They are rational to the extent they are interested and successful at achieving their goals.
Imagine two people, Alice and Bob, share the goal of deadlifting X lbs. Alice and Bob are equally “interested and successful at achieving” all their other goals besides deadlifting X lbs. Bob is stronger than Alice. Therefore, he is more likely to be able to deadlift X lbs. Can we thereby conclude that Bob is more rational than Alice?
You say “all else equal” here. But all else clearly isn’t equal—they have different genders.
You assumed that Alice was a girl (normally a good guess), but I never mentioned his gender in my thought-experiment. Then again, they have different names, etc...But this misses the point of my “all else equal” clause, which refers to their interestedness and succesfulness (besides their (probable) success at deadlifting), not a myriad of accidental features.
Imagine two people, Alice and Bob, share the goal of deadlifting X lbs. Alice and Bob are equally “interested and successful at achieving” all their other goals besides deadlifting X lbs. Bob is stronger than Alice. Therefore, he is more likely to be able to deadlift X lbs. Can we thereby conclude that Bob is more rational than Alice?
No. It is incredibly weak evidence that Bob is more rational than Alice.
They are rational to the extent they are interested and successful at achieving their goals.
Imagine two people, Alice and Bob, share the goal of deadlifting X lbs. Alice and Bob are equally “interested and successful at achieving” all their other goals besides deadlifting X lbs. Bob is stronger than Alice. Therefore, he is more likely to be able to deadlift X lbs. Can we thereby conclude that Bob is more rational than Alice?
You say “all else equal” here. But all else clearly isn’t equal—they have different genders.
All else being equal, yes I’d expect deadlift weight to be somewhat correlated with rationality.
You assumed that Alice was a girl (normally a good guess), but I never mentioned his gender in my thought-experiment. Then again, they have different names, etc...But this misses the point of my “all else equal” clause, which refers to their interestedness and succesfulness (besides their (probable) success at deadlifting), not a myriad of accidental features.
No. It is incredibly weak evidence that Bob is more rational than Alice.