There's one distinction that I think is worth making - but not made clearly in the essay - and that's between beliefs and decisions/actions. Whether a belief is reasonable often just depends on the available evidence, but whether an action is reasonable depends on the <i>value context</i>, i.e. what your goal is.<p>This adds a different perspective to the example of the American football game. If the value context is purely winning the game, then it is rational not to make the kick. However, the value context is actually a lot larger and more nebulous than that; it's some combination of the students' well-being, the college's reputation, the crowd's entertainment and a bunch of other stuff.<p>Before asserting that someone is being irrational, it's always worth thinking about their value context.<p>Edit: Just remembered that of course Hume already understood this very well. "Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them."
> For example, it might be okay to risk a $1 bet to win $1,000,000 if the probability is one in 500, but it is quite another thing for the average person to risk $50,000 to win $1,000,000 if the probability is one in 400. Even with better odds in the second case,<p>The author either made a typo (intended billion rather than million) or doesn't understand probability. The second case is on average going to lose you money. The expected return from getting $1,000,000 1 in 400 times is only $2,500. So betting $50,000 will on average lose you a lot of money.
Being "rational" (doing "reasoning") is not the same as being "reasonable".<p>> <i>Being reasonable means holding beliefs and views for which (1) one can give true or probable evidence that (2) actually (or sufficiently and relevantly) supports them.</i><p>That's a definition of "rational", not "reasonable". Even the <title> tag of the page says "What it is to be rational", not "what it is to be reasonable".<p>The author seems to be opposed to any commonly accepted definition of "reasonable" that isn't reducible to "rational". But if everyone else looks like they're mistaken about what a word means, maybe you're the one who's using the word incorrectly.<p>Being "reasonable" is a fallback that we as a society endorse as a practical ideal, because we know that not everyone can be rational all the time. It'a vague and ambiguous concept because the goalpost moves depending on how rational the target group is typically expected to be in a given situation. This doesn't mean that we should throw away its nuances and replace it with the common denominator that is "rational". Many people believe that one can be reasonable without being fully rational, and vice versa. You can of course disagree with this proposition, but you can't just redefine a keyword to win the argument.
This is an interesting read. However, the final example is a bit puzzling, because point 6 does not follow from 5, 7 does not follow from 6, and 10 does not follow from the previous points because of the addition "if that preventive..." comes out of nowhere. It would be better to make the missing premises explicit.<p>On a side note, I'd like to question the usefulness of using the term "reasonable" in contemporary philosophy. The problem is that "reasonable" is an evaluative predicate. In its everyday, non-technical use "being reasonable" certainly also involves conforming to social norms and expectations, which has barely anything to do with the quality of reasoning. Philosophers would be better served to use another term instead of playing with words inventing connections between "reason" and "being reasonable" when those words have deviated so much from each other over the past centuries. In contemporary English, "reasonable" does not primarily/by default mean "based on (good) reasons."<p>Also worth mentioning is that moral philosophers rarely give satisfying definitions of having a reason vs. there being a reason, there being reason (mass noun reading), reasonable vs. rational, justification, reasoning, and good vs. bad reason. Especially the last point is strange, since we're ultimately only interested in good reasons.<p>That being said, again, it's a nice and interesting article.
A few years ago I attempted to make the writings of Richard Garlikov a little more approachable, as his website is very basic.
I never finished it as the process of converting each article into HTML was very tedious.<p>I've uploaded an example to Imgur [0] and I’d be happy to share all resources if anyone is interested.<p>0. <a href="https://imgur.com/a/EiqxrrK" rel="nofollow">https://imgur.com/a/EiqxrrK</a>
It would be interesting to read a similar essay about how some people mistakenly think reasoning is about truth finding. That would be closer to the realizations I've had.
Being rational within an established societal/economic/scientific system and being rational per se are quite different things. A truly rational argument may lead to the questioning of the existence of these systems, but reforming or removing the system just to accommodate this particular case may be counterproductive and a net loss.
The think about being 'rational' is that you can rationalize just about anything. It's like the balance of exploration and exploitation in CS...the exploitation is the 'rational' and the exploration is taking a chance at something more by being 'irrational.'<p>Sometimes the best way to go is pick a path and stick with it. That's why I had tacos and not sushi for lunch today.
The overgeneralization that the author talks about is, I think, really at the crux of where the rational thinker may go astray (lawmaker, bureaucrat, waterfall process software developer, architect, ...). You can build up an argument which seems to be true, but is in fact irrelevant and wrong/harmful in the real world.
Best. Thing. Ever.<p>After being raised in a cult, this describes perfectly the members in such organizations. A cult is being rational in undermining the reasoning abilities of the members and indoctrinating them to use fake reasoning. And redefining words such as logic, reasoning, truth.
>> As I understand it now, smallpox vaccine is not routinely given any more in the United States since the risk of dying from the vaccination is greater than the risk of getting smallpox.<p>If the article is from 2000, the real reason was that smallpox had, by that point, been eradicated. According to wikipedia:<p><i>The last naturally occurring case was diagnosed in October 1977 and the World Health Organization certified the global eradication of the disease in 1980.</i><p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox</a><p>(Er. Graphic picture warning on that article).
Most people are not rational. A lot of people are very good at recalling facts and pattern-matching, but they don't even come close to understanding the full complexity and the effects of what they're doing or saying.