What makes people irrational thinkers?

[Belacqua]

Anthropologists do not usually pass judgement.  Their task is to learn the meanings within a culture. They are as objective as they can be in the circumstances.

Yes, I think this is a hard-won battle. The myth of progress and the natural tendency for people to assume that their way is the best way are not easy to overcome. 

There's a splendid new book by the late David Graeber called The Dawn of Everything, that addresses several of the prejudices still remaining (allegedly) in anthropology. It's a wonderfully optimistic book in that many of the things we are told are inevitable about our unequal society turn out to be not as necessary as maybe we thought. 

As always, the tendency for questions of epistemology, metaphysics, etc. etc. to turn into ideological issues is constant. You don't have to be a Foucault fan to see that accusations of irrationality often have to do with who runs things.

[The Grand Nudger]

-and yet, christianity is nothing less than or other than the notion that their way is the best and only way.

It's an irrational belief, just not a crazy one.

[Anomalocaris]

Believing in a thing because other people believe it is explicitly irrational.  It's the living embodiment of the ad pop fallacy.  Explicitly irrational, but not crazy or disordered....you know, just like here in our witchcraft believing culture...by any other name.

It is not irrational.   If there is a need to adopt a belief to support decisions, and there is not the direct information, time and resources to methodically formulate the belief based on evidence, then believing a thing because other people believe it may well be the next best thing.

What is irrational Is holding that conviction because other people believe it, or let that belief form basis of decisions that need not be made,   when there is time, resource or direct information required to examine it.

[SlowCalculations]

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Interesting, i had a teacher who once told me people are not born critical thinkers (I'm undecided) but i like to think they just don't have the tools yet. 
Would you agree or disagree just me being curious?

There is an old line that most people think that they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.

Even those who have the tools will tend to apply them in support of their own biases. They may be more likely to reject certain *justifications*, but all that means is that they will use *other* justifications for what they intuit to be the case.

Now, this doesn't mean that logic and reason are useless. It just means that they are not as important as we would like to think when it comes to convincing someone they are wrong. Much better is to find internal contradictions in their system while showing that the contradictions don't arise from other intuitions.

I think you're onto something there. I just don't know what it is myself yet or what I believe it could be it's been something I've wondered lately.

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Believing in a thing because other people believe it is explicitly irrational.  It's the living embodiment of the ad pop fallacy.  Explicitly irrational, but not crazy or disordered....you know, just like here in our witchcraft believing culture...by any other name.

I think i agree, but maybe i agree it's irrational because i don't yet understand everyone's perspectives yet? 
I spend a lot of time in my own head and yet, no matter how hard i try i still feel like some people on here are talking way beyond what i can comprehend no matter how many new concepts i grasp. i'm getting better but i'm still fairly far behind.

[vulcanlogician]

One thing I have learned from teaching math is that logic isn't a natural way of thinking. Even those who have an aptitude have a LOT of difficulty when it comes to coming up with and writing logical proofs. Although we like to claim that logic is the 'laws of thought', in reality, most conclusions most people arrive at are not found through logic.

Instead, people usually have intuitions that they then use some sort of 'reasoning' to justify. But the reasoning is usually NOT the reason they believe. it is the way they justify their intuitions. And their beliefs are based on those intuitions, not on logic or reasoning.

From Economist Daniel Kahneman:

Kahneman divides our thinking into two subsystems: type 1 and type 2. Type 1 thinking is fast, intuitive, unconscious thought. Most everyday activities (like driving, talking, cleaning, etc.) make heavy use of the type 1 system. The type 2 system is slow, calculating, conscious thought. When you're doing a difficult math problem or thinking carefully about a philosophical problem, you're engaging the type 2 system. From Kahneman's perspective, the big difference between type 1 and type 2 thinking is that type 1 is fast and easy but very susceptible to bias, whereas type 2 is slow and requires conscious effort but is much more resistant to cognitive biases.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4102848

"Resistant" being an operative word here. We are never free of cognitive bias. But we aren't helpless slaves to it either.

I agree with you that we are not essentially logical beings. I like Plato's allegory in Phaedrus where he likens us mentally to a chariot with three parts. Two horses and a charioteer. One unruly horse (desire), One obedient horse (emotion), and our rational inclinations (which are represented by the charioteer). Looking at that whole model, you can see that we as people are pretty much 95% emotion and desire-- when accounting for raw power... what really motivates us. Plato never thought that we should be more reasonable than we are desirous or emotional. In fact he considered it impossible. (One of the few matters Plato is decidedly correct on.) Rather, he thought the best role for our reasonable nature is to try it's best to keep the two horses on track as best it could. Only our more passionate nature can actually propel us forward through life. Our reasonable nature can do naught but try and steer as best it can.

Or, put another way by the Lebanese poet, Gibran:

 Your reason and your passion are the rudder and the sails of your seafaring soul.
    If either your sails or your rudder be broken, you can but toss and drift, or else be held at a standstill in mid-seas.
    For reason, ruling alone, is a force confining and passion, unattended, is a flame that burns to its own destruction.

https://poets.org/poem/reason-and-passion

***

As for thinking being "rearranging our prejudices." A bit too cynical, maybe. But I'm sure that's what we're doing some of the time when we think. Maybe even most of the time. But, taking into account Kahneman's distinction. I think we can "escape" our prejudices when we employ type 2 thinking. But type 2 thinking itself can't always do the job either. We need dialectic to finish the job. We need our ideas to be opposed by a disagreeing party, or a Socrates... something... to rouse us out of self-satisfaction.

[Angrboda]

Given that the inclination is to resort to type 1 thinking when one's prejudices are comfitted, and the more difficult to convince type 2 thinking when our prejudices are challenged, the final result does appear to be little more than a shuffling of one's prejudices.

[emjay]

....
"Resistant being" an operative word here. We are never free of cognitive bias, I don't think. But we aren't slaves to it either.

I agree with you that we are not essentially logical beings. I like Plato's allegory in Phaedrus where he likens us mentally to a chariot with three parts. Two horses and a charioteer. One unruly horse (desire), One obedient horse (emotion), and our rational inclinations (which are represented by the charioteer). Looking at that whole model, you can see that we as people are pretty much 95% emotion and desire-- when accounting for raw power... what really motivates us. Plato never thought that we should be more reasonable than we are desirous or emotional. In fact he considered it impossible. (One of the few matters Plato is decidedly correct on.) Rather, he thought the best role for our reasonable nature is to try it's best to keep the two horses on track as best it could. Only our more passionate nature can actually propel us forward through life. Our reasonable nature can do naught but try and steer as best it can.

Or, put another way by the Lebanese poet, Gibran:

 Your reason and your passion are the rudder and the sails of your seafaring soul.
    If either your sails or your rudder be broken, you can but toss and drift, or else be held at a standstill in mid-seas.
    For reason, ruling alone, is a force confining and passion, unattended, is a flame that burns to its own destruction.

https://poets.org/poem/reason-and-passion
...

If I get nothing else out of life, I'd like to truly internalise that message; with the wisdom IMO coming from learning to accept it - both in self and others - rather than fight it. In other words I think we have this sort of illusion that every problem, or difference of opinion, can be addressed with logic alone but it just doesn't work that way, because no one is 100% logical in the first place, or in the sense of having that as the sole directing force in life, Vulcan or Data style (though I admit my analogy could be wrong on both counts - and you'd probably know that best - because I can't remember from Star Trek how much emotion does play a part in Vulcan thinking; whether it's suppressed or they just don't have it... and then with Data you've got him always talking with curiosity about human emotions, and whether or not he may be experiencing them, but in general it appears he acts from a position of logic alone).

[Belacqua]

I think we can "escape" our prejudices when we employ type 2 thinking.

One thing to keep in mind is that our minds are not (as some religious people would have us believe) pure sparks of reason temporarily trapped in the dross of the body. Human beings are intrinsically, unavoidably, embodied and embedded things. It is impossible for us to escape these structures, and to a very large degree the structures determine what we can think. 

The type of body we have determines the kind of input we can take, the way we are likely to interpret the sense impressions, the scales and amounts we can deal with.

The fact that we think in language structures our concepts even as we form them. Language has metaphysical assumptions built into it -- for example, the idea that there are objects and there are actions (i.e. nouns and verbs). Verb tenses, etc. As soon as we formulate a thought, it is already limited in the form it can take. 

And of course no human is raised without culture. The culture we are raised in determines nearly all of our ideas about things. 

If we realize that some set of things we learned as children is in fact foolish, this doesn't mean that we have gained access to some pure vein of truth. It just means that we have gained some tools to evaluate thoughts from our culture, and applied them. Then when we settle on a new view of things which we think is more likely, it is not some new thing we have invented but a different set of explanations which our culture has provided us. No one is ever outside of culture. (And unfortunately, when some people change their beliefs from one set to another within their culture, it seems to be less a function of analysis than of what seems cool. Who has the cleverest propagandists.)

Foucault used the word episteme for the set of ideas and values which a given culture uses to structure its view of truth -- or of what ideas are acceptable. To range outside this strictly bounded area of thought will get you labelled as anything from mildly eccentric to criminally insane. But even the insane tend to be insane in certain recognizable ways, as a combination of bodily function and cultural expression. 

The part that some people don't like to hear is that culture is contingent. And the episteme of any given culture is contingent on its time, place, and genealogy. We may be happy at the bottom of our well and assume that this time we have really seen the truth. But people who claim not to exist inside an episteme, or to have no ideology, or to have no metaphysical beliefs, are just telling you that they haven't examined their own beliefs. 

And while the options that our culture gives us are contingent, not some kind of pure truth, it would be irrational to reject all of these choices. If rationality is the ability to function thoughtfully in the world, then accepting our culture's episteme is unavoidable. We can ponder it, we can read texts from other times and places to get glimpses of other ways of thinking, but the very analysis we do is included inside the episteme of our time. 

Unless somebody wants to argue that the mind is a pure spark of reason with unmediated access to capital-T Truth.

[The Grand Nudger]

You don't have to have hit any pure vein of truth to recognize that a belief premised on a logical fallacy is explicitly irrational.

Things can be irrational, and useful. Irrational and practically necessary, even - particularly in a culture consequentially organized around a specific belief. Sharing that belief, and very publicly sharing that belief, may be the only thing between you and the executioner. Nevertheless, if you believe a thing is true because many people believe it.....even if that thing is actually true...still irrational.

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I think i agree, but maybe i agree it's irrational because i don't yet understand everyone's perspectives yet? 

It's a possibility that we think some belief is irrational, but we're mistaken.  The faithful will never fail to insist as much even if you aren't.  Yet another irrational belief with utility. That people must be mistaken about or ignorant of some aspect of your belief if they contend your belief is irrational. Ironically, we're better at assessing other's beliefs than our own, so the odds are perpetually against that hope.

I spend a lot of time in my own head and yet, no matter how hard i try i still feel like some people on here are talking way beyond what i can comprehend no matter how many new concepts i grasp. i'm getting better but i'm still fairly far behind.

In my experience, it's far more often the case that people mound up garbage around their beliefs, making them seem more complicated than they are. For example..I could tell you that I believe I live in the best country in the world. I could insist that we have a months long back and forth about american history and an exhaustive discussion of the current state of affairs relative to other nations. Big words, hard to source but plausibly argued assertions, in fact...just assume that I manage to get through the whole bit without saying anything fundamentally nuts. I wouldn't....but that's what's fun about thought experiments. You might come out the other end thinking I have a well thought out belief (that is - formally so), and that if you wanted to argue it it would be a tough nut to crack. That you should bone up on a b or c.

You'd be wrong. None of that convo has anything to do with my belief in that regard. I feel a certain way when I think about my country - that's it..that's all, that's what the belief is premised upon in mere reality. It's not a tough nut to crack, it's impossible. You couldn't even touch it by arguing any of my million assertions, one or all of which I'm willing to abandon at no cost to that belief.

In my opinion, getting at the reasons for a persons belief requires that the other person put that belief at risk, which is emphatically not what we do with our most firmly held and deeply cherished beliefs.

[Belacqua]

Plato's allegory

Also I want to be careful with Plato's allegory. 

Like all allegories, it's an illustration, and breaks down pretty quickly if taken too far.

The idea that desire and the emotions are somehow discrete and separate parts of the mind, and that there is some objective rational observing "self" watching them from behind (like the chariot guy) is a cartoon picture. The parts aren't detachable, I think.

So it's dangerous to imagine that we can have calculation of pure reason, with the other parts tamped down momentarily.