Hugin & Munin Journal

Some books are valuable because they introduce an unfamiliar idea. Others give a precise shape to something you had already noticed without knowing how to organise it. Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Inadequate Equilibria: Where and How Civilizations Get Stuck belongs firmly in the second category for me. The book is often described as an explanation of why institutions remain trapped in bad arrangements. That is true, but it leaves out the more difficult question Yudkowsky places in the reader’s hands: when should you trust that an existing system has already found the obvious improvements, and when might it be reasonable to think that you can see something it has missed? This is not permission to assume that experts are fools or that private conviction outranks accumulated knowledge. It is an attempt to distinguish justified deference from deference performed automatically. The distinction depends less on how intelligent or prestigious the people inside a system appear than on what the syst...

Steven Pinker’s Rationality is not, despite the title, simply a handbook on how to think logically. It does explain the tools humans have developed for reasoning more reliably—logic, probability, statistics, Bayesian updating, and causal inference. But its recurring subject is the gap between possessing those tools and actually using them. Cover image: Rationality by Steven Pinker, published by Penguin Books. Used here for purposes of review and commentary. In that sense, the book is part primer and part catalogue of failure. Its most interesting question is not merely what rationality means in the abstract, but why a species capable of inventing extraordinarily powerful methods of reasoning so often falls back on intuition, anecdote, tribal loyalty, and whatever explanation feels right first. Familiar Ground, Clearly Mapped Rationality overlaps heavily with material familiar to anyone who has spent time reading about statistics, cognitive psychology, or the s...