That is a limitation of looking at this community specifically, but the general sense of the question can also be approached by looking at communities for specific activities that have strong norms of rationality.
I think most of the time rationality is not helpful for applied goals because doing something well usually requires domain specific knowledge that’s acquired through experience, and yet experience alone is almost always sufficient for success. In cases where the advice of rationality and experience conflict, oftentimes experience wins even if it should not, because the surrounding social context is built by and for the irrational majority. If you make the same mistake everyone else makes you are in little danger, but if you make a unique mistake you are in trouble.
Rationality is most useful when you’re trying to find truths that no one else has found before. Unfortunately, this is extremely difficult to do even with ideal reasoning processes. Rationality does offer some marginal advantage in truth seeking, but because useful novel truths are so rare, most often the costs outweigh the benefits. Once a good idea is discovered, oftentimes irrational people are simply able to copy whoever invented the idea, without having to bear all the risk involved with the process of the idea’s creation. And then, when you consider that perfect rationality is beyond mortal reach, the situation begins to look even worse. You need a strategy that lets you make better use of truth than other people can, in addition to the ability to find truth more easily, if you want to have a decent chance to translate skill in rationality into life victories.
That is a limitation of looking at this community specifically, but the general sense of the question can also be approached by looking at communities for specific activities that have strong norms of rationality.
I think most of the time rationality is not helpful for applied goals because doing something well usually requires domain specific knowledge that’s acquired through experience, and yet experience alone is almost always sufficient for success. In cases where the advice of rationality and experience conflict, oftentimes experience wins even if it should not, because the surrounding social context is built by and for the irrational majority. If you make the same mistake everyone else makes you are in little danger, but if you make a unique mistake you are in trouble.
Rationality is most useful when you’re trying to find truths that no one else has found before. Unfortunately, this is extremely difficult to do even with ideal reasoning processes. Rationality does offer some marginal advantage in truth seeking, but because useful novel truths are so rare, most often the costs outweigh the benefits. Once a good idea is discovered, oftentimes irrational people are simply able to copy whoever invented the idea, without having to bear all the risk involved with the process of the idea’s creation. And then, when you consider that perfect rationality is beyond mortal reach, the situation begins to look even worse. You need a strategy that lets you make better use of truth than other people can, in addition to the ability to find truth more easily, if you want to have a decent chance to translate skill in rationality into life victories.
What is “rationality” even supposed to be if not codified and generalized experience?