Quotes About Rationality

It is fair, therefore, to assume that growing rationality is a guarantee of man's growing morality.

Rationality belongs to the cool observer, but because of the stupidity of the average man, he follows not reason, but faith, and the naive faith requires necessary illusion and emotionally potent oversimplifications which are provided by the myth-maker to keep ordinary person on course.

I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am.

Je pense, donc je suis.

I am convinced that we have entered an era when anthropology will become a more relevant tool than political science. We will have to radically change our interpretation of events, stop thinking as products of the Enlightenment, and finally envisage the radical nature of violence; this will produce a quite different kind of rationality as required by events.

Maybe. Occam's disposable Bic razor might suggest so.

Nllum magnum ingenium sine mixtr dmentiae fuit. (Seneca

As great-grandchildren of the Enlightenment, we like to think of ourselves as free moral agents, choosing rationally among possible actions, but Scripture unmasks that cheerful illusion and teaches us that we are deeply infected by the tendency to self-deception.

people's stupidity probably explains much of what people do and don't do, as I have conceded all along in this book.

Grammar is the logic of speech, even as logic is the grammar of reason.

Do not indoctrinate your children. Teach them how to think for themselves, how to evaluate evidence, and how to disagree with you.

If you look at economics textbooks, you will learn that homo economicus can think like Albert Einstein, store as much memory as IBM's Big Blue, and exercise the willpower of Mahatma Gandhi. Really. But the folks that we know are not like that. Real people have trouble with long division if they don't have a calculator, sometimes forget their spouse's birthday, and have a hangover on New Year's Day. They are not homo economicus; they are homo sapiens.

The false assumption is that almost all people, almost all of the time, make choices that are in their best interest or at the very least are better than the choices that would be made by someone else.

quasi-hyperbolic discounting.

The distinguished economist and philosopher Amartya Sen famously called people who always give nothing in this game rational fools for blindly following only material self-interest: "The purely economic man is indeed close to being a social moron. Economic theory has been much preoccupied with this rational fool.

Imagine that you are about to purchase a jacket for ($125)[$15] and a calculator for ($15)[$125]. The calculator salesman informs you that the calculator you wish to buy is on sale for ($10)[$120] at the other branch of the store, located a twenty-minute drive away. Would you make the trip to the other store?

it is thought to be somehow related to Adam Smith's invisible hand, the workings of which are both overstated and mysterious.

dumb principal" problems.

We will not be able to protect against future crises if we rail against greed, corruption, and wrongdoing without looking in the mirror and understanding the potentially devastating effects of bounded rationality, self-control problems, and social influences.

When all economists are equally open-minded and are willing to incorporate important variables in their work, even if the rational model says those variables are supposedly irrelevant, the field of behavioral economics will disappear. All economics will be as behavioral as it needs to be. And those who have been stubbornly clinging to an imaginary world that consists only of Econs will be waving a white flag, rather than an invisible hand.

Drawing on some well-established findings in social science, we show that in many cases, individuals make pretty bad decisions—decisions they would not have made if they had paid full attention and possessed complete information, unlimited cognitive abilities, and complete self-control.

He had never told her just what he thought of the value of prayer and all the rest of the self-deluding mumbo jumbo with which otherwise rational people tried to humanize the cosmos. Man had created God in his own image, not the other way around.

Was there a logical answer, something he could accept without slipping on banana skins of mysticism?

Words never fail. We hear them, we read them; they enter into the mind and become part of us for as long as we shall live. Who speaks reason to his fellowmen bestows it upon them. Who mouths inanity disorders thought for all who listen. There must be some minimum allowable dose of inanity beyond which the mind cannot remain reasonable. Irrationality, like buried chemical waste, sooner or later must seep into all the tissues of thought.