Humanity as a species distinguishes itself in its ability to reason. We all would agree that rational thinking should drive all decision making. Few would argue against that. Yet, we find irrationality all around us in society, not just around – we find ourselves making irrational decisions time and again. Perhaps that is what Max Weber meant when he said Rationality is an ideal ‘that contains within itself a world of contradictions’.
This long read is an enjoyable one that talks about these contradictions and more importantly emphasises why we must be aware of these contradictions to get better individually as well as a society.
“We want to live in a more rational society, but not in a falsely rationalized one. We want to be more rational as individuals, but not to overdo it. We need to know when to think and when to stop thinking, when to doubt and when to trust. Rationality is one of humanity’s superpowers. How do we keep from misusing it?”
As the subtitle of the article puts it ‘The real challenge isn’t being right but knowing how wrong you might be.’
The author refers to a growing rationality movement in recent times (this article is from 2021), a movement “with its own ethos, thought style, and body of knowledge, drawn heavily from psychology and economics...I read a collection of rationality blogs—Marginal Revolution, Farnam Street, Interfluidity, Crooked Timber. I haunted the Web sites of the Social Science Research Network and the National Bureau of Economic Research, where I could encounter just-published findings; I internalized academic papers on the cognitive biases that slant our thinking, and learned a simple formula for estimating the “expected value” of my riskier decisions…
…an unusually large number of books about rationality were being published this year, among them Steven Pinker’s “Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters” (Viking) and Julia Galef’s “The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don’t” (Portfolio). It makes sense, Kling suggested, for rationality to be having a breakout moment: “The barbarians sack the city, and the carriers of the dying culture repair to their basements to write.” In a polemical era, rationality can be a kind of opinion hygiene—a way of washing off misjudged views. In a fractious time, it promises to bring the court to order. When the world changes quickly, we need strategies for understanding it. We hope, reasonably, that rational people will be more careful, honest, truthful, fair-minded, curious, and right than irrational ones.”
So what are the contradictions:
“And yet rationality has sharp edges that make it hard to put at the center of one’s life. It’s possible to be so rational that you are cut off from warmer ways of being—like the student Bazarov, in Ivan Turgenev’s “Fathers and Sons,” who declares, “I look up to heaven only when I want to sneeze.” (Greg, too, sometimes worries that he is rational to excess—that he is becoming a heartless boss, a cold fish, a robot.) You might be well-intentioned, rational, and mistaken, simply because so much in our thinking can go wrong. (“RATIONAL, adj.: Devoid of all delusions save those of observation, experience and reflection,” Ambrose Bierce wrote, in his “Devil’s Dictionary.”) You might be rational and self-deceptive, because telling yourself that you are rational can itself become a source of bias. It’s possible that you are trying to appear rational only because you want to impress people; or that you are more rational about some things (your job) than others (your kids); or that your rationality gives way to rancor as soon as your ideas are challenged. Perhaps you irrationally insist on answering difficult questions yourself when you’d be better off trusting the expert consensus. Possibly, like Mr. Spock, of “Star Trek,” your rational calculations fail to account for the irrationality of other people. (Surveying Spock’s predictions, Galef finds that the outcomes Spock has determined to be impossible actually happen about eighty per cent of the time, often because he assumes that other people will be as “logical” as he is.)”
We would recommend reading the whole piece as it also provides practical suggestions for us to deal with these contradictions and remain rational without falling to the rationality trap, such as the importance of self-awareness or metacognition:
“In everyday life, the biggest obstacle to metacognition is what psychologists call the “illusion of fluency.” As we perform increasingly familiar tasks, we monitor our performance less rigorously; this happens when we drive, or fold laundry, and also when we think thoughts we’ve thought many times before. Studying for a test by reviewing your notes, Fleming writes, is a bad idea, because it’s the mental equivalent of driving a familiar route. “Experiments have repeatedly shown that testing ourselves—forcing ourselves to practice exam questions, or writing out what we know—is more effective,” he writes. The trick is to break the illusion of fluency, and to encourage an “awareness of ignorance.””
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