Essay 3:

Three Types of Decision-making

As per Venkatesh Rao (of Ribbonfarm blog fame) in his talk with Shane Parrish (of Farnam Street blog), there are three types of decision making systems:

1. Conceptual Reasoners - Use mental models, find frames to look at a problem, find correct metaphors to use, and then analyse the results of those conceptual reasons to arrive at a conclusion / solution.
2. Ethical Reasoners - they divide the world into good and evil. Not necessarily true and false. They use ethical reasoning as their framework. They have a wide scale of simplistic divisions to much more sophisticated (than group 1) ways to label as their good v evil.
3. Affiliational / Tribal Thinkers - this group of people don’t have a decision making process or framework within their own minds. They take that from the collective consciousness of the group they belong to. How do they identify a group? They tend to emotionally resonate with a group and joint them. The choice is not based upon rational process but based on with whom they want to be friends, party with, hang around with, marry!, etc. Or they become part of a group by default due to being part of school, college, work place, religion, society, etc. After joining the group, they adopt the entire set of opinions of the group, without actually checking / analysing any of them. These are the default Neurath’s raft people.

Which is better?

as always, it depends. Group 1 thrives better in individualistic communities. While groups 2 and 3 do better in more communal / social communities.

From evolutionary POV, humans are hyper-social and in that scenario, herd behavior makes a lot of sense. Humans who were outcast from their group didn’t survive much, so herd behavior has always been a good choice. Group 3 does that without additional cognitive load. Group 2 also does the same thing, but with a label - when you label something as evil, it is easier to fight / unite against it and can act without hesitation. Group 1 people will tend to hesitate, think over in details, pros and cons, etc.

In general, it is likely that group 3 is more numerous than others.

Caveat

In these three types, I identify with the first group (as do both VR and SP above, and also why I agree with them enough to reference them). But it is possible that I may be part of group 3, just that my group is different.