Quotes About Rationality

Nothing sedates rationality like large doses of effortless money. After a heady experience of that kind, normally sensible people drift into behavior akin to that of Cinderella at the ball.

Apartment houses, public transportation, and schools tell us something about the technical development of a society. They do not tell us whether the members of that society are suppressed subjects or free workers, whether they are rational or irrational men and women.

Qué es el sentido común sino la pereza inherente a nuestro entendimiento, de salir del recinto tan pequeño y tan mezquino de nuestras representaciones y admitir la posibilidad de otras premisas?

The trouble with most people is that they think with their hopes or fears or wishes, rather than their minds.

The trouble with most people is that they think with their hopes or fears or wishes rather than with their minds.

our mind is strongly biased toward causal explanations and does not deal well with "mere statistics.

as the psychologist Jonathan Haidt said in another context, "The emotional tail wags the rational dog.

Rational or not, fear is painful and debilitating, and policy makers must endeavor to protect the public from fear, not only from real dangers.

Rationality is logical coherence—reasonable or not.

only test of rationality is not whether a person's beliefs and preferences are reasonable, but whether they are internally consistent. A rational person can believe in ghosts so long as all her other beliefs are consistent with the existence of ghosts. A rational person can prefer being hated over being loved, so long as his preferences are consistent. Rationality is logical coherence—reasonable or not.

The word fallacy is used, in general, when people fail to apply a logical rule that is obviously relevant.

your beliefs should be constrained by the logic of probability.

The ideal of logical consistency, as this example shows, is not achievable by our limited mind. Because we are susceptible to WYSIATI and averse to mental effort, we tend to make decisions as problems arise, even when we are specifically instructed to consider them jointly. We have neither the inclination nor the mental resources to enforce consistency on our preferences, and our preferences are not magically set to be coherent, as they are in the rational-agent model.

The emotional tail wags the rational dog." The affect heuristic simplifies our lives by creating a world that is much tidier than reality.

To a psychologist, it is self-evident that people are neither fully rational nor completely selfish, and that their tastes are anything but stable.

In the standard rational model of economics, people take risks because the odds are favorable—they accept some probability of a costly failure because the probability of success is sufficient.

The implication is clear: as the psychologist Jonathan Haidt said in another context, "The emotional tail wags the rational dog

Its cost is "sunk" and the Econ would not care whether he had bought the ticket to the game or got it from a friend (if Econs have friends).

The assumption that agents are rational provides the intellectual foundation for the libertarian approach to public policy: do not interfere with the individual's right to choose, unless the choices harm others. Libertarian policies are further bolstered by admiration for the efficiency of markets in allocating goods to the people who are willing to pay the most for them.

However, we are not all rational, and some of us may need the security of distorted estimates to avoid paralysis.

For one thing, it helps us see the logical consistency of Human preferences for what it is—a hopeless mirage

The evidence presents a profound challenge to the idea that humans have consistent preferences and know how to maximize them, a cornerstone of the rational-agent model. An inconsistency is built into the design of our minds.

Social scientists in the 1970s broadly accepted two ideas about human nature. First, people are generally rational, and their thinking is normally sound. Second, emotions such as fear, affection, and hatred explain most of the occasions on which people depart from rationality. Our article challenged both assumptions without discussing them directly.

Although Humans are not irrational, they often need help to make more accurate judgments and better decisions, and in some cases policies and institutions can provide that help.