Cognitive Biases, Religion, and Rational Thinking

Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner examine cognitive biases, drawing on Charlie Munger’s ideas about judgment. They debate rationality, religious belief, prayer, false hope, and exploitation, distinguishing immediate dangers from distant risks. Their conversation considers social progress in safety, everyday contradictions, and the psychological costs and comforts of wishful thinking.

Rick Rosner: I sent you a link to a guy named Charlie Munger. He passed away in 2023, but he was Warren Buffett's longtime business partner. They moved in the same circles and succeeded as tough-thinking investors: they looked at companies, bought only the best, and did well.

It takes a ton of work to properly evaluate whether you should buy stock in a company or, in Buffett's case, buy the company outright. He bought few companies relative to how many companies he looked at.

Munger and Buffett believed that if you're tough-minded, you can do well at investing. Munger put out a list, which I tweeted at you, of 25 psychological tendencies that can lead to bad judgments.

We've talked about how your brain isn't a fair dealer of information, mostly in the realm of sex. Our strong sex drive, which helps keep us existing as a species, makes your brain bias your judgments and maybe feed you bad information about how valuable shit is.

Munger doesn't go into sex, but he goes into several other areas where you might be fooling yourself into a bad judgment. 

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Or never.

Rosner: People are familiar with the halo effect. If you have a favourable impression of the person presenting you with information, you're going to believe that information more easily. There are dozens of other ways you can be fooled into stupid judgments or judgments that don't fully take into account all the information and don't fairly weight the information you have.

Jacobsen: Are there any areas of human life where people are hyper-rational?

Rosner: I would say that around risk, people aren't hyper-rational, but people can be extremely risk-averse in some areas.

My mom watched too much local news and too many cop shows, like T. J. Hooker back in the '80s, and maybe overweighted the idea of crime. She didn't take much action about it. She had two locks on the front door plus a chain lock, which probably made her less safe because you needed a key to get out. If there were a fire, you were fucked trying to go out that front door. But that was at least the idea of risk avoidance.

People have been conditioned now. You've got to be a real fucking dickhead not to wear a seatbelt because your car yells at you, unless you've got an old vintage car. A cop can ticket you for not wearing one. Most people wear seatbelts naturally, which is reasonableness as a society.

Car manufacturers, I don't know if they're legally required to, but almost all new cars have airbags, which is reasonableness as a society. Fucking cars used to be death traps in the '30s: metal dashboards, shitty glass in some windshields, no seatbelts. Even if you got in a wreck going 35 miles an hour, you could go through the windshield and die. Or the steering column could punch through you.

As a society, we've gotten more rational about risk that way. We've avoided some risk in commercial aviation. I guess what we're seeing is society as a whole becoming more rational over time in some areas.

Doctors wash their hands now. When Semmelweis pushed handwashing between examinations in the 1840s, he faced resistance. Doctors might have thought, "What the fuck are you talking about?" His findings weren't readily accepted.

People can become more rational as a society once we recognize risk. We don't recognize the risk of driving our own vehicles well. Many people think they're competent drivers but are shittier drivers than they think. Society needs to help regulate our driving.

What do you think? Where do you think people are hyper-rational?

Jacobsen: People are barely rational in a few areas and broadly non-rational in most areas. Wishing it were so is the essence of prayer. The idea that most of the planet is engaged in this behaviour is wishing it were so. There may be incidental or accidental psychological anxiolytic or calming effects that reduce stress from giving false certainty, but that is still grounded in false certainty and wishing it were so, which is a fundamental form of magical thinking. The belief in any form of supernaturalism is non-rational. You can make logical arguments for the supernatural, but based on everything we know by contemporary metrics; I regard supernaturalism as fundamentally non-rational.

Rosner: I'll make an argument in favour of all that: if you fully confront reality and our position in it all day, every day, it is stressful. We're all going to die. From our perspective, there's nothing after death. We may get sick before we die, become old and miserable. We need some comfort to avoid being stressed all the time. If superstition and religion help you chill—

Jacobsen: Those are the same thing to me.

Rosner: What?

Jacobsen: Those are the same thing to me in general.

Rosner: One more place where we're hyper—

Jacobsen: I used to be more soft-handed about this stuff, but I've seen so much nonsense that I don't see any reason for a reasonable person, not an intelligent person as it's apart from intelligence, a reasonable person, to attribute anything to the supernatural or to prayer or to a God. This is the foundation stone of so many people's core beliefs that, rather than acknowledging this, taking offence is the main defence.

Rosner: Right. But we've talked about how you can believe a ton of nonsense and still exist in the world. It doesn't kill you. You can be fully religious and still obey traffic laws and not drink poison. Believing this nonsense doesn't necessarily interfere with daily life.

MAGAs have a lot of nonsense beliefs about Trump that contradict reality: that he's this great guy, that he's fighting for us. For many MAGAs, their entire identity is MAGA. These people believe nonsense all the time, yet they can still exist in the world because their nonsense beliefs don't necessarily affect how safely they behave.

Here's another place where we are highly responsive to consequences: built-in deterrents. We don't stick our hands on hot stoves. We don't slice our fingers with knives. We avoid doing that. We know it's bad because it fucking hurts when you do it.

Jacobsen: When a loved one dies, and we pray for their well-being or our well-being, we're grief-stricken, and we get failure after failure in response to prayer. We keep putting our hands on the hot stove.

Rosner: Figuratively, but the real-world effects of that belief aren't necessarily life-threatening. Here's what happens when a loved one dies: you can feel coerced by the funeral industry into spending up to 30 grand on laying them to rest.

My mom thought ahead. My mom and my stepdad had gravesites already bought. They didn't think that far ahead, though, because they didn't buy headstones or pay for funerals or coffins in advance. We ended up spending, I don't know, probably 25 grand when my mom died. We could afford it, but it was ridiculous.

Five, six, seven grand for a chunk of granite with her name and dates and "beloved mother, daughter," all this carved into it. That's all connected with the proper way to honour the dead. You get fucked, but it doesn't necessarily endanger you. It just means you get victimized a little bit.

Jacobsen: The problem is people get victimized by these systems and by people taking advantage of them in these systems. They go back to blaming themselves or attributing it to things that don't exist, and they come back into that system and get abused again. There are a lot of cases of that. These are trauma factories.

Rosner: Yes. If you're plugged into the church, we know that many religious institutions have had bad actors who sexually abuse children. If you're plugged in, that can be a source of continuing harm.

Jacobsen: I would put even false hope under psychological abuse.

Rosner: I'd argue that, in a lot of cases, false hope is better than no hope at all.

Jacobsen: In the short term, sure. In the long term, I'd argue it can be a source of psychological harm.

Rosner: Ben Franklin, a highly rational guy, expressed a wish that he could be preserved in a cask of Madeira and recalled to life a century later. Wishful thinking, even on the part of a rational guy looking for some mechanism, acknowledging that dead is dead.

Jacobsen: That actually supports the point that we are largely non-rational and rarely hyper-rational. It bolsters my whole point. If someone like that barely has any hope for rational thought, for the rest of us, it's almost completely hopeless.

Rosner: We're rational in matters of daily survival.

Jacobsen: Yes.

Rosner: We follow traffic—

Jacobsen: I say yes, but that's even untruthful. People smoke. They drink. They don't wear the seatbelt. They drink too much water. They drink too little water. They have too much caffeine. They eat shitty food.

Rosner: It's immediate threats to life. We don't play Russian roulette, for the most part.

Jacobsen: I'm in Ukraine, so—

Rosner: You're playing a certain roulette. Is it rational? I don't know.

Jacobsen: In terms of getting some stories that I want to, sure.

Rosner: We are a mix of the irrational and the moment-to-moment rational. The things that have immediate consequences, either in terms of causing pain or injury, we're pretty rational if the pain is proximate to the action. If it's distant, like the consequences of smoking or drinking, we're less rational.

But if we're immediately going to get smacked down, either by pain or by bleeding all over the place or both—

One time I decided to do something. Several times, I've done this a lot in my life. There was a hole in the ground. I came upon it next to my campus in Boulder—big-ass hole. "I'm just going to jump in the hole," and because I'm going to do something stupid and irrational without knowing what's in the hole, how deep it is, or what was poking up. I jumped in the hole like an asshole. I was lucky that it was only six feet deep, and there were only pipes. There wasn't rebar sticking up to impale me or any of that shit. But most people don't do that. If they do, they don't do it often.

Jacobsen: Air raid alarm's over.

Rosner: What?

Jacobsen: Air raid alarm's over.

Rosner: It is over?

Jacobsen: Yes. It was on for 10 minutes while we were talking.

Rosner: Congratulations. That's good. Do you want to wrap it up, and you can try to get some sleep before the alarm starts up again?

Jacobsen: I'd rather wrap it up.

Richard “Rick” Rosner (born May 2, 1960) is an American television writer, producer, game-show writer, media personality, and high-range intelligence-test participant. His credits include Remote Control, The World’s Funniest!, Twenty-One, The Weakest Link, The Man Show, Crank Yankers, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, the Grammy Awards, and the Primetime Emmy Awards. He wrote more than 1,000 credited episodes of Jimmy Kimmel Live!, won a 2012 Writers Guild Award as part of the After the Academy Awards writing team, received multiple Writers Guild nominations, and earned a 2013 Primetime Emmy nomination for Outstanding Writing for a Variety Series. Rosner achieved the only known perfect score on Ronald K. Hoeflin’s Titan Test, ranked among the leading scorers on the Omni Mega Test, and served six years as editor of Noesis, the Mega Society journal. He earned approximately twelve years of college credit within one year and completing requirements equivalent to eight academic majors. In 2013, the World Genius Directory named him “Genius of the Year - America.” Rosner appeared on Jeopardy! and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, was profiled by Academy Award-winning filmmaker Errol Morris in First Person: One in a Million Trillion, and has spent decades developing ideas in cosmology, intelligence, science, technology, television, and culture.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen is a blogger on Vocal with more than 200 publications on the platform. He is the Founder and Publisher of In-Sight Publishing (ISBN: 978–1–0692343; 978–1–0673505) and Editor-in-Chief of In-Sight: Interviews (ISSN: 2369–6885). He writes for International Policy Digest (ISSN: 2332–9416), The Humanist (Print: ISSN, 0018–7399; Online: ISSN, 2163–3576), Basic Income Earth Network (UK Registered Charity 1177066), Humanist Perspectives (ISSN: 1719–6337), A Further Inquiry (SubStack), Vocal, Medium, The Good Men Project, The New Enlightenment Project, The Washington Outsider, rabble.ca, and other media. His bibliography index can be found via the Jacobsen Bank at In-Sight Publishing, comprising more than 10,000 articles, interviews, and republications across more than 200 outlets. He has served in national and international leadership roles within humanist and media organizations, held several academic fellowships, and currently serves on several boards. He is a member in good standing in numerous media organizations, including the Canadian Association of Journalists, PEN Canada (CRA: 88916 2541 RR0001), Reporters Without Borders (SIREN: 343 684 221/SIRET: 343 684 221 00041/EIN: 20–0708028), and others.