What is the optimal balance between cultivation of "reason" and acknowledgement of irrationality?

17 thoughts on “What is the optimal balance between cultivation of “reason” and acknowledgement of irrationality?”

1. Or to be more accurate, you can but it is a very slow process that take immense amounts of effort and only occurs over generations. It took 3 generations after the Civil Rights struggle before this country was ready to elect a black man.

   So in the short term, in the medium term, and for many things even in the long term, you have to take peopel as they are. And people are not rational beings so much as they are rationalizing beings. That’s why many on the right could dislike Obama both for being a Muslim and going to a “radical” Christian church.

   So if you want to improve things today or tomorrow – you use whatever mechanism best helps you sell it. But you also have to be careful not to has a major long term problem for a small short term gain.

   So, organized religion is interested in better schools – we can work together there. They are interested in improved civics and reduced teen pregnancy – and we can find some common ground there. So we should, where we can, agree to achieve that common ground, if we can get agreement to limit the initial push to that common ground.

   But should we bring religion into the schools? Should we bring in abstinence only sec ed? No – because both of those have a giant negative that is not outweighed by their help in improving the schools.

   The trick is to get people to work for the items they have common ground on – rather than fighting over the parts they disagree on.

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   1. That’s a good start. Let’s see if we can develop it more.

      To paraphrase you (maybe with some modification), one consideration that dovetails with the topic is long-term v. short-term time horizons. The shorter the time horizon, the more you accept the fact of irrationality, and the longer the time horizon, the more you try to cultivate rationality. That’s good. It seems obvious, and is, but formulating (and, to the extent possible, formalizing) the obvious is a good way to arrive at the less obvious. (That’s pretty much how mathematics works).

      Focusing on areas of consensus, regardless of the degree of rationality that went into the respective factions arrival at it, is another component. I agree, but here’s an example that points to a challenge involved: If a Moonie-like cult that follows some version of Pythagorian numerology decides that, to advance its interests, it would like to invest much time and effort to tutor kids in math, you have both a resource, and a potential danger of exploiting the opportunity to advance what I am calling “irrationality.” (Not the mathematics, but the mysticism that is intertwined with it). Would there be a way to disintangle the two? If, to exploit the offer, a second non-cultist volunteer would have to be present, does it survive a cost-benefit analysis?

      (By the way, religion is already in our schools, through the subtleties of local politics. For instance, school districts tip-toe around evolutionary theory, and carefully orchestrate and circumscribe its introduction, to the real deficit of the students’ education. I’m not sure if that has any relevance to the topic of the diary, though).

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      1. If the moonies saw the math tutoring as the critical part then there probably is a way to make it work. If they felt that people had to understand their “why”, then it’s a problem. A good example is almost anyone involved in geneology works with the Mormon church groups on this – but the Mormons generally view this as working for this singular goal to be sufficient for the help.

         But it can be handled pretty simply – if you want to tutor you’re welcome to do so as long as you stick to the subject at hand. And with that said, two of my daughters had a history teacher in High School who was an empassioned Republican – and in history class that bias came in. But he was always upfront about it being his opinion.

         I appreciated his teaching them – it gave them a counterbalance to the incessent liberal view up here in Boulder.

         The other thing is I don’t try to get people to act rationally – that’s an exercise in frustration. What I do is I try myself to approach things rationally as I tend to be more successful that way. With others, I try to determine what approach will best get me the results I want.

         During the primary I was talking to a candidate who was frustrated about how she had a very good point on an issue and it wasn’t getting traction. I told her she was right, but that no one cared, so drop it. Life is messy.

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         1. to ensure that the “Moonie” numerologists stay on topic, but I guess that can be reduced considerably through feedback from their students. There’s still a potential problem there, but maybe cheaply resolvable.

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3. It is important that even if individual actors make rational decisions, it doesn’t make the sytem act rationally.

   The financial collapse is a great example of this.  To avoid going in to too much of the detail that has been explained elsewhere. begger thy neighbor is a rational strategy for an individual.  However, when BTN is systematically encouraged, it encourages the system to grow in an irrational manner.

   Back to individuals–being rational is often irrational for individual players.  The amount of time necessary to educate yourself on issues is not efficient and to drop into econospeak, it does not maximize utility.  This is why a republic is supperior to a democracy.

   Most people are better served by using gatekeepers to select and order their information.  Problem is, today we live in an information environment that is multimodal so it is easy for people pre-select gatekeepers that fit their biases.  This makes it even easier for people to devote less energy in to building a critical thinking system (which may be personally rational), but because the gatekeepers start out so biased, the bias prevents individuals from recognizing the value of compromise and cooption.

   Reason and irrationality are not the issue when it comes to public policy: the lack of a common narrative is more of an impediment in crafting policy solutions.

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   1. It is probably a good thing but the first time we got that was post WWII when first, everyone had worked together on a single issue, helped along with national radio and shortly thereafter TV.

      But prior to that people everywhere pretty much were limited to info, culture, etc in their immediate area.

      And now with the Internet we do have people all going their own direction, but we also have many more sources of info and communities that could never have happened before.

      For better or worse, we’re now in a very different setup – it will have good and bad points, but we’re not going to go back, that just doesn’t work.

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   2. But the combination of individual rationality and reduced transaction costs moves in the direction of optimal arrangements.

      More importantly, it increases the supply and usability of our most valuable natural resource: Human genius.

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4. It’s so fascistly-progressive, it’s fascinating.

   I’ll try to round up some time for a reply from my side of the aisle to the concept of making people better, more rational creatures.  In fact, I was going to write an essay tomorrow about that very thing.

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   1. is a rhetorical technique to increase persuasive power independent of substance. The connotation of “fascism” is that of ultra-nationalist, racist domestic and foreign violence. These defects are in no way implicated in the notion of cultivating human rationality through public policy (something one would hope public education is at least somewhat dedicated to accomplishing. After all, what do you think math is? Symbolic logic.).

      Though the denotation of fascism is “state corporatism,” no succesful, pacifist state corporatist society (such as post WWII Japan) is ever called “fascist.” So the prevalent connotation has completely displaced the “technical” denotation.

      But, yes, to some degree we are talking about balancing state corporatism with the robustness of decentralized decision-making (“liberty”). Of course, that’s what we are always talking about: No rational person serious advocates absolute liberty. We all agree that murder, rape, and other forms of predatory violence, for instance, should be prohibited. The real question is how to balance liberty and social control for optimal collective benefit. Liberty is a means to an end, not an end in itself, except to the extent that it is a contributing factor to human fulfilment and happiness.

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      1. …I thought a label, if accurate, was short-hand for something potentially substantive.

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         1. think of it this way: We use symbols to represent things. Labels are merely placeholders for the thing. Some labels, like some words, are rich with meaning that is instantly invoked, so the label is really a conceptual “hyperlink” to a fuller explication. In that sense, you are right, labels can be the functional equivalent of a much more detailed definition. In fact, labels share this quality with “jargon.” Jargon, too, can be a shorthand way to refer to a much larger explication. But, of course, jargon is often a way of obfuscating rather than of clarifying. And so our labels: Sometimes the body of definition they invoke is inaccurate (as in the use of “fascism” to describe policies that do not involve what “fascism” means to most people), defying your premise above. Sometimes they don’t reference any meaning but are rather simple “names” arbitrarly given: What does “Fred” mean, unless you already know who Fred is and are only using the name to refer to him?

            So, labels are potentially substantive, but frequently aren’t. When used in argumentation, they are frequently used as Trojan Horses, importing connotations that have no actual relevance to the topic under discussion. That is how the label “fascist” was used in the post to which I was responding.

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            1. Was used in the sense of its close relationship with the progressive movement from the turn of the century.  The fonts sprang from the same philosophical source.  And while it’s often hidden, it’s quite obvious here.  

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               1. the connotation of the word “fascist” is that of racist ultra-nationalism, which has no relationship whatsoever to the progressive movement. That connotation has completely displaced all other meanings of the word, so using the word “fascist” to describe the progressive movement is intentionally misleading.

                  Having said that, if you cleanse the word “fascist” of its racist and ultranationalist connotations, it merely means “state corporatism,” and that the progressive movement does indeed involve a degree of state corporatism. There is nothing inherently odious about this: It merely raises nuts-and-bolts questions of “what works”?

                  Clearly, absolute liberty is a non-starter: Few reasonable people want to live in a lawless world, and laws are, by definition, infringements on personal liberty. So the real question, as always, is not the false polarity beloved by ideologues, but rather the more nuanced question concerning optimal balances, and most efficient and effective uses of institutional forms.

                  There are several challenges involved: Identifying the goals (which involves some bargaining, but also involves some fairly widely shared general utilitarian principles), and then devising the means. This is not, as you suggest, a necessarily top-heavy, overly-centralized, command-economy approach: If our best analyses were to tell us that our collective welfare is best served by a government that only defines and protects property rights, and that the market should be relied on for all else, then that would be the social institutional system we should embrace.

                  But our best analyses tell us that markets fail due to transaction costs and externalities: Unfettered markets are ground to a near halt, involve great costs to health and safety, when government doesn’t take on some responsibility for reducing transaction costs (such as printing a reliable currency, just to take the most obvious example); and unfettered markets export onto the undifferentiated public enormous burdens in order to keep all undesirable qualities of products for sale out of the pricing mechanism.

                  This is just the beginning of a thorough institutional economics analysis, which is a valuable tool in social policy formation. Call it “fascism” if you like, but it contains none of the qualities of “fascism” which caused that word to be widely associated with evil. And the word you tack onto it is not an argument: A complete analysis of what is implicated, and what it means to our lives is much more to the point.

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   2. (In retrospect it’s tangential, but in the end it’s still related)

      “Our union can be perfected.” – President-Elect Obama

      Those were words from his acceptance speech last Tuesday night. I’m sure it was a rhetorical flourish, meant to refer back to the Preamble of the Constitution. But it says so much more.

      When you compare the Preamble (see the title of this post) to the quotation, however, you’ll note an important difference. That difference is the word “more.”

      That one simple word belies a significant difference in philosophy. You see, the Founders, and, indeed, most people from the beginning of time, viewed people as inherently imperfect, and therefore imperfectable, creatures. And, as such, any human system, be it family, group, or country, is imperfectable as well.

      But we’re not here to just throw up our hands in resignation at our flaws. No, we ought to seek to make ourselves more perfect tomorrow than we are today, and the world a more perfect place, too.

      That lasted for a few thousand years, until the early 1900s. (Though there are stirrings of it in The Republic) About then, the political class found themselves flush with all sorts of new knowledge and understanding. Darwin, Einstein, Marx, and countless others had been able to unlock the wisdom of the ages, and make it accessible to everyone else. With scientific understanding of biology, and physics, and economics, it became possible to understand people, and societies, and social systems.

      If only you could get the right technocrats, the right Brain Trust in place, they could apply these new and wonderful sciences to society. They’d have to be able to do this by fiat, of course, because when you can make everything perfect with your knowledge, why would you need to stick to democratic ideals? A sufficiently enlightened dictator ought to be good enough, if they can make things perfect.

      This was the source of a philosophy that called itself Progressive (sound familiar?). Essentially, they justified this wave of Applied Social Sciences with the concept of pragmatic governance – If it works, who cares how you do it – into a new technocratic ideal.

      The thing is, the concept itself is distinctly illiberal. If you can drum up the support of the people through populism (which can often be easy with the “just do it” pragmatism), so be it. But if you can’t, well, they’re all hoopleheads anyway, and they’ll thank you later. When you have a Brain Trust of the Smartest People in the World, you don’t need popular support. You just need the power to make things better. To “perfect the Union,” if you will.

      Now I don’t know if the President-Elect meant all this or not by that one turn of phrase. But knowing the progressive roots of his Party, it makes one wonder, doesn’t it?

      But it gets worse. You see, in other countries, it wasn’t just society they sought to perfect through Applied Social Sciences. These ideas followed naturally to applying the other Applied Sciences of biology and chemistry and physics to not just human social groups, but to humans themselves. The wave of interest in eugenics came from the exact same stream of thought. In some cases, it took the form of selective breeding, in others, various genetic and biological experiments. In others, it focused on culling certain folks, rather than keeping certain folks. If you get my drift.

      No, it’s been tried before. It didn’t end well.

      For decades, the Left has been emphasizing that this Union is not perfect. Well, no kidding. But that’s the definition of any human society. Can we make it more humane? Every day. Can they, or anyone, make it perfect. Not only no, but Hell No.

      I’m reminded of a speech from the climax of the movie Serenity. (Highly recommended, if you haven’t seen it.) They’ve discovered the story of a Government that had tried its own experiments at perfecting a society. It didn’t end well, either. It’s from science fiction, but the words can be a call to us, too.

      I know this – they will try again. . . A year from now, ten? They’ll swing back to the belief that they can make people… better. And I do not hold to that. – Malcolm Reynolds

      No, we’re not perfect, nor is this Union. But no government, no Brain Trust, no quasi-messianic President-Elect can perfect either. We can only strive toward a more perfect self, and a more perfect Union, one person and one act at a time.

      I don’t know if it was a rhetorical flourish, or if it was a hint at a more dangerous philosophy rearing its head. I hope it was the former. But if it was the latter, well,
      
      
      
      I aim to misbehave.

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      1. I don’t see anything I disagree with, but neither do I see how acknowledging that we can only work to become more perfect, rather than absolutely perfect, is a salient criticism of the progressive movement. We don’t use our brain trust to erase all problems and create a utopia, but rather to do an ever better job of mobilizing our social institutions, our human capital, and our enthusiasm and energy to increase both the global quantity of “wealth” (broadly defined) and the fairness of its distribution.

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      2. which recommends dictatorship, or other evils. In fact, among the things we have learned both from historical experience, and from these wonderful sciences you so eagerly disparage, is that social institutions are at their best when based on the assumption of individual self-interest on the part of all human beings (including those in government). That recognition certainly does not recommend overly centralized power. But we also understand the value of creating contracts, and principle-agent relationships, which enable collective action that could otherwise not occur. Government as agent of the people, who are its principle, is precisely the shift that occurred at about the time of England’s Glorious Revolution, and that informed our own revolution. And that is the institutional development that the progressive movement is a continuation of.

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