Episode: 3464
Title: HPR3464: Being irrational
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3464/hpr3464.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 23:57:33

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3464 for Thursday, the 11th of November 2021.
Today's show is entitled, Being Irrational.
It is hosted by Andrew Conway, and is about 13 minutes long, and carries a clean flag.
The summary is Being Irrational, Is Rational.
Hello Hacker Public Radio people. This is McNalloo, also known as Andrew.
And in this episode I wanted to talk to you about something that has been rattling around
inside my mind for a while, and that is being irrational, that is not being rational.
Now these thoughts were prompted, well, I'm really riffing on some ideas that came to mind while
listening to a recent episode by Clatu, where he was talking about science and evidence and
so forth, although I'm not going to go into Covid stuff again. Dave and I, I think,
covered that to my satisfaction in the previous episode. No, in this one, I want to tackle
the strange flip side of how we approach science, maths or even computer programming,
which I think would be most relevant to hackers here, and essentially my thought line goes like this.
So let's consider playing a game of chess. Now chess is a completely deterministic game.
You don't roll a dice, the rules don't change, you don't argue or debate over the rules,
you don't say well, sometimes a rook can turn left, no rook always goes in a straight line
across the squares, bishops always go diagonally, knights always go in an L shape and so forth.
You know, in a role playing game like Dungeons & Dragons, you can quibble with a dungeon master
but how you might interpret the rules, nothing like that in chess. Also, as I said, no dice rolls,
so it's completely deterministic. Given the state of the board right now, you can actually write
down a list of the next possible moves. Isn't that long a list? Now, the thing that's about chess,
of course, is that a computer would be very good at analysing moves ahead, because there are,
let's say there's only a set number of moves, legitimate moves you can make from any setup of the
board. And a computer can look at that and then look at what the other player might move,
but very quickly end up with an exponential explosion. So it's deterministic but actually
harder than you may think. So our first computers, the computers I grew up with in the 1980s,
the 8-bit computers I had a BBC Micro, but if you're thinking ZX Spectrum or Commodore 64,
that's the kind of thing I'm talking about. They couldn't be that good at chess, because they just
weren't powerful enough, but now my smartphone can easily beat me at chess. But I can do something
my smartphone cannot do. I can get better at chess, I can practice, and maybe there's some chess
programs that can learn, yes. But when I got my very first smartphone, which was a Google G1,
I used to play it, I got a chess app for that, and it used to beat me every single time,
even in the easiest difficulty setting, and I felt so humbled, because I thought, you know,
pretty good at chess, you know, you know, it gets humans anyway, you know, I've never played it
that seriously, but I thought I was an okay player, but no, my smartphone, the dumbest smartphone,
admittedly, but it's still a smartphone, could easily beat me in the easiest difficulty setting.
So, then, after weeks of trying, one night, I'm sat on the train in the station waiting to go home,
so I've been at the pub in Glasgow, quite a few pints to drink, so I'm, let's face it, I'm a
little bit drunk, and I'm sitting on the train waiting for it to depart, and I, to my utter
astonishment, I beat my phone at chess while I'm drunk, I've never managed to do while I'm sober.
Okay, so maybe luck, maybe luck, certainly, next day I play it when I'm sober, I lose again.
Now, obviously, some science is required, a scientific experiment, I need to reproduce this result,
and drink lots of beer again, but putting that aside, the serious point I'm making here is,
it's probably true to say that when I'm not thinking directly, I can be a better chess player
than when I'm thinking completely rationally and logically, and indeed, the way that computers
used to play chess, I've had the way they still play chess, which is by essentially brute force
looking ahead, is quite capable of beating all but the best players, and I think now even the best
players in the world. So, you have to, I have to start asking myself, well, how do I play chess?
When you play chess, you're not just looking at the next, the next move you will probably think
through, look, do a look ahead, and the smaller number of moves you can consider it, and also the
number of moves that your opponent might do, but then when you consider the moves you might
do in response to that, that's starting to get a little bit, but certainly beyond my abilities to
annuity all the possibilities. That's not how an experienced chess player plays though,
an experienced chess player speeds that up measurably by using their experience, a bit of pattern
recognition and some human intuition, so they don't really step through all those steps, they
shortcut them. Now, actually, this shouldn't be a surprise to anybody, because if you play a sport
like football or cricket or baseball, you know, it's not like you solve all the equations of
motion and Newton's law of gravitation in order to hit a ball, you know, use your experience,
your intuition, your practice, you have to do all of that. So, and this is really what I'm getting at,
that I think sometimes in, with all the advances we've made with science, all the technology around
us, we fool ourselves into thinking that our irrational mode of thought is somehow inconvenient,
and that irrational, as a word, irrational, as built with an eye, is a pejorative word.
You're being irrational, as almost akin to saying you're being stupid, you've lost, you've lost
control of yourself. But I'd like to reclaim that word a little bit, because I think being
irrational is actually a very important mode of our thought. In fact, in many ways, for many things,
especially when it comes to being creative, it is really the only way that we can proceed. You can't,
you can't compute what makes a great painting, or a lovely piece of music. Another example is
that if any of you play a musical instrument, I play the guitar, although I don't play as much as I
used to, you might recognize the strange phenomenon when you're trying to learn a new, you know,
saying the guitar, I'm trying to learn a new chord or chord sequence or fingering or finger
plucking or whatever. And you're doing it slowly and you're learning, and then you get, you feel
that you're getting better after maybe an hour of practice, but then you start to get worse, you
over-practice. So you put your guitar down, you go off, maybe chill out for a bit, go to bed,
wake up the next day, pick up the guitar, and wow, you can play it, but you haven't practiced overnight,
well, at least you haven't practiced physically overnight, but perhaps I think during my sleep,
I have practiced that certain strengthening of synapses or whatever has been going on in the
brain while I've slept. I don't know what goes on in my sleep, I'm not sure anyone does really,
but certainly something good happens, and it's certainly not conscious, rational thought. It's
certainly unconscious if you're asleep by definition. So that's my second example. So the first
one was chess, the second one would be playing a musical instrument. Again, there's a certain,
you know, people talk about Bach, JS Bach, as having some mathematical quality,
having a mathematical quality to it. I don't really know what to make of that. I kind of see what they
mean. I'm not a huge fan of Bach, I have to say, but I do see what's good about it. You know,
I do find it intriguing, but is it the same bit of me that is interested in maths, or I'm not sure
it is, I'm not sure, but maybe, maybe it could be. So this leads me into the third example I
wanted to talk about, which is possibly, I think, the most rational mode of human endeavour and
structuring human thought. Now, you could say it's science and scientific method, but actually,
it's probably, in my opinion, in any way, it's mathematics. In fact, there is literally a
branch of mathematics about logic, boolean logic and other forms of logic. But I won't talk about
mathematics in general. So mathematics, if you're doing mathematics, you're, you're right on an
equation, and then there's only a series of operations that you can do in that equation that will
produce the next step. And again, like the game of chess, is an optional, there's no, well, I feel
like this today, so the next step is going to be, I'll put an extra Y in the right hand side,
but not on the left. No, can't do that. There's only a series of, there's only a certain
number of rules that can apply in math on operations you can do in turning one step of a mathematical
argument into the next step. They're ruthlessly logical and rigorous, and it's very difficult sometimes
for our puny non-rational human brains, or other brains that are not geared up, I think,
to think rationally, to comprehend mathematics. For that reason, that's why so many people find it
difficult. Now, so perhaps mathematics, perhaps that's the thing that's pure rationality. There
is no creativity, there's no room for, you know, there's no room for any of that pattern recognition
stuff going on in chess, or is there? Well, it is true that, say you have a theorem in mathematics
that statement that is said to be correct is true rather, that you will then seek to find the
proof to verify that that theorem, that statement is true. And that process of producing a proof
is not rational. If you look at the way a mathematician will go about finding a proof, and it doesn't
need to be in a high-floating mathematician, you could do this. Try yourself, try and prove that
Pythagoras is true, for example, that x squared plus y squared equals z squared, where z is the
longest side of a rectangle triangle, next and y, of the two shorter sides. Now, it's actually not
that difficult to prove, if you've got a little bit of maths, if you've got no maths whatsoever,
I guess it's very, very hard to prove. But actually, when you stop and think about how you do it,
how you derive it, approve how you generate a proof, that's not a rational process. The proof
itself has got to be rational, it's got to be the step follows from the step follows from the
step with no ifs buts or randomness involved at all. But in order to find it, you have to do
something creative, and you have to use your irrational mode of thought to do it.
And I think when people stop and realise that about mathematics, then you really do realise
that we really can't escape their irrational side of our minds, even when we try to, we're stuck
with it, and we have to live with it. Now, I'm not doing down the rational side of things at all,
I'm not saying that a computer programme should sometimes give a different result,
because the CPU decides, I'm going to do a different instruction today, he asked me to copy that,
but of memory from there to there, but I'm not going to do that, I'm just going to make up a number.
You know, we don't want computers to do that, and I'm not advocating it. There's definitely a
place for rational, logical, sequence thought, and processing, definitely as. What I'm saying is
really next time you say that's irrational, maybe think twice, because I don't think
being a rational should be as pejorative as it has come to be.
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