“Less than rational” isn’t the phrase I’d use; as you say, rationality really shouldn’t be understood as a discrete state but as an asymptotic goal, and even then it’s probably preferable to speak in terms of individual biases or cognitive skills as appropriate. But J_Taylor’s second point doesn’t lose much of its force if you cast it in terms of individuals seeking company in their specific contrarian beliefs, for whom this whole “rationality” business might be little more than a group-identifying label or a justifying habit of thought. Granted, it might eventually be possible to bring such a demographic around to actual truth-seeking, but it’ll take more work than debiasing someone who’s already posting in good faith—and this site isn’t so large or so stable that it can afford to spend a lot of time dragging people out of self-constructed ideological labyrinths in which they’re quite comfortable.
It’s a particularly nasty problem, though: ideology looks like common sense from the inside, and so it’s hard to tell to what extent the site culture’s already corrupted by arational ideas that’ve just happened to achieve local hegemony. I’d like to say that a careful and fearless examination of any beliefs that look like common sense to us should turn up the major problems, but frankly I don’t think we’re there yet—and an outside view, unfortunately, isn’t necessarily going to be helpful. There’s plenty of motivated cognition out there, too.
“Less than rational” isn’t the phrase I’d use; as you say, rationality really shouldn’t be understood as a discrete state but as an asymptotic goal, and even then it’s probably preferable to speak in terms of individual biases or cognitive skills as appropriate. But J_Taylor’s second point doesn’t lose much of its force if you cast it in terms of individuals seeking company in their specific contrarian beliefs, for whom this whole “rationality” business might be little more than a group-identifying label or a justifying habit of thought. Granted, it might eventually be possible to bring such a demographic around to actual truth-seeking, but it’ll take more work than debiasing someone who’s already posting in good faith—and this site isn’t so large or so stable that it can afford to spend a lot of time dragging people out of self-constructed ideological labyrinths in which they’re quite comfortable.
It’s a particularly nasty problem, though: ideology looks like common sense from the inside, and so it’s hard to tell to what extent the site culture’s already corrupted by arational ideas that’ve just happened to achieve local hegemony. I’d like to say that a careful and fearless examination of any beliefs that look like common sense to us should turn up the major problems, but frankly I don’t think we’re there yet—and an outside view, unfortunately, isn’t necessarily going to be helpful. There’s plenty of motivated cognition out there, too.