Chapter 9    The Practical Criticism of Bayesianism

In the first place, say its critics, Bayesianism simply can’t be an accurate model of how humans think because humans violate Bayesian principles of rationality every day. Every day, we commit acts that are at odds with what both reasoning and experience have shown is rational. Some societies still execute murderers. Men continue to bully and exploit women. Some adults still spank children. We fear people who look different from us on no other grounds than that they look different from us. We shun them even when we have evidence showing there are many trustworthy individuals in that other group and many untrustworthy ones in the group of people who look like us. We do these things even when experience indicates such behaviors and beliefs are counterproductive.

Over and over, we act in ways that are illogical by Bayesian standards. We stake the best of our human and material resources on ways of behaving that both reasoning and evidence say are not likely to work, and in fact, are often counterproductive. Can Bayesianism account for these glaring bits of evidence that are inconsistent with its model of human thinking?

The answer to this critique is disturbing. The problem is not that the Bayesian model doesn’t work as an explanation of human behavior and thinking. The problem is rather that the Bayesian model of human thinking and the behaviors driven by that thinking works too well. The irrational, un-Bayesian behaviors individuals engage in are not proof of Bayesianism’s inadequacy, but rather parts of a larger proof of how it applies to the thinking, learning, and behavior not just of individuals, but of whole communities and even whole nations.

Societies continually evolve and change because every society contains at least a few people who are naturally curious. Curious people constantly imagine and test new ideas and new ways of doing daily things like getting food, raising kids, fighting off invaders, healing the sick – any of the things the society must do in order to carry on. Often, other subgroups in society view any new concept or way of doing things as threatening to their most deeply held beliefs. If adherents of the new idea keep demonstrating that their idea works and that the reactionaries’ ways are obsolete, then the larger society usually marginalizes the less effectual members and their ideas. In this way, a society mirrors what an individual does when he finds a better way of growing corn or teaching kids or easing Grampa’s arthritic pain. In this way, we adapt – as individuals, but more profoundly, as societies – to changes in our environments, and to new lands and markets and new technologies such as vaccinations, cars, televisions, computers, and so on. Farmers, carpenters, teachers, healers, etc. who cling to obsolete ways are simply passed by, eventually even by their own grandchildren.

But then there are the more disturbing cases, the ones that caused me to write in my last chapter that we are almost completely devoid of any unshakable beliefs. Sometimes large minorities or even majorities of citizens do hang on to obsolete concepts and ways, in spite of mounds of evidence which say those ideas don’t work as well as the new ones others are using.

The Bayesian model of human thinking works well, most of the time, to explain how individuals form and evolve their basic idea systems. Most of the time, the model also can explain how a whole community, tribe, or nation can grow and change its sets of beliefs, thinking styles, customs, and practices. But can it account for the times when majorities in a society do not embrace a new way, in spite of the Bayesian observations and calculations showing the idea is sound and useful? In short, can the Bayesian model explain the dark side of tribalism?

                    

                              

   

        Nazi party rally, 1934. Tribalism at its worst (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

As we saw in our last chapter, for the most part, individuals become willing to drop a set of ideas that seems to be losing its effectiveness when they encounter a new set of ideas that looks more promising. They embrace the new ideas that perform well, that more effectively guide the individual, the family, or even their whole society through the challenges and hazards of real life. 

At the tribal level, whole societies usually drop paradigms, and the ways of thinking and living based on those paradigms, when citizens repeatedly see that the old ideas are no longer working and that a set of new ideas is getting better results. When your neighbors are producing bigger crops, you want to know how and why, and you want to implement new practices that work.

Sometimes, on the level of social change, this mechanism can cause societies to marginalize or ostracize subcultures that refuse to let go of the old ways. Cars and "car people" marginalized the horse culture within a generation. Assembly line factories brought the unit cost of goods down until millions who had once thought that they would never have a car or an icebox bought one on credit and owned it in a year. When assembly line factories came in, old, small-scale shops in which teams of ten men made whole cars, one at a time, were obsolete.

The point is that when a new subculture with new beliefs and ways keeps getting good results, and the old subculture keeps proving ineffectual by comparison, the majority usually do make the switch to the new way – of chipping flint, growing corn, spearing fish, making arrows, weaving cloth, building ships, forging gun barrels, dispersing capital to the enterprises with the best growth potential, or connecting a computer to the worldwide net.

It is also important to note here that, for most new paradigms and practices, the tests applied to them only confirm that the old way is still better. Most new ideas are tested and found to be less effective than the established ones. Only rarely does a superior one come along.

But the crucial insight into why humans sometimes do very un-Bayesian things is the one that comes next.

Sometimes, if a new paradigm challenges a tribe’s core beliefs, Bayesian calculations about what a society will do next break down. Sometimes tribes continue to adhere to obsolete beliefs. The larger question here is whether the Bayesian model of human thinking, when taken up to the level of human social/cultural evolution, can account for these un-Bayesian choices and actions.

Our most deeply held beliefs are those that guide our interactions with other humans – family, friends, neighbors, colleagues, fellow citizens, and foreigners. These are the parts of our lives that we usually see as being guided not by reason but by deep moral beliefs – beliefs grounded in sources much more profound than our beliefs about the physical world. In anthropological terms, these are the beliefs that enable the members of the tribe to achieve social solidarity – to live together without violence, interact, achieve teamwork, and get along.

The continued exploitation of women and execution of murderers described above are both irrational, but are both consequences of the fact that, in spite of our worries about the failures of our moral code in the last hundred years, much of that code lingers on. In many aspects of our lives, we are still drifting with traditional ways, even though our confidence in those ways is eroding steadily. We don’t know what else to do. In the meantime, these traditional ways are so deeply ingrained and familiar as to seem to us to be “natural”, in spite of mounds of evidence showing that they are counterproductive.

When we study the deepest and most profound of these “traditional” beliefs, we are dealing with those beliefs that are most powerfully programmed into every growing child by nearly all of his tribe’s adult members. These beliefs aren’t subject to the Bayesian models that usually govern the learning processes of the individual human. In fact, they are almost always viewed by the individual as being the most crucial parts of his culture and himself. They are guarded in the mind by programmed emotions of fear and anger. We get scared and mad when we think our values are being threatened. They are the beliefs that our parents, teachers, storytellers, and leaders enjoined us to hang on to at all cost. In fact, for most people in most societies, these beliefs and the morés that grow from them are seen as being “normal”. Varying from them is viewed as “abnormal”.

For centuries, in the West, our moral meta-belief – that is to say, our belief about our moral beliefs – was that they had been set down by God and, thus, were universal and eternal. When we took that view, we were in effect placing our moral beliefs in a separate category from the rest, a category meant to guarantee their inviolability. Non-Western societies do parallel things. 

                                                               

                           

                                       John Stuart Mill (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

But are our moral beliefs really different from our beliefs in areas like Science, Athletics, farming, cooking, or automotive mechanics?

The answer is “yes and no”. We are eager to learn better farming practices and medical procedures, and to win at track meets. But, in their attitudes about the executing of our worst criminals or the exploitation of women, many in our society are reluctant to change. Historical evidence shows societies can change in these areas, but only grudgingly. (J. S. Mill, a nineteenth-century British philosopher, discussed the obstinacy of old ways of thinking about women, for example, in the introduction to his essay, The Subjection of Women.¹)

So, do these core beliefs – our values – still operate under the Bayesian model? Yes. But in a very harsh way. Sometimes, the moral beliefs that humans hold most deeply only get changed in an entire nation when experience shows by pain that the old values no longer work, i.e. when the values fail to provide guidelines by which the humans who hold them can make choices, act, and live their lives effectively. In the extreme cases, the values fail so totally that the people who hold the old values begin to die out. They become ill and die young, or they fail to reproduce, or they fail to program their values into their young. Or the whole tribe may be overrun. By one of these mechanisms, a tribe’s entire culture and value system can die out. The tribe’s genes may go on in children born from the merging of two tribes, the victors and the losers, but most of the losing tribe’s set of values, beliefs, and morés – i.e. its culture – become footnotes in History.

And so it is that, as the critics of Bayesianism point out, humans often do behave in ways that seem irrational by purely Bayesian standards. We fly in the face of what reason and evidence say would be our best policy. 

Even in our time, some adults still spank kids. Some men still bully women. Some states still execute their worst criminals. Research based on observation and analysis of these patterns of behavior says that they don’t work; these behaviors do not achieve the results that they aim for. In fact, they reduce the chances that we will achieve those results. These patterns of behavior and the beliefs underlying them exactly fit the term counterproductive. 

Why? Because our culture’s most profound programming institutions – the family, the schools, and the media – continue to indoctrinate us with these values so deeply that once we are adults, we refuse to examine them. Instead, our programming causes us to bristle, and then to defend our “good old ways”, violently if need be. If the ensuing lessons are harsh enough, and there is a reasonable amount of available time, a whole society can sometimes learn, change its ways, and then adapt. But deep social change is always difficult. Alfred Whitehead, in his 1927 essay Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect, wrote:

“… the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur.”²

                

   

                                 Lethal injection room, used to execute criminals  

                                              (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

                                 

       

                                                       Alfred North Whitehead

                                    (credit: Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy) 

It is also worthwhile to say the obvious here, however politically incorrect it may be: all our obsolete-but-obstinate beliefs, values, and behavior patterns did serve useful ends at one time. That is why we acquired them in the first place. 

For example, in some but not all early societies, women were taught to be submissive, first to their fathers and brothers, then to their husbands. The majority of men in such societies were thus rendered more likely to help to nurture the children of their socially sanctioned marriages because each man was confident the children born to “his” women were biologically his own.

Raising kids is hard work. In early societies, if both parents were committed to the task, the odds were better that those children would grow up, marry, have kids of their own, and then program into those kids the values and roles that the parents themselves had been raised to believe in. Other non-patriarchal societies taught other roles for men and women and other designs for the family, but they weren’t as prolific as patriarchy was over the long haul.

Patriarchy isn’t fair. But it makes babies who become adult citizens. Workers. Soldiers. Lots of them. This view of patriarchy is harsh, but real.

Traditional beliefs about male and female roles didn’t work to make people happy. But they did give some tribes numbers and power. They are obsolete today, partly because child nurturing has been largely taken over by the state (public schools), partly because no society in a post-industrial, knowledge-driven economy can afford to stifle half of its human resources (i.e. the female half), and partly because there are too many humans polluting this planet now. 

Population growth is no longer a wise goal because it no longer brings a nation power. In today’s world, millions of poor are more likely to be a liability than an asset for a nation. If they suffer too much, they might even start a violent revolution and unravel their own way of life, i.e. overthrow their government. 

Like patriarchy, all our traditional values, morés, and roles once served useful purposes. Many of them don’t anymore. But it is like pulling teeth without anaesthetic to get the reactionaries among us to admit that many of their cherished “good old ways”, in today's world, are only in the way.

But in general, in all areas of our lives, even those areas we think of as sacred, traditional, and timeless, we humans do change our beliefs, values, and patterns of behavior over time by the Bayesian way. The change may take a generation or two, but we eventually adopt a new view of reality and the human place in it if that new view is more coherent with the facts we are observing, and especially if our lives clearly do improve when we switch over to the new way (of growing food, making tools, curing diseases, etc.) Societies that won’t change die out.  

We’ve come a long way in the West, for example, in our treatment of women and minorities. Values do evolve. Our justice systems aren’t race or gender neutral yet, but they’re much better than they were even sixty years ago.

The larger point can be reiterated. For deep social change, we undergo the Bayesian decision process, but only in the most final of senses. Sometimes it’s not the individual who has to learn to adopt new beliefs, values, and morés; sometimes it is a whole community or even nation. And once in a while, a nation that simply gets culturally overwhelmed - by too much change too fast - dies out, as a nation/culture, completely. 

The El Molo ethnic group in Kenya is almost gone. The Canaanite, Bo, Anasazi, and Beothuk peoples are gone. Troy and Carthage are gone.

None of this is fair. It’s just over.

                              

                       

                                                Demasduit, last of the Beothuk

                                                (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

In the more gradual adjustments that some societies manage to achieve, it also sometimes happens that subcultures within a society die out without the whole tribe dying out. Thus, some values and beliefs in the culture disappear while the larger culture itself, after sustaining trauma and healing, adjusts and goes on.

For example, Hitler and his Nazi cronies ranted until their last hour that their “race” should fight on until they all went down in a sea of blood because they had shown in the most vital of arenas, namely war, that they were weaker than the Russians. Hitler sincerely believed his Nazi philosophy. In the same era, the Japanese cabinet and High Command contained members who were adamant in arguing that the Japanese people should fight on, even in the face of hopeless odds. To do anything other than fight on was inconceivable to these men. (Yukio Mishima’s case was a curious last gasp of Japanese imperialism.³) Fortunately, people who could face reality and adapt prevailed, in both Germany and Japan.

                                      

                                     

                                   Yukio Mishima (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

In a Computing Science metaphor, a culture is just the software of a nation. Or in another metaphor, we can say a culture evolves and survives, or else falls behind and dies, in ways that are analogous to the ways in which a genome thrives or dies. If a nation’s culture – that is, its software – gets good practical results over generations, its carriers multiply; if not, they don’t, and then they and it fade out of homo sapiens’ total population and culture pool. 

What was sad but true for centuries was that a culture’s fitness was sometimes tested by famine or epidemic or natural disaster, but most often it was tested by war. For centuries, when a tribe, operating under its culture, was no longer tough enough to hold its territory against invasions by neighbouring tribes, it fought and lost. Its men were killed, its women and children were carried off by the enemy; its way of life dwindled and was absorbed, or in some cases, vanished entirely. Thus, Joshua smote Hazor, the ancient Greeks crushed Troy, the Romans crushed Carthage. The examples could go on.

                  

   

                                         Ruins of Carthage in modern Tunisia 

                                                  (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

But was Hitler right? Is war inevitable? Even desirable? It depends. The key question is whether we will ever rise above our present, mainly war-driven system of cultural evolution into living by something even more effective. I think it is clear that we have to. Our weapons have grown too big. We have to learn a new way if our species is to live. By reason or suffering or both, we are going to have to arrive at a new way of regularly updating our values and our patterns of group behavior. Either war is obsolete, or we are.

Changes in our circumstances are always coming at us. Some of them we even cause. We can cushion our way of life against them for a while, but over time, reality demands that we either evolve or die out, and in this case, “evolve” means “update our culture”. However, for now, I will leave the war digression and the sociocultural mechanism of human evolution to be more thoroughly discussed in later chapters.

For now, then, let’s settle for saying that the point critics of Bayesianism make about the way in which some human behaviors do not seem to be based on Bayesian types of calculations only looks at first like a successful criticism. If we study the matter more deeply, we see that we do indeed have attachments to some of our most counterproductive values and morés, but there are reasons for those attachments. Repulsive, warmongering programs that lie embedded deep in us. They are software design features that have become design flaws because they have long since fallen out of touch with the physical reality that surrounds us and with the dilemma in which we find ourselves. As Kennedy said, “Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind.”⁴

                                                

                           

                           

                           John F. Kennedy, 35th president of the United States

                                                (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

The point to be drawn from this chapter then is simply this: the Bayesian model of human thinking still holds. Bayesianism can explain why humans hold on to backward, obsolete ideas. Deeply held beliefs and morés do get changed by the Bayesian way, but nearly always this change has come by national-scale pain – war, famine, or plague – over generations. In modern times, we must do better. 

I will have more to say on these matters in later chapters. The first big criticism of Bayesianism has been dealt with. The Bayesian model, when it is applied at the tribal level of human behavior, can fully account for the apparently un-Bayesian behaviors of individuals. 

I now must go on to deal with the second large criticism of Bayesianism, the theoretical one.

And perhaps this is the point at which I should also say that the next chapter is fairly technical, and it isn’t essential to my case. If you want to skip a chapter, the next chapter is one you can skip and still not lose the train of thought leading to the conclusion of the full argument.

Notes

1. John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women (1869 essay). The Constitution Society website. http://www.constitution.org/jsm/women.htm.

2. Albert North Whitehead, Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect (University of Virginia: Barbour-Page Lectures, 1927).

3. Biography of Yukio Mishima, Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Accessed April 8, 2015. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yukio_Mishima.

4. John F. Kennedy, Address to the United Nations General Assembly, New York, NY, September 25, 1961.

http://www.jfklibrary.org/Asset-Viewer/DOPIN64xJUGRKgdHJ9NfgQ.aspx.