Evolution of the Super Model

Experience Matters... In a Bad Way

“Sure, Obama is the superior candidate who has the ability to lead and unite this country, but he just doesn’t have the experience.” –Irrational Hillary supporter

Lately there has been quite the ruckus regarding Obama and his level of experience in Washington. Apparently, Americans consider it “experience” when you happen to sleep under the same roof as the president. Had it not been for Hillary’s eight years as First Lady, Obama would be considered more experienced. She only served seven years as a senator while Obama was a state legislator for seven years and three in the senate. Let’s put this debacle aside for a moment and ask whether experience is necessary to begin with.

In general, someone experienced can be more over-confident and careless than their inexperienced counterpart. Experienced people might only have an advantage over operations they have repeated many times and not necessarily better at their job. These speculations are a few possible arguments for why an experienced person might not have the upper hand in succeeding.

Assuming that none of these are the case, I would still prefer the candidate with less experience in Washington.

Unlike most professions, working in the White House for many years does not imply success or quality work. It is hard for a bad dentist to continue being a dentist for 20 years – he would be sued to bankruptcy before his first year. Government officials have it easy, just don’t get your dick sucked by someone other than your wife and you have a free ride until your term ends. You can even illegally send your country to war killing more than a million innocent people and keep your day job.

Citizens don’t care enough to monitor their politicians’ behaviors and nor do they bother to educate themselves before voting. All the politician needs to do is pummel their face with Botox and make-up every couple years and appeal to people’s primitive emotions. The more experience they have, the better they are at looking pretty.

Where do experienced politicians get their money for campaigning in their 20 year run? Another thing experience in the White House implies is corruption. Big corporations grow fond of power hungry politicians and make sure they stay in the game. The government likes to have and obedient citizenry; the same logic applies to why the rich want an obedient government.

Just take a look at Bush and his whopping 14 years of experience. I’d rather have my dead pet hamster run the country.

What it Means to be More Rational

In my previous post, It’s Not Easy Being Rational, I said that being irrational meant that you behaved contrary to your utility function. Following this line of logic, being rational would mean that you behaved in accordance with your preferences i.e. you did what you wanted to do. This brings up an important question: can one be more rational than another without both being irrational? If both of you did what you wanted to do, how can one be more rational than the other? Yes, allow me to demonstrate.

Being a rational agent requires a purpose or direction. In this case, the purpose is to maximize utility in the most desirable way possible. Once your preferences are determined, there exist a theoretical set of actions that will lead you to maximizing your utility function in the most desirable way. If you currently desire a coke from the fridge, there exists a set of actions that will satisfy this demand in the most desirable way. (It is important to understand that you may not have the prerequisite knowledge to know what these set of actions are).

Assume that the optimal action set includes: getting out of your chair, walk slowly not to wake up the dog, say ‘hi’ to grandma, open the fridge, grab the coke and run back to your room. The closer you in executing this theoretical optimal set of actions, the more rational you are. Unfortunately, when you assess your strategy profiles, you don’t include the action of saying ‘hi’ to grandma. You know that grandma always asks you what you are doing if you don’t say ‘hi’ and you know she doesn’t like you drinking coke. You end up having a quarrel with grandma and fail to execute the optimal set of actions.

Part of being more rational means that you can better predict the consequences of your actions. It is impossible to predict with 100% accuracy (all the time), but the closer to 100% the more rational. After predicting each action’s respective outcome, you must decide which outcomes are most desirable. Of course, the last step would be to follow through with the action set you’ve devised for yourself. Regarding the coke example, if you were more rational, you would have figured out that grandma needed a genuine ‘hi’ from you.

The moral of the story: strive to be more rational, you’ll only be benefiting yourself.

It’s Not Easy Being Rational

If you’ve ever met a disguised anti-rationalist you’ve probably heard the “but it’s rational to be irrational” line. They believe themselves to be clever in finding the rationalist’s loop hole in being irrational. For instance, ‘irrationally’ going on a shopping spree once a month should be deemed a rational act. Clearly, it is easy to point out how such a proposition has no merit. For one, it posits the definition of ‘rational’ to mean the same thing as it’s opposite. These fundamental problems, however, only transpire when you interpret the proposition literally and not for its implicit message.

Saying that a shopping spree is rational and irrational at the same time implies two things about a person 1) their arrogance in throwing around intellectual words they don’t understand 2) the satisfaction and non-regret they get from having a shopping spree once a month. If the former wasn’t the case, the person would understand their once a month shopping spree was never irrational to begin with.

Assigning value to something, and therefore creating a utility function, is not where irrationality is committed. For example, preferring your coffee with two spoons of sugar is just as rational as preferring it with ten. You only act irrationally if behave contrary to your preferences/utility function. A trivial example is if you knowingly added no sugar in your coffee when in the past you’ve always preferred at least one spoonful. For a non-trivial example see Allais Paradox.

You might be thinking to yourself, “If behaving rationally only requires me to do what I want, I must be pretty damn rational.” This reasoning depends on a flawed assumption that you know what you want. If you’ve ever experienced regret or remorse, one of your past actions/choices contradicted your original utility function. These emotions serve as a nice defense mechanism against irrationality because they make us think harder before acting. (Obviously, if you prefer to stray from regret and remorse then you’ll think twice before acting). Unfortunately, not all of us possess such an accurate defense mechanism and therefore must think harder whether or not we believe regret might supervene on our decisions.