A friend from Argentina once told me Argentina keeps its best wines for themselves and exports the mediocre stuff, even at the sake of profits.
Similarly, a friend from Turkey once said he couldn’t find good Turkish olives outside of Turkey because “Turks are terrible businessmen and keep the best olives to themselves.”
These are anecdotal and might be untrue but I liked the idea.
At an individual level, it’s irrational to cooperate in a prisoner’s dilemma yet experiments show people cooperate.
Contributing to open source projects may fall into this category.
Have you observed any obvious behavior that goes counter to profit maximization? Any cool examples?
Nah that’s a cop out. There are legit irrationalities that do not fall into this and i say that as a contemporary utilitarian.
Someone mentioned gambling in the comments and thats exactly one of such examples - the invisible gains here are almost impossible to justify rationally as in the entertainment provided by gambling can be replicated without the dangers of it very easily. As in mathematically speaking playing fair return games will yield the same or higher satisfaction than low yield games meaning low yields games are objectively irrational.
You may not realize it, but you’re pointing your laser towards having money and winning at games. These are sensible enough values, since a lack of money can make life difficult and losing at games can be frustrating. In this regard, you are much like other people who share those values.
You claim that “low yields games are objectively irrational”, a statement that only ever makes sense if you take for granted what objectivity is. From this perspective, it’s easy to argue that the Holocaust was a loss of rationality, a mass hysteria, but this ignores the thorough tracking, meticulous record-keeping, massive logistics planning, and investigation that it involved. Once again, rationality is a tool, it’s a laser that can be pointed anywhere, including bigotry and inhumane values.
There is a difference between science and values, between actions and values, between tools and values. The fact that most humans agree on values doesn’t mean they are ‘objectively true’. These humans are like fish in water, fish who don’t realize they’re in water. They have been socialized into the values of this culture and are absolutely certain they are right and others are wrong. Their gods are the only true gods (which is exactly what their neighbors, who hold other gods dear, believe). These humans don’t realize it, but they too are pointing their lasers toward their beliefs, their gods, and everything they hold dear.
Maybe it helps to look at this inside the brain. Decades of research has shown we build our concepts through relational frames, or conceptual Lego bricks. These tiny bricks relate concepts, such as “low yields games are worse than high yields games”, and they combine to create cognitive palaces. Rationality is a set of relational frames, a ladder of sorts that can be taken anywhere in the palace to help us solve problems and embody our values. Once again, to use the tool we need values; we point the laser; we take the ladder somewhere.
In our mental palaces, we like to keep things organized. We like coherence. But not all order is the same. There is something called literal coherence, which leads us to use deduction, logic, and probabilistic thought —rationality— so that we are right. “Aktchually” guys are literally coherent. Many OCD patients are literally coherent (it doesn’t mean they’re not suffering). They always carry their rationality ladder with them, even if it has a high price.
And then there’s something else, called functional coherence, where we care less about being right and more about what works, what’s helpful, what gets us closer to a valued life and what doesn’t. With functional coherence, we accept that we can’t clean the whole palace. It’s okay if there’s leaves on the paths next to the gardens. It’s okay if the books aren’t in alphabetical order. We know we can use the ladder when we need it, but we sometimes decide to be nimble and run to greet our loved ones, or decide to look in the mirror and be compassionate with whom we see, or really savor the banquet we’re about to eat. This doesn’t mean the ladder can’t help us put up the mirror or fetch the ingredients for our meal. It just means that we don’t get stuck with the ladder.
I’m using metaphorical language because it’s a fast way to convey information in limited time, but if you’re interested in how rationality is built through cognitive bricks, how we can sometimes get stuck in the webs of thought that we build, and how we can use our cognition to live a valued life, you can check out Relational Frame Theory.