louder, for the economists in the room.

it's one of the most frustrating parts of the religious code of economists, that humans are rational profit maximizers. That's only true for businesses that, in a specific legal and economic environment, are bred and pressured to do it this way. Humans, outside of businesses, usually are not like this, unless also pressured into it when the economic structure expands to -make- them disregard everything to chase every cent, or else they starve.

Extract:

humans are only just on the cusp of general intelligence. Perhaps 5% of the population has enough abstract reasoning skill to verbally understand that the above heuristics would be useful once these heuristics are pointed out. That is not at all the same as the ability to automatically implement these heuristics. Our verbal, conversational systems are much better at abstract reasoning than are the motivational systems that pull our behavior. I have enough abstract reasoning ability to understand that I’m safe on the glass floor of a tall building, or that ice cream is not healthy, or that exercise furthers my goals... but this doesn’t lead to an automatic updating of the reward gradients that, absent rare and costly conscious overrides, pull my behavior. I can train my automatic systems, for example by visualizing ice cream as disgusting and artery-clogging and yucky, or by walking across the glass floor often enough to persuade my brain that I can’t fall through the floor... but systematically training one’s motivational systems in this way is also not automatic for us. And so it seems far from surprising that most of us have not trained ourselves in this way, and that most of our “goal-seeking” actions are far less effective than they could be.