The TempleOS guy is a good reminder that being rational and being smart are on orthogonal dimensions.
I don't want to have kids. To many people this isn't considered rational. Some people want to be famous. To me this doesn't seem rational (it is not worth the tradeoffs).
As there are no universally held goals, the notion of rationality (as typically applied) only makes sense within one's own universe, the dimensions of which are mapped by one's own personally held axioms. Using the notion of irrationality as a judgement against others is equivalent to saying "this person should hold the same goals/values as I do." But the thing is, people have wildly different interests, and some people even disagree on the most common goals (such as staying alive). You can judge these people's value systems as being incorrect, but they don't have to listen to you.
Now, the notion of rational/irrational does make some degree of sense when someone is blocking their own goals through their own actions. Even then, people often have multiple competing goals which may disagree with one another, so what appears to be "irrationality" is merely different internal processes competing with one another to accomplish their respective goals. (This is the basis of the Internal Family Systems branch of psychology if you are interested.)
There is a weak connection between epistemic rationality and instrumental rationality: plans based on false beliefs are more likely to have undesired results. (This is why sometimes people lie in order to manipulate others' actions.) But often they don't.
I don't know if you can realistically derive an epistemic or instrumental orientation based on this short comment. That said, if the comment was referring to epistemic rationality, your point is taken.
Edit: given the broader context of Terry's apparent delusions about the world, you're probably right about this.
What I thought you said was that rationality is relative to goals, and that different people have different goals.
What I was trying to add to the discussion is that these goals are rational behaviors that arise from our value systems and beliefs. Different people can have different goals but the same beliefs, they might have more in common with each other than people with the same goals but different beliefs.
> Different people can have different goals but the same beliefs, they might have more in common with each other than people with the same goals but different beliefs.
OK, I see the distinction here. This is true. I'd further note that individual goals often come with sub-goals (conscious or not), and people with overlapping central goals often have disagreements over sub-goals.
This is a major problem in politics (the "narcissism of small differences"), and part of effective politics is getting people to ignore their own sub-goals in service of shared central goals. One may often feel more sympathy with an "outsider" who shares fewer actual concerns with you than with a neighbor who disagrees on specific implementations.
Edit: clarified a little more.
But this wasn't rational.
Although its a book on economics, Von Mesis's "Human Action" premise is that all human activity is necessarily 'rational' from the viewpoint of the actor. Moreover, the goal of "human activity" in general is to bring about a higher state of happiness. Even the refusal to perform an action, is in effect an 'action' who's goal is to increase happiness compared to the alternative.
A person who is convinced they are being hunted by aliens, so wraps their head in aluminum foil is behaving completely rational from their view (by increasing their happiness of not being tortured)...whether or not this is factual is a different issue.
Also he was mentally ill, his brain worked differently than normal. Rationality depends on perspective. He was probably acting with rationale according to his experiences.
It’s a reminder that we don’t understand the brain, or mental illness.
If you're smart, but irrational, then the things you do will exhibit 'interestingness' but won't be connectable to existing bodies of knowledge and understanding, i.e. out of the norm. You have to work harder to understand what's going on, to connect the dots between the elements.
In everybody's brain, thoughts are connected with each other because brains are organized to provide continuity of experience. Rationality concerns how well you can convey that continuity to others.
Philosophers and others distinguish different kinds of rationality – such as, theoretical rationality (rationality of one's beliefs) from practical rationality (rationality of one's actions). Instrumental rationality is the rationality of one's means given one's ends, which according to some philosophers (e.g. Humeans) exhausts practical rationality (putting one's choice of ends themselves beyond rational criticism), whereas others (e.g. Kantians, Thomists) believe that one's ends themselves can also be subject to rational judgement. Some philosophers want to reduce some of these types of rationality to others, something which other philosophers object to–on that topic see https://www.princeton.edu/~tkelly/erair.pdf
I don't really have an opinion on whether or to what extent Terry Davis was or wasn't rational. (I don't really feel qualified to have such an opinion, especially since I never knew him personally, and also since I lack knowledge and/or experience with his illness.) But it is interesting that people are throwing the word "rational" around without appearing to be familiar with the complexity of the debates about how to even define it.
TempleOS is an example of rational thoughts, assembled with intention.
Mental illness and rational thought should not be conflated.
Rational behavior is behavior with purpose. It is acting out of self-fulfillment / self-interest / self-preservation in a logical (or internally consistent) way. "I want this, so I am going to do these things because they will help me achieve this goal".
Irrational behavior is when your behavior does not serve to fulfill any sort of goal whatsoever, or if the behavior is totally at odds with your desired goal.
A dog is rational when he wags his tail to entice gifts of food (because his desire is food). A dog is irrational when he bites the hand that feeds him (because he is a dog and still wants food).
Using this formulation of "rational behavior", mentally ill people frequently fall into the "irrational" group, as they will frequently do things for inexplicable and/or random reasons, which do nothing to serve their purported goals. Obviously this depends massively on what type of mental illness we are talking about, but I think Terry's schizophrenia/bipolar disorder generally qualified, as it led to frequent internally-inconsistent behavior.
I’m saying rational depends on perspective. For a person with mental illness, it might be rational the way they act because their brain for example works differently, they experience things differently, and from their experience, what they do might have purpose, it might serve to meet a goal, it’s rational. But since their experience perhaps is skewed from our reality, from our perspective, from our experiences, the behavior looks irrational.
Internal inconsistency can be objectively measured: "you said you wanted pizza but now you are ordering a burger". I would argue that internal inconsistency is the opposite of rational behavior. Therefore, if mental illness causes internal inconsistencies, it is causing irrational behavior.
Having a mental illness doesn't mean that purported goals cease to exist. You can still ask a person with schizophrenia "what do you want", and they will give you an answer, because they are a person and not an animal.
Taking this back to TempleOS: Terry seemed to want to be known as the greatest programmer on earth. At the same time, his mental illness caused frequent outbursts that were off-putting to many people. It is hard to have a positive reputation as the greatest programmer when your behavior pushes people away from you. I would qualify such an inconsistency as "irrational", would you not? Using racial slurs in an online outburst is not "rational" behavior if your goal is to be respected as an amazing programmer.
Your experiences might not be real or factual, but that doesn’t mean you can’t act rationally to them. Factual and rational are not dependent on each other. You can for example act rationally on the basis of a lie you were told. Doesn’t make your behavior irrational.
Sure, you can say "he is behaving rationally thru the lens of his own perspective" if you want, but that means the rest of us in the shared reality can say "these behaviors are irrational thru the lens of our shared reality". And since we're still here, and he is unfortunately not, I think "our" perspective is the one that matters at this point.
Well, sure, but if we take some definitions of rational:
> Consistent with or based on reason or good judgment; logical or sensible.
or
> Having or exercising the ability to reason. synonym: logical.
I'd say rational doesn't care about factual or not, or others experiences or not. Rational is entirely dependent on how you react to what you experience.
> Sure, you can say "he is behaving rationally thru the lens of his own perspective" if you want, but that means the rest of us in the shared reality can say "these behaviors are irrational thru the lens of our shared reality". And since we're still here, and he is unfortunately not, I think "our" perspective is the one that matters at this point.
I think that's a wrong conclusion.
He was mentally ill. This perhaps skewed his experiences according to our shared reality. His experiences was not factual, one could say. Were his actions irrational? I don't think we can say that from what we know because he might have been acting rationally. The problem might just have been how he was experiencing things, which makes the basis of his actions not based on something we can say is factual or "real". However, if he was acting rationally on his experiences, even though his experiences were "wrong", he was still acting rationally.