Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters

Rationality explores the history of rational thought and the benefits that rationality provides. It also looks at cases of irrational behavior. Irrational actions can be harmless - until they are not. People can often fall prey to confirmation bias, claiming to be rational, but only accepting facts that confirm what they already believe. The true benefit of rationality comes when you are willing to change when overwhelming evidence presents itself.

The power of evidence can also be challenging. Novelty does get press. Thus we me be presented with many of the rare, but novel cases. This can cause us to feel that the rare is more common. Plane crashes are very rare, yet we hear a lot about them. Car crashes are a much more common way to die, but don't get nearly as much publicity. In science, the novel result gets a lot of press. A confirmation of something common would not. The novel result may have a very low probability that is difficult to reproduce. Bayesian logic would discount this rare items.

We must also be careful of logical leaps of faith. There are often small holes in our logical jumps.

The book ends with a look at the current state of the world. There is a great deal of political fragmentation. Trump and his reality distorting "fake news" mantras gets a lot of publicity for the irrational behavior. However, the left can be equally irrational. Both sides tend to hold on to the studies that favor their point of view, disregarding others. Academia has destroyed much of its credibility with the silencing of dissenting views. Rationality requires listening to all points of view to come up with the correct result. It is possible that what is correct today is not tomorrow. A rational should be willing to accept that.