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> The hand-licking story that made the front page today illustrates this point perfectly. [...] > It is only when she applied an irrational approach to the pro

• vinceguidry 8y ago
  I think it's common for people, especially the overly-rational, to conflate correctness with rationality. Yes, with hindsight it can be seen that the actions she initially took were incorrect. But they seemed perfectly rational approaches at the time. If you see your child doing something anti-social, then it's logical to try to correct it because if you don't, it will cause problems for them down the road. In fact, it would have been irrational to not do anything about it. It was only when the logical brain got overridden by maternal instinct that she could choose an approach that led eventually to a resolution. The logical brain demands control over the situation. If she could have surrendered control earlier, perhaps even in the first few times she witnessed it, then she could have taken a less-combative approach.
  • nybble41 8y ago
    > Yes, with hindsight it can be seen that the actions she initially took were incorrect. But they seemed perfectly rational approaches at the time. There was nothing incorrect or irrational about the actions the mother initially took. Her approach was reasonable given the limited information available to her. A slightly more rational approach would perhaps have placed greater emphasis on the value of empathy and her relationship with her child, which was being undermined by some of the measures she took, and given correspondingly less weight to the social pressure she was feeling from others—but in the end she made the rational decision in line with her own principles and priorities and stopped trying to force the issue. Later, when her son was both able and willing to discuss the matter, she was able to analyse the root cause and suggest several rational alternative courses of action which were readily adopted, thus putting an end to the problem for good. It's unclear from the write-up whether any maternal instincts were involved, but the peer pressure which pushed her to force the issue was clearly irrational and played on her instinctive desire for acceptance. Instincts and emotions are a good thing and shouldn't be ignored, but it's a mistake to follow them blindly—they can lead you into trouble just as easily as they can get you out of it. It's best to look at them as valuable inputs into the rational process, to be evaluated alongside other data before drawing any conclusions.
    • vinceguidry 8y ago
      Things are irrational until we understand the dynamics behind them. Then they become rational. When she decided not to press the issue, that wasn't a rational decision made on logic, it was an emotional one where she prioritized one kind of truth, that it was her hurting her child, over another kind of truth, that it was the hand licking that was hurting her child. Only in retrospect did the actuality of the situation make itself known. There was no logical way to weigh one alternative against another. Sure, one later manifested, but it didn't exist in the moment. This is why I say she used irrational means to decide to lay off. I recognized maternal instincts in her reasoning, which I'll quote here: > Finally, I had this moment where I felt that my efforts to ramp up the pressure to force him to stop had crossed some line. I felt I was turning into an abusive parent. > At that moment, I decided this had to stop. I didn't care if he licked his hands the rest of his life. It couldn't be worse than this. Rational analysis failed, some other way of deciding how to handle it took hold. Notice the semantic shift here. She moved from articulating her decision-making process in a cold, logical fashion, then after the failure, she shifts to an empathic, emotional basis. Over-reliance on and unexamined belief in rationality drives this. Sometimes there are multiple truths out there that you are going to have to choose between, with nothing to help to distinguish them. The over-rational mindset will concoct meaningless and even counter-productive forms of "rationality" to paper over their fundamental ignorance. The colloquial term at hand is lamp posting.
      • nybble41 8y ago
        >> Finally, I had this moment where I felt that my efforts to ramp up the pressure to force him to stop had crossed some line. I felt I was turning into an abusive parent. >> At that moment, I decided this had to stop. I didn't care if he licked his hands the rest of his life. It couldn't be worse than this. > Rational analysis failed, some other way of deciding how to handle it took hold. Notice the semantic shift here. She moved from articulating her decision-making process in a cold, logical fashion, then after the failure, she shifts to an empathic, emotional basis. I see the same shift that you mentioned, but unlike you I see the original exclusion of empathy and emotion from the decision-making process as irrational. Up to this point she'd been reacting instinctively and emotionally to the external pressure to make her son stop licking his hands, without considering whether that was really a worthwhile goal or what it might cost in terms of their relationship. Taking her empathy and emotion into account was the rational choice, and allowed her to set aside the peer pressure and clearly see and evaluate how her actions thus far failed to satisfy her own priorities and goals. At that point she rationally chose to stop forcing the issue. > Sometimes there are multiple truths out there that you are going to have to choose between, with nothing to help to distinguish them. The "colloquial term at hand" is false dichotomy. You are never forced to choose one potential truth over another. "I don't know" is a perfectly acceptable response. Naturally you still need to decide on a course of action despite not knowing where the truth lies, but that doesn't require committing to a particular version of the truth and rejecting all others as false. > The over-rational mindset will concoct meaningless and even counter-productive forms of "rationality" to paper over their fundamental ignorance. When one is actually ignorant, admitting ignorance is the rational choice; proceeding as if one were not ignorant (for example, by choosing one version of the truth over another when there is nothing to distinguish them) would be the hallmark of an irrational mindset, not an "over-rational" one.