Hobo Monks, Essentialist Humans, and Pleasure

I don't believe anybody can be "in complete control" of ones self. That just is not in our nature.

Indeed, this is just a rhetorical turn of speech.

The information presented demonstrates that human beings often do not act rationally. But "people are not rational actors" isn't a causal explanation, it's just a description of a situation. Arguing against such an "explanation" makes no more sense than using such an explanation.

Or you could say that it is because people are rational actors, but that rationality is often itself irrational.

Reason is a useful and important skill, but reason is the manipulation of symbols that exist within our own minds, not autonomously in the external world. If we take reason for granted, apply it without recognizing its subjective nature, and consider its product to be objective knowledge of the world, then we are acting rationally, but it is irrational to do so.

Um, Did you read the article? Did you see how I praised Predictably Irrational? Or did you just jump at the opportunity to call me an evolutionary hack?

I challenge you to provide me with an example of a perfectly rational human actor. How might he live his life? Maybe a human can be rational within the confines of a specific problem-universe, i.e., any claims that he makes are logically derived from inherent axioms. But there are no axioms of "how to live" unless you're St Thomas Aquinas, but even his morality is suspect.

Okay, even if you say that Utility is not just $, but emotional payout, I will 100% agree that we're often irrational in our decision making; c.f. Dan Gilbert and Dan Ariely for more information. BUT IN THE CONTEXT I WAS REFERRING TO, preferring restaurant soup to a bedpan is not irrational because we give more emotional value to positive associated emotions and negative emotional value to the bedpan.

So cut it out.

I hear you about the confusion there. It's really just shoddy writing. One of my weaknesses as a writer, one that I just recently became explicitly aware of, is that when I write, I do it after stacking lots of "schemas": I understand A because of B, and understand B because of C, but many of my audience might only understand C, and I talk about A without first meeting them at C, graduating to B, and then stacking A. (In case you're interested, I'm planning on writing a cohesive post about this phenomenon soon).

Many of my claims are scientifically backed but I simply do not care enough to go through and cite them; I would like to but it's not a good use of my time at this point. If you are curious about a specific claim I am always happy to point you in the right direction of the research. Other claims are admittedly speculation and I almost always denote them as such. There is a storied history of philosophers engaging in thought experiments so dismissing my actions as part of some NEW pseudoscience born through the web is erroneous. Likely many of the things I discussed (such as the precise nature of memory encoding, storage, and recall) will not be unraveled in our time. But you may be pleased to know though that I have discussed several of these articles with academics and would've hesitated to publish if I'd got strong dissent.

P.S. The lesson is "Actions to achieve our goals are explicit, and prepackaged so we can directly execute on them." The text copy I was referring to was steps for the user to take. Thanks for the feedback.