Rationality: What it is, Why it Seems Scarce, Why it Matters

Steven Pinker (2021)

In a paragraph

We have an elementary faculty of reason and have developed techniques that magnify its scope. The normative tools of reason should be taught and practiced, and care is needed to avoid mistakes of reasoning.  All our beliefs should fall within a reality mindset, but the human mind is adapted to understanding remote spheres through a mythology mindset.

Key points

• ‘This book grew out of a course I taught at Harvard which explored the nature of rationality and the puzzle of why it seems to be so scarce.’ 

• The benchmarks of rationality that people so often fail to measure up should be a goal of education and popular science. Just as citizens should grasp the basics of history, science, and the written word, they should command the intellectual tools of sound reasoning. These include logic, critical thinking, probability, correlation and causation, the optimal ways to adjust our beliefs and commit to decisions with uncertain evidence. 

• The cognitive wherewithal to understand the world and bend it to our advantage is not a trophy of Western civilization; it’s the patrimony of our species. Humans evolved to occupy the ‘cognitive niche’: the ability to outsmart nature with language, sociality, and know-how.

• To understand what rationality is, why it seems scarce, and why it matters, we must begin with the ground truths of rationality itself: the ways an intelligent agent ought to reason, given its goals and the world in which it lives. These “normative” models come from logic, philosophy, mathematics, and artificial intelligence, and they are our best understanding of the ‘correct’ solution to a problem and how to find it. They serve as an aspiration for those who want to be rational, which should mean everyone. A major goal of this book is to explain the most widely applicable normative tools of reason.

• The many ways in which ordinary people fall short of these benchmarks have become famous. But often there is a method to people’s madness. A problem may have been presented in a deceptive format, in a peculiar environment, for unusual goals. Some of today’s florid outbursts of irrationality may be understood as the rational pursuit of goals other than an objective understanding of the world.

• It is easy to make mistakes of reasoning. Three Simple Maths Problems. The Monty Hall Dilemma.  Exponential growth. Blunders of reasoning may come from thoughtlessness rather than ineptitude.

• Sometimes we should turn our reasoning over to instruments — the tools of logic, probability, and critical thinking – that extend our powers of reason beyond what nature gave us.

• Define Rationality as ‘The ability to use knowledge to attain goals.’

• A rational agent must have a goal, whether it is to ascertain the truth of a noteworthy idea, called theoretical reason, or to bring about a noteworthy outcome in the world, called practical reason (“what is true” and “what to do”)

• With this definition the case for rationality seems all too obvious: do you want things or don’t you? If you do, rationality is what allows you to get them.

• Reason can reason about itself. Its successes are apparent. Championed by Rationality Community.

• Trade-offs among goals and time frames. Life is a never-ending gantlet of marshmallow tests. Odyssean self-control. Libertarian paternalism.

• Moral convictions would seem to depend on nonrational preferences. But when you combine self-interest and sociality with impartiality you get the core of morality.

• Formal and informal fallacies. Human rationality is a hybrid system combining logical computation and pattern association.

• Probability: Credence or Bayesian v frequentist concept. Random: lack of pattern v lack of predictability. Boy or Girl Paradox. Post-hoc hanky-panky. The Cluster Illusion.

• Bayesian Reasoning. Suppose the prevalence of breast cancer in women is 1% and a breast cancer test has a true-positive rate of 90% and the false-positive rate is 9%. Doctors think that a woman testing positive is 80%+ likely to have cancer but Bayes’s rule allows you to calculate the correct answer: 9%.  The posterior probability is (prior probability x likelihood)/commonness of data.  (0.01 x 0.9)/(0.99 x 0.09 + 0.01 x 0.9) = 9%

• Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. ‘Surprising’ is a synonym for ‘low prior probability’

• Expected utility as method of rational choice. Suspect there are countless decisions in life where if we did multiply the risks by the rewards we would choose more wisely. Doesn’t take a lot of math to show that the expected utility of ovarian cancer screening is negative. How many people have ruined their lives by taking a gamble with a large chance at a small gain and a small chance at a catastrophic loss? How many lonely singles forgo the small chance of a lifetime of happiness with a soul mate because they think only of the large chance of a tedious coffee with a bore? But prospect theory. And the negative pole, death, is a singularity that makes all calculations of utility moot.

• Signal Detection and Statistical Decision Theory. Our moral aspirations for justice outstrip our probative powers.

• Game Theory. Decision making when outcomes dependant on decisions of others.

• Causation and correlation. Events have more than one cause, a reality regularly flouted in public discourse. A few simple concepts from statistics can make everyone smarter: main effect and interaction.

• Why does humanity appear to be losing its mind? Motivated reasoning.  Myside bias.  Expressive rationality.

• We children of the Enlightenment embrace the radical creed of universal realism: we hold that all our beliefs should fall within the reality mindset. But as desirable as that creed is, it is not the natural human way of believing. The human mind is adapted to understanding remote spheres of existence through a mythology mindset. The mythology mindset still occupies swaths of territory in the landscape of mainstream belief, including religion, nationalism and intuitive dualism, essentialism and teleology. Western religious belief is safely parked in the mythology zone with belief in God outside the sphere of testable reality.

• Since the Enlightenment, the tides in the modern West have eroded the mythology zone, a historical shift that the sociologist Max Weber called ‘the disenchantment of the world.’ But there are always skirmishes at the borders. The brazen lies and conspiracies of Trumpian post-truth can be seen as an attempt to claim political discourse for the land of mythology rather than the land of reality. Like the plots of legends, scripture, and drama, they are a kind of theater; whether they are probably true or false is beside the point.

• But for all the vulnerabilities of human reason, our picture of the future need not be a bot tweeting fake news forever. The arc of knowledge is a long one, and it bends toward rationality.

• The media can become either crucibles of knowledge or cesspools of malarkey, depending on their incentive structure.

• We are a species that has been endowed with an elementary faculty of reason and that has discovered formulas and institutions that magnify its scope. They awaken us to ideas and expose us to realities that confound our intuitions but are true for all that.

Comments

This was always going to be a fine book, the great writer on a subject he teaches and is passionate about. The book draws on Pinker’s Harvard lectures on rationality to set out for the general reader the role of rationality, some central techniques and some pitfalls.  As expected, the whole book is clear, engaging, balanced and valuable.  A highlight for me was the discussion of rational and mythological mindsets.

NOTES

Preface

Rationality ought to be the lodestar for everything we think and do. (If you disagree, are your objections rational?) Yet in an era blessed with unprecedented resources for reasoning, the public sphere is infested with fake news, quack cures, conspiracy theories, and “post – truth” rhetoric.

Though the problems are daunting, solutions exist, and our species has the intellectual wherewithal to find them. Yet among our fiercest problems today is convincing people to accept the solutions when we do find them.

As a cognitive scientist I cannot accept the cynical view that the human brain is a basket of delusions. Hunter-gatherers — our ancestors and contemporaries — are not nervous rabbits but cerebral problem solvers.

We’re so smart: smart enough to have discovered the laws of nature, transformed the planet, lengthened and enriched our lives, and, not least, articulated the rules of rationality that we so often flout.

This book grew out of a course I taught at Harvard which explored the nature of rationality and the puzzle of why it seems to be so scarce. Like many psychologists, I love to teach the arresting, Nobel Prize–winning discoveries of the infirmities that afflict human reason, and consider them to be among the deepest gifts to knowledge that our science has contributed.

The benchmarks of rationality that people so often fail to measure up should be a goal of education and popular science. Just as citizens should grasp the basics of history, science, and the written word, they should command the intellectual tools of sound reasoning. These include logic, critical thinking, probability, correlation and causation, the optimal ways to adjust our beliefs and commit to decisions with uncertain evidence.

The yardsticks for making rational choices alone and with others.

The distinction between two modes of believing: the reality mindset and the mythology mindset.

Though it may seem paradoxical to lay out rational arguments for rationality itself, it’s a timely assignment. Some people pursue the opposite paradox, citing reasons (presumably rational ones, or why should we listen?) that rationality is overrated, such as that logical personalities are joyless and repressed, analytical thinking must be subordinated to social justice, and a good heart and reliable gut are surer routes to well-being than tough-minded logic and argument. Many act as if rationality is obsolete.

In an era in which rationality seems both more threatened and more essential than ever, Rationality is, above all, an affirmation of rationality.

1. How Rational an Animal?

The cognitive wherewithal to understand the world and bend it to our advantage is not a trophy of Western civilization; it’s the patrimony of our species.

The San of the Kalahari Desert.  They reason their way from fragmentary data to remote conclusions

More Homer Simpson than Mr. Spock

But evolutionary psychologists, mindful of the ingenuity of foraging peoples, insist that humans evolved to occupy the “cognitive niche”: the ability to outsmart nature with language, sociality, and know-how. If contemporary humans seem irrational, don’t blame the hunter-gatherers.

It is a kit of cognitive tools that can attain particular goals in particular worlds.

To understand what rationality is, why it seems scarce, and why it matters, we must begin with the ground truths of rationality itself: the ways an intelligent agent ought to reason, given its goals and the world in which it lives. These “normative” models come from logic, philosophy, mathematics, and artificial intelligence, and they are our best understanding of the “correct” solution to a problem and how to find it. They serve as an aspiration for those who want to be rational, which should mean everyone. A major goal of this book is to explain the most widely applicable normative tools of reason.

The many ways in which ordinary people fall short of these benchmarks have become famous through the Nobel Prize–winning research of Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky, and other psychologists and behavioural economists.

In many cases there is a method to people’s madness.  A problem may have been presented to them in a deceptive format,  The normative model may itself be correct only in a particular environment, and people accurately sense that they are not in that one. The model may be designed to bring about a certain goal, and, for better or worse, people are after a different one. 

Some of today’s florid outbursts of irrationality may be understood as the rational pursuit of goals other than an objective understanding of the world.

Though explanations of irrationality may absolve people of the charge of outright stupidity, to understand is not to forgive.

Three Simple Math Problems

The lesson of the Cognitive Reflection Test is that blunders of reasoning may come from thoughtlessness rather than ineptitude.

Human intuition doesn’t grasp exponential (geometric) growth.

A Simple Logic Problem

How can humans make it through the day with an inability to apply the most elementary rule of logic? Part of the answer is that the selection task is a peculiar challenge.

Bake together the content relevant to the problem with the rules of logic

Augment the ecological rationality we are born and grow up with — our horse sense, our street smarts — with the broader-spectrum and more potent tools of reasoning perfected by our best thinkers

A Simple Probability Problem

Let’s Make a Deal.  Something about the Monty Hall dilemma is designed to bring out the stupid in our System 1. But in this case System 2 is not much brighter.

The easier something is to visualize, the likelier it seems.

The conjunction fallacy, in which a conjunction is more intuitively probable than either of its elements. “The Linda problem”:

The Moral from Cognitive Illusions

They lead to incorrect answers, yes, but they are often correct answers to different and more useful questions.

Excellent as our cognitive systems are, in the modern world we must know when to discount them and turn our reasoning over to instruments — the tools of logic, probability, and critical thinking that extend our powers of reason beyond what nature gave us.

2. Rationality and Irrationality

Rationality is uncool. Postmodernism and critical theory (not to be confused with critical thinking) hold that reason, truth, and objectivity are social constructions that justify the privilege of dominant groups.

“The ability to use knowledge to attain goals.”

A rational agent must have a goal, whether it is to ascertain the truth of a noteworthy idea, called theoretical reason, or to bring about a noteworthy outcome in the world, called practical reason (“what is true” and “what to do”)

William James. With the filings the path is fixed; whether it reaches the end depends on accidents. With the lover it is the end which is fixed; the path may be modified indefinitely.

With this definition the case for rationality seems all too obvious: do you want things or don’t you? If you do, rationality is what allows you to get them.

The recent cliché that we’re living in a “post-truth era” cannot be true. If it were true, then it would not be true,

Nagel in The Last Word.  Perfect rationality and objective truth are aspirations that no mortal can ever claim to have attained. But the conviction that they are out their licenses us to develop rules we can all abide by that allow us to approach the truth collectively in ways that are impossible for any of us individually.

The rules are designed to sideline the biases that get in the way of rationality:

Another reassurance that reason is valid is that it works.

Rationality rejecters can refuse to play the game.

In democracies the force is less brutish, but people still find means to impose a belief rather than argue for it. ‘Shut up, he explained.’  Counter you with force rather than argument.

A higher-order rationality that tells us when it can be rational to be irrational.

Hume was making the logical point that reason is the means to an end, and cannot tell you what the end should be.

One of our goals can be incompatible with the others. Our goal at one time can be incompatible with our goals at other times. And one person’s goals can be incompatible with others.

We call the first two applications of reason “wisdom” and the third one “morality.”

Conflicts among Goals

Evolutionary psychologists call these motives “proximate,” meaning that they enter into our conscious experience, and we deliberately try to carry them out. They can be contrasted with the “ultimate” motives of survival and reproduction.

Which are the figurative goals of our genes

When we say someone’s acting emotionally or irrationally, we’re often alluding to bad choices in these tradeoffs.

Conflicts among Time Frames

Life is a never-ending gantlet of marshmallow tests,

“That’s a problem for future Homer. Man, I don’t envy that guy.”

Social discounting rate. A rate of 0.1 percent, which reflects only the chance we’ll go extinct, means that we value future generations almost as much as ourselves and calls for investing the lion’s share of our current income to boost the well-being of our descendants. A rate of 3 percent, which assumes growing knowledge and prosperity, calls for deferring most of the sacrifice to generations that can better afford it. Hyperbolic.

Odyssean self-control.  Libertarian paternalism. “Choice architecture” Rational ignorance. madman strategy, Taboo

Moral convictions would seem to depend on nonrational preferences

Moral statements indeed must be distinguished from logical and empirical ones. Philosophers in the first half of the twentieth century took Hume’s argument seriously and struggled with what moral statements could possibly mean if they are not about logic or empirical fact.

When you combine self-interest and sociality with impartiality — the interchangeability of perspectives — you get the core of morality.

And that is the power of reason: it can reason about itself.

3. Logic and Critical Thinking

The chapter is about logic, not in the loose sense of rationality itself but in the technical sense of inferring true statements (conclusions) from other true statements (premises).

Logic is called “formal” because it deals not with the contents of statements but with their forms

Affirming the consequent: “IF P THEN Q. Q. Therefore, P. ”

Denying the antecedent: “IF P THEN Q. NOT P. Therefore, NOT Q.”

No true Scotsman

Begging the question

the informal fallacy of assuming what you’re trying to prove.

While it may not be true that “the majority is always wrong,” it certainly is not always right

Arguing ad hominem, against the person.

Many facts, of course, are hurtful: the racial history of the United States, global warming, a cancer diagnosis, Donald Trump. Yet they are facts for all that, and we must know them, the better to deal with them.

Formal and informal fallacies waiting to entrap us (Wikipedia lists more than a hundred),

Logical versus Empirical Truths

Formal versus Ecological Rationality

Philosophy professors who present students with contrived thought experiments, like whether it is permissible to throw a fat man over a bridge to stop a runaway trolley which threatens five workers on the track, often get frustrated when students look for loopholes, like shouting at the workers to get out of the way. Yet that is exactly the rational thing one would do in real life.

Classical versus Family Resemblance Categories

A third reason that rationality will never be reduced to logic

Logical Computation versus Pattern Association

“hidden” layer of neurons between the input and the output, as shown on the next page. This changes the network from a stimulus-response creature to one with internal representations — concepts.

The networks are called deep learning systems because of the number of layers between the input and the output

Human rationality is a hybrid system.

4. Probability and Randomness

Time and chance happen to them all. An essential part of rationality is dealing with randomness in our lives and uncertainty in our knowledge.

“Random” in common parlance refers to two concepts: a lack of patterning in data, and a lack of predictability in a process.

Brevity is the soul of pattern: we say that a dataset is nonrandom when its shortest possible description is shorter than the dataset itself.

This credence estimate is sometimes called the Bayesian interpretation of probability

Frequentist

Availability heuristic.

Data came to be considered a public good.

Communal outrage.  Victim narrative: a moralized allegory in which a harmful act is sanctified, the damage consecrated. The goal of the narrative is not accuracy but solidarity.

People avidly consume data in the weather, business, and sports pages, so why not the news?

Crib deaths within a family are not independent,

Conditional probability: prob (A | B).

Boy or Girl paradox. People tend to say 0.5; the correct answer is 0.33.

“Did you see that poor disabled guy?  “Yeah, but his tailor is a genius — the suit fits him perfectly!”

The psychoanalyst Carl Jung proposed a mystical force called synchronicity to explain the quintessential thing that needs no explanation, the prevalence of coincidence in the world.

post hoc hanky-panky.

The cluster illusion.  If 23 people are in a room, the chances that two will share a birthday are better than even. With 57 in the room, the odds rise to 99 percent.

When a series of plagues is visited upon us, it does not mean there is a God who is punishing us for our sins or testing our faith. It means there is not a God who is spacing them apart.

5. Beliefs and Evidence: (Bayesian Reasoning)

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

“Rationality Community”

Suppose that the prevalence of breast cancer in the population of women is 1 percent. Suppose that the sensitivity of a breast cancer test (its true-positive rate) is 90 percent. Suppose that its false-positive rate is 9 percent. A woman tests positive. What is the chance that she has the disease? The most popular answer from a sample of doctors given these numbers ranged from 80 to 90 percent. Bayes’s rule allows you to calculate the correct answer: 9 percent.

posterior probability.  prior probability. likelihood. commonness or ordinariness of the data.

She is representative of an art history major, and the stereotype crowds out the base rates.

Bayesian updating.

It’s simply the mindset of someone who wasn’t born yesterday.

The reason these studies were sitting ducks for the replicability snipers is that they had low Bayesian priors. Not as low as ESP, to be sure, but it would be an extraordinary discovery if mood and behaviour could be easily pushed around by trivial manipulations of the environment.

The problem is that “surprising” is a synonym for “low prior probability,”

Forbidding the use of ethnic, sexual, racial, or religious base rates is a public commitment to equality and fairness

Failure to think clearly about base rates — to lay out when there are good reasons for forbidding them and when there are not.

The problem is: which base rate?

Fluency in Bayesian reasoning and other forms of statistical competence is a public good that should be a priority in education.

The principles of cognitive psychology suggest that it’s better to work with the rationality people have and enhance it further.

6. Risk and Reward: (Rational Choice and Expected Utility)

Everyone complains about his memory, and no one complains about his judgment.

John von Neumann

Theory of what makes choices consistent with the chooser’s values

Commensurability

Transitivity

Closure

The theory of rational choice is a theory of decision making with known unknowns: with risk, not necessarily uncertainty.

Consolidation.

Decider faced with a series of risky choices works out the overall risk according to the laws of probability

Independence

If you prefer A to B, then you also prefer a lottery with A and C as the payouts to a lottery with B and C as the payouts

Consistency: if you prefer A to B, then you prefer a gamble in which you have some chance at getting A, your first choice, and otherwise get B, to the certainty of settling for B.

To meet these criteria for rationality, the decider must assess the value of each outcome on a continuous scale of desirability, multiply by its probability, and add them up, yielding the “expected utility” of that option. (In this context, expected means “on average, in the long run,” not “anticipated,” and utility means “preferable by the lights of the decider”

A rational chooser is a utility maximizer

Utility is not the same as self-interest; it’s whatever scale of value a rational decider consistently maximizes.

bounded rationality

satisfice

Whether a choice driven by these emotions is “rational” depends on whether you think that emotions are natural responses we should respect, like eating and staying warm, or evolutionary nuisances our rational powers should override.

emotions triggered by possibility and certainty

Prospect theory.

the negative pole, death is not just something that really, really sucks. It’s game over,

with no chance to play again, a singularity that makes all calculations of utility moot.

We do always want to keep our choices consistent with our values. That’s all that the theory of expected utility can deliver, and it’s a consistency we should not take for granted.

Suspect there are countless decisions in life where if we did multiply the risks by the

rewards we would choose more wisely.

Doesn’t take a lot of math to show that the expected utility of ovarian cancer screening is negative.

How many people have ruined their lives by taking a gamble with a large chance at a small gain and a small chance at a catastrophic loss.

How many lonely singles forgo the small chance of a lifetime of happiness with a soul mate because they think only of the large chance of a tedious coffee with a bore?

Betting your life: Have you ever saved a minute on the road by driving over the speed limit, or indulged your impatience by checking your new texts while crossing the street? If you weighed the benefits against the chance of an accident multiplied by the price you put on your life, which way would it go? And if you don’t think this way, can you call yourself rational?

7. Hits and False Alarms: (Signal Detection and Statistical Decision Theory)

The output of statistical decision theory is not a degree of credence but an actionable decision: to have surgery or not, to convict or acquit.

Our moral aspirations for justice outstrip our probative powers.

8. Self and Others (Games Theory)  

Game Theory: the analysis of rational choice when dependent on choices of others. 

Rock-paper-stone, Volunteer’s Dilemma, Rendezvous, Chicken, Prisoner’s Dilemma, Public Goods games.

Reactive attitudes equip us for games.

9. Correlation and Causation

 A correlation is the dependence of the value of one variable on another.

Regression to the mean.  Winner’s curse.

 Causation as constant conjunction, counterfactual, mechanism. Events are embedded in a network of causes and conditions.

A randomized experiment is the closest we can come to creating the counterfactual world that is the acid test for causation. Experiments of nature.

Multiple regression.

Events have more than one cause, all of them statistical. The idea seems elementary, but it’s regularly flouted in public discourse.

A few simple concepts from statistics can make everyone smarter. The revelatory concepts are main effect and interaction.

Clinical v acuarial judgement

10. What’s Wrong with People?

As soon as I mention the topic of rationality, people ask me why humanity appears to be losing its mind. At the time of this writing, a glorious milestone in the history of rationality is coming into view: vaccines likely to end a deadly plague are being administered less than a year after the plague emerged. Yet in that same year, the Covid-19 pandemic set off a carnival of cockamamie conspiracy theories.

Yet nothing from the cognitive psychology lab could have predicted QAnon, nor are its adherents likely to be disabused by a tutorial in logic or probability.

A second unpromising lead is to blame today’s irrationality on the current scapegoat for everything, social media.

To understand popular delusions and the madness of crowds, we have to examine cognitive faculties that work well in some environments and for some purposes but that go awry when applied at scale, in novel circumstances, or in the service of other goals.

Motivated Reasoning

The time-honoured method to head off a line of reasoning before it arrives at an unwanted destination is to derail the reasoner by brute force. But there are fewer crude methods that exploit the inevitable uncertainties surrounding any issue and steer the argument in a favored direction with sophistry, spin-doctoring, and the other parts of persuasion.

Rather be right than get it right.

The Myside Bias

The myside bias is only too replicable.

Recent flip-flops in which side supports which cause, such as immigration, trade, and sympathy for Russia, suggests that the political sides have become sociocultural tribes rather than coherent ideologies.

Religious sects, which are held together by faith in their moral superiority and contempt for opposing sects.

Gerrymandering and other geographic distortions of political representation, which incentivize politicians to cater to cliques rather than coalitions.

Could the myside bias possibly be rational? There is a Bayesian argument that one ought to weigh new evidence against the totality of one’s prior beliefs rather than taking every new study at face value.

Expressive rationality.

Unfortunately, what’s rational for each of us seeking acceptance in a clique is not so rational for all of us in a democracy seeking the best understanding of the world. Our problem is that we are trapped in a Tragedy of the Rationality Commons.

Two Kinds of Belief: Reality and Mythology

People divide their worlds into two zones.

The reality mindset.

The other zone is the world beyond immediate experience:

People may entertain notions about what happens in these zones, but they have no way of finding out, and anyway it makes no discernible difference to their lives. Beliefs in these zones are narratives, which may be entertaining or inspiring or morally edifying. Whether they are literally “true” or “false” is the wrong question. The function of these beliefs is to construct a social reality that binds the tribe or sect and gives it a moral purpose. Call it the mythology mindset.

Bertrand Russell famously said, “It is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatsoever for supposing it is true.” The key to understanding rampant irrationality is to recognize that Russell’s statement is not a truism but a revolutionary manifesto. For most of human history and prehistory, there were no grounds for supposing that propositions about remote worlds were true. But beliefs about them could be empowering or inspirational, and that made them desirable enough.

Russell’s maxim is the luxury of a technologically advanced society

We children of the Enlightenment embrace the radical creed of universal realism: we hold that all our beliefs should fall within the reality mindset.

But as desirable as that creed is, it is not the natural human way of believing. In granting an imperialistic mandate to the reality mindset to conquer the universe of belief and push mythology to the margins, we are the weird ones.

The human mind is adapted to understanding remote spheres of existence through a mythology mindset.

Submitting all of one’s beliefs to the trials of reason and evidence is an unnatural skill, like literacy and numeracy, and must be instilled and cultivated.

The mythology mindset still occupies swaths of territory in the landscape of mainstream belief. The obvious example is religion.

Thankfully, Western religious belief is safely parked in the mythology zone,

Believers in belief

Belief in God is an idea that falls outside the sphere of testable reality.

Another zone of mainstream unreality is the national myth.

Since the Enlightenment, the tides in the modern West have eroded the mythology zone, a historical shift that the sociologist Max Weber called “the disenchantment of the world.” But there are always skirmishes at the borders. The brazen lies and conspiracies of Trumpian post-truth can be seen as an attempt to claim political discourse for the land of mythology rather than the land of reality. Like the plots of legends, scripture, and drama, they are a kind of theater; whether they are probably true or false is beside the point.

The Psychology of Apocrypha

dualists,

intuitive essentialists,

intuitive teleologists.

A scientific education is supposed to stifle these primitive intuitions, but for several reasons its reach is limited.

Foundational principles, such as that the universe has no goals related to human concerns, that all physical interactions are governed by a few fundamental forces, that living bodies are intricate molecular machines, and that the mind is the information-processing activity of the brain, are never articulated, perhaps because they would seem to insult religious and moral sensibilities.

Conspiracy theories, by their very nature, are adapted to be spread.

Reaffirming Rationality

But for all the vulnerabilities of human reason, our picture of the future need not be a bot tweeting fake news forever. The arc of knowledge is a long one, and it bends toward rationality.

Cluster of good cognitive habits, which Stanovich calls the Rationality Quotient

We are not helpless against the onslaught of “post-truth” disinformation. Though lying is as old as language, so are defenses against being lied to.

Since no one can know everything, and most people know almost nothing, rationality consists of outsourcing knowledge to institutions that specialize in creating and sharing it,

Rationality should be the fourth R, together with reading, writing, and arithmetic.

The media can become either crucibles of knowledge or cesspools of malarkey, depending on their incentive structure. Wikipedia.

Impartiality the core of rationality: a reconciliation of our biased and incomplete notions into an understanding of reality that transcends any one of us. Rationality, then, is not just a cognitive virtue but a moral one.

11. Why Rationality Matters

We are a species that has been endowed with an elementary faculty of reason and that has discovered formulas and institutions that magnify its scope. They awaken us to ideas and expose us to realities that confound our intuitions but are true for all that.