Rationality is about pattern recognition, not reasoning

An interesting post. You started with the assumption that formal reasoning is the right way to go and found out that it's not necessarily so. Let me start from the opposite end: the observation that the great majority of people reason all the time by pattern-matching, this is the normal, default, bog-standard way of figuring things out.

You do not need to "retrain" people to think in patterns -- they do so naturally.

Looking at myself, I certainly do think in terms of patterns -- internal maps and structures. Typically I carry a more-or-less coherent map of the subject in my head (which certain areas being fuzzy or incomplete, that's fine) and the map is kinda-spatial. When a new piece of data comes in, I try to fit it into the existing (in my head) structure and see if it's a good fit. If it's not a good fit, it's like a pebble in a shoe -- an irritant and an obvious problem. The problem is fixed either by reinterpreting the data and its implications, or by bending and adjusting the structure so there is a proper place for the new data nugget. Sometimes both happen.

Formal reasoning is atypical for me, that's why I'm not that good at math. I find situations where you have enough hard data to formally reason about it to be unusual and rare (that would probably be different if I were an engineer or an accountant :-D). Most often you have stochastic reasoning with probability distributions and conditional outcomes and that is amenable to analysis only at low levels. At high enough levels you're basically back to pattern recognitions, ideally with some support from formal reasoning.

In any case, I'm not sure why do you think that teaching people to think in patterns will be hard or will lead to major jumps in productivity. People already do this, all the time. Essentially you are talking about unlearing the reliance on formalism which is applicable to very few.

Very high level epistemic rationality is about retraining one's brain to be able to see patterns in the evidence in the same way that we can see patterns when we observe the world with our eyes.

Can you explain a bit more why you think that the way people with very high level epistemic rationality process evidence is analogous to how we recognize visual patterns? Do you think these two mental processes are fundamentally using the same algorithms, or just that both are subconscious computations that we don't understand very well?

I agree that a picture of many weak arguments supporting or undermining explicit claims does not capture whet humans do---the inferences themselves are much more complex than logical deductions, such that we don't yet know any way of representing the actual objects that are being manipulated. I think this is the mainstream view, certainly in AI now.

I don't know what it means to say that our pattern recognition capabilities are stronger than our logical reasoning; they are two different kinds of cognitive tasks. It seems like saying that we are much better at running fast than lifting heavy objects. Sometimes you can do a task in one way or the other, and we might say that one or the other is better way to get something done. And we can compare to other animals, or to machines, and talk about comparative advantage. And so on.

Perhaps the most relevant claim would be asking what fraction of variance in outcomes is described by one characteristic or another, or in which domain is practice most helpful. I think that explicit principles about how to reason do not distinguish good mathematicians from each other, though they may distinguish mathematicians at different times. The situation seems similar in most endeavors. I think this is because it is so much easier to transfer explicit information between people, so the residual is what differentiates. Learning the explicit info is still the right first step to mastery, though it's not most of the work.

Improving explicit info and norms seems to be the main way that we progress as a civilization, because that's what you can build on, share, and so on. But of course, those can be explicit norms about how to train any part of reasoning, and I am pretty agnostic about what kind of reasoning is best to try to improve.

Overall I feel like there is a broad version of your thesis that I think is clearly true. You are no doubt making a more specific claim. I'm interested to see it fleshed out. I can easily see disagreeing with it. If I do, it's probably because I have a broader sense of / distribution over ways we might use our brain. For example:

"Very high level epistemic rationality is about retraining one's brain to be able to see patterns in the evidence in the same way that we can see patterns when we observe the world with our eyes."

Is a specific way we can use our built in pattern recognition, one could list perhaps half a dozen similar tactics at a similar level of abstraction. I will be interested to see if you have evidence that distinguishes between these principles and singles out one as most important. (You could also interpret your quote in a broad way, in which case I think it is very clear. So I guess I should just wait to discuss!)

Note that the accuracy of this kind of literal analogy, or how far you can take that analogy, is a question that researchers in computer science and AI explicitly discuss. Most everyone agrees that there is some of this, but I think there is legitimate uncertainty about how much.

Also, when you say "don't make their discoveries through reasoning," it's not exactly clear what this means. This might also be something that I disagree with strongly, or it may be something that I think is very clear (or maybe somewhere in between). Logic plays a key role in the mathematician's reasoning. None of the steps the mathematician makes are valid inferences in any formal proof system (but neither are any steps of most published proofs!), though often she will write or think pairs of statements that are in fact related to each other in a logically precise way, and the existence of such relationships is a key part of why the cognitive process yields correct results.

I'd be glad to offer what help I can. Based on other posts of yours, I would definitely practice brevity. This post is over 1000 words long and easily could be condensed to 250 or less.

This is interesting. I have found that when you are like 16, you often want everything to be super logical and everything that is not feels stupid. And growing up largely means accepting "common sense", which at the end of the day means relying more on pattern recognition. (This is also politically relevant - young radicalism is often about matching everything with a logical sounding ideology, while people when they grow and become more moderate simply care about what typical patterns tend to result in human flourishing more than about ideology.)

There is something in pattern recognition that feels pretty "conservative" in the not-too-political sense. Logical reasoning is an individualistic thing, you can make your own philosophy of things especially if you are young and feel you are so much smarter than everybody else. But if you treat your brain as a pattern sensor, it is different.

First of all experience matters more than sheer brightness. You start to think less and less that old people are dinosauric fools and respect them more and more. (Of course the right kind of experience matters more than just clocking in a lot of birthdays. There are 19 years old guys who are so fanatic about cars that they spend day and night working on them and probably know why your car does not run well than your dad does.)

Second, throwing a lot of brains on the patterns i.e. actually listening to other people's opinions starts to look good. It scales differently. You can feel you can out-reason and out-logic a thousand people because logic is not additive. But being a sensor its. When hunting for a detail, you cannot out-see two thousand eyeballs. So you start to respect other people's opinions more.

Third, there are depositories of recognized patterns. They are usually called best practices, accepted practices or even traditions. They start to matter.

It is a very sobering experience, and for me it was kind of painful (because humiliating, deflating), it happened between 21 and 26.

It is turning people more conservative in the not-so-political sense and it is probably a good thing, at least I think it made me better off, although it was painful. For example, in architecture, do you value bravely tradition bucking original design, or you value traditional pattern-book architecture? Scruton argues the later is more likely to create an environment in which people feel good.

If I understand correctly, Carl correctly estimated Mark Zuckerberg's future net worth as being $100+ million upon meeting him as a freshman at Harvard, before Facebook.

Well, if I understand the post correctly, even as a freshman, Mark apparently had previous experience with owning/running a business, and was deliberately trying to become a tech entrepreneur. Now, given that someone is from a privileged family, is attending school at (almost) the maximally privileged and well-connected institution (at least on the East Coast) for wannabe rich guys, has previous experience with business by the time he reaches age 18, possesses enough intelligence to be going to school at Harvard (which, despite being partly a privilege club, still requires genuine intelligence and work-ethic to get into), and is clearly driven to become a rich tech guy... it's not that unrealistic to say that he would, eventually, achieve his goal.

It just requires conditioning on a bunch of facts that most people don't know about Mark Zuckerberg. But once you do condition on the facts that were available at the time... it all adds up to normality.

But anyway, to address the heart of the post... "pattern-matching" and inductive reasoning are similar but not identical. AFAIK, the human mind performs probabilistic causal induction on whatever data "makes it through" the sensory cortices, which are quite possibly but not surely doing something like independent component analysis via unsupervised neural learning... so yeah.

Most people have some solid intuitions about how probabilistic causal induction works, not in quantitative terms but in terms of "What happens if I do this?". That's the whole reason TVTropes exists. The problem is that we tell people only special little causal models called "logic" or "debate rules" or, God help the poor victims, "philosophy" are invested with the Special Epistemic Normative Power of telling you true things, rather than specifically training the inductive faculties we really rely on, the faculty of spotting what reality is doing by looking.

You have not understood correctly regarding Carl. He claimed, in hindsight, that Zuckerberg's potential could've been distinguished in foresight, but he did not do so.

Thanks for the post Jonah.

In medical school, I was taught that when you're a novice doctor, you'll make diagnoses and plans using deliberative reasoning, but that experts eventually pattern-match everything.

If that's true, then pattern-matching might arise naturally with experience, or it might be something that's difficult to achieve in many domains at once.

When I read your article, the reasons that I might doubt that you deserve collaborators are:

1) that enthusiastic self-reports of special perceptual-cognitive abilities have a low prior probability 2) that you lack mechanistic explanations of things you did that led to you percieving some types of patterns more easily

Also, it seems almost like a parody that you spent 10,000+ hours learning to see patterns in evidence. Like, I thought you might in the next line say 'gotcha, that's describing how I learnt English as a child'! Do you mean you learnt patterns, or you learnt how to learn patterns? And if you want others to help you to teach the material, you'll almost certainly need to start by teaching pieces of it yourself!

Putting all of this to the side, I enjoyed the post - thanks for writing it - and am interested to see what you come up with.

What you are describing is my native way of thinking. My mind fits large amounts of information together into an aesthetic whole. I took me a while to figure out that other people don't think this way, and they can't easily just absorb patterns from evidence.

This mode of thinking has been described as Introverted Thinking in Ben Kovitz's obscure psychology wiki about Lenore Thomson's obscure take on Jungian psychology. Some of you are familiar with Jungian functions through MBTI, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Introverted Thinking (abbreviated Ti) is the dominant function of the INTP type.

It will only take a few quotes to illustrate why you are talking about the same thing:

Introverted Thinking (Ti) is the attitude that beneath the complexity of what is manifest (apparent, observed, experienced) there is an underlying unity: a source or essence that emerges and takes form in different ways depending on circumstances. What is manifest is seen as a manifestation of something. From a Ti standpoint, the way to respond to things is in a way that is faithful to that underlying cause or source and helps it emerge fully and complete, without interference from any notion of self. The way to understand that underlying essence is to learn to simultaneously see many relationships within what is manifest, to see every element in relation to every other element, the relationships being the "signature" of the underlying unity. This can only be experienced directly, not second-hand.

Introverted thinking is a form of mental representation in which every input, every variable, every aspect of things is considered simultaneously and holistically to perceive causal, mathematical, and aesthetic order. What you know by Ti, you know with your hands, your eyes, your muscles, even a tingling sensation "downstairs" because you sense that everything fits. Every variable is fair game to vary, every combination of variables worthy of consideration; the only ultimate arbiter is how well the parts form a unified whole rather than a jumble.

Introverted Thinking (Ti) is contrasted with Extraverted Thinking (Te):

From the Te perspective, anything for which you can't give an operational definition in terms of measurement (an "objective test") doesn't exist. The decision criteria are defined not exactly in terms of the things: they're defined in terms of observations of a sort that anyone can do and get the same result. You put the totality of the real-world situation onto your scales, so that all causal factors come into play--both known and unknown. What's accessible to you is the reading on the scale: that and only that is the basis for your decision.

As a dominant function, Te typically leads one to pursue and collect reliable ways of making decisions to get predictable results. The repeatability of a process becomes one of the main criteria for finding it valuable. Repeatable processes are valuable from a Te perspective because they enable you to make agreements with other people, where there is no doubt as to whether each party has fulfilled its part of the agreement. Making and delivering on promises is often how a Te attitude leads one to understand ethics.

Introverted Thinking about language:

From the Ti standpoint, communication is possible only between people who share some common experience of the things that they're talking about. To say something that you can understand, I need to relate it logically to things in your own experience. To show you how far a piece of wood bends, instead of giving a numerical measure (Te), I'd either encourage you to bend a piece of wood yourself, or find some mathematically similar thing that you know about and relate wood-bending to that. Words cannot be defined prior to the reality that they're about; words and criteria defined independently of the reality would be meaningless. The world itself provides a natural set of reference points, arising from the real, causal structure of things. Ultimately, to talk is to say, "I mean *that)."

Introverted Thinking uses language and concepts merely as pointers to patterns in reality that are incredibly more complex than anything that can be described in words. In contrast, Extraverted Thinking is about step-by-step justification according to shared language and critera. A common failure mode of Extraverted Thinking is King on The Mountain, which I think everyone will instantly recognize.

Introverted Thinking and Extraverted Thinking, along with Extraverted Intuition and Introverted Intuition, are combined to create rationality. Extraverted Intuition provides the idea generation, Introverted Thinking provides pattern recognition, Extraverted Thinking handles justification, and Introverted Intuition avoids bias. According to the Jung-Thomson-Kovitz theory, all of these modes of thinking provide benefits and failure modes. For example, a failure mode of Introverted Thinking is that since it is aesthetic and subjective, it can be very hard for Introverted Thinkers with different inputs to reconcile worldviews if they differ, whereas Extraverted Thinkers could slowly hammer out agreement step-by-step.

LessWrong seems mostly dominated by INTJs, who have Introverted Intuition and Extraverted Thinking. They are mostly focused on justification and bias. These are important skills, but Introverted Thinking is important for marshaling the priors of the totality of your experience.

I'd welcome any suggestions for how to find collaborators.

Keep posting the material here. Post to Main. Don't worry about it not being polished enough: you'll get plenty of feedback. Ignore feedback that isn't useful to you.

Some contrary evidence about usefulness of explicit models: http://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-first-principles-2015-1

My take is that you need both, some things are understood better "from first principles" (engineering) others are more suitable for pattern matching (politics).

I believe that what you are describing is known as internalizing.

A new paper may give some support to arguments in this post:

The smart intuitor: Cognitive capacity predicts intuitive rather than deliberate thinking

Cognitive capacity is commonly assumed to predict performance in classic reasoning tasks because people higher in cognitive capacity are believed to be better at deliberately correcting biasing erroneous intuitions. However, recent findings suggest that there can also be a positive correlation between cognitive capacity and correct intuitive thinking. Here we present results from 2 studies that directly contrasted whether cognitive capacity is more predictive of having correct intuitions or successful deliberate correction of an incorrect intuition. We used a two-response paradigm in which people were required to give a fast intuitive response under time pressure and cognitive load and afterwards were given the time to deliberate. We used a direction-of-change analysis to check whether correct responses were generated intuitively or whether they resulted from deliberate correction (i.e., an initial incorrect-to-correct final response change). Results showed that although cognitive capacity was associated with the correction tendency (overall r = .13) it primarily predicted correct intuitive responding (overall r = .42). These findings force us to rethink the nature of sound reasoning and the role of cognitive capacity in reasoning. Rather than being good at deliberately correcting erroneous intuitions, smart reasoners simply seem to have more accurate intuitions.

Do you really think that this is something that can be taught through writing?

Most intuitive pattern recognition comes through repeated practice, and I think that it might make more sense to create some sort of training regimen/coaching that allows others to have that practice, instead of writing a post about it.

If you did create this training, I'd be incredibly interested in taking it (probably up to about $300 or so, which is admittedly small for this type of thing).

algorithms that people have been constructed (within the paradigm of deep learning) are highly nontransparent: nobody's been able to interpret their behavior in intelligible terms.

Not quite true Jonah: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1311.2901.pdf

Does this capture any of what you're talking about? This is my intuitive take away from the post so I want to check if it's not what is intended. An analogy: we know that the lens has flaws and we can learn specific moves to shift the lens a bit so that we can see the flaws more easily. For those with high levels of epistemic rationality, bumping the lens around in just the right ways is, or has become, an automatic process such that they seem to have a magic ability to always catch the flaws right away. We ask them for an algorithm to do that and they point to a mishmash of different ways of nudging the lens. Both sides feel mildly silly. "So I move the it 2cm to the left followed by a 2 degree rotation clockwise?", "Uh, just nudge it around a bit dude, you should see what I mean after trying for a while."

How many bad ideas or ambiguously true ideas do mathematicians have for every good idea they produce? How many people feel "deep certainties" about hypotheses that never pan out? Even when sometimes correct, do their hunches generally do better than chance alone would suggest? I agree with the idea that pattern recognition is important, but think your claims are going too far. My opinion is that successful pattern recognition, even in the hands of the best human experts, relies heavily on explicit reasoning that takes control over the recognition mechanisms and keeps them accurately targeted. Without cumbersome restraints that resist mental manipulations, humans are more likely to invent numerology than Calculus. Filtering out bad ideas or chains of thought that pattern recognition brings into one's head is important.

A significant reason I've had problems with advanced Calculus is that my brain starts inventing too many justifications for things, and then I become unable to distinguish between remembered rules which are valid and ones which my mind invented without sufficient justification. The difference between a superstition, a heuristic, and a rule is extremely important, but I don't think pattern recognition is well equipped to monitor thoughts to maintain these distinctions. I see pattern recognition as being about what things have in common. That has a lot to recommend it, but differences are important too. I wouldn't say either pattern recognition or reasoning are of primary importance. They're two halves of a whole, either alone is almost useless while both together can be very very strong. In my own case, it's the restrictions I find difficult, being imaginative is almost too easy for me.

Is this what you were referring to in "Is Scott Alexander bad at math?" when you said that being good at math is largely about "aesthetic discernment" rather than "intelligence"? Because if so that seems like an unusual notion of "intelligence", to use it to mean explicit reasoning only and exclude pattern recognition. Like it would seem very odd to say "MIT Mystery Hunt doesn't require much intelligence," even if frequently domain knowledge is more important to spotting its patterns.

Or did you mean something else? I realize this is not the same post, but I'm just not clear on how you're separating "aesthetic discernment" from "intelligence" here; the sort of aesthetic discernment needed for mathematics seems like a kind of intelligence.

On my return to Caen, for convenience sake, I verified the result at my leisure.

Why? Because...proofs are needed to persuade other people, I suppose. You don't need proofs and arguments if you reasoning solipsistically.

Your observation that

the most effective people in the world have a very specific way of thinking. They use their brain's pattern-matching abilities to process the world, rather than using explicit reasoning

is the subject of Malcolm Gladwell's book Blink.

I don't remember that Gladwell gave any tips for actually developing one's skills for this type of thinking, but he does have a number of interesting stories and analysis about this type of thinking. It also makes the observation that this type of non-explicit reasoning can lead us astray.

I suspect that pattern-matching is vastly more efficient than explicit reasoning as you suggest, but that it is subject to bias and can in some cases lead one astray. Therefore, I think that rationality is a combination of both types of thinking - to use your example, a mathematician uses his/her pattern matching thought processes to figure out how to approach proving a theorem, but then reasons explicitly when formalizing the proof (and explicit reasoning would be used in verifying the proof as well).

At least some of the biases discussed in the sequences and elsewhere can be attributed to non-explicit reasoning and the antidote to these biases is to reason explicitly.

An exploration of the unknown through known first-principles seems to be a good balance between order and chaos.

Oh this is nice. I've also come to realise this over time, ,in different words, and my mind is extremely tickled by how your formulation puts it on an equal footing with other non-explicit-rationality avenues of thought.

I would love to help you. I am very interested in a passion project right now. And we seem to be classifying similar things as hard-won realisations, though we have very different timelines for different things; talking to you might be all-round interesting for me.

Hi Jonah, this article is very intriguing since I might be going through a similar phase as you. Please add me to any list of collaborators you're drawing up.

This seems valuable—I'm interested in helping (will email).

I want to highlight that "communicating how to do it" might not make sense as a frame. Pattern-matching is closely related to chunking. Ctrl+F yields other people who've mentioned chess, so I'll just point at that and then note that we actually know exactly how to communicate the skill of chunking chessboards: you get the person to practice chess in a certain way. There are of course better and worse ways to do this, but it seems like rather than looking for an insight to communicate you want to look for a learning process and how to make it more efficient by (e.g.) tightening feedback loops.

I have a lot of evidence that this way of thinking is how the most effective people think about the world. Here I'll give two examples. Holden worked under Greg Jensen, the co-CEO of Bridgewater Associates, which is the largest hedge fund in the world.

BW also uses a lot of explicit models, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHe0bXAIuk0

Holden working under Greg is also generally weak evidence about how Greg thinks.

I personally agree with your core thesis that pattern matching is central. I invested a lot of effort into Quantified Self community building and gave press interviews praising the promise of QS. I think at the time I overrated straight data over pattern matching. Today I consider pattern matching much more important. I'm happy to collaborate on developing this line of thought.

I'm weary of whether using the word 'rationality' in this context is useful. Webster defines the word as: 'the quality or state of being agreeable to reason'. Wikipedia says: 'Rationality is the quality or state of being reasonable, based on facts or reason. Rationality implies the conformity of one's beliefs with one's reasons to believe, or of one's actions with one's reasons for action.'

Have you read http://lesswrong.com/lw/1wu/reasoning_isnt_about_logic_its_about_arguing/ ?

The coolest possible output of a collaboration like this would be some kind of browser-based game you could play that would level up your rationality.

Also, what characteristics/skills does your ideal collaborator have? Maybe what you want to do is find an effective altruist whose work could benefit very strongly from the skills you describe, tutor them in the skills, and having taught 1 person, see if you can replicate the most effective bits of teaching bits and scale them to a larger audience.

This sounds like an explanation for the old adage: "Go with your gut". If your brain is a lot better at recognizing patterns than it is at drawing conclusions through a chain of reasoning, it seems advisable to trust that which your brain excels at. Something similar is brought up in The Gift of Fear, where the author cites examples where the pattern-recognition signaled danger, but people ignored them because they could not come up with a chain of reasoning to support that conclusion.

Sufficiently high quality mathematicians don't make their discoveries through reasoning. The mathematical proof is the very last step: you do it to check that your eyes weren't deceiving you, but you know ahead of time that it's your eyes probably weren't deceiving you. Given that this is true even in math, which is thought of as the most logically rigorous subject, it shouldn't be surprising that the same is true of epistemic rationality across the board.

Interesting that you bring up this and Poincare's experience. Jacques Hadamard wrote a book examining this phenomenon based on information he gathered from other mathematicians as well as his (layman's) knowledge of the psychology of the day. His conclusions bore several similarities to what you're trying to explain in this post. He did, however, note that experiences like Poincare's generally only took place if the researcher in question spent a lot of time working on the problem in the old "chain of reasoning" way, with the pattern often becoming clear some weeks or months later, after the researcher had moved on to a different problem. Perhaps this is what constitutes training one's brain to see patterns.

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What would be the goal of any such collaboration: LessWrong posts, a book, a podcast series? Knowing what you will produce will help you sell yourself to potential collaborators.