Thank you for the reading suggestions! Perhaps my mind has already packaged Spock / lack of emotion into my understanding of the concept of ‘Rationality.’
To respond directly -
Your purely emotion / empathetic desire for altruism governs setting your goals, your pure rational thinking governs how you go about reaching your goals.
Though if pure emotion / altruism sets my goals, the possibility of irrational / insignificant goals remains, no? If for example, I only follow pure emotion’s path to… say… becoming an advocate for a community through politics, there is no ‘check’ on the rationality of pursuing a political career to achieve the most good (which again, is a goal that requires rational analysis)?
In HPMoR, characters are accused of being ‘ambitious with no ambition’ - setting my goals with empathetic desire for altruism would seem to put me in this camp.
Perhaps my goal, as I work my way through the sequences and the site, is to approach rationality as a tool / learning process of its own, and see how I can apply it to my life as I go. Halfway through typing this response, I found this quote from the Twelve Virtues of Rationality:
How can you improve your conception of rationality? Not by saying to yourself, “It is my duty to be rational.” By this you only enshrine your mistaken conception...Do not ask whether it is “the Way” to do this or that. Ask whether the sky is blue or green. If you speak overmuch of the Way you will not attain it.
Would you argue that there is some attribute that is fundamentally different between children growing up in the post WWII era and today (or any other era for that matter)? My very anecdotal evidence is that once any sort of division into groups occurs, children act in a matter very similar to the Ratters and Eagles. There was a gifted and talented program at my elementary school, which consisted of students from across the county who were bussed into the school and took classes seperately from other students. At the graduation pool party, an innocent slash contest escalated into a full out fight between over.. I’d say approximately 40 students, some of whom inflicted relatively significant injuries. Of course, in group bias had always existed throughout the school years, but violence associated with in group bias isn’t something that I feel would be atypical in children of different eras.