It is kind of a meme that people learn about rationality and then observe how irrational everyone else is . It is a lot easier to observe others’ irrationality than your own. But probably one’s own irrationality is more important.
1. So, work on your own irrationality first before focusing on others’ limitations.
2. As for dealing with other people’s irrationality, see (1).
3. Finally, people are going to do what they want to do. With some very rare people you can introduce them to rationality things and they might change. With most, they cannot or don’t want to be rational. This is the reality that you need to rationally deal with.
4. Also be aware that full rationality is not possible. This in the sense that you cannot do all the calculations needed to behave totally rationally. You need to employ all sorts of heuristics and short cuts. My computational capacity is limited, also my memory. Gathering data is costly. Time is short. So tolerate other people who deal with this in ways you might not prefer.
It is kind of a meme that people learn about rationality and then observe how irrational everyone else is . It is a lot easier to observe others’ irrationality than your own. But probably one’s own irrationality is more important.
I’ve just felt how much this is true by thinking about some of the answers I got.
There really is a huge difference between just “knowing” something (I’d have knew this even before being told in these replies) and actually realising that I was making stupid mistakes in how I thought about this very subject.
I would have agreed to point 1. and 2. right away, and I wrote this question with 3. firmly in mind, so I thought I was being really rational about all this issue, since I actually knew I was just supposed to search for a way to solve the way I felt about it and not magically expecting people to change overnight, and I still had overlooked a mistake I was making about how I thought about “dumb people” that was causing most of my negative feelings.
About 4, heuristics, shortcuts and not wanting to think about something were all thing I understood and tolerated in other people.
I felt angry when
1) facing the sheer, total lack of judgement that some people show in areas where I felt they should at least try to have some, and
2) facing the more questionable approaches to finding truth that supposedly smart experts use while talking about stuff they are thought to know. The kind of stuff you find in magic theories and psychoanalysis, only that apparently it has been creeping into all types of humanistic modern fields, and when before I could just vaguely recognise that something was just wrong with how they reached a conclusion, as soon as I finished reading about reductionism and all useful parts of cognition having to be Bayesian at some level, I could suddenly give that a name, and understand exactly what they were doing wrong and put it into words, so I got suddenly a lot more annoyed at them, as if it was the mistake that had just gotten dumber rather than me getting smarter.
It is kind of a meme that people learn about rationality and then observe how irrational everyone else is . It is a lot easier to observe others’ irrationality than your own. But probably one’s own irrationality is more important.
1. So, work on your own irrationality first before focusing on others’ limitations.
2. As for dealing with other people’s irrationality, see (1).
3. Finally, people are going to do what they want to do. With some very rare people you can introduce them to rationality things and they might change. With most, they cannot or don’t want to be rational. This is the reality that you need to rationally deal with.
4. Also be aware that full rationality is not possible. This in the sense that you cannot do all the calculations needed to behave totally rationally. You need to employ all sorts of heuristics and short cuts. My computational capacity is limited, also my memory. Gathering data is costly. Time is short. So tolerate other people who deal with this in ways you might not prefer.
I’ve just felt how much this is true by thinking about some of the answers I got.
There really is a huge difference between just “knowing” something (I’d have knew this even before being told in these replies) and actually realising that I was making stupid mistakes in how I thought about this very subject.
I would have agreed to point 1. and 2. right away, and I wrote this question with 3. firmly in mind, so I thought I was being really rational about all this issue, since I actually knew I was just supposed to search for a way to solve the way I felt about it and not magically expecting people to change overnight, and I still had overlooked a mistake I was making about how I thought about “dumb people” that was causing most of my negative feelings.
About 4, heuristics, shortcuts and not wanting to think about something were all thing I understood and tolerated in other people.
I felt angry when
1) facing the sheer, total lack of judgement that some people show in areas where I felt they should at least try to have some, and
2) facing the more questionable approaches to finding truth that supposedly smart experts use while talking about stuff they are thought to know. The kind of stuff you find in magic theories and psychoanalysis, only that apparently it has been creeping into all types of humanistic modern fields, and when before I could just vaguely recognise that something was just wrong with how they reached a conclusion, as soon as I finished reading about reductionism and all useful parts of cognition having to be Bayesian at some level, I could suddenly give that a name, and understand exactly what they were doing wrong and put it into words, so I got suddenly a lot more annoyed at them, as if it was the mistake that had just gotten dumber rather than me getting smarter.
I like how much your answer bears resemblance to advice on other subjects unrelated to rationality.