Looks like rain all day, so time for another. I’ll skip to episode 41. 40 was titled “the religion of no religion”, but that turned out to be a bit of a bust. 41 discussed something that I am very interested in, but it’s not something you can talk about openly. That is, are most people just incredibly irrational, and likewise stupid, and is there any way a few smart, rational people can deal with them? This post puts some science to that, speaking generally about our brains and history, so it’s not offensive to those stupid irrational people that we all know are out there.
We know there are standards of rationality, but we know that even those who can list them fail to meet them. Is it competence or performance? We can identify incompetence in extreme cases, like brain damage, but what about those who are well versed in logic, but not wise. This is the problem of science of denial, where people are legitimately afraid of the man who can make an atomic bomb, but doesn’t know how to NOT use it.
CC, you’ll be glad to know that the only reference to DesCartes is, “he’s wrong”. But, science shows rationality doesn’t automatically come from intelligence either. As we see here in CFI, it can be hard to sort out when someone misunderstands vs when they are using fallacious reasoning for their conclusion. Vervaeke’s theme in this series is that we need to look at how we size up problems. We can use science, but that only works in a narrow, controlled, environment. If we tried to approach our daily problems scientifically, we would be stuck considering every angle, and we would fail in the daily acts of problem solving. So, that’s NOT rational.
This session ends with learning to be “actively open minded”. But the series isn’t over, it’s not some final solution. It’s grounded in Stoicism and CBT therapy, so it’s not some wild new idea Vervaeke invented. For me, becoming aware of my confirmation biases was a first step in losing my old belief system. Being curious, and just letting myself wonder about all of the amazing stuff out there, is also part of it. And, don’t forget, question your worldview, all the time. Although that gets back to picking an approach like science and trying to apply it to everything, constantly questioning everything would result in daily failures too. So, it becomes more about practices and less about rules and laws and data.