Since you’ve gone with the definition, are you sure that definition is solid? A reasoning process like “spend your waking moments deriving mathematical truths using rigorous methods; leave all practical matters to curated recipes and outside experts” may tend to arrive at true beliefs and good decisions more often than “attempt to wrestle as rationally as you can with all of the strange and uncertain reality you encounter, and learn to navigate toward worthy goals by pushing the limits of your competence in ways that seem most promising and prudent” but the latter seems to me a “more rational reasoning process.”
The conflation of rationality with utility-accumulation/winning also strikes me as questionable. These seem to me to be different things that sometimes cooperate but that might also be expected to go their separate ways on occasion. (This, unless you define winning/utility in terms of alignment with what is true, but a phrase like “sitting atop a pile of utility” doesn’t suggest that to me.)
If you thought you were a shoe-in to win the lottery, and in fact you do win, does that retrospectively convert your decision to buy a lottery ticket into a rational one in addition to being a fortunate one? (Your belief turned out to be true, your decision turned out to be good, you got a pile of utility and can call yourself a winner.)
Since you’ve gone with the definition, are you sure that definition is solid? A reasoning process like “spend your waking moments deriving mathematical truths using rigorous methods; leave all practical matters to curated recipes and outside experts” may tend to arrive at true beliefs and good decisions more often than “attempt to wrestle as rationally as you can with all of the strange and uncertain reality you encounter, and learn to navigate toward worthy goals by pushing the limits of your competence in ways that seem most promising and prudent” but the latter seems to me a “more rational reasoning process.”
The conflation of rationality with utility-accumulation/winning also strikes me as questionable. These seem to me to be different things that sometimes cooperate but that might also be expected to go their separate ways on occasion. (This, unless you define winning/utility in terms of alignment with what is true, but a phrase like “sitting atop a pile of utility” doesn’t suggest that to me.)
If you thought you were a shoe-in to win the lottery, and in fact you do win, does that retrospectively convert your decision to buy a lottery ticket into a rational one in addition to being a fortunate one? (Your belief turned out to be true, your decision turned out to be good, you got a pile of utility and can call yourself a winner.)
A thing I should likely include is something like the definition gets disputed, but what I present is the most standard one.