Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Rationality is described as the quality of being reasonable when hard facts are to be considered. It represents a balance between bias and the person’s reasons for that bias, but also one’s actions with respect to the reasons for action. Psychology, economics, and even artificial intelligence as sciences place tremendous focus on reasoning.

But what would society be like if people were perfectly rational? According to Julia Galef, president and co-founder of the Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR), “…our confidence in a claim would match the amount of evidence backing it up. We’d change our minds in response to good arguments. We wouldn’t stay stuck in jobs or relationships we hate, or make the same mistakes again and again.”

Understanding rationality

Rationality doesn’t shouldn’t be regarded as lack of feelings. Rather, it means understanding what lies behind those feelings, and analyzing those feelings to ultimately ensure a better outcome for the individual as well as for the world. Even intuition – which heavily relies on emotional intelligence and stands in contrast with reason – plays a central role in our decision making (as we discussed recently). Without it, we would spend our entire lives trying to find the most accurate answer to questions like, “should I drink cold water?” or “is this car safe?”

There are certain degrees of rationality that one can exercise based on the information at hand. Isaac Asimov stressed this fact with the following example:

“When people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.”

For who’s asking, the actual term used to describe the earth’s shape is Oblate Spheroid (which basically means it’s slightly oval / elliptical).

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