Okay, so there's a lot to break down here and a lot of conflations taking place. At a base level we can understand, I know people in my life who seem more "rat

Okay, so there's a lot to break down here and a lot of conflations taking place. At a base level we can understand, I know people in my life who seem more "rational" in general than people I know who I would describe as more "emotional". In this sense, you can think of "rational" thinking as any thought-pattern that activates the cortex -- roughly speaking, the region of the the brain associated with higher-order and abstract thinking. On a more nuanced level, the author seems to be making a case about capital-R "Rationalism", as espoused by communities like Less Wrong, Effective Altruism, capital-L Libertarians, and the singularity wonks. In this, I feel like the author is making a huge conflation that I feel is kind of misleading and rather insulting to people who don't buy into one small communities ideas about cognitive bias and logical fallacies. Often times, "evidence" of "irrational" behaviors, as displayed for example in the Linda problem and the Wason task, typically fail in that the askers don't understand language or how it's typically used. There are loads of people that have a rational bent that will get these problems wrong, simply because they don't put too much thought into it, or they're trying to answer a question linguistically, rather than purely "Rationally". I have a lot of theories as to why LessWrong / Libertarian types develop this inflated sense of self importance about their "Rational" outlook of the world, but it's pedagogical, and probably insulting to those involved, so I'll leave it for another day.