How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind: The Strange Career of Cold War Rationality

by Paul Erickson, Judy L. Klein, Lorraine Daston

In the United States at the height of the Cold War, roughly between the end of World War II and the early 1980s, a new project of redefining rationality commanded the attention of sharp minds, powerful politicians, wealthy foundations, and top military brass. Its home was the human sciences—psychology, sociology, political science, and economics, among others—and its participants enlisted in an intellectual campaign to figure out what rationality should mean and how it could be deployed.

           

How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind brings to life the people—Herbert Simon, Oskar Morgenstern, Herman Kahn, Anatol Rapoport, Thomas Schelling, and many others—and places, including the RAND Corporation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the Cowles Commission for Research and Economics, and the Council on Foreign Relations, that played a key role in putting forth a “Cold War rationality.” Decision makers harnessed this picture of rationality—optimizing, formal, algorithmic, and mechanical—in their quest to understand phenomena as diverse as economic transactions, biological evolution, political elections, international relations, and military strategy. The authors chronicle and illuminate what it meant to be rational in the age of nuclear brinkmanship.

Genres: History, History Of Science, Nonfiction, American History, War, Psychology, Politics

272 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 2011

Reviews

[Betawolf · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an intellectual history of rationality, one of the more overloaded terms in all intellectual history. The authors insist on the phrase 'Cold War rationality' because they are attempting to bound and historicise the subject, but they failed to convince me of their bounds.

It was first and foremost a sense of unprecedented urgency that distinguished debates over rationality during the Cold War from those over similar issues raised before and after: in the minds of the participants, nothing less than the fate of humanity hinged on the answers to these questions.

Yes, because modern discussions about rationality don't reference the fate of humanity or anxiously consider certain time-frames. There's certainly not a community of discordant self-critical voices arguing urgently about how to think, and what getting that wrong might mean for the species. Ahem.

There's a tone to the book that irks me. The authors seem affronted not at their subjects' methods (imperfect, sure, but they would be the first to agree, and the authors acknowledge these were at least no worse than the alternatives) but at their intellectual arrogance in attempting to solve the problem of nuclear annihilation. As if it is better to be humbly and fearfully inactive than to save the world, safer to cower before complexity than to attempt to discern some rules, some fundamental principles to guide the most important decisions in the world. Would the authors be happier, less sniffily derisive, with scholars who wrote only indecisive analyses of particular events? Who kept tidily to their own disciplines rather than pursuing fundamentals across the behavioural sciences? Decision scientists who stick to description, and make little effort to be useful to decision-makers?

Whatever the opinion of the authors, the book describes some fascinating scientific history. I had no idea that dynamic programming had origins so closely connected to the US Air Force, for example, and seeing the cost of computation at the time really drives home how incredible advances have been. While there are a bunch of names in here that I recognise (Ellsberg, von Neumann, Morgenstern, Nash, Deutsch, Kahneman and Tversky), there are also quite a few new ones with interesting contributions. Yet it felt at times a little like the authors wanted to do a comprehensive history of RAND but lacked the energy -- everything is covered fairly quickly, and it often feels like 'gosh' factoids are being held up to distract you. For example, chapter four repeats a few times the mildly interesting fragment that anthropologists were studying Micronesian cultures at the same time as the US was blowing up some Micronesian islands with nuclear weapons tests. The author of that chapter seems fascinated that neither research programme mentions the other, despite the obvious explanation that they had essentially no bearing on one another.

I struggled a bit to understand the book's perspective on events it was describing, and especially what exactly it was criticising (if indeed that was the point -- I find myself second-guessing. Was the tone that annoyed me imagined? Should I be giving more weight to the 'almost' in the title? Are all the many scare-quotes actually just some weird authorial habit?). I'm probably not the right person to do a proper critical review of this -- I'd want to read a dissection from a modern rationalist who's reread the sequences more recently, uses more formal methods, and ideally has some prior interest in the Cold War (so, I guess approximately anyone who's regularly taken part in Petrov Day exercises). However, I can plead also that some of the things seemingly being critiqued were really all over the place. In the first content chapter, we're meant to doubt the sense in scientists... looking for rules? In the fourth, the terribly strange rationalists are... collecting social and anthropological data efficiently? The sixth sees the authors questioning whether the rules of logical conjunction make sense. I omit the second and third only because I'm genuinely not sure if the authors were criticising anything there. Sometimes what sounded like fairly sensible research methods were described in shocked detail, and I had to check a few times to see that, yes, the authors acknowledge that these methods were very successful and produced useful results and in several cases led to Nobel prizes.

I mean, I'm not in general opposed to the thesis that scientists studying rationality in the period from World War II until the 90's could have been up to some weird stuff and gotten a bunch of important findings wrong. That would be pretty much expected at this point. What I'm confused about is the book doesn't really show us any such thing, at least not consistently. About the only approach the book compellingly presents as wrong is the deterrence rationality work by Kach, but that chapter spent much more time on the work of Osgood, whose predictions it contends were better supported than Kach's, and who it seems was also studying instrumental rationality and game-theoretic methods in the context of the Cold War, just using a slightly different frame. This is hardly damning of the whole research culture.

If I had to strengthen what I think their point might be, it would go like this: it is natural in any science to form models that are simplified and controlled forms of the phenomenon being studied, to enable fundamental rules to be discerned. However reasoning about and optimisation of models is only useful insofar as they are true to the phenomenon. So if you draw a map of Europe, you might justifiably omit terrain features and just focus on the national borders. But if you intend to use the map to plan the march of an army, this map is in many ways terrible, and optimisations that make sense on the map, like marching into Italy from France, might encounter unexpected barriers in the territory (like the Alps). The study of rationality in conflict during the Cold War showed some of these problems -- simplified representations of decision-making and reasoning problems were optimised and studied in the laboratory, but the very simplification of the model meant that results from its analysis could not be relied upon in the desired application domain of international diplomacy, and there was sometimes an uncritical assumption that actors like the Soviet Union would behave according to rational incentives rather than being affected by the multifarious 'other factors' stripped out of the models made to arrive at those predictions. This is agreeable enough, and a criticism that I think modern rationalism is well aware of and tries to handle with its much heavier empirical testing focus.

Overall, I was not convinced and honestly a little puzzled by the authors, and felt there was a depth lacking to the history, but I did enjoy some of the study descriptions, and it was a nice if odd trip around a subject I like.

[Nils · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brilliant ensemble-cast intellectual history of the debates over how to define rationality during the cold war, a debate that began in the pressure cooker of WWII operations research, achieved a chain reaction at RAND in the first postwar decade, mushroomed in economics via game theory, and then delivered its fallout across the social sciences (which the authors insist on calling the "human sciences"), and most particularly in psychology. The central argument of the book is that what the rationality theorists did was to strip away from the much broader and older Enlightenment concept of "reason" as many elements as possible - such as judgment, taste, fairness, understanding, imagination, etc. - to produce a powerfully reductive formal concept of "rationality" that was independent of personality or context, and that was therefore amenable to algorithmic expression through a series of simple, unambiguous, sequential steps that could be reproduced mechanically - in particular in the new digital computers that were just beginning to become available. In particular, the concept of the universally transitively-consistent preference-maximizing homo economicus became THE ideal of what "rationality" was supposed to mean.

But the deep revelation of the book is that the very effort to create such a powerfully simple concept of reason repeatedly ran up against and indeed revealed the limits of reason as actually practiced by actually existing humans, particularly with respect to the highest stakes question of the time, namely the strategic nuclear rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union. Herbert Simon, for example, realized that maximization was not always an (ahem) reasonable objective, since the computing power required to resolve the most complex algorithms was not readily available. Reaching "good enough" minimum thresholds (what Simon called "satisficing") was often a more appropriate objective for many categories of problem.

Part of the subtle cheekiness of the book, which was written collectively (the authors claim they used a algorithm to assign chapter "authorships" randomly) and with surprising style and wit, is that it insists on using a method -- that is, paying close ethnographic attention to the social and institutional contexts, the shared sociabilities, for the production of these Cold War ideas about rationality -- which is directly at odds with the definition of rationality-as-calculation that their subjects were trying to distill. Yet at the same time, the authors deeply appreciate the ways in which the men they write about (and they were almost all men) used their powerful set of ideas to gain purchase on the most pressing problems of their era, and to use that purchase to gain access to the highest corridors of power in Washington.

The only significant flaw of the book is that while it nods briefly to the absence of similar sorts of debates in the Soviet Union (they note that there was some Soviet work in cybernetics, but they hypothesize, somewhat limply, that Marxist dialectical materialism prevented the methodological innovations that the Americans were undertaking), it does not do nearly enough to account for how and why Cold War rationality was a peculiarly American phenomenon. After all it wasn't just Soviet and Chinese Communists who didn't play the Cold War rationality game; neither did intellectuals in Britain, France, or Germany.

[Nat]

Undoubtedly this is the wrong reaction to have to pictures of dudes in short sleeved shirts and crewcuts playing huge war games and building scale models of airfields to improve the flow of supplies during the Berlin airlift and sitting around on the floor in rooms with meticulously cool midcentury design...but wow it looks like fun.

[Lucas · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book came at the topic of rationality from a very interesting perspective. It's full of neat factoids, but doesn't really cohere as a book. I'd still recommend reading it if you're interested in this area, but only if you're very interested.

My main takeaway was that many of the flaws in the rational agent model were known to people who helped formalize it, though they still tried to use it for making some of the most consequential decisions ever made. Some interesting tidbits:
1. An especially damning criticism was that the main players in the "game" of nuclear brinksmanship were actually constituted of a group of people trying to make a decision. But it was known at the time that there is no way to always aggregate group preferences into a consistent set of preferences (e.g. by Arrow's impossibility theorem), so that made the assumption that the USSR or the US would act "rationally" pretty suspect. It seemed like Schelling was trying to study this further but didn't get very far.
2. The development of linear programming was very closely related to the Berlin Airlift and the US Air Force. I had only been exposed to it in a computer science context, so I wasn't aware this was an active area of economics research at that time.
3. The Soviets didn't have a similar collection of "rationality theorists" to the US, though they became enamored of Norbert Wiener's "cybernetics". I wish this had been covered more in this book, since it would have been pretty interesting.
4. There was apparently a lot of anthropology and psychology research going on in Micronesia at the same time that nuclear tests were destroying much of it.

There were some weak points of the book. The first was that the writing style changed abruptly, especially across chapters, which is a bit jarring. At least one of the authors was not very good at clarity or concision, though much of the book had competent prose.

The vantage point of the book was a also bit odd, as they didn't seem to want to let history give verdicts on anything. For example, linear programming is a totally accepted (if mature) technology with an enormous set of applications and accomplishments. Yet it was described in the same tentative way as a lot of the discussion about selfish rational agents. Similarly, Bayesian probability isn't discussed much, but when it is mentioned, it's lumped in with the mishmash of other ideas this book is about. But Bayesian probability is pretty widely accepted today as a useful set of tools for conducting science, and is even gaining significant ground over frequentist statistics.

There seemed to be some philosophical confusion about the applications of game theory in evolutionary biology, where the authors seemed to think that the life forms undergoing evolution would have to have some understanding of strategies in multiplayer games. (I may have misunderstood this part of the book, but it sure seemed like a pretty basic error in their understanding of the science.) Separately, Kahnemann & Tversky's "heuristics and biases" program was incongruously declared to be part of the same rationality research program the book was criticizing, when it seems like they were pretty obviously doing a much more successful critique of the rationality modeling described in earlier chapters. A bunch of extremely unconvincing critiques of their research were very briefly mentioned, but not described in enough detail to allow the reader to make any kind of determination. In any case, the chapter covering behavioral economics didn't seem to reach any coherent points, and could've benefited from some editing.

[Jean-françois Virey · Rating 2 out of 5]

NB: my low rating for this book only reflects the tedium I felt while reading it, not its academic worth. There was much in the book I already knew and much I didn't actually care about (I still have to be sold on the usefulness of game theory, which is probably an indication of my lack of mathematical sophistication), and the fact that the book is mostly the chronicle of a failure (a bit like the search for a perfect language or the program of the Vienna Circle) makes it all the more frustrating.

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s true, reason almost lost its mind.

[Alan Johnson]

This book’s basic point is similar to the distinction between reason and rationality that I made in Reason and Human Ethics, especially in chapters 1 and 2. Here is a quote from the Introduction (page 2 of the Kindle edition) of How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind:

Philosophers have debated the nature of reason—and of rationality—for millennia. There was nothing new about squabbles on that score. But the two terms had either been used as rough synonyms or had each been assigned its own domain: reason referred to the highest intellectual faculty with the most general applications, from physics to politics to ethics; rationality referred more narrowly to the fitting of means to ends (sometimes called instrumental reason) and was especially associated with economics and engineering. What was distinctive about Cold War rationality was the expansion of the domain of rationality at the expense of that of reason, asserting its claims in the loftiest realms of political decision making and scientific method—and sometimes not only in competition with but in downright opposition to reason, reasonableness, and common sense.

This analysis is almost but not quite correct. As my book Reason and Human Ethics demonstrates (especially in chapters 1 and 2), the true distinction is between reason (practical reasoning about ends as well as means, with associated “informal” [not formal] logic), on the one hand, and instrumental rationality, on the other. The former concept is Aristotelian, not Kantian. But what the authors call “Cold War rationality” is, perhaps, the “logical” conclusion of a movement for instrumental rationality that started centuries earlier. And the authors do appear to approach my concept later in their Introduction.