Rational thinking doesn’t preclude data gathering. There’s lots of data points to inform that position: who will I be playing against? What is my relative skill

Rational thinking doesn’t preclude data gathering. There’s lots of data points to inform that position: who will I be playing against? What is my relative skill compared to them? Is skill a major factor in my poker play? Can I expect to lose money? If I expect to lose money, would I enjoy that anyway because the game itself is fun? Would I have a particular threshold over which my losses would ruin my fun? Can I come up with a sure fire way to prevent my losses breaching the fun threshold? After data gathering, it’s no longer garbage in and garbage out. You’ll note the questions assumed a randomness to the results, captured the worst case scenario, and minimized it to something I can live with. You can do this with everything. That’s the beauty of rational thinking. It’s less about knowing the absolute correct solution and more about being conscious of the process of decision, rather than letting intuitive cues be the only deciding factors.