Sort of. And we all know the answer to that question is that it’s often completely impossible.
Some of the examples in the article are matters where human hardware tends to lead us in the wrong direction. But others—particularly the Albanian case, are to a large extent failures of intent. Good quality rationality is a long term investment that many people choose not to make. The result is vulnerability to believing impossible things. Irrationality is often a choice, and I think that, long term, our failure to be rational springs as much from choosing not to be as much as it does from failures in execution when sincerely trying to be. You can compensate, to a degree, for our hardware based inclinations to see patterns where none exist, or stick with what we have. But nothing compensates for choosing the irrational.
We can all see that irrationality is expensive to varying degrees depending on what you do. But this is only convincing to those of us who are already convinced and don’t need to know. So what was the article intending to do?
Sort of. And we all know the answer to that question is that it’s often completely impossible.
Some of the examples in the article are matters where human hardware tends to lead us in the wrong direction. But others—particularly the Albanian case, are to a large extent failures of intent. Good quality rationality is a long term investment that many people choose not to make. The result is vulnerability to believing impossible things. Irrationality is often a choice, and I think that, long term, our failure to be rational springs as much from choosing not to be as much as it does from failures in execution when sincerely trying to be. You can compensate, to a degree, for our hardware based inclinations to see patterns where none exist, or stick with what we have. But nothing compensates for choosing the irrational.
We can all see that irrationality is expensive to varying degrees depending on what you do. But this is only convincing to those of us who are already convinced and don’t need to know. So what was the article intending to do?
So yes—sort of.
Not to sound insufficiently pessimistic, but I don’t think that’s been rigorously established. It doesn’t seem impossible to raise the sanity waterline—it seems more likely that we have inferential distances to cross and armors built to protect false beliefs we must pierce.
I like this comment. Given the historical improvements that have already come about, it can’t be unreasonable to look for more.