I think it makes more sense to word this as “others are not remarkably more irrational than you are” rather than saying that disagreements are not caused by irrationality.
I think some of these cases aren’t irrationality at all, but difference in partial information. Belief trajectories are not path-independent: even just learning the same events in different order will lead you to updating differently. But there’s also irrationality involved (e.g. I’m very unconvinced about arguments against the gambler’s fallacy when there are people who express it in so many words all the time), it just shouldn’t be your go to explanation to dismiss everyone else but yourself.
Yep, I think this is the likely wording as well, since on a quick read, I suspect that what the research is showing isn’t that humans are rational, but rather that we simply can’t be rational in realistic situations due to resource starvation/resource scarcity issues.
Note, that doesn’t mean it’s easy or possible at all to fix the problem of irrationality, but I might agree with “others are not remarkably more irrational than you are.”
I think it depends a bit on what we mean by “rational”. But it’s standard to define as “doing the best you CAN, to get to the truth (or, in the case of practical rationality, to get what you want)”. We want to put the “can” proviso in there so that we don’t say people are irrational for failing to be omniscient. But once we put it in there, things like resource-constraints look a lot like constraints on what you CAN do, and therefore make less-ideal performance rational.
That’s controversial, of course, but I do think there’s a case to be made that (at least some) “resource-rational” theories ARE ones on which people are being rational.
I think it makes more sense to word this as “others are not remarkably more irrational than you are” rather than saying that disagreements are not caused by irrationality.
I think some of these cases aren’t irrationality at all, but difference in partial information. Belief trajectories are not path-independent: even just learning the same events in different order will lead you to updating differently. But there’s also irrationality involved (e.g. I’m very unconvinced about arguments against the gambler’s fallacy when there are people who express it in so many words all the time), it just shouldn’t be your go to explanation to dismiss everyone else but yourself.
Yep, I think this is the likely wording as well, since on a quick read, I suspect that what the research is showing isn’t that humans are rational, but rather that we simply can’t be rational in realistic situations due to resource starvation/resource scarcity issues.
Note, that doesn’t mean it’s easy or possible at all to fix the problem of irrationality, but I might agree with “others are not remarkably more irrational than you are.”
I think it depends a bit on what we mean by “rational”. But it’s standard to define as “doing the best you CAN, to get to the truth (or, in the case of practical rationality, to get what you want)”. We want to put the “can” proviso in there so that we don’t say people are irrational for failing to be omniscient. But once we put it in there, things like resource-constraints look a lot like constraints on what you CAN do, and therefore make less-ideal performance rational.
That’s controversial, of course, but I do think there’s a case to be made that (at least some) “resource-rational” theories ARE ones on which people are being rational.