Reasoning, and What It Is To Be Rational (2000)
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This adds a different perspective to the example of the American football game. If the value context is purely winning the game, then it is rational not to make the kick. However, the value context is actually a lot larger and more nebulous than that; it's some combination of the students' well-being, the college's reputation, the crowd's entertainment and a bunch of other stuff.
Before asserting that someone is being irrational, it's always worth thinking about their value context.
Edit: Just remembered that of course Hume already understood this very well. "Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them."
Blegh. Neuroscientifically, "the passions" are just reasoning about your bodily and mental well-being. It can be reasoning better or worse, since "perception is unconscious inference" as Helmholtz put it, but these things largely amount to the same problem being posed with respect to different datasets.
The author either made a typo (intended billion rather than million) or doesn't understand probability. The second case is on average going to lose you money. The expected return from getting $1,000,000 1 in 400 times is only $2,500. So betting $50,000 will on average lose you a lot of money.
Anyway, can you even talk about "expected return" on independent events like these? There is no expectation of you winning, ever, in either scenarios.
Indeed odds of winning are technically "better". But if I gave you the opportunity of getting $1,000,000 99/100 times for the cost of $1,000,000 I don't think anyone would say those odds are better than 1:400.
> Anyway, can you even talk about "expected return" on independent events like these?
Technically, I used the wrong term. I meant "expected value" which is `probability of winning * value of winning`. However, you definitely can use "expected return" to talk about singular events if there are known probabilities involved.
> There is no expectation of you winning, ever, in either scenarios.
Surely you expect to win occasionally (namely 1 out of 500 times or 1 out of 400 times). If you had no expectation of winning, there would be no point; it would just be lost money.
Just that "expected" sounds like there's a certainty about it. If I lose 100 times in a lottery with 1:500 odds, it does not mean my odds have now improved to 1:400. Playing the lottery 500 times does not give you expected return of 1, the odds are the same 1:500 in every round.
It does seem give a sense of certainty, but is not how "expect" is used in probability. The expected value is just the average value per attempt as converges as attempts approaches infinity. So its a useful measure of a distribution (which can be used to make informed gambling decisions), but shouldn't be used to make a prediction on any single attempt.
The example doesn't support that point very well because the expected value of making that bet is negative, so the bet would not make sense even in the naive case, where all dollars have equal utility.
edit: You can downvote all you want, but it still doesn't make sense to consider the expected return on one item in isolation. If you disagree, provide a reason.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MajyZJrsf8fAywWgY/a-lesswron...
A large number of people in this community regretted failing to invest in cryptocurrency, despite being the perfect group of people to recognize the spectacular potential payoff of the decision.
> Being reasonable means holding beliefs and views for which (1) one can give true or probable evidence that (2) actually (or sufficiently and relevantly) supports them.
That's a definition of "rational", not "reasonable". Even the <title> tag of the page says "What it is to be rational", not "what it is to be reasonable".
The author seems to be opposed to any commonly accepted definition of "reasonable" that isn't reducible to "rational". But if everyone else looks like they're mistaken about what a word means, maybe you're the one who's using the word incorrectly.
Being "reasonable" is a fallback that we as a society endorse as a practical ideal, because we know that not everyone can be rational all the time. It'a vague and ambiguous concept because the goalpost moves depending on how rational the target group is typically expected to be in a given situation. This doesn't mean that we should throw away its nuances and replace it with the common denominator that is "rational". Many people believe that one can be reasonable without being fully rational, and vice versa. You can of course disagree with this proposition, but you can't just redefine a keyword to win the argument.
On a side note, I'd like to question the usefulness of using the term "reasonable" in contemporary philosophy. The problem is that "reasonable" is an evaluative predicate. In its everyday, non-technical use "being reasonable" certainly also involves conforming to social norms and expectations, which has barely anything to do with the quality of reasoning. Philosophers would be better served to use another term instead of playing with words inventing connections between "reason" and "being reasonable" when those words have deviated so much from each other over the past centuries. In contemporary English, "reasonable" does not primarily/by default mean "based on (good) reasons."
Also worth mentioning is that moral philosophers rarely give satisfying definitions of having a reason vs. there being a reason, there being reason (mass noun reading), reasonable vs. rational, justification, reasoning, and good vs. bad reason. Especially the last point is strange, since we're ultimately only interested in good reasons.
That being said, again, it's a nice and interesting article.
6 follows from 4 and 5 by modus tollens.
7 is just a rewording of 6. "any ... which causes harm" -> harmful and "more highly than, nor equal to," -> "less highly than"
10 indeed does not follow because no premise provides a way of assessing effects of one behavior on another. However the phrasing "if that preventive" simply is a conditional referencing the object described in the consequent, "whatever prevents the harm"
You're right, I didn't see that at first glance and stand corrected.
It could be that some current academics use the word that way. I would be surprised though, I don't know why they would prefer the ambiguous "reasonable" to the established and well-defined term "rational" (I don't think this is the same as asking physicists to stop using "energy"). It's even in the Wikipedia entry for "Reason" [1]:
> The meaning of the word "reason" in senses such as "human reason" also overlaps to a large extent with "rationality" and the adjective of "reason" in philosophical contexts is normally "rational", rather than "reasoned" or "reasonable".
[0] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/g28WWuaMLXNzAnR9v/rational-v...
No it isn't. It's not cited within any of the philosophical literature on rationality.
I missed that you were focusing on 'reasonable' in contrast to 'rational', though. Indeed, 'rational' is generally preferred in a philosophical context.
I've been leaning heavily towards the idea the "usefulness", broadly interpreted, is utterly paramount -- even in the world of abstract philosophy. It is perhaps second only to truth, but it is much easier to evaluate, and often an incredibly good proxy for truth anyways.
I've uploaded an example to Imgur [0] and I’d be happy to share all resources if anyone is interested.
Personally, I find reason to be the only way to find truth.
Mathematics isn't concerned with deciding the 'true' axioms, instead they explore what happens if you (say) grant/deny the axiom of choice.
Go write the essay if you've had fun realizations!
Which is to say that no one thinks they're irrational or unreasonable. But that's also part of the game. For many people the real game is social, not truth-finding, because that's where the real stakes are. I don't think people are explicitly aware of it, but they learned that this is the way the game is played because that's what everyone else is doing, frequently even the truth-finders. And again the real stakes are here, and anyway it comes more naturally to most people. The truth-finding game is hard and often has worse prizes.
Is this a matter of semantics? It's strange because, if a word's meaning comes from how it's used by most people, well what most people say and believe reasoning means and what they are actually doing when they say they are reasoning are different.
Sometimes the best way to go is pick a path and stick with it. That's why I had tacos and not sushi for lunch today.
e.g. If you think that tigers are woozles, ok. If you want to attribute woozles with subjective properties outside of a label, you're very likely going to die when you try to interact with them.
After being raised in a cult, this describes perfectly the members in such organizations. A cult is being rational in undermining the reasoning abilities of the members and indoctrinating them to use fake reasoning. And redefining words such as logic, reasoning, truth.
If the article is from 2000, the real reason was that smallpox had, by that point, been eradicated. According to wikipedia:
The last naturally occurring case was diagnosed in October 1977 and the World Health Organization certified the global eradication of the disease in 1980.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox
(Er. Graphic picture warning on that article).
The really "irrational" decisions, such as decisions based on altruism, can still be made even with complete knowledge and understanding of the full complexity of the issues that led to the decision.