&gt;</text></item><item><author>abnry</author><text>On this topic: It&amp;#x27;s always bugged me when behavioral economists start going on about &amp;quot;irrational human behavior.&amp;quot; Many times they are simply not accounting for cognitive or longterm costs. Using your precious energy on too many system 2 calculations will not help you live a good life. So compromises are made. Thinking is hard work. It is entirely reasonable to minimize hard work.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>logicchains</author><text>&amp;gt;So a &amp;quot;rational&amp;quot; actor in economics seem (to me at least) to mean the typical selfish bastard who only acts to maximise their own profit outcome, no matter how its defined, and excludes a green warrior buying a good or chattel to NOT use it, or somebody buying it to give to charity, or buying it to round up another charge to get north of a shipping fee but its a nonce purchase and has no intent or purpose..&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s not true at all. Rational is defined as someone acting to maximise their utility (roughly satisfaction), which is capable of encompassing &amp;quot;a green warrior buying a good or chattel to NOT use it, or somebody buying it to give to charity, or buying it to round up another charge to get north of a shipping fee but its a nonce purchase and has no intent or purpose&amp;quot; perfectly fine.</text></comment>
<story><title>The Bias Bias in Behavioral Economics</title><url>https://www.nowpublishers.com/article/Details/RBE-0092</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ggm</author><text>I think &amp;quot;rational&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;irrational&amp;quot; have taken on domain-specific meaning in economics. This is not unusual. Ontologies and DSL are kind-of a way of life now, in any information-theoretic field.&lt;p&gt;In my space, we refer to some things as &amp;quot;portable&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;non-portable&amp;quot; which has very specific intent, which doesn&amp;#x27;t relate to if you can pick them up or not. I think loan-words which have close analogies in a few minds rapidly diverge.&lt;p&gt;So a &amp;quot;rational&amp;quot; actor in economics seem (to me at least) to mean the typical selfish bastard who only acts to maximise their own profit outcome, no matter how its defined, and excludes a green warrior buying a good or chattel to NOT use it, or somebody buying it to give to charity, or buying it to round up another charge to get north of a shipping fee but its a nonce purchase and has no intent or purpose..&lt;p&gt;its a narrow, domain-specific meaning. I think that word doesn&amp;#x27;t mean what you think it means &lt;i&gt;inconceivable&lt;/i&gt;</text></item><item><author>abnry</author><text>On this topic: It&amp;#x27;s always bugged me when behavioral economists start going on about &amp;quot;irrational human behavior.&amp;quot; Many times they are simply not accounting for cognitive or longterm costs. Using your precious energy on too many system 2 calculations will not help you live a good life. So compromises are made. Thinking is hard work. It is entirely reasonable to minimize hard work.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ssivark</author><text>Even such a domain specific definition is borderline useless because there is no way to constrain the &amp;quot;utility&amp;quot; which rational agents are supposed to maximize -- which makes the concept of a rational agent tautological, and not at all predictive. (&amp;quot;People behave that way because they behave that way&amp;quot;. I might encode my observations in a utility function but that doesn&amp;#x27;t suddenly help me generalize to other situations)&lt;p&gt;The other thing is that the limited situations which psychologists&amp;#x2F;economists measure people in are very artificial, and there&amp;#x27;s no reason for people to ace the experimenter&amp;#x27;s metric.&lt;p&gt;Responding to grandparent: It&amp;#x27;s not just that project are efficient and not quite correct -- they&amp;#x27;re probably more correct and scientists have no way to tell.&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;If you judge a fish by it&amp;#x27;s ability to climb trees, it will live it&amp;#x27;s whole life thinking it is stupid.&amp;quot;</text></comment>