In Offense of Rationality

Okay, I said I'd get around to my issues with Rationality several months ago. So maybe I actually should. To start, I'm not against being rational. It's just a mode of thought that says "don't use invalid premises." The problems start when you try to define what an "invalid premise" is. Based on how you do it, Rationality as a worldview forks into two major camps:

Truth-Rationality: an invalid premise is one that contradicts objective reality. In other words, seek the truth, and only the truth. Believing in, say, astrology is right out. Sometimes called "epistemic rationality".

Value-Rationality: an invalid premise is one that makes it more difficult to achieve your goals. Believing in astrology is okay if it by some strange miracle benefits you in the long run. Sometimes called "instrumental rationality".

I feel that Value-Rationality is pretty tautological (Think things that are good for you! Don't think things that are bad for you!), so I'd like to focus most of the rest of this post on Truth-Rationality. Most people who've gushed to me about Rationality have, explicitly or not, taken that stance. And it's a very tempting stance to take. Truth is good, so why not use it in all things? I can think of three general reasons:

The Truth isn't always available. This is primarily true with non-naturalistic things, such as religion and the supernatural. When the rationalist says "it's irrational to believe in god", he's saying that there's no evidence to believe in god. But at the same time, there's not evidence to not believe in god, either. If you start talking about how it's unnecessary or hurts people, then you're not arguing about the truth. You're making a value-judgment.

The Truth isn't always necessary. Do we have free will? Who cares? Having free will isn't gonna affect you one way or another. Trying to come up with a "rational" argument about it is a waste of time.

The Truth isn't always helpful. This is the important one. People are far more empowered by their beliefs than their knowledge. If you learn knowledge that contradicts your beliefs, then you could very well sabotage your ability to do well in something. Normally this is used in conjunction with belief in religion, but that topic is so damn volatile I'd like to give some more down to earth examples:

-If you take a group of students and tell half of them they are smart and the other half they are hard workers, the latter group will develop considerably more over time. This is true even that group didn't start out as hard workers. Their untrue beliefs give rise to actual, measurable differences in ability.

-Let's say you start going to the gym. Initially, you feel embarrassed that you're so much less fit than everybody else there, but tell yourself that they're not paying attention and focus on exercising. Over months you start getting much stronger and healthier. When you start talking to the other gym-goers, one admits that during the first two months everybody was laughing at you behind your back.

Would you really have wanted to know that from the start?

And no, don't go "that wouldn't have stopped me". Unless you've been bullied before (and even then) you have no way of predicting just how much pain it would have caused you. Maybe it would have been tolerable. Or maybe it would have caused you to go less or even stop entirely. Is having do deal with the truth really so much better than just pretending that everything is okay?

This isn't a special case, either. Confidence in yourself is almost a necessary condition to succeeding at something. It's easier to give a good speech if you're confident you're a good speaker, even if that means overestimating yourself. And confidence in yourself is often disconnected from the truth. It's very hard for physical knowledge to make you feel better about something- Our minds are better at manifesting raw emotive will than producing it from abstract facts. The truth can help, if it provides grounds to support, and it can prompt you to do better, if you can see room for improvement. But for truth to always help? Nope. It's a lot easier to use the truth to shatter your confidence than to bolster it.

This is not to say that the truth is conditionally bad. Often it's incredibly important we find it. One of the big advantages of Rationality as a worldview is that it emphasizes we understand our cognitive biases, like our habit of externalizing our problems. And often, even if the truth hurts now it will help in the long run. But that doesn't mean you should embrace it and damn the consequences. There may be a way of using false premises in the short run and the truth in the long run. Delusion is a pretty neat thing.

Now a lot of rationalists say there's No Such Thing. There's never a case where a false premise provides more value than a true one. This is such a sweeping statement about humanity that I find it utterly ridiculous. See the gym example. See religion. People are a mess of contradictions and groundless beliefs, but many can draw power from it. If you can live completely free of false premises and still have the same level of empowerment, then you're not human. You're an ubermensch.

Truth-Rationality has some serious problems. You're welcome to still have it as a worldview, but you should recognize that it cannot and does not work for everybody. Sadly, I do see a lot of Truth-Rationalists see themselves as better than those who aren't. Maybe if you could be a perfect TR, where your mind is just so and the flaws in TR don't apply to you. But if you were a perfect TR, you'd see yourself as equal to everybody else on this earth. It doesn't matter what you believe, as long as it drives you to grow as a person.

Or not, if that's not your goal. I shouldn't be judging.

The Fallacy of Reason

Last night I had an argument with a friend about a thing. Since this was online I will probably be having this argument with them tomorrow too. Over the course of this argument I brought up something from my personal life. Her response was (paraphrased) "I want to talk about arguments, not personal feelings."

On the surface this seems reasonable. We are always told that anecdotes have no place in evidence. If a study shows that punching chickens does not cure cancer and I tell about how aunt Martha punched a chicken and cured her leukemia, I'm being a terrible debater. I think this has been taken too far, though. Anecdotes have been entirely shut out in favor of "reason". But are these enriched by the lack of experience? I'd say no. It's the opposite.

As much as we hate to admit it, reason is a subjective thing. We find evidence to suit beliefs, not the other way around. We put too much power on our invisible assumptions, and too little on what we profess we believe. Let me take an obvious example:

"The presidency requires being always available and able to give your all. Women can have children and need maternity leave. So women should not be president."

Sounds silly, right? Replace 'president' with leader and you get something from Rousseau. He was a hell of a lot smarter than I was and way better at using his reason. So why does he say something so stupid? He's operating under the prevailing assumption of the time that men > women. His argument perfectly fits in with his beliefs so he does not try at all to examine it for flaws.

Are we any better? Our 'reason' is built on axioms, and those axioms didn't come from the brain wizards. It's shaped by your world. Where you grew up. The people you talk to. What you want to believe. It's why every 14 year old can so obviously see how everything works and you just don't get it. His world is so limited that nothing challenges his core beliefs. He may use great reason, but that's like building your house out of the best cardboard around. It's still made of cardboard. Everybody's been there. I have. So have you.

It's only we grow a little older and actually get some experience in the world that we stop thinking we know all of the answers. The experience is what should shake our core beliefs. Think communism will make everything just peachy? You see how people backstab each other if we can get away from it. Or maybe Objectivism is the One True Path! Oh wait, the poor people are poor because they're in terrible nightmares, not because they're lazy bums. Religious people are deluded sheeple! If you can get through this university and still believe that, then I applaud your willful ignorance.

That's why I bring up personal experience. I can't make you live my life. I can't force you to grow up in a very religious community, or struggle with mental illness, or have to learn humor like a new language. But by god I can let you know what it's like. It's a tiny glimpse into a different world, and maybe, just maybe, you'll see that your core beliefs aren't the unshakable tenets of reality. Just as mine aren't. No one's is. But if we think that trying to understand each other's personal experiences is an affront to some nebulous 'reason', we're not going to get anywhere. We'll just logic ourselves in our tiny bubbles and pretend that if people don't agree with us they're not being 'intellectual'. That's as far from reason as you can possibly get.

The External Self

The other day I was talking with a friend about something private. At one point I critiqued some of his actions, saying he was acting callous. His response was "I may act callous, but I'm not callous on the inside. That's what matters." If people can't see what he's really like on the inside, then they're badwrong. He can discard them.

It's a troubling thing to hear, especially because I realize I do it myself. One of my biggest fears is being an arrogant person. I obsess over being modest and not arrogant. I also think that if people do think I'm arrogant, then they're mistaken, because I work so hard to not be arrogant that I know I'm not. They're just seeing a face, an external part of me that doesn't reflect who I truly am.

The problem with thinking this way is that you're dropping a wall between how you think and how you act. Just because something is part of the external self does not mean it has no impact on you. It's still an external self. If you present yourself in a certain way, you can't say that it's not how you actually are. Even if it wasn't, you're acting in that form. That's going to bleed into your 'actual' self.

This is especially true since we are fallible people. Just because we think we are a certain way does not mean we are that way. There are aspects of us we are blind to, willfully or not. We have to listen to other people, and hope that they can see the things we can't.

So a question. If I think I'm not arrogant, but a lot of people say I act arrogant, am I arrogant or not?

Yes. Yes I am.

This sucks.

Chain of Insights

I vaguely know I had something I was going to talk about this week. Probably something either navel-gazing or incredibly pretentious. But I can't remember it. And I don't care! Because I actually have something I DO want to talk about!

Last night I was getting ready for bed when I was struck with a mode of insight. It's hard to describe. For maybe five minutes my brain stopped thinking in terms of logical progresses and just went straight from premises to conclusions. I managed to write one of them down, but the rest faded away after half an hour. It was one of the most surreal experiences since Chile.

So now what? I really want to make it happen again. How do I do that? I don't know. I'm completely at loss for how to go about this. Anybody have any ideas?

On Inertia

Let's try an experiment. Take some homework you have. If it's reading, read two or three sentences. If it's a problem set, set up one of the problems. I'll wait for you to do that.

Okay. Do you stop after three lines or read an entire paragraph? Do you try to solve the problem?

I know I do. As I started making small, cumulative changes, I noticed some patterns to how I did things. I didn't want to start working on a project. But once I started, I didn't want to stop. Once I start a problem set, I have no trouble working for two hours. The problem is starting. It's not quite laziness, because I don't give up early. I think a better word is 'inertia'. At person at rest remains at rest, and a person moving remains moving.

Inertia prevents you from doing things. But I think it can also work in your favor. Since the hardest part of doing something is starting it, we should be able to cheat that by using a small stepping stone. If you don't feel like exercising, say you'll walk to the gym to clear your mind. Then enter the gym to use the water fountain. Then just do a small part of your routine...

It's all about that first step. Inertia is a powerful thing.