Quotes About Rationality

Our fears are not always reasonable

The angrier you were, the less likely you were to think clearly.

Making more rational decisions isn't just a matter of willpower or consciously handling more decisions in deliberative mind. Our deliberative capacity is already maxed out. We don't have the option, once we recognize the problem, of merely shifting the work to a different part of the brain, as if you hurt your back lifting boxes and shifted to relying on your leg muscles.

And the effect is stronger the more the ticket costs. Imagine if, instead of $95, you had spent $150 or $250 or $500. As the price tag grows, so does the effect of sunk costs.

Now imagine if you had gone for that night of blackjack a year ago. When you think about the outcomes as having happened in the distant past, it is likely your preference for the results reverses, landing in a more rational place. You are now happier about the $100 win than about the $100 loss. Once we pull ourselves out of the moment through time-traveling exercises, we can see these things in proportion to their size, free of the distortion caused by whether the ticker just moved up or down.

But this is irrational. If you wouldn't buy a stock today, you ought not hold it today, because a decision to hold is the same as a decision to buy.

They point to numerous negative consequences of goal setting, several of which interfere with rational quitting behavior. In particular, they note the pass-fail nature of goals, their inflexibility, and how pursuing them leads to ignoring other opportunities that might be available.

When we're choosing among new options, loss aversion causes us to favor the ones that have the lowest absolute loss associated with them, even if those options come at a lower expected value. In other words, our aversion to taking a loss causes us to make decisions a rational actor would not.

As with all the strategies in this book, we must recognize that no strategy can turn us into perfectly rational actors. In addition, we can make the best possible decisions and still not get the result we want.

When we make in-the-moment decisions (and don't ponder the past or future), we are more likely to be irrational and impulsive.* This tendency we all have to favor our present-self at the expense of our future-self is called temporal discounting.

Eliminate emotion from your investment program.

Banks are run by executives, and executives protect themselves, and that does not always mean that banks are going to behave rationally.

Cualquiera que le diga palabras sabias a un ignorante parecerá que no está en su sano juicio (Las Bacantes, 409 aC)

But why do they have to continuously return to this irrational, religious, etc., stuff? Why? In a given state of subjectivity, there is no other way [ ... ]. If in order to exist we absolutely have to have recourse to this kind of thing, it isn't surprising that people rush headlong into it, even if they know that rationally it doesn't hold water. There's no getting rid of molar strata. Schizoanalysis cannot replace organizations.

I hope I haven't given you the impression that I consider kissing intrinsically irrational.

I'm merely trying to give you the sort of argument that would appeal to your intelligence.

Daddy's girl. Was it a 'itty-bitty bravekins and did it suffer? Oooooo-tweet, de tweetest thing, wasn't she dest too tweet? Before her tiny fist the forces of lust and corruption rolled away; nay, the very march of destiny stopped; inevitably became inevitable, syllogism, dialectic, all rationality fell away

mad with common sense

I believe in God, but I don't think you have to go crazy to prove it.

I believe in God, but I don't think you have to go crazy to prove it. - Smokeys dad, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe.

on the road halfway between faith and criticism stands the inn of reason. reason is faith in what can be understood without faith, but it's still a faith, since to understand presupposes that there's something understandable.

Having seen how lucidly and logically certain madmen justify their lunatic ideas to themselves and to others, I can never again be sure of the lucidness of my lucidity.

that most people think with their feelings, whereas I feel with my thoughts.

On the road halfway between faith and criticism stands the inn of reason. Reason is faith in what can be understood without faith, but it's still a faith, since to understand presupposes that there's something understandable.