Why is it so hard to be rational?

Even beyond the hard process bottleneck on creating or lucking upon events that produce the evidence we need, however, there is also the limitation that Bayes only gives you a probability. It doesn't give you a decision theory or even a thresholding function. For those, you need a whole lot of other things like utility functions, discount rates, receiver operating characteristics and an understanding of asymmetric costs of false positives versus false negatives, that are often different for each decision domain.

And, of course, to get a utility function meaningful for humans, you need values. There is no algorithm that can give you values. They're just there as a basic primitive input to all other decision making procedures, yet they often conflict in ways that cannot be reconciled even within a single person, let alone across a society of many people.

Take a non political example: How safe are whole tomatoes to eat? What did the grocery store spray on them? Is it safe? Will it wash off? What about the warehouse were they were stored for months, what did they put on them to keep them from spoiling? What about the farmer, what did they spray on them to protect against pests? What is in the water, is it safe? Now we're ready to eat: Does anyone in my family have any kind of intolerance to raw tomatoes? And this is a pretty simple toy example.... In general, we've collectively decided to trust in the good in people. We hope that if something is bad/lie/harmful, then someone in the know will raise the alarm for the group.

The goal of rational thinking is not some conceit of perfection [1] but debugging the runtime for a better result. Humans are in fact very good at communication and at debugging language errors. They have evolved a rational capacity. It can evidently be developed but it needs to be exercised.

This is where hypothesis of an educational system often enters the discussion.

[1] Galef and others call the "Star Trek" Spock character a Vulcan Strawman or Straw Vulcan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_Galef

This seems to be a pretty good overview:

https://www.athenarium.com/thinking-in-bets-annie-duke/

The question is, can we organize and educate ourselves so we can leverage that parallel power and let each person become experts in their areas with proper trusts and incentives? And manage to pass along the previous generation computation to the next, without corrupting the data?

Edit: And I forgot all the tools we've designed to help us compute all that, of which I'd count math as a tool to help us compute, and computers as another.

I'd go further to say that there are real world issues that compound the variables. Namely that individual actions increasingly have global consequences eg. individual purchasing behaviors have externalities that the market is not pricing in and thus fall to the consumer to have to calculate.

Further, given that these global issues these kinds of calculations are game theoretic by their nature, making it even more complicated.

I would still like to see some studies which delve into whether sugar and caffeine are catalysts for biasing us towards system 1 and how they affect system 2, mindfulness, patience, etc...

This also had a rather frustrating effect. It is true that not just intensely traveling (not in the sight seeing way), but also actual living in several different countries and cultures, changed my horizon a lot. It definitely had the effect you talk about.

But then what? You cannot tell your partner in discussion "you would not think like that if you had traveled/lived outside of your culture", and it's also impossible to send everyone off to travel in order to experience the same. Much less in the US, where for most of the country you cannot just hop into a train for a few hours to encounter a completely different language and culture. (I grew up in Europe and moved to the US as an adult, but I've also lived in several different European countries before, and traveled to far away places like Asia.)

It's not an easy task. But 10 minutes a day can add up and reinforce that information.

A related idea is cognitive distortion. It's basically an irrational thought pattern that perpetuates negative emotions and a distorted view of reality. One example many here can relate to is imposter syndrome. But to feel like an imposter you have to overlook your achievements and assets and cherry-pick negative data points.

If you want to be rational about an opinion, you have to think first, "what are my hypothesis". Most people start with the opinion and then go down to the hypothesis. That can't work like that. That's the hypothesis + the logic that should create an opinion. Not the other way around

Focus on yourself and controlling your emotions. Be the calm.

In Bayesian decision theory, you'd choose the action (walk directly by the bush; walk by the bush but have your guard up; steer clear of the bush) that minimizes your loss function (e.g. probability of dying or probability of your blood line dying out). You'd end up picking a path that balances the risk of being eaten by a lion with the cost of having to walk further (and thus having less time and energy to gather food; or tripping and cutting yourself and dying of infection; or whatever).

If consumer ethics is important to you then it obviously warrants some deliberation, weighted by an upper bound of your potential impact. But identifying areas of meaningless choice and simply choosing randomly (and not even caring if the choice is sufficiently random) frees up a lot of mental energy.

Exactly what you said. Once you accept one toxic thought, it tends to branch out into other decisions. Unfortunately there are many, many memes out there ready to cause an infection.

These things can be fatal.

It could be that, like dietary restrictions to reduce the spread of disease, the foophobia is no longer needed, but keep Chesterton's fence in mind before you say it's unneeded.

...is a pretty silly phrase. If you don't have a reason for something, it can't (by definition) be reasonable.

I like chocolate ice cream more than vanilla ice cream, and you're not gonna convince me otherwise by debating the flavor with me. It entirely could be the case that my preference is from cultural conditioning, but it's not my concern.

If your friend has a mindset of "to each his own" there's no problem.

In my experience, people usually can give ‘concrete’ reasons for it, but what constitutes ‘concrete’ is a matter of opinion, and I don’t consider everybody’s reasons to be valid. But of course, they do.

1) It’s not reasonable to expect someone to dig so deeply, and there isn’t enough time to do it for every issue.

2) Someone, somewhere, has done an even deeper dive into the same issue. From their perspective, I’m the one that hasn’t done my research. When it’s “enough” is a fuzzy line.

Take money for example. You can create a theoretical decision-making dilemma involving certain sums of money, and work out what the most rational strategy is, but in reality, the differences between different sums of money is going to differ between people depending on different value systems and competing interests. So then you get into this scenario where 1 unit of money means something different to different people (the value you put on 1 € is going to be different from the value I put on it; the exchange rates are sort of an average over all these valuations), which might throw off the relevance of the theoretical scenario for reality, or change the optimal decision scenario.

The other issue beside the one you're relating to -- the subjectivity of the weights assigned to different outcomes, the achille's heel of utility theory -- is uncertainty not just about the values in the model, but whether the model is even correct at all. That is, you can create some idea that some course of action is more rational, but what happens when there's some nontrivial probability that the whole framework is incorrect? Your decision about A and B, then, shouldn't just be modeled in terms of whatever is in your model, but all the other things you're not accounting for. Maybe there are other decisions, C and D, which you're not even aware of, or someone else is, but you have to choose B to get to them.

Just yesterday I read this very well-reasoned, elegant, rational explanation by an epidemiologist about why boosters aren't needed. But about 3/4 of the way through I realized it was all based on an assumption that is very suspect, and which throws everything out the window. There are still other things their arguments were missing. So by the end of it I was convinced of the opposite conclusion.

Rationality as a framework is important, but it's limited and often misleading.

Disagree; value systems are the inputs to rationality. The only constraint is that you do the introspection in order to know what it is that you value. In that sense buying a stereo based on appearance is the right decision if you seek status among peers or appreciate aesthetics. It's the wrong decision if you want sound quality or durability.

I think the real issue is that people don't do the necessary introspection, and instead just glom onto catch-phrases or follow someone else's lead. That's why so many people hold political views that are contrary to their own interests.

I would argue we've largely been anesthetized due to successful Gish Galloping. I have great admiration for people who put the effort in to sort out the issues, academics and journalists. But just now everyone eye-rolled when I said those two terms.

Reason needs axioms (beliefs) to build a rational discourse, and without emotions, it is impossible to choose a limited set of starting axioms to begin making logical inferences from.

I agree with the person above who said being rational is about making post-hoc rationalizations. We know by cognitive science that a majority of explanations are build that way: after observing facts, we intuitively develop a story that is consistent with our expectations about the fact, as well as with our preconceived beliefs. "Being rational" in this context would be limited to reviewing our beliefs when these ad-hoc rationalizations become inconsistent one with another.

(And you're playing the game agaonst the squirrels anyway.)