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Why do humans reason massively wrong?

1. Because they confuse reasoning and rhetoric.
2. Because their reasoning is most often constructed backwards.
3. Because they constantly apply heuristics, or worse, dogmas.
4. Because they see that their status is sufficient to impose a decision, and therefore exempts them from reasoning.

What is rhetoric?

It's the art of gaining the upper hand in a verbal contest. We are particularly attached to it in public, because it corresponds to positioning ourselves above others in terms of social rank. In other words, in public, we generally don't seek to be right so much as to have the upper hand.

What is backwards reasoning?

In correct reasoning, we conduct an exhaustive analysis of the situation, which eventually highlights a conclusion that we discover.
In backward reasoning, we start from a conclusion chosen arbitrarily, because it conforms to our immediate interest, or our beliefs, and we construct a posteriori a biased reasoning which consists of selecting and articulating the elements which justify this conclusion , to give the illusion of reasoning resulting from analysis.

What is a heuristic?

A heuristic is a method that allows you to find a not too bad solution to a complicated problem, with much less effort than discovering the optimum solution would require.

Take for example the traveling salesman problem. A traveling salesman must visit prospects in, for example, 100 cities, and is looking for the shortest route to get there. Finding the actually shortest route is not possible for this traveler, who will be led to adopt tricks (heuristics) to make it simpler.
A very simple heuristic could, for example, consist of going from city to city, each time choosing the least distant among the remaining cities. It's very easy to trace. On the other hand, it is not at all optimal at the end of the course.
Our traveler will therefore be able to apply a second heuristic which consists of returning to the last cities, and deciding to travel through them earlier, each time making a detour as short as possible in his journey.

In our lives, we constantly apply heuristics. The problem is that the less competent we are in an area, the more we apply simplistic heuristics to it. Ultimately, our natural functioning leads us to easily find bad solutions.

The interest of heuristics is twofold for the individual:
1. They allow you to save yourself the effort of reasoning, therefore preserving your time and energy.
2. Using dogmas as heuristics generally improves one's position in the game of alliances. Dogmas are often ineffective heuristics, or even completely erroneous, that is to say leading to a very poor solution to the initial problem.

Go deeper

Refer to question 'What is a human?' which provided another light on the low quality of our reasoning.

Refer to chapter 4'The decision-making process, or the reign of the irrational' from the book From capital to reason.

Wikipedia article regarding cognitive biases

 

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