---
layout: post
title: Thoughts on paranoia I
date: 2019-05-16 15:15:15
categories: misc
---

I've been occasionally thinking about "paranoia" for a long time now, and
perhaps it's time to write down some of these thoughts.

But first, let me clarify one thing. The word "paranoia" has of course a
clinical, formal meaning, but this post isn't about it; there is also an
informal notion of "paranoia" — that's what i'm going to write about. The
meaning can vary from person to person, but essentially it boils down to "a
state where the person in question is fearful, cautious or anxious about
something they shouldn't be (according to those who apply the term)".

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This "definition" does sound a lot like "phobia", but perhaps the most important
difference here is that "phobias" are supposed to be inherently irrational,
caused by a trauma or even being natural (such as fear of heights, perhaps). By
contrast, "paranoia", even if it may ultimately be considered irrational, is
more likely to be caused by exaggerated imagination mixed with otherwise
rational thinking.

But that's from the perspective of someone who uses this word deprecatingly
(most likely to describe others). It may also be occasionally used by people to
describe themselves without negative connotations (similar to how some
copyright-ignoring people may proudly call themselves "pirates"). This may of
course complicate the matters, since other people labeled as "paranoid" would
argue against such word usage.

So for simplicity sake, lets skip over how the word should be used and rather
concentrate on the core of "normies vs paranoics" debate. Which essentially
boils down to whether the aforementioned fears, anxieties or precautions are
rational or irrational. It is, of course, a matter of personal taste, knowledge
and considerations, but recently i have come to conclusion that there might be a
common fundamental issue dividing these camps.

It is attitude towards probabilistic nature of our knowledge about
universe. From the typical point of view of normies, paranoics exaggerate
probability of some bad event. But while that can certainly be true sometimes,
that is not necessary: paranoic and normie may come up with the same probability
evaluation, and still react differently.

Lets say there's 0.1% chance of dying (just to be dramatic) in the course of
some activity. That's not that much, or is it? Overwhelming majority of people
would survive it, so you may consider it worth taking the risk. On the other
hand, one of a thousand is going to die. Imagine thousand people together, and
then one of them dies: it's not that hard to see that it can very well be
you. Or even imagine it on a world population scale: people who would die could
populate a big city. But then again, you probably had that risk in your life and
survived it already... Any number of arguments can be brought to support either
point of view.

And with this, we come to another point: calculation of outcome probabilities
can be rational, but what about actual decision-making that would take in
account these probabilities? What kind of criteria can we possibly use to
determine whether certain decision is rational or not? If somebody decides that
the probability of dying vs probability of getting huge money prize is 50-50 and
after cold considerations takes the risk, can you really call that irrational?
Is it even rational to value your life? Most people would probably say it is,
but on what grounds?

There are, of course, cases when one can say one decision would be more rational
than the other: e.g. when A leads to *all* good outcome probabilities be higher
and *all* bad outcome probabilities be lower than B. But where do you see these
in practice? Usually people can't even actually estimate probabilities, let
alone stumble upon such rare cases.

So in practice, **there is no way to objectively judge rationality of a
decision**. It is only possible after learning all personal priorities and
assumptions used to come with it, but usually that's not even attempted.

Hopefully, this perspective may help people on either side to better understand
each other rather than be content with convenient labeling.
