8 ms·

'We conclude' or 'I believe?' Study finds rationality declined decades ago

austincheney 5y ago
I see this most directly occur on HN in discussions about housing prices. People feel threatened when challenged by facts, data, or the lack thereof.
raxxorrax 5y ago
I believe I am lost in translation, but I could also have concluded as such I guess. This is even less meaningful than word clouds in my opinion (final conclusion pending).
Xophmeister 5y ago
I remember being taught (or reading somewhere) that using expressions like "I believe" or "I feel", rather than "I think", can be more persuasive, because they're more open-ended and less assertive (which can put people off). Whereas something dispassionate like "we conclude" or "the evidence shows" would be more appropriate for academic discourse.
- thelittleone 5y ago
  I feel this is true. Often conversations evolve from describing a first person experience "I went to the shops" to "you know, when you get there and XYZ.. and how you have to..." I feel a lot less receptive when this shift happens. Another example "you should try fasting" instead of "fasting felt helpful for me".
- dqpb 5y ago
  I find “believe” and “feel” to be more natural in relation to a fact which is still under investigation. As more affirmative samples come in, I feel and believe more strongly in its truth. “Conclude” implies conclusion, where no further evidence is needed, and where no evidence to the contrary is expected. The history of science suggests the vast majority of results are not conclusive. So maybe this language is not entirely a measure of rational vs emotional, but also a measure of confidence. Nevertheless, I think the conclusion of this article probably is correct.
juliangamble 5y ago
Similar themes are echoed in Steven Pinker's 'Rationality' or 'Enlightenment Now'.
ordu 5y ago
According to the article rationality started to decline at ~2000, and about at the same time psychology came short of a rejection of all the prior research due to deficiencies in a methodology. Maybe it is not a decline of a rationality, but an better understanding of a real value of a scientific result? Also at 2001 Judea Pearl published "Causality: Models, Reasoning and Inference", which gives mathematical tools to track causes and effects. This book is full of "beliefs". Less so then the previous book of the same author ("Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems"), but nevertheless. I believe, that the use of word "believe" or "feel" is not a sign of rejecting rationality. In this case it is about accepting the idea that we do not know the absolute truth and inviting others to challenge our beliefs. It fits nicely with ideas of Pearl's causality which states that it is impossible to reason about causes while sticking strictly to objectivity. So I feel it differently: it is not people became less rational, it is the rationality itself became less objective.
- coldtea 5y ago
  >In this case it is about accepting the idea that we do not know the absolute truth and inviting others to challenge our beliefs. Empirically, does it seem we're in more open times where we're more "inviting others to challenge our beliefs"?
  - beardyw 5y ago
    I think it is more that established facts have been shown to be only true within limits. Newton has been correct enough for centuries, but now we know more. So we hedge our bets.
  - toyg 5y ago
    I suspect the issue is the separation of academia and the mainstream discourse. In academia, these days, you can probably question anything and everything - revisionism is rampant in all sorts of areas. In the mainstream, though, that is not necessarily the case.
    - netizen-936824 5y ago
roenxi 5y ago
It might be linked to the rise of the internet where it became easy, on any topic, to find data that directly contradicts any other data. There was a lot less data available in 1990. Anyone who makes a habit of saying "the data shows..." is going to experience a lot of bruising episodes where they learn how wrong they were.
riskycodes 5y ago
Ironically, while this is a very data-driven piece of research, the fact that it chimes with how most people (especially within the HN crowd) 'feel' will make it more persuasive! I hope that some of this trend is due to the acceptance thresholds lowering slightly, allowing for publication of incomplete research, on which others can build, rather than requiring a complete conclusion. Of course, one may draw conclusions about funding causing people to wrap up research prematurely.
- tomlockwood 5y ago
  > Ironically, while this is a very data-driven piece of research, the fact that it chimes with how most people (especially within the HN crowd) 'feel' will make it more persuasive! Well said! I wonder if the crowd here will realize they're only seeing this article because so many of their compatriots felt good enough about the article to upvote it.
Quanttek 5y ago
I'm not sure I would take their work at face-value. These studies of word frequencies over time are often too atomized in their failure to consider the relationships between words at all. And of course, such a change in speech patterns doesn't have to actually speak to a decline in rationality but to a stronger focus on the author of a claim. The rational process of thinking might be as prevalent nowadays, it's just differently worded.
- moate 5y ago
  The idea that the meaning of words changes along with the frequency of their usage seems pretty important to linguistic studies. For example, it's not hard to imagine data like this being used to say that the there is "less cultural interest in political correctness due to it's declining usage in discourse" while not factoring in that "woke" has largely replaced it in the frequency of usage while often representing the same concept in the speaker's mind. The way language and speech change is extremely complex, and I feel like an analysis that uses that time span starts to become almost worthless as anything other than a trivia fact. "People speak differently than they did 20, 50, or 100 years ago" was already pretty well understood, and the assumption that these words have inherent, immutable meaning is misrepresenting what words actually are, stand-ins and generalizations limited by the speaker's understanding of them and the audience they're spoken to.
draw_down 5y ago
floodle 5y ago
It's a pretty bold leap to find a shift in language and then presume that this represents an underlying change in how people reason. It would be equally believable that people are simply using different, more fashionable, words, but reasoning the same as they have always done.
- civilized 5y ago
  I've been reading and criticizing media-hyped studies for a long time, and I've noticed there is an "interestingness bias" in these studies' conclusions. Media-hound scientists will always walk straight past the less interesting explanations of their data and seize on the most attention-grabbing conclusion as the one "the data clearly suggests." Then the comment section will go "what about the less interesting explanations"? Which of course were downplayed in the paper, and omitted entirely from the media promotion of the paper.
- krageon 5y ago
  I think it is not unreasonable to believe language (and word use) and thinking patterns are connected. The fact that these relate (and yes, that different words lead to different thinking patterns) is well understood in practicing areas of psychology.
- tgv 5y ago
  It's utter bollocks. And it even looks as if they've assigned "intuition" vs "rational" words afterwards. How come "truth" is intuition while "determine" isn't? But adding "facebook" is really the nail in the coffin: that only became available in 2004 or so, and so could almost only show an upward trend.
ggm 5y ago
Empiricism has context. It was weaponised by a crackpot senator in Queensland who doesn't understand science and used as a cudgel to fuel his rants. His point appears to be that nothing he can't understand can be true, and since elected (upper house elected, party ticket elected, not actually individually elected) he is the arbiter of truth.
- headsoup 5y ago
  Sounds like Trudeau... Is this senator 100% wrong all the time? Which bits are wrong? Sounds more like you've just used this comment section to launch your own rant against a voice that's too loud for your liking...
  - ggm 5y ago
    The senator is wrong to assume repeating "show me empirical facts" is an answer to all complex scientific questions. Firstly because much science is about nuance, and secondly because he's wrong to assume he can understand them. It's two errors, frequently made, by people from an elected bully pulpit. A more honest statement from people in this position would be "can you help me understand these empirical facts" because believing there's a magic spreadsheet they can understand with a single =SUM(...) column answer is distorting Science. I can't speak to Trudeau -He's in another economy. Nobody is 100% wrong all the time.
aqsalose 5y ago
Interesting language analysis, but I disagree with the conclusion. Authors merely stating "conclude" or "determine" instead "believe" or "feel" doesn't prove they actually were any more or less rational or logical. The latter use could be more truthful to ones internal thought process. [If I write "I believe <blah blah>" because I believe something and state the reasons why I believe something, it is probably more informative than the output produced if I believe <blah blah>, then search Google for some random authoritative looking sources that say something that superficially matches what I want to say, and then write "these authoritative sources conclude <blah blah>"]. The observation indicates that popularity of some turn of phrase and "key words" over another have changed over time, which is interesting. But for determining how the actual "rationality" of content has changed, one should pick some set of random articles from different periods and actually analyze structure of arguments presented.
- civilized 5y ago
  Yeah, maybe the outward pretense of rationality was more important in decades past. In my experience reading scientific papers, "we conclude" is just a pretentious old-timey way to say "I think". It never actually meant anything more rigorous, it was just the norm to write more pretentiously and inflate the certainty of conclusions. We've been greatly humbled by being wrong over and over in recent decades. Maybe that has driven people to be less confident and stop presenting their thoughts as inevitable rational conclusions. Another illustration of the weakness of their data interpretation -- the figure shows use of the word "data" has declined in the past 20 years. Has actual use of data declined over this period? Quite the opposite, surely. I think (haha) this last point is actually quite revealing and strongly supports the "decreasing pretension" interpretation of the paper's word use trend charts. Maybe people stopped saying "the data says" over and over in a crude attempt to box the reader into submission.
  - scsilver 5y ago
    It's hard for me to appreciate an argument that we were more rational during a time of religious dominance, the last 2000 or so years. We've been greatly humbled by being wrong over and over in recent decades. Maybe that has driven people to be less confident and stop presenting their thoughts as inevitable rational conclusions. This resonates with me. We are more able to verify our assertions, quicker, faster, more accurately and are more hesitant to make bold claims. I also think we have a bit of division of specialization going on, where the world keeps turning if everyone is competent in their specialty, allowing our personal, unprofessional, side to act more irrationally without as much consequence as in the past. Ultimately it's really hard for me to believe that as we spread education and opportunity to the 8 billion people of the world, we are somehow measurably less rational then when a large swath of our population couldn't even read or write.
watwut 5y ago
Saying "conclude" instead of "believe" does not make your conclusion more logical or less emotions based. Many irrational and emotion based opinions are masked by sure language.
rgrieselhuber 5y ago
"I conclude" doesn't solve the problem either. It's still an attempt to make a conclusive statement in the midst of the never-ending epistemological crisis. If we are to remain rational observers of reality, it is far better IMO to frame statements as "thus far, our hypotheses have / have not been invalidated based on the following experiments, which can be reproduced by following these exact steps..." along with proper control groups, etc.
SMAAART 5y ago
Sad and true. Not funny.
DaedPsyker 5y ago
I'm not sure on the actuality of reduction in rationality but using shifting meaning and changes in phrases just strikes me just a slight step up from reading tea leafs. Yes if there was some obvious shift of everyone referencing religious texts or astrological forecasts that would be one thing. Going from I concur to I believe is just a stretch to state anything about rationality.
cryptica 5y ago
It's not fair to equate terms like 'data', 'analysis' and 'result' with 'reason'. In fact, terms like 'think' and 'believe' are more rational because they leave room for doubt - This aligns better with reality since we can never be 100% sure of anything. Statistics can be manipulated in many ways; data could be collected incorrectly (introducing bias), could be aggregated and combined incorrectly and then searched and tabulated incorrectly. To assume that 'data' is always correct and paints a clear picture shows a lack of rationality.
lkxijlewlf 5y ago
> The authors did find that the shift from rationality to sentiment in book language accelerated around 2007 with the rise of social media, when across languages the frequency of fact-related words dropped while emotion-laden language surged, a trend paralleled by a shift from collectivistic to individualistic language. Engagement algorithms, most likely. People are probably more likely to engage longer if they're emotionally stimulated than bombarded with a bunch of pesky facts.
jart 5y ago
Link to actual paper: https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/118/51/e2107848118.full.pdf https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/118/51/e2107848118.full.pd... Link to corpus (it's paywalled): https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1199644 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1199644 Link to the democratization of fiction publishing: https://justine.lol/fiction.png https://justine.lol/fiction.png
readthenotes1 5y ago
We are taught not to assail someone's feelings. It's much easier to criticize someone's conclusions. At least, that what I feel.
voakbasda 5y ago
Aternate hypothesis: the rise of more subjective terms parallels increased social justice movements, and thus reflects the attempt to soften language to appease those who might vehemently disagree with “conclusions” that you might draw. Thus, it is not the authors have declined in their own rationality, but are instead increasingly choosing to rationally avoid the increasing levels of conflict now present in every aspect of discourse. Certainly, that explains why I avoid making statements without couching them in such doubt, even when I rationally know that such diminishes those statements potential impact. I’m better off falling short than getting knocked down.
HumanReadable 5y ago
Or maybe we just use the same words to convey different things over time. I often find myself saying "I feel like <some argument> might be the case" when it would have been just as accurate to say "I think <some argument> might be true" I don't think it makes me any less rational to use the word "feel" over "think", what makes me more or less rational will be the content of <some argument>
germandiago 5y ago
The article is relatively ok though I disagree that not being rational can be attached to individualism. There is one dentece suggesting that. Looks like politics shoehorned into the article. My opinion is that rationalism can only come from individuals. Only individuals exist. There is no such thing as a collective brain.
tshanmu 5y ago
I believe that we conclude... why have one when we can have both?

I see this most directly occur on HN in discussions about housing prices. People feel threatened when challenged by facts, data, or the lack thereof.

raxxorrax 5y ago

I believe I am lost in translation, but I could also have concluded as such I guess. This is even less meaningful than word clouds in my opinion (final conclusion pending).

Xophmeister 5y ago

I remember being taught (or reading somewhere) that using expressions like "I believe" or "I feel", rather than "I think", can be more persuasive, because they're more open-ended and less assertive (which can put people off). Whereas something dispassionate like "we conclude" or "the evidence shows" would be more appropriate for academic discourse.

thelittleone 5y ago
I feel this is true. Often conversations evolve from describing a first person experience "I went to the shops" to "you know, when you get there and XYZ.. and how you have to..." I feel a lot less receptive when this shift happens. Another example "you should try fasting" instead of "fasting felt helpful for me".
dqpb 5y ago
I find “believe” and “feel” to be more natural in relation to a fact which is still under investigation. As more affirmative samples come in, I feel and believe more strongly in its truth. “Conclude” implies conclusion, where no further evidence is needed, and where no evidence to the contrary is expected. The history of science suggests the vast majority of results are not conclusive. So maybe this language is not entirely a measure of rational vs emotional, but also a measure of confidence. Nevertheless, I think the conclusion of this article probably is correct.

juliangamble 5y ago

Similar themes are echoed in Steven Pinker's 'Rationality' or 'Enlightenment Now'.

ordu 5y ago

According to the article rationality started to decline at ~2000, and about at the same time psychology came short of a rejection of all the prior research due to deficiencies in a methodology. Maybe it is not a decline of a rationality, but an better understanding of a real value of a scientific result? Also at 2001 Judea Pearl published "Causality: Models, Reasoning and Inference", which gives mathematical tools to track causes and effects. This book is full of "beliefs". Less so then the previous book of the same author ("Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems"), but nevertheless. I believe, that the use of word "believe" or "feel" is not a sign of rejecting rationality. In this case it is about accepting the idea that we do not know the absolute truth and inviting others to challenge our beliefs. It fits nicely with ideas of Pearl's causality which states that it is impossible to reason about causes while sticking strictly to objectivity. So I feel it differently: it is not people became less rational, it is the rationality itself became less objective.

coldtea 5y ago
>In this case it is about accepting the idea that we do not know the absolute truth and inviting others to challenge our beliefs. Empirically, does it seem we're in more open times where we're more "inviting others to challenge our beliefs"?
- beardyw 5y ago
  I think it is more that established facts have been shown to be only true within limits. Newton has been correct enough for centuries, but now we know more. So we hedge our bets.
- toyg 5y ago
  I suspect the issue is the separation of academia and the mainstream discourse. In academia, these days, you can probably question anything and everything - revisionism is rampant in all sorts of areas. In the mainstream, though, that is not necessarily the case.
  - netizen-936824 5y ago

roenxi 5y ago

It might be linked to the rise of the internet where it became easy, on any topic, to find data that directly contradicts any other data. There was a lot less data available in 1990. Anyone who makes a habit of saying "the data shows..." is going to experience a lot of bruising episodes where they learn how wrong they were.

riskycodes 5y ago

Ironically, while this is a very data-driven piece of research, the fact that it chimes with how most people (especially within the HN crowd) 'feel' will make it more persuasive! I hope that some of this trend is due to the acceptance thresholds lowering slightly, allowing for publication of incomplete research, on which others can build, rather than requiring a complete conclusion. Of course, one may draw conclusions about funding causing people to wrap up research prematurely.

tomlockwood 5y ago
> Ironically, while this is a very data-driven piece of research, the fact that it chimes with how most people (especially within the HN crowd) 'feel' will make it more persuasive! Well said! I wonder if the crowd here will realize they're only seeing this article because so many of their compatriots felt good enough about the article to upvote it.

Quanttek 5y ago

I'm not sure I would take their work at face-value. These studies of word frequencies over time are often too atomized in their failure to consider the relationships between words at all. And of course, such a change in speech patterns doesn't have to actually speak to a decline in rationality but to a stronger focus on the author of a claim. The rational process of thinking might be as prevalent nowadays, it's just differently worded.

moate 5y ago
The idea that the meaning of words changes along with the frequency of their usage seems pretty important to linguistic studies. For example, it's not hard to imagine data like this being used to say that the there is "less cultural interest in political correctness due to it's declining usage in discourse" while not factoring in that "woke" has largely replaced it in the frequency of usage while often representing the same concept in the speaker's mind. The way language and speech change is extremely complex, and I feel like an analysis that uses that time span starts to become almost worthless as anything other than a trivia fact. "People speak differently than they did 20, 50, or 100 years ago" was already pretty well understood, and the assumption that these words have inherent, immutable meaning is misrepresenting what words actually are, stand-ins and generalizations limited by the speaker's understanding of them and the audience they're spoken to.

draw_down 5y ago

floodle 5y ago

It's a pretty bold leap to find a shift in language and then presume that this represents an underlying change in how people reason. It would be equally believable that people are simply using different, more fashionable, words, but reasoning the same as they have always done.

civilized 5y ago
I've been reading and criticizing media-hyped studies for a long time, and I've noticed there is an "interestingness bias" in these studies' conclusions. Media-hound scientists will always walk straight past the less interesting explanations of their data and seize on the most attention-grabbing conclusion as the one "the data clearly suggests." Then the comment section will go "what about the less interesting explanations"? Which of course were downplayed in the paper, and omitted entirely from the media promotion of the paper.
krageon 5y ago
I think it is not unreasonable to believe language (and word use) and thinking patterns are connected. The fact that these relate (and yes, that different words lead to different thinking patterns) is well understood in practicing areas of psychology.
tgv 5y ago
It's utter bollocks. And it even looks as if they've assigned "intuition" vs "rational" words afterwards. How come "truth" is intuition while "determine" isn't? But adding "facebook" is really the nail in the coffin: that only became available in 2004 or so, and so could almost only show an upward trend.

ggm 5y ago

Empiricism has context. It was weaponised by a crackpot senator in Queensland who doesn't understand science and used as a cudgel to fuel his rants. His point appears to be that nothing he can't understand can be true, and since elected (upper house elected, party ticket elected, not actually individually elected) he is the arbiter of truth.

headsoup 5y ago
Sounds like Trudeau... Is this senator 100% wrong all the time? Which bits are wrong? Sounds more like you've just used this comment section to launch your own rant against a voice that's too loud for your liking...
- ggm 5y ago
  The senator is wrong to assume repeating "show me empirical facts" is an answer to all complex scientific questions. Firstly because much science is about nuance, and secondly because he's wrong to assume he can understand them. It's two errors, frequently made, by people from an elected bully pulpit. A more honest statement from people in this position would be "can you help me understand these empirical facts" because believing there's a magic spreadsheet they can understand with a single =SUM(...) column answer is distorting Science. I can't speak to Trudeau -He's in another economy. Nobody is 100% wrong all the time.

aqsalose 5y ago

Interesting language analysis, but I disagree with the conclusion. Authors merely stating "conclude" or "determine" instead "believe" or "feel" doesn't prove they actually were any more or less rational or logical. The latter use could be more truthful to ones internal thought process. [If I write "I believe <blah blah>" because I believe something and state the reasons why I believe something, it is probably more informative than the output produced if I believe <blah blah>, then search Google for some random authoritative looking sources that say something that superficially matches what I want to say, and then write "these authoritative sources conclude <blah blah>"]. The observation indicates that popularity of some turn of phrase and "key words" over another have changed over time, which is interesting. But for determining how the actual "rationality" of content has changed, one should pick some set of random articles from different periods and actually analyze structure of arguments presented.

civilized 5y ago
Yeah, maybe the outward pretense of rationality was more important in decades past. In my experience reading scientific papers, "we conclude" is just a pretentious old-timey way to say "I think". It never actually meant anything more rigorous, it was just the norm to write more pretentiously and inflate the certainty of conclusions. We've been greatly humbled by being wrong over and over in recent decades. Maybe that has driven people to be less confident and stop presenting their thoughts as inevitable rational conclusions. Another illustration of the weakness of their data interpretation -- the figure shows use of the word "data" has declined in the past 20 years. Has actual use of data declined over this period? Quite the opposite, surely. I think (haha) this last point is actually quite revealing and strongly supports the "decreasing pretension" interpretation of the paper's word use trend charts. Maybe people stopped saying "the data says" over and over in a crude attempt to box the reader into submission.
- scsilver 5y ago
  It's hard for me to appreciate an argument that we were more rational during a time of religious dominance, the last 2000 or so years. We've been greatly humbled by being wrong over and over in recent decades. Maybe that has driven people to be less confident and stop presenting their thoughts as inevitable rational conclusions. This resonates with me. We are more able to verify our assertions, quicker, faster, more accurately and are more hesitant to make bold claims. I also think we have a bit of division of specialization going on, where the world keeps turning if everyone is competent in their specialty, allowing our personal, unprofessional, side to act more irrationally without as much consequence as in the past. Ultimately it's really hard for me to believe that as we spread education and opportunity to the 8 billion people of the world, we are somehow measurably less rational then when a large swath of our population couldn't even read or write.

watwut 5y ago

Saying "conclude" instead of "believe" does not make your conclusion more logical or less emotions based. Many irrational and emotion based opinions are masked by sure language.

rgrieselhuber 5y ago

"I conclude" doesn't solve the problem either. It's still an attempt to make a conclusive statement in the midst of the never-ending epistemological crisis. If we are to remain rational observers of reality, it is far better IMO to frame statements as "thus far, our hypotheses have / have not been invalidated based on the following experiments, which can be reproduced by following these exact steps..." along with proper control groups, etc.

SMAAART 5y ago

Sad and true. Not funny.

DaedPsyker 5y ago

I'm not sure on the actuality of reduction in rationality but using shifting meaning and changes in phrases just strikes me just a slight step up from reading tea leafs. Yes if there was some obvious shift of everyone referencing religious texts or astrological forecasts that would be one thing. Going from I concur to I believe is just a stretch to state anything about rationality.

cryptica 5y ago

It's not fair to equate terms like 'data', 'analysis' and 'result' with 'reason'. In fact, terms like 'think' and 'believe' are more rational because they leave room for doubt - This aligns better with reality since we can never be 100% sure of anything. Statistics can be manipulated in many ways; data could be collected incorrectly (introducing bias), could be aggregated and combined incorrectly and then searched and tabulated incorrectly. To assume that 'data' is always correct and paints a clear picture shows a lack of rationality.

lkxijlewlf 5y ago

> The authors did find that the shift from rationality to sentiment in book language accelerated around 2007 with the rise of social media, when across languages the frequency of fact-related words dropped while emotion-laden language surged, a trend paralleled by a shift from collectivistic to individualistic language. Engagement algorithms, most likely. People are probably more likely to engage longer if they're emotionally stimulated than bombarded with a bunch of pesky facts.

jart 5y ago

Link to actual paper: https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/118/51/e2107848118.full.pdf https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/118/51/e2107848118.full.pd... Link to corpus (it's paywalled): https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1199644 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1199644 Link to the democratization of fiction publishing: https://justine.lol/fiction.png https://justine.lol/fiction.png

readthenotes1 5y ago

We are taught not to assail someone's feelings. It's much easier to criticize someone's conclusions. At least, that what I feel.

voakbasda 5y ago

Aternate hypothesis: the rise of more subjective terms parallels increased social justice movements, and thus reflects the attempt to soften language to appease those who might vehemently disagree with “conclusions” that you might draw. Thus, it is not the authors have declined in their own rationality, but are instead increasingly choosing to rationally avoid the increasing levels of conflict now present in every aspect of discourse. Certainly, that explains why I avoid making statements without couching them in such doubt, even when I rationally know that such diminishes those statements potential impact. I’m better off falling short than getting knocked down.

HumanReadable 5y ago

Or maybe we just use the same words to convey different things over time. I often find myself saying "I feel like <some argument> might be the case" when it would have been just as accurate to say "I think <some argument> might be true" I don't think it makes me any less rational to use the word "feel" over "think", what makes me more or less rational will be the content of <some argument>

germandiago 5y ago

The article is relatively ok though I disagree that not being rational can be attached to individualism. There is one dentece suggesting that. Looks like politics shoehorned into the article. My opinion is that rationalism can only come from individuals. Only individuals exist. There is no such thing as a collective brain.

tshanmu 5y ago

I believe that we conclude... why have one when we can have both?