See your post’s great grandparent… sure, tedious dick-waving is tedious and dick-waving, but if we’re trying to get a point across… maybe I should drop that metaphor.
If we’re trying to cultivate appreciation of rationality, it seems inefficient to beat around the… aargh.
Take 3: It seems inefficient to completely neglect to mention rationality.
That’s why I don’t agree with “don’t show them thinking, show them doing”. Of course, you’d have to show the thinking in ordinary words that a person of normal intelligence who hasn’t had a lot of formal education might use. Proverbs might help; they could be part of the way your rationalist thinks, they could be part of the way /she explains things to others, and they could help your reader to remember it later, if/when they encounter similar situations in their own life. And you wouldn’t call them a rationalist, that’s a ‘big word’. Other people would call them ‘wise’, and they themselves would probably say ‘it’s just common sense’.
“Rationalists should win”, right? You could show an ordinary person solving a problem because s/he doesn’t fall for some bias or other.
If the rationalists win, but normal people don’t realize they’re rationalists, or what made them so...
...then they avoid a lot of tedious ideological dick-waving.
See your post’s great grandparent… sure, tedious dick-waving is tedious and dick-waving, but if we’re trying to get a point across… maybe I should drop that metaphor.
If we’re trying to cultivate appreciation of rationality, it seems inefficient to beat around the… aargh.
Take 3: It seems inefficient to completely neglect to mention rationality.
...and go off to wave their dicks at some other issue :-D
That’s why I don’t agree with “don’t show them thinking, show them doing”. Of course, you’d have to show the thinking in ordinary words that a person of normal intelligence who hasn’t had a lot of formal education might use. Proverbs might help; they could be part of the way your rationalist thinks, they could be part of the way /she explains things to others, and they could help your reader to remember it later, if/when they encounter similar situations in their own life. And you wouldn’t call them a rationalist, that’s a ‘big word’. Other people would call them ‘wise’, and they themselves would probably say ‘it’s just common sense’.