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Comment by crispyambulance | Hacker News Reader

I like the "The marriage of sense and reason" section.

There are so many "wrong-on-the-internet" folks who believe they're being rational, but in fact are merely cherry-picking whatever bits of reality (they use the word "facts") they understand, formulating their response only on that basis and ignoring everything else that isn't easy to observe, measure or reason about.

Being rational or objective is a very tall order. We are never _actually_ prepared to do that in real-life scenarios. It is only remotely feasible in the most stripped-down, simplified set-ups.

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My fave too.

I once read 3 pages of a self help book I received as a present.

It said, essentially, emotions happen for a reason. When you have a difficult emotion, go back to the root thought or observation that caused the emotion, and you’ll learn something important about yourself or your world.

Stopped reading because I wanted internalize that first. Never finished the book...

Being rational is separate from being objective. Please do not mix these terms to confuse people.

Typical way to attempt rationality is to follow a well defined algorithm to make a decision, with well defined inputs. Even if it is a simple as "sum these assigned numbers and pick highest option" it is more rational than the alternative.

You can quantify and tune your "gut" or estimation skills the same way as with any other. Remember and learn from both successes and mistakes, exercise the skill.

Most people learn only from representative instances which is actually irrational and a known human logic hole - representativeness heuristic. This means their gut feeling is relatively mistuned this making for bad decisions.

Asking just one simple question - how meaningful was it - is very effective to avoid the pitfall...

Emotions have more context than one would wish and not all of it obvious. This is what makes using this as decision input hard.

Similarly, quantification is separate from being rational.

In your simple example "sum these assigned numbers and pick the highest option," how did you assign those numbers? In most real life scenarios, qualities are difficult to quantify. If you start from questionable quantifications, as the saying goes, "garbage in, garbage out."

Often the rational thing to do is to acknowledge the nigh-impossibility of quantification (let alone combining those quantifications; what if the qualities interact in nonlinear ways?).

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