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16. Dez. 2017 · Suppose that your belief does get things right in this way. The fact that you succeeded in getting things right is explained in part by the fact that you were thinking rationally. In other words, rationality matters because rationality is the means by which we pursue the goal of getting things right.
24. Jan. 2024 · To see why, consider that one of the benefits of rationality is that you’re better able to achieve your goals and values. You can’t do this if you’re not even sure what your values are, but understanding one's values involves both System 1 feelings and System 2 processing of those feelings.
- Overview
- Models of Rationality
- Why are people irrational?
rationality, the use of knowledge to attain goals.
(Read Britannica’s biography of Steven Pinker, author of this entry.)
Rationality has a normative dimension, namely how an agent ought to reason in order to attain some goal, and a descriptive or psychological dimension, namely how human beings do reason.
Normative models from logic, mathematics, and artificial intelligence set benchmarks against which psychologists and behavioral economists can compare human judgment and decision making. These comparisons provide answers to the question “In which ways are humans rational or irrational?”
Formal logic, for example, consists of rules for deriving new true propositions (conclusions) from existing ones (premises). A common departure from formal logic is the fallacy of affirming the consequent, or leaping from “p implies q” to “q implies p,” for example, going from “If a person becomes a heroin addict, the person first smoked cannabis” to “If a person smokes cannabis, the person will become a heroin addict.”
Probability theory allows one to quantify the likelihood of an uncertain outcome. It may be estimated as the number of actual occurrences of that outcome divided by the number of opportunities for it to have taken place. Humans instead often base their subjective likelihood on the availability heuristic: the more available an image or anecdote is in memory, the likelier they judge it to be. Thus, people overestimate the likelihood of events that get intense media coverage, such as plane crashes and rampage shootings, and underestimate those that don’t, such as car crashes and everyday homicides.
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So, why do people so often make irrational judgments and decisions? It’s not that we’re an inherently irrational species. Humans have discovered the laws of nature, explored the solar system, and decimated disease and hunger. And, of course, we established the normative benchmarks that allow us to assess rationality in the first place. Humans can be irrational for several reasons.
First, rationality is always bounded. No mortal has unlimited time, data, or computational power, and these costs must be traded off against the benefits of the optimal solution. It makes little sense to spend 30 minutes studying a map to calculate a shortcut that would save you 10 minutes in travel time. Instead, people often must rely on fallible shortcuts and rules of thumb. For example, if one had to determine which of two cities has the larger population, then guessing that it’s the one with a major-league football team yields the correct result most of the time.
Second, human rationality is optimized for natural contexts. People indeed have trouble applying formulas that are couched in abstract variables like p and q, whose power comes from the fact that any values can be plugged into them. But people can be adept at logical and probability problems that are couched in concrete examples or pertain to significant challenges in living. When asked how to enforce the rule “If a bar patron drinks beer, the patron must be over 21,” everyone knows one must check the age of beer drinkers and the beverage of teenagers; no one fallaciously “affirms the consequent” by checking the beverage of an adult. And, when a diagnosis problem is reframed from abstract probabilities (“What is the likelihood that the woman has cancer?”) to frequencies (“How many women out of a thousand with this test result have cancer?”), they intuitively apply Bayes’s rule and answer correctly.
Third, rationality is always deployed in pursuit of a goal, and that goal is not always objective truth. It may be to win an argument, to persuade others of a conclusion that would benefit oneself (motivated reasoning), or to prove the wisdom and nobility of one’s own coalition and the stupidity and evil of the opposing one (myside bias). Many manifestations of public irrationality, such as conspiracy theories, fake news, and science denial, may be tactics to express loyalty to or avoid ostracism from one’s tribe or political faction.
Fourth, many of our rational beliefs are not grounded in arguments or data that we establish ourselves but are based on trusting institutions that were established to pursue truth, such as science, journalism, and government agencies. People may reject the consensus from these institutions if they sense that they are doctrinaire, politicized, or intolerant of dissent.
Many commentators have despaired about the future of rationality given the rise in political polarization and the ease of disseminating falsehoods through social media. Yet this pessimism may itself be a product of the availability heuristic, driven by conspicuous coverage of the most politicized examples. People, for example, are divided by vaccines but not by antibiotics, dentistry, or splints for fractures. And irrationality is nothing new but has been common throughout history, such as beliefs in human and animal sacrifice, miracles, necromancy, sorcery, bloodletting, and omens in eclipses and other natural events. Progress in spreading rationality, driven by scientific and data-based reasoning, is not automatic but propelled by the fact that rationality is the only means by which goals may be consistently attained.
Rationality is important for solving all kinds of problems in order to efficiently reach one's goal. It is relevant to and discussed in many disciplines. In ethics, one question is whether one can be rational without being moral at the same time. Psychology is interested in how psychological processes implement rationality.
7. Mai 2024 · Why rationality? One basic motivation may be solidly personal: to not come off like a fool by eschewing it, as Turgenev’s poor character is finally detecting. Rationality seems to exhibit an aspect of control of a specific sort. This aspect is not directly considered in the precepts as given so far.
7. Aug. 2018 · On Wedgwood’s view, rationality is a matter of coherence, in a broad sense that includes not only relations between beliefs or credences, but also between other sorts of mental states or mental events, e.g., between beliefs and sensory experiences. Rationality is a value.
His 2023 book, Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters, delves into the enigmatic nature of human progress, examining how we have achieved so many impressive scientific...
