Superrationality
Created | Updated Jan 28, 2002
All travellers on planet Earth should understand the meaning of superrationality. It has to be considered as a fundamental etiquette to be observed at all times.
To explain what it means we shall consider what has come to be known as 'The Tragedy of the Commons', from the name of an article written by Garrett Hardin, an evolutionary biologist. The 'commons' refers generally to any shared resource. Hardin's classic example is of a shared enclosure of grazing land, traditionally called a common, upon which each herdsman in the community has the right to graze his animals. The problem is that if each herdsman was to allow all of his animals to feed upon the common, the land would quickly become overgrazed and useless. Yet, because it is free, each herdsman is tempted to graze as many of his animals on the common that he can, certainly at least as many as his neighbours. Each herdsman's desire to make sure of his fair share eventually guarantees that no one gets any share at all. This is the tragedy of the commons. It is rapidly becoming the tragedy of planet Earth.
In a 'commons' situation, the rationality of the individual person, if it pays no heed to the global rationality, is actually an irrationality. In Hardin's example, the irrationality is obvious. If the herdsmen were simply to exercise a little short-term restraint, they could guarantee the long-term health of their common pasture. As it is, their individual greed turns and acts not just against the global good, but against the individual good too. The irrationality of the situation on planet Earth is no less obvious, except that the scale is so great and the implications are so awful that earth-people cannot bring themselves to acknowledge it - nor, of course, do anything about it. They each decide that the tiny little bit of restraint that they could exercise individually would be of such little consequence on the global scale that there is no point bothering. It wouldn't make any difference. As Douglas Hofstadter (who coined the term 'superrationality') so neatly puts it, "apathy at the individual level translates into insanity at the mass level."
As a vehicle to explore the relationship between individual and global rationalities, Hofstadter chooses a variant of a simple game called the 'Prisoner's Dilemma'. It is played for points between two people who have no communication with each other, and no knowledge of each other. Each player is given the choice of cooperating or defecting. No more than that. Cooperate or defect. Now, if both players choose to defect, their pay-off will be one point each. If one player chooses to defect and the other to cooperate, then the defector's pay-off will be five points and the cooperator will get none. On the other hand, if both players choose to cooperate, their pay-off will be three points each. The aim of the game is to acquire as many points as possible.
Try to imagine taking part in a Prisoner's Dilemma tournament where each person plays every other person. You are asked simply to make a choice between cooperation and defection. You have no idea who the other players are, and have to assume that you never will. To emphasize again, the idea is to come out of the tournament with as many points as possible. Pretend that you are playing for money. £100 a point!
Well then, what is your choice? Are you to cooperate, or are you to defect? It's a tough decision. The situation is full of the most horrible paradoxes. There is no rational strategy. The dilemma is that, collectively, it is in the best interests of everyone to cooperate, while, individually, it is in the best interests of everyone to defect. Let us attach some numbers to this to make the point as clearly as possible. Imagine a tournament of twenty-one players. If each player was to cooperate, everyone would receive £6000, twenty lots of three hundred pounds. However, the choice to cooperate has to be made in the knowledge that defection is always more profitable. If everyone else has cooperated, you can clear £10000 by defecting yourself. On the other hand, if each player was to defect, everyone would receive just £2000. And if you were unfortunate enough to be the sole cooperator among twenty defectors, you would end up with precisely nothing. Think about this a while before reading on. You might want to bookmark this point and come back a little later.
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We hope you have put some hard thought behind your decision. Did you cooperate? If you did, we have to suggest that you made a very strange choice, for by cooperating you were guaranteed to win less points than by defecting. Suppose you were told that you were the last person to make a choice. Would you still cooperate? Since everyone else has already posted their decision, it would make no sense at all to do anything but defect. Yet, why should knowing that your choice is the last make any effective difference. You have no contact with the other players. You might as well assume that everyone else has already decided anyway. There is an overwhelming case to be made for defection. Do you want change your mind? Or perhaps you chose to defect in the first place. If you did, we again have to suggest that you made a very strange choice. Since there is such a strong case for defection, it is likely that everyone chose to do exactly that, receiving £2000 each. However, looking from the outside, from a global perspective, at the twenty-one of you collectively, your unanimous choice to defect appears as an act of unalloyed folly. You have each short-changed yourself to the tune of £4000 - the extra cash you would have won had you each cooperated. There is an overwhelming case to be made for cooperation. Again, do you want to change your mind? What is your final choice?
Let us bring the discussion back into more real world terms. Imagine that you suddenly experience a phenomenally cold spell of weather, of arctic bitterness - increasingly likely as the planet's weather system becomes destabilised. The demand for electricity would rise dramatically, everyone cranking their heating up to the maximum in an effort to keep out the cold. Add to that lots of extra hot meals and drinks, and the demand for power soon overtakes the electricity company's capacity to supply. An announcement is made which requests people to turn their heating down - otherwise there will have to be indiscriminate power cuts. Either everyone reduces their demand by a little, or some people will have to go without power completely. And that could include you. Do you reduce your consumption? As with the tournament above, it is easy to believe that there is nothing to gain by cooperating. Your little bit of electricity is not going to make any difference, so, if most people have cooperated, you might just as well keep your heating right up and stay snugly warm. On the other hand, if the majority have defected and kept their heating up - selfish, thoughtless people - there is already a chance that your power will be cut off, so you might just as well keep yours up too and make the most of it while it lasts. No one is ever going to know. Of course, if you think this way, it is a very good bet that a lot of other people will be thinking the same way. And that is why you suddenly get blacked out. And frozen out. Individual vanity snowballs into global insanity.
The decision to keep your heating turned up full, like the decision to defect in our tournament, is perfectly rational. Yet, as we have seen, it is also irrational. There is a need to refer to some kind of higher rationality. The decision to turn your heating down a notch, putting on an extra pullover instead, is a superrational decision. Hearing a rumour that there is going to be a shortage of some commodity, coffee for example, and therefore buying a little bit less than normal, rather than stocking up and helping to actualize the rumoured shortage, is a superrational decision - because, by taking account of the collective good, your superrational choice will eventually be reflected back to work for your own good. You hope. The fear is, of course, that those people who are addicted to their caffeine in a serious way will panic and hoard up on supplies, clearing the shelves so that next time around you will go short. And it is that fear which exerts such a strong grip over our mind, making us want to buy in bulk too, in order to guarantee our own supply. Just like our Prisoner's Dilemma tournament, the overriding thought is that you can only be worse off as a result of cooperating. As we saw previously, the rational case for defection seems to be overwhelming. But defecting is not rational. It is thoroughly irrational.
A final example. Say you were on a touring holiday on a foreign planet that you would probably never visit again. You hike into some hills for a picnic. After eating and drinking too much, you fall asleep in the sun, and when you eventually awake, tired and lethargic, you don't much want to clear up the lunch mess and pack all your rubbish away. Why not just walk off? You will never be back to this spot. You don't know anyone here. No one knows you. Yet, although a few people do sadly just walk away from their rubbish, the majority of us do not. Our conscience speaks to us. Understanding that we would not want to chance upon such a mess ourselves, we do what we wish other people would do and leave our picnic spot just as we found it. We are joined with our fellow hikers by a common superrational value. However, if we were to come across the mess that someone has left, to be rightly true to that superrational value we are compelled to pack the rubbish out on their behalf. We have to take their responsibility upon ourselves. If we leave this mess, it will be that much more likely that other not so superrational hikers will also leave theirs, thinking that their little bit of mess won't make any difference to the mess that's already there. Our values are part of the value context of our whole galactic community. Only by living the value of superrationality can we expect our fellow hitch-hikers to live it also. The more superrational we become, the more superrational we can expect our fellow travellers to be. We can only promote sanity with our own sane behaviour.
The importance of observing the etiquette of superrationality on fragile plants like Earth is obvious. You have to set an example. It is a global courtesy. If Earth culture honoured and respected the value of superrationality, the ensuing trust would ensure that sanity prevailed over insanity. Tragedy could still be averted.
References:
Hardin, Garrett. "The Tragedy of the Commons". Science 162, no.3859 (Dec 13, 1968): 1243-48
Hofstadter, Douglas R. Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern. Penguin Books, 1985. Chapter 30
To explain what it means we shall consider what has come to be known as 'The Tragedy of the Commons', from the name of an article written by Garrett Hardin, an evolutionary biologist. The 'commons' refers generally to any shared resource. Hardin's classic example is of a shared enclosure of grazing land, traditionally called a common, upon which each herdsman in the community has the right to graze his animals. The problem is that if each herdsman was to allow all of his animals to feed upon the common, the land would quickly become overgrazed and useless. Yet, because it is free, each herdsman is tempted to graze as many of his animals on the common that he can, certainly at least as many as his neighbours. Each herdsman's desire to make sure of his fair share eventually guarantees that no one gets any share at all. This is the tragedy of the commons. It is rapidly becoming the tragedy of planet Earth.
In a 'commons' situation, the rationality of the individual person, if it pays no heed to the global rationality, is actually an irrationality. In Hardin's example, the irrationality is obvious. If the herdsmen were simply to exercise a little short-term restraint, they could guarantee the long-term health of their common pasture. As it is, their individual greed turns and acts not just against the global good, but against the individual good too. The irrationality of the situation on planet Earth is no less obvious, except that the scale is so great and the implications are so awful that earth-people cannot bring themselves to acknowledge it - nor, of course, do anything about it. They each decide that the tiny little bit of restraint that they could exercise individually would be of such little consequence on the global scale that there is no point bothering. It wouldn't make any difference. As Douglas Hofstadter (who coined the term 'superrationality') so neatly puts it, "apathy at the individual level translates into insanity at the mass level."
As a vehicle to explore the relationship between individual and global rationalities, Hofstadter chooses a variant of a simple game called the 'Prisoner's Dilemma'. It is played for points between two people who have no communication with each other, and no knowledge of each other. Each player is given the choice of cooperating or defecting. No more than that. Cooperate or defect. Now, if both players choose to defect, their pay-off will be one point each. If one player chooses to defect and the other to cooperate, then the defector's pay-off will be five points and the cooperator will get none. On the other hand, if both players choose to cooperate, their pay-off will be three points each. The aim of the game is to acquire as many points as possible.
Try to imagine taking part in a Prisoner's Dilemma tournament where each person plays every other person. You are asked simply to make a choice between cooperation and defection. You have no idea who the other players are, and have to assume that you never will. To emphasize again, the idea is to come out of the tournament with as many points as possible. Pretend that you are playing for money. £100 a point!
Well then, what is your choice? Are you to cooperate, or are you to defect? It's a tough decision. The situation is full of the most horrible paradoxes. There is no rational strategy. The dilemma is that, collectively, it is in the best interests of everyone to cooperate, while, individually, it is in the best interests of everyone to defect. Let us attach some numbers to this to make the point as clearly as possible. Imagine a tournament of twenty-one players. If each player was to cooperate, everyone would receive £6000, twenty lots of three hundred pounds. However, the choice to cooperate has to be made in the knowledge that defection is always more profitable. If everyone else has cooperated, you can clear £10000 by defecting yourself. On the other hand, if each player was to defect, everyone would receive just £2000. And if you were unfortunate enough to be the sole cooperator among twenty defectors, you would end up with precisely nothing. Think about this a while before reading on. You might want to bookmark this point and come back a little later.
:-)
:-(
:-)
:-(
:-)
:-(
:-)
:-(
:-)
:-(
:-)
:-(
:-)
:-(
We hope you have put some hard thought behind your decision. Did you cooperate? If you did, we have to suggest that you made a very strange choice, for by cooperating you were guaranteed to win less points than by defecting. Suppose you were told that you were the last person to make a choice. Would you still cooperate? Since everyone else has already posted their decision, it would make no sense at all to do anything but defect. Yet, why should knowing that your choice is the last make any effective difference. You have no contact with the other players. You might as well assume that everyone else has already decided anyway. There is an overwhelming case to be made for defection. Do you want change your mind? Or perhaps you chose to defect in the first place. If you did, we again have to suggest that you made a very strange choice. Since there is such a strong case for defection, it is likely that everyone chose to do exactly that, receiving £2000 each. However, looking from the outside, from a global perspective, at the twenty-one of you collectively, your unanimous choice to defect appears as an act of unalloyed folly. You have each short-changed yourself to the tune of £4000 - the extra cash you would have won had you each cooperated. There is an overwhelming case to be made for cooperation. Again, do you want to change your mind? What is your final choice?
Let us bring the discussion back into more real world terms. Imagine that you suddenly experience a phenomenally cold spell of weather, of arctic bitterness - increasingly likely as the planet's weather system becomes destabilised. The demand for electricity would rise dramatically, everyone cranking their heating up to the maximum in an effort to keep out the cold. Add to that lots of extra hot meals and drinks, and the demand for power soon overtakes the electricity company's capacity to supply. An announcement is made which requests people to turn their heating down - otherwise there will have to be indiscriminate power cuts. Either everyone reduces their demand by a little, or some people will have to go without power completely. And that could include you. Do you reduce your consumption? As with the tournament above, it is easy to believe that there is nothing to gain by cooperating. Your little bit of electricity is not going to make any difference, so, if most people have cooperated, you might just as well keep your heating right up and stay snugly warm. On the other hand, if the majority have defected and kept their heating up - selfish, thoughtless people - there is already a chance that your power will be cut off, so you might just as well keep yours up too and make the most of it while it lasts. No one is ever going to know. Of course, if you think this way, it is a very good bet that a lot of other people will be thinking the same way. And that is why you suddenly get blacked out. And frozen out. Individual vanity snowballs into global insanity.
The decision to keep your heating turned up full, like the decision to defect in our tournament, is perfectly rational. Yet, as we have seen, it is also irrational. There is a need to refer to some kind of higher rationality. The decision to turn your heating down a notch, putting on an extra pullover instead, is a superrational decision. Hearing a rumour that there is going to be a shortage of some commodity, coffee for example, and therefore buying a little bit less than normal, rather than stocking up and helping to actualize the rumoured shortage, is a superrational decision - because, by taking account of the collective good, your superrational choice will eventually be reflected back to work for your own good. You hope. The fear is, of course, that those people who are addicted to their caffeine in a serious way will panic and hoard up on supplies, clearing the shelves so that next time around you will go short. And it is that fear which exerts such a strong grip over our mind, making us want to buy in bulk too, in order to guarantee our own supply. Just like our Prisoner's Dilemma tournament, the overriding thought is that you can only be worse off as a result of cooperating. As we saw previously, the rational case for defection seems to be overwhelming. But defecting is not rational. It is thoroughly irrational.
A final example. Say you were on a touring holiday on a foreign planet that you would probably never visit again. You hike into some hills for a picnic. After eating and drinking too much, you fall asleep in the sun, and when you eventually awake, tired and lethargic, you don't much want to clear up the lunch mess and pack all your rubbish away. Why not just walk off? You will never be back to this spot. You don't know anyone here. No one knows you. Yet, although a few people do sadly just walk away from their rubbish, the majority of us do not. Our conscience speaks to us. Understanding that we would not want to chance upon such a mess ourselves, we do what we wish other people would do and leave our picnic spot just as we found it. We are joined with our fellow hikers by a common superrational value. However, if we were to come across the mess that someone has left, to be rightly true to that superrational value we are compelled to pack the rubbish out on their behalf. We have to take their responsibility upon ourselves. If we leave this mess, it will be that much more likely that other not so superrational hikers will also leave theirs, thinking that their little bit of mess won't make any difference to the mess that's already there. Our values are part of the value context of our whole galactic community. Only by living the value of superrationality can we expect our fellow hitch-hikers to live it also. The more superrational we become, the more superrational we can expect our fellow travellers to be. We can only promote sanity with our own sane behaviour.
The importance of observing the etiquette of superrationality on fragile plants like Earth is obvious. You have to set an example. It is a global courtesy. If Earth culture honoured and respected the value of superrationality, the ensuing trust would ensure that sanity prevailed over insanity. Tragedy could still be averted.
References:
Hardin, Garrett. "The Tragedy of the Commons". Science 162, no.3859 (Dec 13, 1968): 1243-48
Hofstadter, Douglas R. Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern. Penguin Books, 1985. Chapter 30
