once a person breaks or is broken through a specific cognitive barrier, rationalism becomes the easiest form of thinking and living. you could make it a bit harder on yourself and help your genes and synapses get back on track and your offspring evolve but you deliberately decide against it because it's less effort to succumb to the worst version of others than think about or work on any version of yourself.<p>math, science, money, the psycho-social level, it doesn't really matter. it's a bit like people who just throw the towel and accept what limits them or their endeavor and people who just engineer something to solve their problem and evolve.<p>rationalists throw the towel and accept what is, despite having all the evidence that it is NOT so. throw in some statistics and they'll take it (Quillette) as a general truth, emphasizing their understanding of the small sample, of course :D, and then they do a lot to make that truth work. that's why rationalist thinking in science and engineering and business falls short all the time. short of contextual potential and necessity, not under some utopian or dystopian "perfect conditions" but in the real world.<p>they follow something allegedly perfect because striving for the next better and forever imperfect thing triggers some psychological or linguistic trauma, the resolve of which they did not put in the work into.<p>this is commonly abused by "top-down" for status, covetousness, control, and it's the main sub-textual theme of therapeutic techniques and methods and everywhere in the advertisement and entertainment industry and trigger the whole reinforcement cycle as soon as they can get into the next generation of child or teen minds.<p>it's too poofy, really, as if poofy wanted to have their own concept behind why a different kind of poofy is their real self and requires numerous surgeries and entirely different sets of hormones from somewhere else in the animal kingdom. "it should cost a billion to look that good". wtf.<p>yeah, sure, there's statistics and algorithms, and linguistics can be twisted and turned either way but any proper scrutiny of these people and their thinking usually ends up in some whiny rejection to face illusions and the mechanics behind those illusions. it works, of course, but it really does not bode all that well.<p>It's enough to understand that if your narrative is "rational", it's about as rational as that of the Church when they fucked Jesus and some of the greatest scientists, inventors in history.<p>Rationality leads to Mafia-style thinking, buying wins and titles in competitions like the Fußball-Weltmeisterschaft and while most people don't care because it's just bread and games, it should bother rational people even more than anyone, because fraud breaks rational links. If A or B are complete fucking bullshit and actually unrelated to each other or their context, then A + B equals something that is not a rational result - not a result at all, actually.<p>I used to always think "organic" and "natural" evolution and development are better, but the "AI" industry proved that it applies to artificial evolution and progress as well. And it's all due to Game Theory rationality and whiny grown-ups with childhood trauma or the fear that their offspring might evolve beyond their methods and lose their position in the deluded hierarchies for the sake of better ways, better living, better loving, better thinking.<p>To give even more attack surface and inspiration: if you can't admit symbiosis is possible because you got mobbed or can't stand losing with or without sabotage, then you will attempt to break anyone who made symbiosis happen, going so far as to burn everything down that worked and is evolving __perfectly fine, or you slowly narrow the field of possibilities to prove some "self-fulfilling" systems effect (over time).