Re:Stuck: Why the rent and mortgage-burdened don’t always mo...
by WorldMaker on Wednesday April 25, 2018 @03:55PM
(#16925406)
Maybe it's just that your personal definition of "rational" is too narrow for it to fit collectives?
For instance, you seem to conflate "right" and "rational" here: «the "right" choice, the "rational" choice».
If "rational" means to you the maximal beneficial choice (the "right" choice), then of course any group that gets stuck in a local maximum seems irrational in that light.
You may also be conflating "rational" with "normal/not strange/unexpected". Such as here: « believe that human culture is irrational / arbitrary »
But if "rational" is simply supposed to mean "has thought behind it", as it generally gets defined in science, such as your Anthropology example, then that example does show rationality (people noticed that eating pork resulted in unhealthy diseases, so they thought to stop eating pork and went to pass the word around). Whether or not the means were strange (evangelization, for instance) is orthogonal to whether or not thought was put into it. Whether or not the outcome was the maximal option (say, early invention of germ theory rather than pork abstinence), is orthogonal to whether or not thought was put into it (and even orthogonal to whether or not the outcome was simply a local maximum).
For instance, you seem to conflate "right" and "rational" here: «the "right" choice, the "rational" choice».
If "rational" means to you the maximal beneficial choice (the "right" choice), then of course any group that gets stuck in a local maximum seems irrational in that light.
You may also be conflating "rational" with "normal/not strange/unexpected". Such as here: « believe that human culture is irrational / arbitrary »
But if "rational" is simply supposed to mean "has thought behind it", as it generally gets defined in science, such as your Anthropology example, then that example does show rationality (people noticed that eating pork resulted in unhealthy diseases, so they thought to stop eating pork and went to pass the word around). Whether or not the means were strange (evangelization, for instance) is orthogonal to whether or not thought was put into it. Whether or not the outcome was the maximal option (say, early invention of germ theory rather than pork abstinence), is orthogonal to whether or not thought was put into it (and even orthogonal to whether or not the outcome was simply a local maximum).