With the core of rationalism being built from provable patterns of human irrationality, I wonder what “irrationalist” philosophy and behavior would look like.
What conclusions would follow from treating the human capacity for rational thought and behavior with the importance or mere obviousness more traditionally poured into attempting to understand and resolve our “irrationalities”?
There’s the side from which the expected results look so obvious (“chaos, duh”) that they don’t seem worth thinking about. It’s the boring one. There are others.
Part of the value of rational thought comes from its verifiability and replicability across many minds and eras. But that’s not a proof that no thought which fails to verify, fails to replicate, is certain to be without value.
(swap in whatever comparable term suits you for ‘value’ in that—I’ve tried playing the whack-a-mole of tabooing each term in turn which slips into that conceptual void, and concluded that having some linguistic placeholder there seems load-bearing for communication).
I think at its most interesting it looks like encrypting your actions and thought processes so that they look like noise or chaos to outside observers.
I think that’s definitely an aspect of the interesting side: effective encryption relies on deep understanding of how well the opponent can break the encryption. It needs to be strong enough to seem certain it won’t be broken in a reasonable timeframe, but that balances against being fast enough to encrypt/decrypt so it’s practical to use.
The encryption metaphor also highlights a side of rationality as rendering one’s thoughts and actions maximally legible to observers, which strikes me as being true in some ways and interestingly limited in others.
With the core of rationalism being built from provable patterns of human irrationality, I wonder what “irrationalist” philosophy and behavior would look like.
What conclusions would follow from treating the human capacity for rational thought and behavior with the importance or mere obviousness more traditionally poured into attempting to understand and resolve our “irrationalities”?
There’s the side from which the expected results look so obvious (“chaos, duh”) that they don’t seem worth thinking about. It’s the boring one. There are others.
Part of the value of rational thought comes from its verifiability and replicability across many minds and eras. But that’s not a proof that no thought which fails to verify, fails to replicate, is certain to be without value.
(swap in whatever comparable term suits you for ‘value’ in that—I’ve tried playing the whack-a-mole of tabooing each term in turn which slips into that conceptual void, and concluded that having some linguistic placeholder there seems load-bearing for communication).
I think at its most interesting it looks like encrypting your actions and thought processes so that they look like noise or chaos to outside observers.
I think that’s definitely an aspect of the interesting side: effective encryption relies on deep understanding of how well the opponent can break the encryption. It needs to be strong enough to seem certain it won’t be broken in a reasonable timeframe, but that balances against being fast enough to encrypt/decrypt so it’s practical to use.
The encryption metaphor also highlights a side of rationality as rendering one’s thoughts and actions maximally legible to observers, which strikes me as being true in some ways and interestingly limited in others.