David Friedman is awesome. I came to the comments to give a different Friedman explanation for one generator of economic rationality from a different Friedman book than “strangepoop” did :-)
In “Law’s Order” (which sort of explores how laws that ignore incentives or produce bad incentives tend to be predictably suboptimal) Friedman points out that much of how people decide what to do is based on people finding someone who seems to be “winning” at something and copy them.
(This take is sort of friendly to your “selectionist #3” option but explored in more detail, and applied in more contexts than to simply explain “bad things”.)
Friedman doesn’t use the term “mimesis”, but this is an extremely long-lived academic keyword with many people who have embellished and refined related theories. For example, Peter Thiel has a mild obsession with Rene Girard who was obsessed with a specific theory of mimesis and how it causes human communities to work in predictable ways. If you want the extremely pragmatic layman’s version of the basic mimetic theory, it is simply “monkey see, monkey do” :-P
If you adopt mimesis as THE core process which causes human rationality (which it might well not be, but it is interesting to think of a generator of pragmatically correct beliefs in isolation, to see what its weaknesses are and then look for those weaknesses as signatures of the generator in action), it predicts that no new things in the human behavioral range become seriously optimized in a widespread way until AFTER at least one (maybe many) rounds of behavioral mimetic selection on less optimized random human behavioral exploration, where an audience can watch who succeeds and who fails and copy the winners over and over.
The very strong form of this theory (that it is the ONLY thing) is quite bleak and probably false in general, however some locally applied “strong mimesis” theories might be accurate descriptions of how SOME humans select from among various options in SOME parts of real life where optimized behavior is seen but hard to mechanistically explain in other ways.
Friedman pretty much needed to bring up a form of “economic rationality” in his book because a common debating point regarding criminal law in modern times is that incentives have nothing to do with, for example, criminal law, because criminals are mostly not very book smart, and often haven’t even looked up (much less remembered) the number of years of punishment that any given crime might carry, and so “can’t be affected by such numbers”.
(Note the contrast to LW’s standard inspirational theorizing about a theoretically derived life plan… around here actively encouraging people to look up numbers before making major life decisions is common.)
Friedman’s larger point is that, for example, if burglary is profitable (perhaps punished by a $50 fine, even when the burglar has already sold their loot for $1500), then a child who has an uncle who has figured out this weird/rare trick and makes a living burgling homes will see an uncle who is rich and has a nice life and gives lavish presents at Christmas and donates a lot to the church and is friends with the pastor… That kid will be likely to mimic that uncle without looking up any laws or anything.
Over a long period of time (assuming no change to the laws) the same dynamic in the minds of many children could lead to perhaps 5% of the economy becoming semi-respected burglars, though it would be easy to imagine that another 30% of the private economy would end up focused on mitigating the harms caused by burglary to burglary victims?
(Friedman does not apply the mimesis model to financial crimes, or risky banking practices. However that’s definitely something this theory of behavioral causation leads me to think about. Also, advertising seems to me like it might be a situation where harming random strangers in a specific way counts as technically legal, where the perpetration and harm mitigation of the act have both become huge parts of our economy.)
This theory probably under-determines the precise punishments that should be applied for a given crime, but as a heuristic it probably helps constrain punishment sizes to avoid punishments that are hilariously too small. It suggests that any punishment is too small which allow there to exist a “viable life strategy” that includes committing a crime over and over and then treating the punishment as a mere cost of business.
If you sent burglars to prison for “life without parole” on first offenses, mimesis theory predicts that it would put an end to burglary within a generation or four, but the costs of such a policy might well be higher than the benefits.
(Also, as Friedman himself pointed out over and over in various ways, incentives matter! If, hypothetically, burglary and murder are BOTH punished with “life without parole on first offense” AND murdering someone makes you less likely to be caught as a burglar, then murder/burglary is the crime that might be mimetically generated as a pair of crimes that are mimetically viable when only one of them is not viable… If someone was trying to use data science to tune all the punishments to suppress anti-social mimesis, they should really be tuning ALL the punishments and keeping careful and accurate track of the social costs of every anti-social act as part of the larger model.)
In reality, it does seem to me that mimesis is a BIG source of valid and useful rationality for getting along in life, especially for humans who never enter Piaget’s “Stage 4” and start applying formal operational reasoning to some things. It works “good enough” a lot of the time that I could imagine it being a core part of any organism’s epistemic repertoire?
Indeed, entire cultures seem to exist where the bulk of humans lack formal operational reasoning. For example, anthropologists who study such things often find that traditional farmers (which was basically ALL farmers, prior to the enlightenment) with very clever farming practices don’t actually know how or why their farming practices work. They just “do what everyone has always done”, and it basically works...
One keyword that offers another path here is one Piaget himself coined: “genetic epistemology”. This wasn’t meant in the sense of DNA, but rather in the sense of “generative”, like “where and how is knowledge generated”. I think stage 4 reasoning might be one real kind of generator (see: science and technology), but I think it is not anything like the most common generator, neither among humans nor among other animals.
David Friedman is awesome. I came to the comments to give a different Friedman explanation for one generator of economic rationality from a different Friedman book than “strangepoop” did :-)
In “Law’s Order” (which sort of explores how laws that ignore incentives or produce bad incentives tend to be predictably suboptimal) Friedman points out that much of how people decide what to do is based on people finding someone who seems to be “winning” at something and copy them.
(This take is sort of friendly to your “selectionist #3” option but explored in more detail, and applied in more contexts than to simply explain “bad things”.)
Friedman doesn’t use the term “mimesis”, but this is an extremely long-lived academic keyword with many people who have embellished and refined related theories. For example, Peter Thiel has a mild obsession with Rene Girard who was obsessed with a specific theory of mimesis and how it causes human communities to work in predictable ways. If you want the extremely pragmatic layman’s version of the basic mimetic theory, it is simply “monkey see, monkey do” :-P
If you adopt mimesis as THE core process which causes human rationality (which it might well not be, but it is interesting to think of a generator of pragmatically correct beliefs in isolation, to see what its weaknesses are and then look for those weaknesses as signatures of the generator in action), it predicts that no new things in the human behavioral range become seriously optimized in a widespread way until AFTER at least one (maybe many) rounds of behavioral mimetic selection on less optimized random human behavioral exploration, where an audience can watch who succeeds and who fails and copy the winners over and over.
The very strong form of this theory (that it is the ONLY thing) is quite bleak and probably false in general, however some locally applied “strong mimesis” theories might be accurate descriptions of how SOME humans select from among various options in SOME parts of real life where optimized behavior is seen but hard to mechanistically explain in other ways.
Friedman pretty much needed to bring up a form of “economic rationality” in his book because a common debating point regarding criminal law in modern times is that incentives have nothing to do with, for example, criminal law, because criminals are mostly not very book smart, and often haven’t even looked up (much less remembered) the number of years of punishment that any given crime might carry, and so “can’t be affected by such numbers”.
(Note the contrast to LW’s standard inspirational theorizing about a theoretically derived life plan… around here actively encouraging people to look up numbers before making major life decisions is common.)
Friedman’s larger point is that, for example, if burglary is profitable (perhaps punished by a $50 fine, even when the burglar has already sold their loot for $1500), then a child who has an uncle who has figured out this weird/rare trick and makes a living burgling homes will see an uncle who is rich and has a nice life and gives lavish presents at Christmas and donates a lot to the church and is friends with the pastor… That kid will be likely to mimic that uncle without looking up any laws or anything.
Over a long period of time (assuming no change to the laws) the same dynamic in the minds of many children could lead to perhaps 5% of the economy becoming semi-respected burglars, though it would be easy to imagine that another 30% of the private economy would end up focused on mitigating the harms caused by burglary to burglary victims?
(Friedman does not apply the mimesis model to financial crimes, or risky banking practices. However that’s definitely something this theory of behavioral causation leads me to think about. Also, advertising seems to me like it might be a situation where harming random strangers in a specific way counts as technically legal, where the perpetration and harm mitigation of the act have both become huge parts of our economy.)
This theory probably under-determines the precise punishments that should be applied for a given crime, but as a heuristic it probably helps constrain punishment sizes to avoid punishments that are hilariously too small. It suggests that any punishment is too small which allow there to exist a “viable life strategy” that includes committing a crime over and over and then treating the punishment as a mere cost of business.
If you sent burglars to prison for “life without parole” on first offenses, mimesis theory predicts that it would put an end to burglary within a generation or four, but the costs of such a policy might well be higher than the benefits.
(Also, as Friedman himself pointed out over and over in various ways, incentives matter! If, hypothetically, burglary and murder are BOTH punished with “life without parole on first offense” AND murdering someone makes you less likely to be caught as a burglar, then murder/burglary is the crime that might be mimetically generated as a pair of crimes that are mimetically viable when only one of them is not viable… If someone was trying to use data science to tune all the punishments to suppress anti-social mimesis, they should really be tuning ALL the punishments and keeping careful and accurate track of the social costs of every anti-social act as part of the larger model.)
In reality, it does seem to me that mimesis is a BIG source of valid and useful rationality for getting along in life, especially for humans who never enter Piaget’s “Stage 4” and start applying formal operational reasoning to some things. It works “good enough” a lot of the time that I could imagine it being a core part of any organism’s epistemic repertoire?
Indeed, entire cultures seem to exist where the bulk of humans lack formal operational reasoning. For example, anthropologists who study such things often find that traditional farmers (which was basically ALL farmers, prior to the enlightenment) with very clever farming practices don’t actually know how or why their farming practices work. They just “do what everyone has always done”, and it basically works...
One keyword that offers another path here is one Piaget himself coined: “genetic epistemology”. This wasn’t meant in the sense of DNA, but rather in the sense of “generative”, like “where and how is knowledge generated”. I think stage 4 reasoning might be one real kind of generator (see: science and technology), but I think it is not anything like the most common generator, neither among humans nor among other animals.