Often you will hear people say “why do people always engage in ‘group-think'”? As if group-think is always a bad thing! The reality is that group-think is often highly adaptive. That’s why people engage in it. You’re outsourcing expensive cognition to the collective, tradition, or in some cases to someone with expertise.
Of course, there are whole domains of heuristics and biases that developed out of exposing how humans do not reason appropriately, but other researchers have argued that our species’ irrationality is often quite useful in our ancestral evolutionary environment. In other words, a lot of what frustrates is us not a bug, but a feature.
For example, in an ancient pre-modern environment where culture and environment were generally stable reasoning to everything basically consists of reinventing the wheel constantly. The contemplative life may have been the starving life. The “way things have been done” may not always seem perfectly optimal, but they were sufficient.
To give an empirical example of this that I’ve always found sad, the Irish were exceptional among European peasants peoples in taking to a potato monoculture without must hesitation. Believe it or not the Russians were tardy at adoption. This resulted in a massive demographic expansion which saw Ireland’s population peak at around 8,000,000. But the cost of this was the Great Famine, which illustrated how the wholesale adoption of practices which were optimal in the short-term were not optimal evaluated over the long-term (Ireland’s population today is less than 5,000,000, though some of this is due to the culture of emigration which emerged during the Great Famine). Evolution is evaluated over the long-term, so universal cognitive ticks which we see across our species are probably there for a reason, whether as a direct cause, or a side-effect.
Finally, intellectuals who enjoin the masses to not engage in group-think have no difficulty in falling into the same practices when operating outside their own domains of expertise. What this suggests is that “critical-rationalism” is not something that emerges in a vacuum. Rather, it is a cognitive method that develops in a particular cultural context, and individually is often the outcome of confidence and experience gained through years of education and mental practice within a narrow topic.
Getting yourself out of the cave and not misinterpreting the shadows can be hard. And truthfully, it probably wasn’t even optimal. The roaches will inherit the earth long after we’re gone, and they likely never even reflect upon their own selfhood.
Your Irish potato famine reasoning is exactly why I am always concerned about our just-in-time production/distribution systems today. They may be hyper-efficient, but they are delicate and may not handle shocks to the systems well.
Redundancies may be inefficient and costly, but they allow survival when unexpected disruptions occur. As you put it, short-term optimization is not always long-term optimization.
a evolutionary biological example are clonal lineages. in insects and plants you can have clonal lineages and those which go through the two-fold cost of sex (males don’t reproduce, and any given reproduction has half the genetic material). often these lineages are successful in the short term, but they seem to have shallow evolutionary roots. the implication is that emerge frequently but go extinct frequently.
I would say the Irish situation was at least partly caused by the government. Corn laws made grain-growing artificially profitable for Irish landowners, who maximized grain production for exports while forcing their tenants to subsist on agronomically efficient potatoes. So the choice was at least partly forced on the Irish and it may not represent such an exception to the general tendency to follow traditional wisdom.
jtgw, what are these laws that “made grain-growing artificially profitable for Irish landowners”?
Tariffs on grain imports (Corn Laws) made domestic grain profitable. So that incentivized more investment in grain production, which meant landowners used as much land as they could to grow grain to export, limiting amount of land available to tenants. Tenants could only survive by switching to potatoes, which turned out to be nutritious enough that it enabled population growth to Malthusian limits.
jtgw, but tariffs on imported grain mean less grain imports, which means more grain on the international market and lower prices than there would be with no tariffs. That means less incentive to export.
The Corn Laws made grain production for within-country sale more profitable and production for export less profitable.
What is the difference between starving from not having low priced grain as opposed to not having high priced grain?
@Roger Sweeny:
I think the grain was mainly exported to England from Ireland so that fits with the last thing you said.
Ireland was not the only country where potato crops failed, it happened in most of Europe (not excepting Britain).
The Irish did not starve because they could not get a potato, they starved because half the ground forces of the British Empire, backed by local constabularies and loyalist militias, were deployed to remove practically all food from the country at gunpoint (c.f., Fogarty, Christopher, “Ireland 1845-1850: the Perfect Holocaust, and Who Kept it ‘Perfect’,” 2015).
About 20 years later, a British “famine response” program under Lord Litton, Viceroy of India, generated many more millions of victims, c.f. (Davis, Mike, “Late Victorian Holocausts,” 2001).
jtgw: it’s some time since I read “The visitation of God?”, by Austin Bourke of Cork University; but I remember fairly clearly that, by examining the records of Irish ports, he showed that before and during the famine most of the grain grown in Ireland was in fact consumed in Ireland.
Also, I’m puzzled by your distinction between grain-growing landlords and potato-growing tenants. Very few Irish landlords were themselves extensive farmers. Instead they rented most of their land to tenants, many of whom grew and harvested grain in the regions where it would grow.
The tenants had to put in the work to grow the grain but they were not allowed to consume it during the famine because the grain belonged to the landowners, which I believe is what Jeff L. was alluding to. It is clear that whatever the proportion of grain the Irish did consume during the famine was not sufficient.