This is a core concept in anthropology + ethnographic research: start with the assumption that a group of people are behaving rationally, suspend judgment, and figure out what the rationale is.
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Sometimes people are, in fact, "irrational"
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I actually first started thinking this way as a critical response to behavioral economics models. I think almost all of that is badly flawed. If you poke at their various “biases” you can usually find a Chesterton-Miller fence.
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Behavioural econ is like early 20th century positivist psychology trapped in amber. There’s an implicit assumption /conceit that the researcher is rational and everyone else isn’t, in a way every other branch of social science moved past fifty years ago.
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If you assume everyone is irrational, you build in an excuse for why any system you design doesn’t work + exhibits behaviour you can’t explain.
If you assume everyone is rational but you don’t yet understand their rationale, you can actually build understanding and compensate.
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Sure, one should start by assuming there is rationality of some sort at play; but one should also leave open the possibility that irrationality may, in fact, be at work.
As Larry Summers famously remarked about the foolishness of the EMH: "There are idiots. Look around."
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You’re slipping from ‘rational’ in one sense to ‘irrational’ in another. The latter is nearly always from the POV of an authoritarian. This is why it is so hard to persuade the subject they’re being irrational even with seemingly impeccable logic.
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I think these conversations suffer from deep diffs in such foundational things as the value of one’s own life and mental state in the implicit, unconscious cost function. If find it hilarious that we try to convince people of vaccine rationality when they believe in *religion*
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If your religious beliefs means a great deal to you and your sanity rests on it and life is intolerable without it, it’s rational to risk life to save belief.
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Basically I think people restless for societal change beyond the scope of personal agency willfully conflate knowledge of circumstances and revealed behavioral valuation of circumstances
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It is very rare for impasses to rest on simple lack of facts or the failure of one side to make an inference. In such cases persuasion is usually trivial. Like teaching within an otherwise trusted relationship.
The word “rationality” is kinda useless IMO. I prefer “logical” as a narrower adjective applied to arguments with no assumption made on the priors in the context shaping the valuation of the subjective inferences.
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2+2=4 is a logical inference within Peano arithmetic. It can fit within many subjectively rational patterns of reasoning, which may not be mutually commensurately even within different situational thinking patterns for 1 person. I don’t even expect individual consistency.
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