Ask HN: How can rational thinking increase in individuals and societies? |
Ask HN: How can rational thinking increase in individuals and societies? |
Education: We should educate for core thinking process as in the old days like logic and rhetoric topics. E.g. Logic can be taught and is undervalued as a trait these days. I'd prefer to work with someone that had great logic than rote learnt job requirements.
Experience: By balancing society and encouraging broad experience and social mixing you will get a more rational society. In my experience 90% of society is trying to be good citizens, but often they have a blinked view on the world. Mixing widly for greater experiences will reduce the tribal tendency people have e.g wealthy people to assume unemployed are lazy or the poor to think the wealthy have it all roses. This would cross to other areas like religion, guns, race if people can see the perspective where people are coming from. And those with opposing views more likely dont feel they have to push to the extreme to be understood. And simply seeing things in action opens your eyes. Like people that claim single payer healthcare will never work. Go spend some time in Canada, UK and Australia and you will see it works fairly well. Likewise you'll see bad things that reinforce what you need to protect.
What metric do we use to measure the happiness of a society? Do we want everyone to be as educated as possible? I once read some study that correlated intelligence with unhappiness (ignorance is bliss) so wouldnt it maybe be smarter to try to keep as much people as uneducated as possible?
The "ideal" society is such a philosophical question. On a related tangent it saddens me that although we have such technologic progress we still all work 40+ hours a week ... why?!
First thing is for people to realize the prevalence of belief systems and how they are not derived or supported rationally.
Next thing is for people to realize that everyone has a belief system, no matter how non-religious or empirical they think their worldview is.
Subdsidiarity is the principle that decisions should be made locally as much as possible. In government it's what we call "federalism": most decisions are made by individuals; those that cannot are made by local government answerable to the people; those that cannot be made locally may be made by the county or state; only those very few decisions that cannot be made by states are the purview of the federal government. The US was supposed to operate this way. It hasn't since before World War I.
Why is subsidiarity connected to rational decision making? Simply, because the world is too complex for any one person or group to understand, model, predict, and control it. Most decisions can be made best by the individuals concerned, who have the relevant knowledge. This also reduces the cognitive burden on everyone else. Since higher authorities have few powers, their impacts are minimal. Citizens who do not have the time or information to follow those high level decisions may rationally ignore and trust the system, because it has little impact on them. Those who do have the inclination to pay attention to politics can make a fair evaluation of their leaders because the leaders are only involved in a few things.
One of the reasons you see people acting in such an emotional and heuristic way, nowadays, is that the central governments and even transnational organizations are at the same time manifestly incompetent and incredibly impactful. All citizens must be concerned with who wins the federal offices, because the federal government seizes half of every dollar they earn, and imposes itself into every intimate choice they make. So no one can afford to ignore it. At the same time, government is so complex and makes so many decisions that no citizen has the time or information to study it thoroughly. So what can a rational person do? They must seek shortcuts, such as finding trusted personalities to follow, or making judgments based on rules of thumb, slogans, and so forth.
In sum, because rational choice is only possible when we have the time and the information needed to make choices, neither the citizen nor the central authority can make rational choices in a centralized superstate. Decentralizing decision making spreads the work out to more minds, and places less burden on each individual.
There is little point in educating and refining individuals (although they may benefit) unless the whole network of society can be improved net.
P.J O'Rourke points out that a great many ignorant people exist in America, especially in certain zip codes.
He says the average Russian is far more well read and educated, not just in theory but in spirit too, and a great many of them have superior intelligence that makes their population natural adepts in science and literature.
Despite all of this; Russia is poorer and considerably worse off than the USA today.
It is good that you ask the question in the context of individuals and groups. There is something of a microeconomics/macroeconomics divide here! The aid of one does not help the other. It is a most strange and counter intuitive paradox.
I say a good heuristic for our 'algorithm' for improving society and individuals is a diversity of options. Then we allow society and individuals to make the value judgments of what to choose independently. That is the classic position of a Westerner such as myself.
The caveat then is to what extent does informing a judgment control that outcome. That is a wicked problem. As computer scientists say, Garbage in, Garbage out. I suspect if you solve for that then you have your answer.
Most of the time I believe we act instinctively. This implies there is also a cost to rationality. I also believe rationality is a distant cousin to education and raw intelligence. There are too many examples of educated quick witted people who believe things that cannot be true.
To make a stab at a practical endeavour which would answer your question, I would guess that directing attention productively could increase rationality. I think in some way having a pencil and a piece of paper increases your powers of reason, or at least the possible scope. Putting somebody into a room with a cool temperature, good lighting, some paper and writing materials, no distractions and perhaps preliminary meditation is very likely to increase your powers of reason.
Can we offload rationality to our subconscious without allowing ourselves to succumb to heuristics? What are some strategies we can use for relying less on heuristics and more on logic?
How can we avoid perceptual errors which influence our judgement?
etc.
Think about how hard you mentally push yourself on a day to day. It isn't a stretch to think that cognition can be trained stronger.
Do you ever wonder what an Eagle's vision would be like if they lived inside of a 10x15 room their whole life?
> At birth, the number of synapses per neuron is 2,500, but by age two or three, it’s about 15,000 per neuron. The brain eliminates connections that are seldom or never used, which is a normal part of brain development. [0]
How much do you think the average kid, or their adult counterpart, would need to use their brain for sitting in front of the tv or working a menial job / boring school?
I believe we set our own cognitive limits and I hope that we can learn to reset them.
An almost textbook definition of cognitive bias right there.
> How can we avoid perceptual errors which influence our judgement?
You have to work incredibly hard to achieve that. Perceptual and bias errors are the most common and difficult to find in ourselves.
My personal take is to become really good at two things: understanding when and how it is appropriate to trust in someone else's domain authority/expertise, and whatever it is you'd like to be an expert on.
Don't expect this behavior out of your fellow citizens, or even yourself, most of the time. It requires battling with some pretty strong evolutionary drives.
Frankly, cultivating humility is probably easier (which is saying something, as that's pretty difficult for most humans as well).