From the OP: “Whereas a rational individual is still limited by her individual intelligence, creativity, and charisma, a rational group can promote the single best idea, leader, or method out of hundreds or thousands or millions.”
GIGO. At any given time, the rational group will be limited by their consensus beliefs and mental models. (Indicator of group quality—do their mental models improve over time?) Rationality is just a tool for uncovering truth. I’ve often found that I’ll go to work on a hard problem using rigorous intellectual tools (Mathematics, on which rationality is based) but then I’ll be flummoxed and have to set it aside. Then the answer will pop into my head the next morning as I’m eating breakfast, at which point I’ll use math to validate the intuition I’ve just had.
Sometimes we need to stumble on the truth by accident or other non-rational means. Can rationality help us if we don’t even know the right questions to ask in the first place? I think it’s a powerful tool, not a panacea.
We may well benefit from rationality, but that doesn’t mean all of the answers we seek will come sliding down the chute when we turn the crank on the machine. However, I will say that it is a fantastic filter for revealing which are the wrong answers.
Toyota is an example of a company that utilizes rationality for a competitive edge. Whenever they have an assembly line problem, they go through the “Five Whys” exercise. Ask “why” iteratively five times. Why five? It’s a manageable number, usually enough to get at the real underlying issue, and you have to set some fairly low limit, otherwise employees doing the exercise will keep quitting their jobs and go off to live in the woods to live as philosopher ascetics.
From the OP: “Whereas a rational individual is still limited by her individual intelligence, creativity, and charisma, a rational group can promote the single best idea, leader, or method out of hundreds or thousands or millions.”
GIGO. At any given time, the rational group will be limited by their consensus beliefs and mental models. (Indicator of group quality—do their mental models improve over time?) Rationality is just a tool for uncovering truth. I’ve often found that I’ll go to work on a hard problem using rigorous intellectual tools (Mathematics, on which rationality is based) but then I’ll be flummoxed and have to set it aside. Then the answer will pop into my head the next morning as I’m eating breakfast, at which point I’ll use math to validate the intuition I’ve just had.
Sometimes we need to stumble on the truth by accident or other non-rational means. Can rationality help us if we don’t even know the right questions to ask in the first place? I think it’s a powerful tool, not a panacea.
We may well benefit from rationality, but that doesn’t mean all of the answers we seek will come sliding down the chute when we turn the crank on the machine. However, I will say that it is a fantastic filter for revealing which are the wrong answers.
Toyota is an example of a company that utilizes rationality for a competitive edge. Whenever they have an assembly line problem, they go through the “Five Whys” exercise. Ask “why” iteratively five times. Why five? It’s a manageable number, usually enough to get at the real underlying issue, and you have to set some fairly low limit, otherwise employees doing the exercise will keep quitting their jobs and go off to live in the woods to live as philosopher ascetics.