Quotes About Rationality

by creating bureaucracies, we put civil servants in a position to make decisions based on abstract and theoretical matters, with the illusion that they will be making them in a rational, accountable way.

science is about how not to be a sucker.

By definition, what works cannot be irrational; about every single person I know who has chronically failed in business shares that mental block, the failure to realize that if something stupid works (and makes money), it cannot be stupid.

behavioral problem; we like to emit logical and rational ideas but we do not necessarily enjoy this execution. Strange as it sounds, this point has only been discovered very recently (we will see that we are not genetically fit to be rational and act rationally; we are merely fit for the maximum probability of transmitting our genes in some given unsophisticated environment).

These may seem irrational to an outsider who defines rationality in terms of what he can explain.

ideas do not truly sink in when emotions come into play;

It means that rational thinking has little, very little, to do with risk avoidance. Much of what rational thinking seems to do is rationalize one's actions by fitting some logic to them.

focusing on the rationality of a belief rather than its consequences

Judging people by their beliefs is not scientific. There is no such thing as the "rationality" of a belief, there is rationality of action. The rationality of an action can be judged only in terms of evolutionary considerations.

our actions are not quite guided by the parts of our brain that dictate rationality. We think with our emotions and there is no way around it.

people who are otherwise rational engage in smoking or in fights that get them no immediate benefits;

Anything that hinders one's survival at an individual, collective, tribal, or general level is, to me, irrational.

I am convinced of that after spending almost all my adult and professional years in a fierce fight between my brain (not Fooled by Randomness) and my emotions (completely Fooled by Randomness) in which the only success I've had is in going around my emotions rather than rationalizing them.

Rationality does not depend on explicit verbalistic explanatory factors; it is only what aids survival, what avoids ruin.

My problem is that I am not rational and I am extremely prone to drown in randomness and to incur emotional torture. I am aware of my need to ruminate on park benches and in cafés away from information, but I can only do so if I am somewhat deprived of it. My sole advantage in life is that I know some of my weaknesses, mostly that I am incapable of taming my emotions facing news and incapable of seeing a performance with a clear head. Silence is far better.

Most of the tension in life will take place when the one who reduces and fragilizes (say the policy maker) invokes rationality.

And one needs to be rational in not making trial and error completely random.

in a trial and error mode, you exercise rationality by not looking in the same place twice.

If people were rational, their rationality would cause them to figure patterns from the past and adapt, so that past information would be completely useless for predicting the future.

One may be risk loving yet completely averse to ruin. The central asymmetry of life is: In a strategy that entails ruin, benefits never offset risks of ruin. Further: Ruin and other changes in condition are different animals. Every single risk you take adds up to reduce your life expectancy. Finally: Rationality is avoidance of systemic ruin.

withhold judgment in the absence of evidence

some idiosyncratic behavior on the part of the individual (deemed at first glance "irrational") may be necessary for efficient functioning at the collective level.

Before the "enlightenment" and the age of rationality, there was in the culture a collection of tricks to deal with our fallibility and reversals of fortunes. The elders can still help us with some of their ruses.

the power of optionality as an alternative way of doing things, opportunistically, with some large edge coming from asymmetry with large benefits and benign harm. It is a way—the only way—to domesticate uncertainty, to work rationally without understanding the future, while reliance on narratives is the exact opposite: one is domesticated by uncertainty, and ironically set back. You cannot look at the future by naive projection of the past.