Best 266 quotes in «rationality quotes» category

On your quest to spirituality it is often required to suspend your rationality; but true spirituality asks that you enhance your rationality.

Our propensity to overvalue what we own is a basic human bias, and it reflects a more general tendency to fall in love with, and be overly optimistic about, anything that has to do with ourselves. Think about it - don't you feel that you are a better-than-average driver, are more likely to be able to afford retirement, and are less likely to suffer from high cholesterol, get a divorce, or get a parking ticket if you overstay your meter by a few minutes? This positivity bias, as psychologists call it, has another name: "The Lake Wobegone Effect", named after the fictional town in Garrison Keillor's popular radio series 'A Prairie Home Companion', In Lake Wobegone, according to Keillor, "all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average." I don't think we can become more accurate and objective in the way we think about our children and houses, but maybe we can realize that we have such biases and listen more carefully to the advice and feedback we get from the others.

Out of a single man, they get a thousand: homo economicus, homo politicus, homo physico-chimicus, homo endocrinus, homo skeletonicus, homo emotions, homo percipiens, homo libidinosus, homo peregrinans, homo ridens, homo ratiocinans, homo artifex, homo aestbeticus, homo religiosus, homo sapiens, homo historicus, homo ethnographicus, and many, many more. But at the very end of the production line in this laboratory of mine sits a Scienter who is quite unique. Three thousand brains in one. His function is to collect all the data and clarifications written up by the specialist Scienters. When he has collated everything, he is convinced that he has clasped the red rabbit or the essential man entire to his understanding. There you are, you can see him from here,' he ended, with a sign to one of his assistants who brought me a pair of binoculars. I put them to my eyes and, indeed, at the far end of the gallery, I saw the Omniscienter. There he was, an enormous cranial dome with a tiny, shapeless, crumpled face, which seemed to me to be hanging by the ears from the two ebony knobs on the back of a raised throne. Swinging to and fro beneath this head was a little cloth puppet which dangled its empty trouser legs over the crimson plush seat. His tiny right arm was kept aloft by means of a wire, and the index finger rested on his temple in the gesture of one who knows. Above the throne ran a banner bearing this inscription: I KNOW EVERYTHING, BUT I DON'T UNDERSTAND ANY OF IT

P.C. Hodgell said - That which can be destroyed by the truth should be. Do not flinch from experiences that might destroy your beliefs. The thought you cannot think controls you more than thoughts you speak aloud. Submit yourself to ordeals and test yourself in fire. Relinquish the emotion which rests upon a mistaken belief, and seek to feel fully that emotion which fits the facts. If the iron approaches your face, and you believe it is hot, and it is cool, the Way opposes your fear. If the iron approaches your face, and you believe it is cool, and it is hot, the Way opposes your calm. Evaluate your beliefs first and then arrive at your emotions. Let yourself say - If the iron is hot, I desire to believe it is hot, and if it is cool, I desire to believe it is cool.

People go funny in the head when talking about politics. The evolutionary reasons for this are so obvious as to be worth belaboring: In the ancestral environment, politics was a matter of life and death. And sex, and wealth, and allies, and reputation... When, today, you get into an argument about whether "we" ought to raise the minimum wage, you're executing adaptations for an ancestral environment where being on the wrong side of the argument could get you killed. Being on the right side of the argument could let you kill your hated rival! [...] Politics is an extension of war by other means. Arguments are soldiers. Once you know which side you're on, you must support all arguments of that side, and attack all arguments that appear to favor the enemy side; otherwise it's like stabbing your soldiers in the back—providing aid and comfort to the enemy. People who would be level-headed about evenhandedly weighing all sides of an issue in their professional life as scientists, can suddenly turn into slogan-chanting zombies when there's a Blue or Green position on an issue.

People who are more rational don't perceive emotion less, they just regulate it better.

Poor Hayduke: won all his arguments but lost his immortal soul.

Rationality is undetected rhetoric.

(...) rationality is a very narrowly restricted skill.

Rationality or consciousness is itself a ratio or proportion among the sensuous components of experience, and is not something added to such sense experience. Subrational beings have no means of achieving such a ratio or proportion in their sense lives but are wired for fixed wave lengths, as it were, having infallibility in their own area of experience. Consciousness, complex and subtle, can be impaired or ended by a mere stepping-up or dimming-down of any one sense intensity, which is the procedure in hypnosis. And the intensification of one sense by a new medium can hypnotize an entire community.

Reasonableness is a matter of degree. Beliefs can be very reasonable (Japan exists), fairly reasonable (quarks exist), not unreasonable (there's intelligent life on other planets) or downright unreasonable (fairies exist). There's a scale of reasonableness, if you like, with very reasonable beliefs near the top and deeply unreasonable ones towards the bottom. Notice a belief can be very high up the scale, yet still be open to some doubt. And even when a belief is low down, we can still acknowledge the remote possibility it might be true. How reasonable is the belief that God exists? Atheists typically think it very unreasonable. Very low on the scale. But most religious people say it is at least not unreasonable (have you ever met a Christian who said 'Hey, belief in God is no more reasonable than belief in fairies, but I believe it anyway!'?) They think their belief is at least halfway up the scale of reasonableness. Now, that their belief is downright unreasonable might, in fact, be established empirically. If it turned out that not only is there no good evidence of an all-powerful, all-good God, there's also overwhelming evidence against (from millions of years of unimaginable and pointless animal suffering, including several mass extinctions - to thousands of children being crushed to death or buried alive in Pakistan earthquake, etc. etc. etc.) then it could be empirically confirmed that there's no God. Would this constitute a 'proof' that there's no God? Depends what you mean by 'proof'. Personally I think these sorts of consideration do establish beyond any reasonable doubt that there is no all-powerful all-good God. So we can, in this sense, prove there's no God. Yet all the people quoted in my last blog say you cannot 'scientifically' prove or disprove God's existence. If they mean prove beyond any doubt they are right. But then hardly anything is provable in that sense, not even the non-existence of fairies.

Religion is scepticism with God occupying the seat of reason.

[S]cience has contributed a great deal to war and violence, and people well trained in science are sometimes not entirely rational and are even dogmatic. We have to find a way to teach reflectively, not just scientifically.

Sexual starvation forces a heterosexual man to see beauty in every single female who he can sleep with without his society’s disapproval.

Since knowledge, thinking, and rational action are properties of the individual, since the choice to exercise his rational faculty or not depends on the individual, man’s survival requires that those who think be free of the interference of those who don’t. Since men are neither omniscient nor infallible, they must be free to agree or disagree, to cooperate or to pursue their own independent course, each according to his own rational judgment. Freedom is the fundamental requirement of man’s mind. A rational mind does not work under compulsion; it does not subordinate its grasp of reality to anyone’s orders, directives, or controls; it does not sacrifice its knowledge, its view of the truth, to anyone’s opinions, threats, wishes, plans, or “welfare.” Such a mind may be hampered by others, it may be silenced, proscribed, imprisoned, or destroyed; it cannot be forced; a gun is not an argument. (An example and symbol of this attitude is Galileo.) It is from the work and the inviolate integrity of such minds—from the intransigent innovators—that all of mankind’s knowledge and achievements have come. (See The Fountainhead.) It is to such minds that mankind owes its survival. (See Atlas Shrugged.)

Solzhenitsyn described this: It would be hard to identify the exact source of that inner intuition, not founded on rational argument, which prompted our refusal to enter the NKVD schools… People can shout at you from all sides: ‘You must!’ And your own head can be saying also: ‘You must!’ But inside your breast there is a sense of revulsion, repudiation. I don’t want to. It makes me feel sick. Do what you want without me; I want no part of it.

Some information is classified legitimately; as with military hardware, secrecy sometimes really is in the national interest. Further, military, political, and intelligence communities tend to value secrecy for its own sake. It's a way of silencing critics and evading responsibility - for incompetence or worse. It generates an elite, a band of brothers in whom the national confidence can be reliably vested, unlike the great mass of citizenry on whose behalf the information is presumably made secret in the first place. With a few exceptions, secrecy is deeply incompatible with democracy and with science.

Spiritual": religion without any rules. All the comfort of fictitious friends with none of their demands.

Take practical and rational steps in maximizing your time

The duty and the responsibility of a rationalist is to thoughtfully and promptly carry out his actions, in fraternal affection, without considering country, language, God, religion and caste.

The essence of extended rationality is to know when you are being irrational.

The fundamental difference between ideology and science is that the former asserts what you or someone else would prefer to hear, and the second about what is plausible in his vision, without taking this preference into account. Ideology can never be more than a subjective value judgment, while science must be free from that judgment. Ideology is intended for the masses, who have little or no rational and analytical thinking, science - for intellectuals, for whom this thinking is the main value. The masses will never be able to do genuine science, because no true intellectual can be an ideologue, because any ideological assumption will deprive him of his rational and analytical thinking or significantly reduce it. Free rational thinking based on empirical scientific facts often forces you to go against various common forms of ideology, such as history and religion.

The goal of argumentation is to make a case so forceful (note the metaphor) that skeptics are coerced into believing it—they are powerless to deny it while still claiming to be rational. In principle, it is the ideas themselves that are, as we say, compelling, but their champions are not always averse to helping the ideas along with tactics of verbal dominance, among them intimidation (“Clearly . . .”), threat (“It would be unscientific to . . .”), authority (“As Popper showed . . .”), insult (“This work lacks the necessary rigor for . . .”), and belittling (“Few people today seriously believe that . . .”). Perhaps this is why H. L. Mencken wrote that “college football would be more interesting if the faculty played instead of the students.

The human has not one but two births – first, when a person is born from the mother’s womb, and second, when that person rises from the socio-culturally imposed cocoon of prejudices and ignorance.

The idea of our own rationality...was convincing to us only because we so wished to be convinced. To any impartial observer, could such a thing exist, the sham was patent. Emotion and instinct were the basis of all our decisions, our actions, everything we valued, the way we saw the world. Reason and rationality were a thin coat of paint on a ragged surface.

The less evidence we have for what we believe is certain, the more violently we defend beliefs against those who don't agree.

The methods of increasing the degree of truth in our beliefs are well known; they consist in hearing all sides, trying to ascertain all the relevant facts, controlling our own bias by discussion with people who have the opposite bias, and cultivating a readiness to discard any hypothesis which has proved inadequate.

The more rational we are, the more emotional we can be.

The most damaging cognitive bias is overconfidence (illusory superiority), making leaders use their “gut” when they should be more rational.

Then are there no rules at all, Lord?” Moneo's voice conveyed a faint hint of hysteria. Leto smiled to ease the man's tensions. “Perhaps one. Short–term decisions tend to fail in the long–term.

The point we are trying to make is that disagreement is futile agitation unless it is undertaken with the hope that it may lead to the resolution of an issue. These two facts, that people do disagree and can agree, arise from the complexity of human nature. Men are rational animals. Their rationality is the source of their power to agree. Their animality, and the imperfections of their reason that it entails, is the cause of most of the disagreements that occur. Men are creatures of passion and prejudice. (P. 146)

The practice which obtains amongst the Americans of fixing the standard of their judgment in themselves alone, leads them to other habits of mind. As they perceive that they succeed in resolving without assistance all the little difficulties which their practical life presents, they readily conclude that everything in the world may be explained, and that nothing in it transcends the limits of the understanding. Thus they fall to denying what they cannot comprehend; which leaves them but little faith for whatever is extraordinary, and an almost insurmountable distaste for whatever is supernatural.

There is no history of mankind, there is only an indefinite number of histories of all kinds of aspects of human life. And one of these is the history of political power. This is elevated into the history of the world. But this, I hold, is an offence against every decent conception of mankind. It is hardly better than to treat the history of embezzlement or of robbery or of poisoning as the history of mankind. For the history of power politics is nothing but the history of international crime and mass murder.

There is voluminous evidence that exclusive reliance on heuristic processing tendencies of Type I sometimes results in suboptimal responding (Baron, 2008; Evans, 2007a; Gilovich, Griffin, & Kahneman, 2002; Johnson-Laird, 2006; Kahneman & Tversky, 1973, 1996, 2000; Koehler & Harvey, 2004; Nickerson, 2004, 2008; Nisbett & Ross, 1980; Tversky & Kahneman, 1974, 1983, 1986) and that such thinking errors are not limited to the laboratory (Ariely, 2008; Åstebro, Jeffrey, & Adomdza, 2007; Baron, 1998; Baron, Bazerman, & Shonk, 2006; Belsky & Gilovich, 1999; Berner & Graber, 2008; Camerer, 2000; Chapman & Elstein, 2000; Croskerry, 2009a, 2009b; Dawes, 2001; Hilton, 2003; Kahneman & Tversky, 2000; Lichtenstein & Slovic, 2006; Lilienfeld, Ammirati, & Landfield, 2009; Myers, 2002; Prentice, 2003; Reyna et al., 2009; Stewart, 2009; Sunstein, 2002, 2005; Taleb, 2001, 2007; Tavris & Aronson, 2007; Tetlock, 2005; Thaler & Sunstein, 2008; Ubel, 2000).

the thing about fear is that it defies the laws of rationality. It creates its own laws instead

The type of journalism that relies on the reporter's notion of what does or doesn't "seem" correct or controversial is self-indulgent and irresponsible. It gives credence to the belief that we can intuit our way through all the various decisions we need to make in our lives and it validates the notion that our feelings are a more reliable barometer of reality than the facts.

The Way of Bayes is also an imprecise art, at least the way I'm holding forth upon it. These blog posts are still fumbling attempts to put into words lessons that would be better taught by experience. But at least there's underlying math, plus experimental evidence from cognitive psychology on how humans actually think. Maybe that will be enough to cross the stratospherically high threshold required for a discipline that lets you actually get it right, instead of just constraining you into interesting new mistakes.

The world,” he said, “grows hourly more and more sceptical of all that lies beyond its own narrow radius; and our men of science foster the fatal tendency. "The Phantom Coach

The would-be sorcerer alone has faith in the efficacy of pure knowledge; rational people know that things act of themselves or not at all.

Though he never actually joined it, he was close to some civilian elements of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which was the most Communist (and in the rather orthodox sense) of the Palestinian formations. I remember Edward once surprising me by saying, and apropos of nothing: 'Do you know something I have never done in my political career? I have never publicly criticized the Soviet Union. It’s not that I terribly sympathize with them or anything—it's just that the Soviets have never done anything to harm me, or us.' At the time I thought this a rather naïve statement, even perhaps a slightly contemptible one, but by then I had been in parts of the Middle East where it could come as a blessed relief to meet a consecrated Moscow-line atheist-dogmatist, if only for the comparatively rational humanism that he evinced amid so much religious barking and mania. It was only later to occur to me that Edward's pronounced dislike of George Orwell was something to which I ought to have paid more attention.

To choose an option, rationally, is to choose the associated explanation. Therefore, rational decision-making consists not of weighing evidence but of explaining it, in the course of explaining the world. One judges arguments as explanations, not justifications, and one does this creatively, using conjecture, tempered by every kind of criticism. It is in the nature of good explanations – being hard to vary – that there is only one of them. Having created it, one is no longer tempted by the alternatives. They have been not outweighed, but out-argued, refuted and abandoned. During the course of a creative process, one is not struggling to distinguish between countless different explanations of nearly equal merit; typically, one is struggling to create even one good explanation, and, having succeeded, one is glad to be rid of the rest.

To leave a man's ego bigger, retweet him. To leave his faculty of reasoning better, challenge his tweet.

Tribalism is an addiction that is driven by false beliefs that need to be reflected back to be perceived as true.

Undoubtely, modern Science is rational and the scientific method is based on rationality. But rationality is a wider concept, and it can explore what is beyond the scope of Science and its method.

What a deep [trust] in the rationality of the structure of the world and what a longing to understand even a small glimpse of the reason revealed in the world there must have been in Kepler and Newton to enable them to unravel the mechanism of the heavens in long years of lonely work!

What the efficient market hypothesis doesn't account for is that people are not always rational. Just ask any divorce lawyer.

What we're currently proud of, could be our ultimate downfall in the future if we keep on admiring it and don't want to progress.

When a human being develops an argument, when a human being attempts not only to think but to speak with precision, he or she is often made to feel that this is a mark of social inadequacy and that there is something comical about it. The younger the human being, the more humorous it becomes. So that humans whose inclination it is to think and speak in this way become self-conscious from an early age, and a kind of minstrelisation creeps in.

When a man tells you he knows the exact truth about anything, you are safe in inferring he is an inexact man.

When an economist attempts to prove that it is "irrational" to vote in national elections (because the effort expended outweighs the likely benefit to the individual voter), they use the term because they do not wish to say "irrational for actors for whom civic participation, political ideals, of the common good are not values in themselves, but who view public affairs only in terms of personal advantage.