Mental energy is actually a limiting factor and I believe that this is the cause for more failures than people care to admit. That is, we as humans have a tendency to pick our battles as we have a limited amount of time and thinking resources and as such only invest large amounts of both only on a very small set of descisions. This means that most descisions do get done rather automatically.. which (as has been argued in previous articles) is rather normal. However, I think that a rationalist should be able to determine wether the thing he messed up was something he clearly did without paying it much attention (and thus did as best as he could given his very limited resources of time) or wether he really did invest a lot of consideration into it and just messed up. In both cases, lessons of course need to be learned and priorities adjusted (the fact you did it automatically might need to be corrected so that the next time you WOULD actually think in that situation) but I still believe that we cannot hold ourselves to the highest of rational standards for every single descision we make..
Maybe this is what the original author meant by saying that his mental energy budget is limited. Anyways, I thought that this aspect required further discussion...
Mental energy is actually a limiting factor and I believe that this is the cause for more failures than people care to admit. That is, we as humans have a tendency to pick our battles as we have a limited amount of time and thinking resources and as such only invest large amounts of both only on a very small set of descisions. This means that most descisions do get done rather automatically.. which (as has been argued in previous articles) is rather normal. However, I think that a rationalist should be able to determine wether the thing he messed up was something he clearly did without paying it much attention (and thus did as best as he could given his very limited resources of time) or wether he really did invest a lot of consideration into it and just messed up. In both cases, lessons of course need to be learned and priorities adjusted (the fact you did it automatically might need to be corrected so that the next time you WOULD actually think in that situation) but I still believe that we cannot hold ourselves to the highest of rational standards for every single descision we make..
Maybe this is what the original author meant by saying that his mental energy budget is limited. Anyways, I thought that this aspect required further discussion...