As a species, we like to think we make rational decisions. More likely is that we pick comforting mental images and demand them from the world, then invent backward rationalizations for our actions and their unintended consequences.
Whenever you’re on a project and things go wrong for you, it makes sense to stop what you’re doing and re-trace your steps.
As part of that, you’re going to eventually question the assumptions you made in approaching the project.
With the demise of the 20th century, we saw some of the roughest times for humanity fade away — except they’re still here.
The last 100 years has been a time of the most radical change since humanity’s inception, for us. We’ve had some great heights (air travel, space flight, DNA, digital computing) and also some great lows (two world wars, genocides, dumbing down of culture).
Although the signs are still faint, there’s evidence that our future may run into trouble. Particularly, there’s the troubling convergence of these factors:
- Our population keeps growing.
- Our politics keep getting more deceptive and corrupt.
- Pollution keeps increasing.
- We keep using more land for more humans.
- With globalization and the loss of culture, the international corporations and big media keep getting more powerful.
- Despite being liberal democracies, our governments have now become a form of “soft fascism”: the Nanny State.
Some uninformed people will tell you that “slippery slope” arguments, or the idea that letting one thing slide leads to more things sliding, are a logical fallacy. To my mind it’s more accurate to say that slippery slope arguments are often misapplied.
One area they’re not is increase. When laws requiring us to wear seatbelts were passed, we were told they were not going to be used as an excuse to pull over motorists and profit by ticketing them. Can anyone claim that’s the case anymore?
Our population increases. Our economies increase. Each time we legalize some oddity, for example medical marijuana, the onrush of people forces the policy to expand even more. Soon we’re on that slippery slope.
This blog exists to question an important myth, which is that we are rational as a species. We are not — mainly because it’s unclear if we’re (a) in charge of ourselves, in any meaningful sense and (b) actually intending the results of our actions.
To an informed observer, it seems more likely that we are reacting to changes in our reality, and striking back against it monkey-style with assertions of what we’d like to believe. Then to make ourselves sound competent, we invent as many rational reasons (“justification,” “rationalization”) as we can — thinking backward from effect to cause.
I’m going to tackle a series of our big myths, starting in this post with the myth of our rationality itself. But you can look forward to me tackling:
- Equality
- Consumerism
- Diversity
- Free speech
- Profit motive
- Eco-stewardship
Let the blood of sacred cows renew the grass beneath our feet which, we are surprised to find, exists independent of our conscious minds.
this website makes such sense out of the shithole society i live in know as AMERICA
i love this website
major kudos to you dude
I look forward to it!
You might be interested in some psychological literature on irrationality. As an introduction I can think of nothing better than “Irrationality” by Stuart Sutherland and “Predictably Irrational” by Dan Ariely. Great writers, great books – the phenomena presented go a long way to explaining why people do what they do.
As a companion to those, anything on game theory will shed light on how and why different groups co-operate and/or defect.
I am very concerned with our social/ polital direction. Further, the current mentality that Life, Liberty and Happiness is owed to us, is incomprehensible to me and sad. I suppose I am no longer the typical AmeriCan, who takes pride in what he builds, and takes pride in earning his Life, Liberty and Happiness. I see no short term sollution, after all, americans did not become (amerikans) dependent and lazy overnight. Perhaps your attempt at educating will help. KUDOS!
[...] Steve Harris – “The Entropy of Reddit“, “The Myth of Human Rationality” [...]
That was thought provoking…
The way I see it, it’s more about the potential of rationality. By and large as a species we tend towards irrationality but there is always the potential for rationality. Most of the time, we die before we have a chance to individually cultivate it.
On the level of group psychology, I think that we are, pretty much, irrational by default. So potential towards rationality only really tends to become an actuality on the individual level, in specific cases.
This leads to the distinct feeling that one is amidst a cage full of wild monkeys running amok, or in the middle of a lunatic asylum.
Since lunatics, and monkeys, are prone to extreme bursts of physical strength and violence, commensurate with their degrees of irrationality, sometimes survival dictates pretending to be an chimp, or madman, where appropriate.
I’ve come to peace with the distinct possibility that the human race en masse always has been, and always will be, supremely irrational as an aggregate mass.. this is to say as a mass we will tend to manifest collective behavior that, more times than not, will seem utterly unreasonable.
This is not always a fault, there are rich aspects of human nature that are sentimental, emotional, and irrational. One could even speculate supra-rational, though this is a stretch.
In the domains where reason is of real advantage, the few people who tend to predominate in reasonableness are probably better off using their reason to discern the emotional motives and triggers of everyone else, who are rather unreasonable, so as to better influence and convince them that what is actually rational, and sane, also benefits them in ways that are emotionally appealing.
Lest the denizens of the cage rip one’s arms off, and beat one to death with it while howling.
Then again.. I could simply just be being overly optimistic.