Does Irrationality Fuel Innovation?

Rationality is overvalued for day to day life. It works for certain things like science, where you are lead by the evidence and you constantly adjust some model of understanding of reality to more accurate standards, but it really don't seem to work well for everything in one's life. The reason is that we operate under deeply unscientific environments like partial-information, uncertainty and unpredictability. In these environments 'intuition' that might not be backed by rational thought is frequently more valuable. Technically you can try to be always rational in your life and play the 'risk minimization' game, but you will probably have a very mediocre life with limited success.

A quote from George Bernard Shaw (some would say insisting people use your middle name is unreasonable):<p>“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”<p>Irrationality is just an extreme form of being unreasonable, is it?

I&#x27;ve heard it rumored that one of Peter Thiel&#x27;s private beliefs is that tech bubbles are necessary to fund non-trivial innovation in new industries (when expected value to investors is largely negative). This is a fascinating question either way.

&quot;I also like the strategy of temporarily suspending your disbelief and throwing yourself headlong into something for a while, allowing your emotional state to be as if you were 100% confident&quot;<p>All work happens because of this essentially. A result of over-zealousness. Irrational thoughts that keep you going that extra mile at 2 am because you really believe in an idea (more than it ought to be believed many times). If people didn&#x27;t feel irrationally strong about things, then nothing meaningful (sometimes low probability of success, but high expected value as the author mentions) would get done.

I think most people have group think.<p>To not have group think is considered &#x27;irrationality&#x27; since most people don&#x27;t think the person is correct. So perhaps you are playing with words.<p>I wouldn&#x27;t have thought a large company just ignoring local laws could use this as a driving tactic to win a world market.<p>But I think that was my group think over their irrationality.

Indeed, irrationality fuels innovation! Look at the phenomenon called life.<p>Life evolves by doing random mutations, and throwing away everything that fails hard enough. No analysis is performed at all, and reams of completely pointless changes are tried.<p>This process has produced the most innovative and advanced chemical, mechanical, and information-processing devices known to date.<p>The problem of course is that the random-walk approach immensely wasteful. In our daily lives, we strive to somehow less waste, and tend to avoid being an unfortunate random mutation destined to fail. Here genetic evolution gives way to memetic evolution.<p>But the memetic evolution has many of the same properties: many &quot;random&quot; things are tried, and a number of most spectacular successes are results of lucky coincidences and following patently wrong initial ideas. Of course, most of such crazy ideas just fail, like in biological evolution.<p>I would compare innovation to stock market: while you can sort of predict some local movements with a chance better than rolling a dice, you still face a fundamentally random process, and it&#x27;s rational to approach it like one. For one thing, it means to accept its unpredictability and the limited usefulness of any rational models. Following a hunch may be as good a strategy as careful analysis. Probably a mix of both would give the best results; it looks like what some famous innovators did.

Risk aversion is rational behavior. However, it&#x27;s not irrational concepts that succeed; rather, rational ideas that are counter-intuitive.

Imagine this is something you know to be true about yourself, or is an attitude necessary&#x2F;useful to fuel innovation: “What matters most to me is doing something daring that plausibly benefits others”.<p>I suspect many people have deep drives of this nature, featuring multiple values - in this case, being daring (a matter of character) <i>and</i> benefitting others (a matter of welfare).<p>It would be irrational in such case to pursue a project: (1) that isn’t daring, (2) without regard to whether it’s daring, (3) with exclusive regard to whether it’s daring, (4) that doesn’t plausibly benefit others, (5) without regard to whether it plausibly benefits others, or (6) with exclusive regard to whether it plausibly benefits others.<p>3 and 5, and 2 and 6, are corollaries.<p>Is irrationality necessary or helpful to fuel innovation? Of course depends on what we mean by &quot;rationality&quot; and what value(s) rationality is meant to serve. My answer would be &quot;no&quot;.

&quot;You are under no obligation to remain the same person you were a year ago, a month ago, or even a day ago. You are here to create yourself, continuously&quot; --Feynman

I believe that all projects I&#x27;ve been involved in would not have been green-lighted had the full extent of time, effort, and costs been known up front.<p>And I think that&#x27;s part of the game. How much leg do you need to reveal to get the signature?<p>They&#x27;ve all been worthwhile projects in the end, however.

Rational deals with knowns.<p>Innovation deal with unknowns.<p>The unknown may be known, thus become rational!<p>Embrace the incompetence to expell it.

Interesting article, really made me think, thank you.

Yes.

My belief is yes, and this is just my opinion.<p>I think startup founders are irrational, crazy optimistic, because the odds of making it compared to the effort put in are completely off. But they get to do what they enjoy, perhaps for a while. This is possibly even more true for the employees in such companies.<p>Rational people go into corporations, and get an MBA, which is at its core a course in (economic) rationality. And the result of this rationality is bottom line is everything, even if it means to suck the soul out of everything or even shrinking the company, or even destroying the Earth.<p>I admit, I despise (economic) rationality. Rationality is only ever reactive, it cannot give you a goal, or a vision. It cannot give society any values. The values or goals have to be irrational, by definition.<p>There are some nice examples from game theory underlying this, but probably the best is Varoufakis&#x27; story about students of economics and business he taught.<p>When Yanis came to his game theory class, he gave a proposal to students, instead of them having to work and getting a mark for the course based on their knowledge, the students would just secretly vote on what mark they should get and they would all get the minimal mark anybody voted for. But the proposal would only be implemented if all the students agree. Inevitably, there were some people against this. Later Yanis asked these students in private, why did they vote against the proposal, they could certainly save themselves a lot of effort! They always, and without any hint of irony, told him that they believe there would be some idiot who would irrationally put in a bad mark. The irony being, of course, it was them, who was irrational!<p>I think this story beautifully underlies the futility of the quest for ultimate rationality.<p>And I find it hilarious that while free market ideology touts rationality as the ultimate goal, the reality of capitalism is that it actually requires people to create startups and small businesses, which is inherently irrational behavior.