In the New Yorker, Joshua Rothman writes,
The realities of rationality are humbling. Know things; want things; use what you know to get what you want. It sounds like a simple formula. But, in truth, it maps out a series of escalating challenges. In search of facts, we must make do with probabilities. Unable to know it all for ourselves, we must rely on others who care enough to know. We must act while we are still uncertain, and we must act in time—sometimes individually, but often together. For all this to happen, rationality is necessary, but not sufficient. Thinking straight is just part of the work.
I was pleasantly surprised to find that it is not a hit piece. He discusses Julia Galef, Steven Pinker, and Tyler Cowen. He quotes from one of my blog posts.
Actually knowing something is both impossible and irrelevant. Pretty much everything outside of existence itself is unprovable once you really understand the idea of “proof”. Everything we think we know is really just something we believe. Some of those beliefs are pretty solid. If I jump off a cliff, I’m almost certainly going to fall. We haven’t found an exception to gravity yet, and I’m not going to go looking for one by throwing myself off random cliffs to see what happens.
Some of those beliefs are pretty tenuous. I suspect the bulk of macroeconomics falls into that category, although I’m no expert. Because so much seems to be theoretical results drawn from idealistic models that may or may not be realistic or practical, macroeconomics seems to take a lot of belief. And certainly a lot of belief in the abilities and motivations of the source.
This is actually a good thing. Once you realize that proof is a fool’s errand, you (hopefully) start paying greater attention to how you evaluate evidence and how you form beliefs. The problem is that not enough people do this because we’re told that we can be certain as long as we follow whomever is telling us to follow them. The illusion of certainty keeps people from examining how they come to conclusions, which just reinforces the illusion into one big self-reinforcing cycle.
Both Greg and the author appear to have a zeal for rationalism that while laudable might seem to some to come up short when one is confronted with the mysteries of human life. As Jacques Barzun wrote:
“Still earlier, as we saw in Rabelais and Montaigne, the caution was given: do not reduce all experience to formulas by reason: leave room for impulse and intuition, these acts of the whole being that are often called ‘nature,’ or again, ‘the heart,” both by contrast with ‘the mind.’ Wisdom lies not in choosing between them, but in knowing their place and limits.”
Curiosity seems to me to provide a path to such wisdom that is “lovely”in the Adam Smith sense. F.H. Buckley’s book by that title promotes both rationality as well the tolerance to not merely dismiss what may seem irrational. And curiosity seems to be a healthy psychological motivator in such pursuits, more so than the need to see oneself as right about everything. Curiosity is what helps one to identify and address one’s errors. As Shmuel Klatzkin writes in his review of the book “…. the path of curiosity. It leads us deeper into humanity, requiring of us grit, originality, creativity, a rejection of smugness, and many other of the simple yet indispensable tools of living a worthwhile life that increases constantly in meaningfulness.
And thus curiosity and real faith are inextricably enmeshed.” https://spectator.org/curiosity-twelve-rules-for-life-fh-buckley-review/. At any rate a different take on the scout mindset.
I agree with anonymous @ 11:02. Humility, curiosity and an appreciation of humanity are key elements of rationalilty. Life is full of uncertainty. Not only does no one know the future but no one especially knows what is best for any Individual, including the individual!
Still, society must move forward making do with its collective wisdom and objectives. The value of freedom in a society is it (a) requires society to recognize the dignity of the individual and (b) it allows for individuals to pursue and discover better ways of organizing humanity.
The constant threat to free society is the irrationality of coercion and control. The problem being that in the midst of fear, people are prone to embrace irrationality to their own detriment and destruction. We are seeing this irrationality playing out around the world in response to the Covid pandemic.
The greatest error of the American Federalists is they failed to include in the Bill of Rights the statement: Under no condition shall these rights be infringed unless by the will of the people, according to the established amendment process. Now that it is accepted by every branch of the Federal government that the US Constitution is a suggestion, and not the law of the land, the document is just an historical artifact.
It is a privilege for a person to live in a rational society and be rewarded for making rational decisions. Ideally, every person enjoys that experience. But we ought not to kid ourselves that what is desirable is easily achieved or naturally preserved.
.
While useful, rationality is an incomplete guide to organizing society. For one, from a pure mathematical perspective, even if you could “solve” for a system, the objective function is “arbitrary” and not a result of rationality. That’s why religion/philosophy is needed to specify the objective function, following which, one could hope to use rationality. The other problem is the assumptions that one makes while solving for the system are often implicit and based on the shared understanding rather than spelt out. For an argument to be truly rational, they have to be specified unambiguously – this is why math papers are long even for simple proofs. And all this whiteout getting in to Godel.
To me, deification of rationality is something people should begin to outgrow post college. It’s a useful tool amongst many and should be treated as such. Alas, the real world is analog and not binary.
Maybe Rothman’s is not a hit piece as such, but it is still rather suspect, with its swipe that people
“had embraced a *nihilist populism* that sees *all forms* of public rationality as suspect. COVID *deniers*….”
What does he mean by “*nihilist populism* … *all* forms of public rationality …, and COVID *deniers*?
Depending on what he means by these phrases, it may be that at least some of the folks “denying” covid are not
“nihilist populists” dissing *all* forms of public rationality.
People have their beliefs, based on their hearts and often wishful thinking, and use rationalization to claim they are being rational about those beliefs and policies based on “rationality” which is mostly just their prior beliefs, rationalized.
How many people change their minds based on the evidence, and how often? Far fewer, in reality, than would rationally be expected in any honestly rational society.