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Are we discussing "rationality" without having defined that term? I would guess that's probably an example of irrationality. As I see it, people mostly use "ra

by bloak 8y ago

Are we discussing "rationality" without having defined that term? I would guess that's probably an example of irrationality. As I see it, people mostly use "rationality" to refer to a set of theories, such as mathematics, which are useful tools that can help people make decisions in the real world. However, people still have to decide when and how to use those tools. Deciding which tools to use and how is another thing that theories, such as mathematics, might help people with, but, again, people have to decide when and how to use those tools in deciding which tools to use. To avoid an infinite regression, most decisions need to be made unconsciously: at some point people just do what feels right. If you've discovered some theory that seems really useful and not as well known as it deserves to be, tell us about it: that sounds interesting. If you've got some vague waffle about the usefulness of theory/rationality in general, then I'm not so interested because I don't even see any entertainment in that, let alone practical use.

s-shellfish 8y ago
Let's not forget the obvious connection between emotions and rationality - rationalizing. This is post-hoc reasoning, and it's often incorrect when there's emotional conflict, people diverge paths intellectually, and establish intellectual arguments to deal with the consequences of conflict. This often is unpredictable, circular, and can cause people to develop belief systems that are contradictory to their character, as well as make choices that otherwise go against intuition, feelings - all the things that make us human and individual - the things that we choose to pursue because those are the things we know make life worth living. Making a choice that opposes your base nature because you've developed a belief system that tells you 'this is the way things are now, so work with this, not that' - that can be very chaotic, effectively shoving you in a bind where you must both rediscover/reinvent knowledge from scratch, while accumulating information you paradoxically accept as truthish garbage. We go with what we know because having some stability and structure, even if it's not perfect, is better than having none in perpetuity.
- mockingbirdy 8y ago
  Rationalizations are an important aspect. I will now explain how to make a more accurate analysis in social situations utilizing this knowledge. You need emotion, but you also need to understand the emotion. Problem is that your limbic system can't talk. Therefore, we resort to rationalizations. But most of the time, the rationalization is highly inaccurate. Why? Because our unconscious side has a lot of information about negative things about us and we try to avoid it because it doesn't help us feel good (this emotion exists solely so that mental health can be preserved and cognitive dissonance gets reduced). Example: You are angry that your husband is late. Possible explanation: You are angry because he's always acting selfish and doesn't respect you. Other explanation that is probably more accurate but contains negative aspects that the consciousness hides (drive attention away from) to reduce cognitive dissonance: There is a deep fear to get rejected. Maybe there are experiences in the past where trusted people just left you. This deeply rooted fear triggers anger as a reaction because your unconscious side sees a threat (indirect increase of likelihood of death through social rejection). - - - How to utilize this? Analyze your emotions and try to ask: "What useful information does it contain?" and "What are the root causes for this emotion, what is the incentive system behind it?". The hardest part is that you have to know about your deepest insecurities, deficits, negative experiences and fears ("I'm objectively not very attractive", "My mother never showed me her love in unconditional ways", ...) and regulate your emotions (instead of acting out that anger, you analyze it on a meta-level and extract information from it for a more accurate analysis). This requires extreme self-reflection and years of struggling. When one finally masters this, he's considered enlightened which basically means that he's able to not only analyze his own behavior and emotions, but can also use this knowledge to act accordingly.
  - lbotos 8y ago
    This is a great thought. For those who haven't read Crucial Conversations, I really advise you do. They hit on a point in that book around how we understand our feelings in moments of conflict and how we often avoid seeing the other as a thinking party: - What is my story? - What am I pretending not to know about my role in the problem? - Why would a reasonable, rational and decent person do this? - What should I do right now to move toward what I really want? Crucial Conversations genuinely changed my life, and I'm the kind of person that was praised for my communication skills.
bad_user 8y ago
"Rationality" should be pretty obvious ... in accordance to logic. And logic has a very rigorous definition. > "people mostly use "rationality" to refer to a set of theories, such as mathematics" Your thinking is flawed, probably by having wrong ideas about what mathematics is. Mathematics is logic, a fact obscured by the math we end up learning all the way up to high school, which does not capture the essence of math. Speaking of which, add the Curry–Howard correspondence in the mix and the plot thickens ;-) ]
- mbrock 8y ago
  Rigorous definitions of logic—the various systems of formal logic—do not fully define reason. They are more like particular schemes that formalize and idealize some aspects of reasoning. Those systems are derived from reasoning, using reasoning, in accordance with reason, but they are not reasoning itself, unless you want to claim that the process of inventing or refining formal logics is itself unreasonable. It's impossible to fully define a foundational concept like rationality. This concept has been used as an example of an "essentially contested concept" whose "proper use… inevitably involves endless disputes."
- s-shellfish 8y ago
  Mathematics is partially logic. Logic alone can not construct all of mathematics, so far. But constructive mathematics, I get the sensation that HN computer-science-logician-mathematicians have a tendency towards disapproval of such a thing. Honestly I wonder sometimes... The plot is already quite thick, in my extremely humble opinion.
lucio 8y ago
My feeling is that your comment is incorrect /s
mindslight 8y ago
To me, the concept of "rationality" pertains to the decision making process rather than specific flavors of deductive rules or metrics. Rationality is how open you are to understanding the critiques of your decision (both from others, and self-reflection), many of which are necessarily going to come from paradigms that you are not thinking in. For example, someone who is in the mindset you describe (we've all been there at some point in our lives), but yet rejects the message (explicit or implicit) that his reasoning framework carries inbuilt assumptions, is actually very irrational.
samirillian 8y ago
I agree, people never seem to have a clear definition of rationality; usually they mean empiricism or just generally agreeing with majority opinion. So many people argue that mathematicians sometimes go nuts because of a failure of rationality, but to me it seems to be exactly a failure of this unconscious-intuition, which undergirds rationality.
mcguire 8y ago
My understanding of rationality, in the sense commonly used by economists, for example, is that the rational entity has a collection of knowledge, in the sense of "justified true beliefs", and the entity believes all logical consequences of those beliefs. There are many problems with that definition of rationality, hence "behavioral economics". The surprise is that behavioral economics took so long to develop.
- AlexCoventry 8y ago
  I usually interpret it as simply having good reasons, as in "rational drug design."
AnimalMuppet 8y ago
You want an internet discussion to start with definitions of terms. That expectation/desire is probably also an example of irrationality. Not everything is a formal discussion, even when the topic is rationality.

by bloak 8y ago

s-shellfish 8y ago

Let's not forget the obvious connection between emotions and rationality - rationalizing. This is post-hoc reasoning, and it's often incorrect when there's emotional conflict, people diverge paths intellectually, and establish intellectual arguments to deal with the consequences of conflict. This often is unpredictable, circular, and can cause people to develop belief systems that are contradictory to their character, as well as make choices that otherwise go against intuition, feelings - all the things that make us human and individual - the things that we choose to pursue because those are the things we know make life worth living. Making a choice that opposes your base nature because you've developed a belief system that tells you 'this is the way things are now, so work with this, not that' - that can be very chaotic, effectively shoving you in a bind where you must both rediscover/reinvent knowledge from scratch, while accumulating information you paradoxically accept as truthish garbage. We go with what we know because having some stability and structure, even if it's not perfect, is better than having none in perpetuity.

mockingbirdy 8y ago
Rationalizations are an important aspect. I will now explain how to make a more accurate analysis in social situations utilizing this knowledge. You need emotion, but you also need to understand the emotion. Problem is that your limbic system can't talk. Therefore, we resort to rationalizations. But most of the time, the rationalization is highly inaccurate. Why? Because our unconscious side has a lot of information about negative things about us and we try to avoid it because it doesn't help us feel good (this emotion exists solely so that mental health can be preserved and cognitive dissonance gets reduced). Example: You are angry that your husband is late. Possible explanation: You are angry because he's always acting selfish and doesn't respect you. Other explanation that is probably more accurate but contains negative aspects that the consciousness hides (drive attention away from) to reduce cognitive dissonance: There is a deep fear to get rejected. Maybe there are experiences in the past where trusted people just left you. This deeply rooted fear triggers anger as a reaction because your unconscious side sees a threat (indirect increase of likelihood of death through social rejection). - - - How to utilize this? Analyze your emotions and try to ask: "What useful information does it contain?" and "What are the root causes for this emotion, what is the incentive system behind it?". The hardest part is that you have to know about your deepest insecurities, deficits, negative experiences and fears ("I'm objectively not very attractive", "My mother never showed me her love in unconditional ways", ...) and regulate your emotions (instead of acting out that anger, you analyze it on a meta-level and extract information from it for a more accurate analysis). This requires extreme self-reflection and years of struggling. When one finally masters this, he's considered enlightened which basically means that he's able to not only analyze his own behavior and emotions, but can also use this knowledge to act accordingly.
- lbotos 8y ago
  This is a great thought. For those who haven't read Crucial Conversations, I really advise you do. They hit on a point in that book around how we understand our feelings in moments of conflict and how we often avoid seeing the other as a thinking party: - What is my story? - What am I pretending not to know about my role in the problem? - Why would a reasonable, rational and decent person do this? - What should I do right now to move toward what I really want? Crucial Conversations genuinely changed my life, and I'm the kind of person that was praised for my communication skills.

bad_user 8y ago

"Rationality" should be pretty obvious ... in accordance to logic. And logic has a very rigorous definition. > "people mostly use "rationality" to refer to a set of theories, such as mathematics" Your thinking is flawed, probably by having wrong ideas about what mathematics is. Mathematics is logic, a fact obscured by the math we end up learning all the way up to high school, which does not capture the essence of math. Speaking of which, add the Curry–Howard correspondence in the mix and the plot thickens ;-) ]

mbrock 8y ago
Rigorous definitions of logic—the various systems of formal logic—do not fully define reason. They are more like particular schemes that formalize and idealize some aspects of reasoning. Those systems are derived from reasoning, using reasoning, in accordance with reason, but they are not reasoning itself, unless you want to claim that the process of inventing or refining formal logics is itself unreasonable. It's impossible to fully define a foundational concept like rationality. This concept has been used as an example of an "essentially contested concept" whose "proper use… inevitably involves endless disputes."
s-shellfish 8y ago
Mathematics is partially logic. Logic alone can not construct all of mathematics, so far. But constructive mathematics, I get the sensation that HN computer-science-logician-mathematicians have a tendency towards disapproval of such a thing. Honestly I wonder sometimes... The plot is already quite thick, in my extremely humble opinion.

lucio 8y ago

My feeling is that your comment is incorrect /s

mindslight 8y ago

To me, the concept of "rationality" pertains to the decision making process rather than specific flavors of deductive rules or metrics. Rationality is how open you are to understanding the critiques of your decision (both from others, and self-reflection), many of which are necessarily going to come from paradigms that you are not thinking in. For example, someone who is in the mindset you describe (we've all been there at some point in our lives), but yet rejects the message (explicit or implicit) that his reasoning framework carries inbuilt assumptions, is actually very irrational.

samirillian 8y ago

I agree, people never seem to have a clear definition of rationality; usually they mean empiricism or just generally agreeing with majority opinion. So many people argue that mathematicians sometimes go nuts because of a failure of rationality, but to me it seems to be exactly a failure of this unconscious-intuition, which undergirds rationality.

mcguire 8y ago

My understanding of rationality, in the sense commonly used by economists, for example, is that the rational entity has a collection of knowledge, in the sense of "justified true beliefs", and the entity believes all logical consequences of those beliefs. There are many problems with that definition of rationality, hence "behavioral economics". The surprise is that behavioral economics took so long to develop.

AlexCoventry 8y ago
I usually interpret it as simply having good reasons, as in "rational drug design."

AnimalMuppet 8y ago

You want an internet discussion to start with definitions of terms. That expectation/desire is probably also an example of irrationality. Not everything is a formal discussion, even when the topic is rationality.