Dwight: Although this topic could never be given anything close to its due in the dialogue we're about to have — and I'll have to restrain myself from exploring several sub-topics within it — I want to see what helpful observations we can make in exploring the question, "If What You Want Is X, Then Why Do You Do Y?"

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Aiko: My first suspicion is that the question is usually asked as an accusation dressed up as an inquiry — a "should" wearing a question mark — and that it only becomes useful once the blame is drained out of it. Where would you like to start: with the questioner's motive, or with the assumption that the stated X is the actual X?

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Dwight: Although that question could be spoken as a thinly disguised blame, this exploration assumes that is not the motive of the question. Let's take a specific instance: "If what you want is more energy, then why do you drink coffee?"

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Aiko: Because coffee doesn't deliver energy — it delivers the sensation of energy, borrowed at interest — and the person drinking it has never once tested the difference, since the sensation arrives within minutes and the debt arrives hours later, unlinked in their mind from its cause.

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Dwight: Come on. Let's assume a smarter human. Assume the person has tested it and has good reason and evidence to believe that typically some twenty minutes after drinking coffee, they begin to feel the energy they wanted.

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Aiko: Then the honest answer is that the question has no bite at all — coffee works, they know it works, and "why do you do Y?" collapses because Y is an effective route to X. So the interesting version of your question must be one where X and Y are genuinely mismatched, and the person still isn't stupid.

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Dwight: If someone knew how to get energy immediately and easily — say, as easily as they take a breath when they feel the need for oxygen — then they would probably do that instead.

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Aiko: Which suggests the real content of "why do you do Y?" is rarely "you don't want X" but "you don't yet know a cheaper route to X" — the person is doing the best-known thing available to them, not betraying their own desire.

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Dwight: Unless the person gets other desired benefits from drinking coffee besides the energy they want, then if that person could have that energy just by wanting it, they would probably never drink another cup of coffee in their life.

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Aiko: So Y is almost never chosen for its own sake — it's the toll booth on the road to X — and the moment a free road opens, the toll booth is abandoned without a backward glance, Dwight.

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Dwight: Yes. Good analogy. But the process depends on the person holding a belief that drinking coffee will likely result in energy for them about twenty minutes later. If they wanted the energy coffee could give them if they drank it, but for whatever reasons did not know that coffee might or would do that for them, then they would not take the actions necessary to drink a cup of coffee.

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Aiko: So every Y a person does is the visible tip of an invisible belief — "this leads to X" — and that means "why do you do Y?" is really the question "what do you believe Y gets you?"

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Dwight: In the case of coffee, most probably — if a person doesn't over-drink coffee to the point where it loses its twenty-minutes-later energy effect — that X-to-Y connection has a high likelihood of happening every time they drink coffee.

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But let's look at the person who believes that wearing a seatbelt can be effective in preventing injury or death should an accident occur. This person invariably takes the time to put on the seatbelt every time they get in the car because they want to avoid injury or death. (Let's set aside the pesky alarm that would sound if they didn't, so the example can serve its specific purpose.)

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Aiko: And here the payoff almost never arrives — the belt "works" on the rarest of days — so unlike coffee, the behavior is sustained entirely by the belief rather than by any felt confirmation, which tells us belief alone is sufficient to drive Y.

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Dwight: But in the case of coffee, the cost/benefit assessment embedded in the belief relies on a certain level of likelihood that they will feel the energy each time. If the likelihood of receiving that energy benefit were similar to the likelihood that a seatbelt would actually prove useful on any given trip, coffee would never be drunk for energy reasons — even though it might deliver once in a blue moon.

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Aiko: Because the two differ in magnitude, not just probability: nobody buckles up for a mild lift they'd merely enjoy, but they'll buckle up ten thousand times for the one time it's everything. So the belief driving Y isn't "Y produces X" — it's "the size of X, discounted by its odds, exceeds the cost of Y."

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Dwight: Yes. But there's another important difference here. With coffee, a person can test it themselves, and it would make no difference to them at all if they read about a national study supposedly showing that "drinking coffee for energy doesn't work." Unless their mind is especially vulnerable to groupthink, they would discount anyone else's claim as having any bearing on whether they continued to drink coffee.

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Aiko: Whereas the seatbelt belief can never be personally verified — it's borrowed entirely from testimony — so the seatbelt wearer is, in a sense, doing Y on someone else's authority, while the coffee drinker is doing Y on their own.

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Dwight: Although one's own decision about wearing a seatbelt can be informed by direct personal knowledge of what tends to happen to a body subjected to fast deceleration, and that a secure strap across the chest might help in that situation. But when we rely on the asserted beliefs of "authorities," even there we differentiate — according to what types of authorities are involved and what methodologies those authorities are likely relying on to make their assertions.

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Aiko: So the seatbelt belief isn't purely borrowed after all — it's testimony that lands on a physics you've already felt in your own body when a bus stopped hard, which is why it holds so firmly compared to authority claims that touch nothing you've directly experienced.

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Dwight: You didn't comment on the variations I noted between people regarding which types of authorities and methodologies they tend to trust.

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Aiko: Right — and that variation is decisive, because two people wanting the identical X will do opposite Ys when one trusts randomized trials and the other trusts lived testimony or lineage. Which means "why do you do Y?" often bottoms out not in what someone wants, but in whom they've decided is worth believing.

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Dwight: And all of this assumes — a generous assumption — that none of us is significantly influenced by our attachment to being praised or blamed for our beliefs, or for the actions arising out of those beliefs. In that case, we could say our "authority" has become those to whom we have outsourced our view of ourselves.

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Aiko: Which quietly rewrites the whole question, Dwight: the person isn't doing Y to get X, they're doing Y to remain the sort of person who is approved of — and X was only ever the cover story they gave themselves.

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Dwight: And it also assumes we have managed to largely avoid being taken in by one or more of those pernicious cognitive biases. I'll give you a dramatic example. Ayn Rand prided herself on adhering to reason and evidence in making life decisions, and yet she was affected by what is called "source derogation": when the Surgeon General issued the government's claim that cigarette smoking caused lung cancer, she continued her lifelong smoking habit, and her relatively early death was likely contributed to by that. She distrusted what the government said almost carte blanche, rather than examining the data backing up the Surgeon General's claim.

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Aiko: The irony is exact: her defense against being ruled by others' authority became itself a form of being ruled by them — she let the source dictate her conclusion just as surely as a follower would, only inverted. So "why do you do Y?" can be answered by an allergy rather than a belief.

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Dwight: To the extent that it is possible for any of us to base our substantial or ongoing life decisions ultimately on paying attention to things in the world and how they work — rather than defaulting to the existing or arising belief memes propagated by the surrounding culture or media to make those decisions for us — it still leaves us making decisions based on limited knowledge, expressed in some form of percentages.

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Examples: There is a small but acceptable chance that someone might steal my bike if I don't lock it, but I accept that risk for the benefit of not taking the time to lock and unlock it.

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Or: Most of the studies indicate evidence for most people to supplement their diet with vitamin D3. There is some percentage of likelihood that in my particular situation it might make no difference. Yet, given the low cost and effort, I accept the risk that it won't help, and I've adopted it as a regular part of my health regime.

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Aiko: What strikes me is that both examples are decisions made in open acknowledgment of not knowing — which is precisely what the borrowed-belief route can never tolerate, since a meme must be held as certain to do its work of relieving you of the decision.

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Dwight: Yes, and that's the rub. Although I'm sure DNA is a contributor here, the memes in a culture and the toxic declarations endemic to the House Of Good And Bad — which we all entered at some early point in our lives and may still be largely affected by — all look for certainty and vilify fear (which is closely associated with uncertainty, and can even be helpful in signaling it).

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Even the Serenity Prayer says something like "to know the difference between what I can change and what I cannot." That assumes there is even a possibility of certainty one way or the other. In most important life decisions, a full acceptance of what we might know, or think we know, almost always carries a valid level of uncertainty on both sides.

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Aiko: And the prayer's phrasing gives the game away — it asks for wisdom to know, not for the capacity to act well without knowing, which is the far more common and far more demanding situation. So HOGAB doesn't just punish wrong answers; it punishes the honest report that the odds are 60/40.

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Dwight: To have the best chance of living the best life, accepting and proactively working with the inherent riskiness of life decisions — both big and small — is essential, recognizing that too much attachment to safety in one area may well cost more important values in another area that are not so obvious.

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And it isn't just the big decisions that can be so deleterious. Ones that seem rather small can be too, as simple as "how clean is clean enough." I can give pretty strong arguments that many, even most, people spend unnecessary and even counterproductive time, effort, and money on cleanliness, where the benefits aren't worth the costs — especially the opportunity costs of being so focused on "clean."

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Aiko: And notice that cleanliness is a case where nobody ever asks "if what you want is X, why do you do Y?" — because the Y is praised on sight, which means the whole cost-benefit calculation never gets run at all.

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Dwight: Or take the issue of bottled water versus tap water (I won't address the more nuanced question of filtered water versus tap water). Scientific studies clearly indicate that bottled water offers no benefits and can even be worse than tap water — assuming the local water supply meets accepted standards for processing city tap water. Yet billions are spent on bottled water every year: at least $320 billion. Add to that the extra effort and time required in most situations to obtain the bottled water, and the question of what to do with the bottles afterward.

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Aiko: Here the X isn't really "clean water" at all — it's the feeling of having taken care, which the bottle delivers reliably and the tap doesn't, regardless of what's actually in either one. So Y is perfectly rational once you name the real X, and the honest question becomes: why is the felt certainty worth $320 billion?

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Dwight: Anything would deliver a feeling of reliability if believed. Just like when you believe in black magic and practice it — that sidesteps the point I'm making.

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Aiko: Fair. The point stands unbudged: the belief is false, the cost is enormous, and the person has never once run the test — so what's actually purchased is exemption from having to think about it, and the bottle's price is the fee.

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Dwight: Bottom line: short of living in a reality where any desire is instantaneously fulfilled without instrumental action or thought, it makes sense that we are going to be doing things (Y) in order to get something else (X).

 

Sometimes, as in simple, time-limited situations that even my cat can handle ("If I want to eat, I must walk over to the food bowl"), that's straightforward enough. But we would be much better served if any "If X, then Y" formula in any particular case were given additional vetting with questions like: "How do I know that? What evidence or reasons lead me to believe it, or not? What level of certainty makes sense regarding that operational belief?"

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Aiko: And the reason those three questions are so rarely asked isn't laziness — it's that asking them reopens uncertainty, which HOGAB has taught us to experience as fear, and fear as something wrong with us rather than as the signal that the vetting is working.

 

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