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The Irrationality Myth | Big Think | Praxis - 0 views

bigthink.com/...rationality-test

TOK reason Kahneman irrationality psychology

shared by markfrankel18 on 20 Aug 14 - No Cached

There is indeed ample data that institutions and individuals can wreak havoc when they deviate from certain principles of logic and objectivity. There is also a good deal of dispiriting evidence about the rationality of voters that spurs questions about the effectiveness—and even the legitimacy—of democratic government. Yet much of the work of cognitive scientists—even fascinating Nobel Prize-winning research by Daniel Kahneman—leaves me edified but not alarmed. The human capacity for reason may be fragile and partial but it is not belied by studies in which large percentages of subjects answer a few tricky questions incorrectly.
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My hypothesis is that while we love reading about humanity’s tendency toward the irrational, we take offense when light is thrown on our own individual incompetencies. 
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The Irrationality Within Us - Scientific American Blog Network - 0 views

blogs.scientificamerican.com/...the-irrationality-within-us

TOK reason psychology emotion

shared by markfrankel18 on 13 Dec 16 - No Cached

Why we are not as rational as we think, and why that matters
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We are more rational than those who nudge us - Steven Poole - Aeon - 3 views

aeon.co/...tional-than-those-who-nudge-us

TOK economics bias rational reason Kahneman

shared by markfrankel18 on 29 Sep 14 -

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We are told that we are an irrational tangle of biases, to be nudged any which way. Does this claim stand to reason?
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A culture that believes its citizens are not reliably competent thinkers will treat those citizens differently to one that respects their reflective autonomy. Which kind of culture do we want to be? And we do have a choice. Because it turns out that the modern vision of compromised rationality is more open to challenge than many of its followers accept.
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Modern skepticism about rationality is largely motivated by years of experiments on cognitive bias.
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The thorny question is whether these widespread departures from the economic definition of ‘rationality’ should be taken to show that we are irrational, or whether they merely show that the economic definition of rationality is defective.
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During the development of game theory and decision theory in the mid-20th century, a ‘rational’ person in economic terms became defined as a lone individual whose decisions were calculated to maximise self-interest, and whose preferences were (logically or mathematically) consistent in combination and over time. It turns out that people are not in fact ‘rational’ in this homo economicus way,
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There has been some controversy over the correct statistical interpretations of some studies, and several experiments that ostensibly demonstrate ‘priming’ effects, in particular, have notoriously proven difficult to replicate. But more fundamentally, the extent to which such findings can show that we are acting irrationally often depends on what we agree should count as ‘rational’ in the first place.
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if we want to understand others, we can always ask what is making their behaviour ‘rational’ from their point of view. If, on the other hand, we just assume they are irrational, no further conversation can take place.
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And so there is less reason than many think to doubt humans’ ability to be reasonable. The dissenting critiques of the cognitive-bias literature argue that people are not, in fact, as individually irrational as the present cultural climate assumes. And proponents of debiasing argue that we can each become more rational with practice. But even if we each acted as irrationally as often as the most pessimistic picture implies, that would be no cause to flatten democratic deliberation into the weighted engineering of consumer choices, as nudge politics seeks to do. On the contrary, public reason is our best hope for survival.
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The Difference Between Rationality and Intelligence - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ionality-and-intelligence.html

TOK bias reason intuition

shared by markfrankel18 on 17 Sep 16 - No Cached

The major finding was that irrationality — or what Professor Stanovich called “dysrationalia” — correlates relatively weakly with I.Q. A person with a high I.Q. is about as likely to suffer from dysrationalia as a person with a low I.Q.
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Based on this evidence, Professor Stanovich and colleagues have introduced the concept of the rationality quotient, or R.Q. If an I.Q. test measures something like raw intellectual horsepower (abstract reasoning and verbal ability), a test of R.Q. would measure the propensity for reflective thought — stepping back from your own thinking and correcting its faulty tendencies.
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The Dangers of Pseudoscience - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...the-dangers-of-pseudoscience

TOK science pseudoscience

shared by markfrankel18 on 11 Oct 13 -