If people were 100% rational, would the world be better?

[vulcanlogician]

Or it would be some kind of 100% rational hellscape?

What role does irrationality play in improving our lives?

[Peebothuhlu]

     



   

 Not at work.

[purplepurpose]

Androids nation. Earth full of elons musks. Boring as hell.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Imma go with ‘rational hellscape’. 

-It isn’t rational to care for the disabled, for example.

-Rearing a child with severe birth defects isn’t rational.

-Most of the things we do for fun aren’t rational.

-It isn’t rational for people to volunteer to aid disaster victims.

The list is endless. Humans are not primarily rational beings - we are rationalizing beings. Becoming 100% rational would deprive us of our humanity.

Boru

[ignoramus]

^
That is the most rational answer ever!

(but I do agree 100%)

[The Grand Nudger]

I’m not sure that pursuing what me might call our biological imperatives is explicitly irrational. Caring for the disabled, raising injured or deformed children, simply pursuing things that make us giggle, even.

Boils down to what we’re excluding with term. If what we mean by rational is only the intentional and conscious application of a formal western philosophy, then we could lose all rationality and not notice. Things wouldn’t be better or worse for us in everyday life all other things being equal.

At least in thought experiment land. In reality much of the circumstances of our life and much of what brings us joy…even if we wont allow those things to be rational, are/were at least created by such a formal rational process. Things wouldn’t be equal at all.

Or, maybe, the human mind is itself some kind of rational product or process. Such that nothing we do is irrational, though much of what we do amounts to getting things wrong. This is closer to my own position. I wouldn’t call us 100% anything, but I do think that our X tends to get multiple passes at everything we do. This thing, rational or rationalizing, is a tool that we use to more successfully pursue our goals ( whatever we describe them as)

[no one]

The world would more than likely be the same, civilization and societies would benefit from clarity of mind and the absence of idiocy.

[Anomalocaris]

-It isn’t rational to care for the disabled, for example.

If one could establish the case that caring for the disabled indirectly improve the chances that oneself would cared for if oneself becomes disabled.

-Rearing a child with severe birth defects isn’t rational.

If one could establish the case that rearing a child with severe birth defect indirectly improve the odds that other children with less severe birth defects would also be reared.

-Most of the things we do for fun aren’t rational.

The fact that they are fun to do provides rationale to do them

-It isn’t rational for people to volunteer to aid disaster victims.

If one could establish the case that caring for the disabled indirectly improve the chances that oneself would cared for if oneself becomes disabled.



People are rational.   They just don’t admit to what their goals really are.

[Neo-Scholastic]

IMHO when linear convergent thinking styles are fetishized the older and often wiser parts of the brain get ignored.

[Angrboda]

Lack of emotion in decision-making tends to lead toward behavior that appears distinctly irrational.