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Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

Like hell it isn't.

At the risk of going "no true scottsman", I hate this kind of anti-intellectual nonsense. The methods of science, engineering and rational reasoning are the best tools we have for solving world problems. They were literally invented for it. They're reified applied reasoning. You eschew them at your own peril.

Now of course to solve problems involving humans, you have to factor in the human element - the complexity of our individual emotions, and of the societal interplay. This is where a lot of attempts at solving problems fail, and it's appropriate to criticize that. But that doesn't give you a free pass to go by your gut in contexts our monkey brains have never experienced in the past. This means we need to double-down and carefully, rationally, find out what works and what doesn't.

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I don't think this essay is anti-intellectual at all. I think it is an exploration of the longstanding philosophical problem of trying to rationally design a world for irrational beings. The excerpt from Dillow on consequentialism brings to mind an idea from James Scott: that elites control policy discussions by limiting the accepted terms of the argument to legible, rationalizable factors - generally economic and technocratic variables visible from a top-down view. This can place serious limits on our access to the store of human knowledge embedded in emotion and practice. What we consider "irrational" impulses are sometimes the products of generations of evolutionary tuning that would seem to be feats of engineering brilliance if they came with the proper documentation. Meta-rationality includes exploring the bounds and the weaknesses of the tools in our contemporary rationalist arsenal, as well as searching under the couch cushions of irrationality for the occasional bit of value.

Thanks for the succinct account of irrational impulses, and for the James Scott ref. Can you recommend any particular book of his? My local library appears to have _Against the Grain_ on hand.

Against the Grain is great. I'm drawing upon Seeing Like A State and The Art of Not Being Governed.

>This is where a lot of attempts at solving problems fail

I think this is where a lot of attempts at defining problems fail. I don't think this has any impact on the validity of the scientific method of problem solving, once you've clearly defined your problem.

That too. Not much good comes from efficiently "solving" what turns out to not be the real problem. You have to start factoring in the human element at the very top, at the level of problem discovery and definition.

>The methods of science, engineering and rational reasoning are the best tools we have for solving world problems.

How do you feel about the fact that was is rational and irrational (indeed our whole meta-rational basis) has changed in time according not to new discoveries but merely the movement of the cultural zeitgeist[0]? What about the differences between instrumental reason (and rationality), technological rationality in which modern technology changes what we see as rational (see Marcuse) and rationality of ends, rather than just the means?

My point is that we can't simply say "rationality" as if it's a fixed tool we can use so easily, at least, we can't use it without also considering the current ideological context in which we are using it. Surely you admit there are different rationalities, such as economic rationality, which would seem to eschew any human factor that does not count towards profit efficiency?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eclipse_of_Reason_(Horkheimer)

The way I see it, rationality doesn't choose your values for you, the same way mathematical reasoning doesn't choose your axioms for you. It's not a fixed tool in a sense that we're still discovering its various methods, but it is a tool that should not depend on cultural context - because what works to achieve your goal or correctly predict consequences doesn't change even as your goal might.

Or, in other words, the principle of "garbage in, garbage out" applies.

Isn't rationality the principle of GIGO, though? Let's say I have a garbage idea, but my methods for acheiving it are rationally constructed - isn't this even a little problematic? Surely me must judge not only the means (and ignore any aspect of the goal) but to look and examine whether the goal is a good too.

But if your claim is that rationality is independent of culture (which, as I've already noted, is rubbish, since the idea of what is rational and irrational changes with cultural zeitgeist, unless you have some claim to objective rationality which I don't) then we can't use a static methods of rationality to judge the goodness of a particular goal, which is obviously context-dependent. So if not rationality, then what? I suggest critical thinking in place.

> Isn't rationality the principle of GIGO, though? Let's say I have a garbage idea, but my methods for acheiving it are rationally constructed - isn't this even a little problematic? Surely me must judge not only the means (and ignore any aspect of the goal) but to look and examine whether the goal is a good too.

That's what I was trying to say in my previous comment. Even if you execute rational reasoning perfectly, if you start with garbage input, you end up with garbage output. If you intrinsically value something horrible, e.g. murdering kittens, rationality isn't going to tell you to not do it; on the contrary, it'll suggest the most effective means of doing that.

> But if your claim is that rationality is independent of culture (which, as I've already noted, is rubbish, since the idea of what is rational and irrational changes with cultural zeitgeist, unless you have some claim to objective rationality which I don't)

I meant it in the same way in which 2+2=4 or F=ma are independent of culture. Of course the work of discovering rational reasoning was happening over long time, with important contributions in Ancient Greece and earlier. But we've only recently managed to get some good formal tools applicable to real-life problems of reasoning, namely probability theory.

> then we can't use a static methods of rationality to judge the goodness of a particular goal, which is obviously context-dependent. So if not rationality, then what? I suggest critical thinking in place.

What do you suggest this "critical thinking" is made of? As for judging the goodness of a particular goal - you can decompose that into parts that can be judged rationally on their effectiveness (and consistency), and parts that have to be judged morally.

You're a better person than me. Since you responded, I tried to read the OC. Word salad.

To your point, I now believe all design problems are human problems, which sometimes involve math and science.

I read Neal Postman's Technopoly and Donald Norman's Design of Everyday Things around the time I was figuring out that computers weren't delivering on their promises in the areas I care about (CAD for A/E/C, education), and in some cases made things worse. Validation for what I was experiencing, observing.

I credit Postman and Donald Norman for my conversion from technophile to humanist.

I don't have anything to say about rationality. I gave up (forfeited) after the 2016 USA elections.

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