Hacker News Reader

Comment by bakhy | Hacker News Reader

i think you missed my point, which was that these so called "cognitive failures" are really integral to what we are. rationalism is not generally wrong. improving your cognitive abilities should be a goal for everyone. but it tends to lead people to a worldview where simple humanity is deemed inferior, wrong, and where a person actually starts believing that they outgrew themselves and their humanity, that they are superior, objective, free of bias. this is an illusion, nobody is free of bias.

in fact, people who believe they successfully suppressed or outgrew any emotion are typically the ones most influenced by it, subconsciously.

View on HN

The rationalists I know in real life tend to be acutely aware that they are still biased in many ways, and would probably laugh at the sentence fragment "successfully suppressed or outgrew [an] emotion". Maybe we know completely different people who affiliate with the word "rationality".

Much like the Zen ideologies, there is no end state to being a rational human being. You can't just stop at one point and say "That's it, I'm perfectly rational now, therefore..."

Instead, it's more of an ongoing process. The process of identifying your biases and reasoning about them is on-going. You will always have biases, the trick is to make the subconscious influence conscious. To come back to the Zen comparison - the more rational you become, the more you realize you're not rational at all.

well said. i just feel it is something people easily say, but hardly put into practice.

i am being unfair, perhaps, as the other comment here states. i may be identifying some negative aspects in some people with a whole group that did not deserve it. but, OTOH, you two may be resorting to the "No True Scotsman" fallacy.

> you two may be resorting to the "No True Scotsman" fallacy.

That may be a fair statement, since I do not believe there is a perfectly rational person in the real world - just those who are working to fight against their inherit irrationality. All we can ever rationally (oh, the irony) expect is that they do their best.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com