[vinceguidry]

Americans are becoming too rational and this is a major problem. When you over-value rationality, you expect to be able to have a rational answer to every question.

The hand-licking story that made the front page today illustrates this point perfectly. Approached rationally, the mom could not solve the problem, no amount of mental effort would yield a resolution or insight into the issue. When the mind expects an answer to a problem that it can't solve, it applies more and more 'force' until it breaks through. In this case, the force was destroying her family relationships. But this is what frustrated rationalism does. People don't or can't catch themselves before they create awful situations.

It is only when she applied an irrational approach to the problem, surrendering the need to control the situation, that she could finally understand what was going on.

I rail against excessive rationality on HN all the time, promoting a more cautious, traditional outlook on certain things like office politics. I expect coders to be exceptionally rational, I don't have any issue with it.

But Americans in general are succumbing to the trend of expecting to be able to answer every question they ever have in their lives and throwing away their emotional health on meaningless symbols and missing the true core nature of what it means to be happy and healthy and whole.

Perhaps the starkest example of this phenomenon is when atheists lament that there aren't any atheist churches. 50 years ago, if you were an atheist, you still went to church. They were still the pillars that communities revolved around, the very loom of the fabric of society.

Nowadays, we've thrown away every last bit of symbolism that brings people together and wonder why we're so lonely. If things aren't perfectly rational, people's minds rebel immediately and harshly, like it's my fault you don't understand a concept requiring depth of study to really grasp.

I don't know what the answer is, but I do know that the mind will create a myth if it doesn't already believe in one. Money, job, marriage is the American Dream myth. It stems ultimately from positivism and expecting to be able to understand everything.

It doesn't have to be this way. You might not be able to fix everybody else but you can fix yourself.

[kemayo]

> The hand-licking story that made the front page today illustrates this point perfectly. [...]

> It is only when she applied an irrational approach to the problem, surrendering the need to control the situation, that she could finally understand what was going on.

I feel like you have a somewhat idiosyncratic definition of "irrational" that you're applying here.

What I took from the hand-licking story was that her initial attempt to brute-force the issue without understanding it was irrational, i.e. "not logical or reasonable", and that approach failed. Then, quite reasonably and rationally, she backed off and established trust with her child, found out the underlying cause of the issue, and provided a solution that resolved the underlying issue.

[vinceguidry]

I think it's common for people, especially the overly-rational, to conflate correctness with rationality. Yes, with hindsight it can be seen that the actions she initially took were incorrect. But they seemed perfectly rational approaches at the time.

If you see your child doing something anti-social, then it's logical to try to correct it because if you don't, it will cause problems for them down the road. In fact, it would have been irrational to not do anything about it.

It was only when the logical brain got overridden by maternal instinct that she could choose an approach that led eventually to a resolution.

The logical brain demands control over the situation. If she could have surrendered control earlier, perhaps even in the first few times she witnessed it, then she could have taken a less-combative approach.

[nybble41]

> Yes, with hindsight it can be seen that the actions she initially took were incorrect. But they seemed perfectly rational approaches at the time.

There was nothing incorrect or irrational about the actions the mother initially took. Her approach was reasonable given the limited information available to her. A slightly more rational approach would perhaps have placed greater emphasis on the value of empathy and her relationship with her child, which was being undermined by some of the measures she took, and given correspondingly less weight to the social pressure she was feeling from others—but in the end she made the rational decision in line with her own principles and priorities and stopped trying to force the issue. Later, when her son was both able and willing to discuss the matter, she was able to analyse the root cause and suggest several rational alternative courses of action which were readily adopted, thus putting an end to the problem for good.

It's unclear from the write-up whether any maternal instincts were involved, but the peer pressure which pushed her to force the issue was clearly irrational and played on her instinctive desire for acceptance. Instincts and emotions are a good thing and shouldn't be ignored, but it's a mistake to follow them blindly—they can lead you into trouble just as easily as they can get you out of it. It's best to look at them as valuable inputs into the rational process, to be evaluated alongside other data before drawing any conclusions.

[vinceguidry]

Things are irrational until we understand the dynamics behind them. Then they become rational. When she decided not to press the issue, that wasn't a rational decision made on logic, it was an emotional one where she prioritized one kind of truth, that it was her hurting her child, over another kind of truth, that it was the hand licking that was hurting her child.

Only in retrospect did the actuality of the situation make itself known. There was no logical way to weigh one alternative against another. Sure, one later manifested, but it didn't exist in the moment.

This is why I say she used irrational means to decide to lay off. I recognized maternal instincts in her reasoning, which I'll quote here:

> Finally, I had this moment where I felt that my efforts to ramp up the pressure to force him to stop had crossed some line. I felt I was turning into an abusive parent.

> At that moment, I decided this had to stop. I didn't care if he licked his hands the rest of his life. It couldn't be worse than this.

Rational analysis failed, some other way of deciding how to handle it took hold. Notice the semantic shift here. She moved from articulating her decision-making process in a cold, logical fashion, then after the failure, she shifts to an empathic, emotional basis.

Over-reliance on and unexamined belief in rationality drives this. Sometimes there are multiple truths out there that you are going to have to choose between, with nothing to help to distinguish them. The over-rational mindset will concoct meaningless and even counter-productive forms of "rationality" to paper over their fundamental ignorance. The colloquial term at hand is lamp posting.

[nybble41]

>> Finally, I had this moment where I felt that my efforts to ramp up the pressure to force him to stop had crossed some line. I felt I was turning into an abusive parent.

>> At that moment, I decided this had to stop. I didn't care if he licked his hands the rest of his life. It couldn't be worse than this.

> Rational analysis failed, some other way of deciding how to handle it took hold. Notice the semantic shift here. She moved from articulating her decision-making process in a cold, logical fashion, then after the failure, she shifts to an empathic, emotional basis.

I see the same shift that you mentioned, but unlike you I see the original exclusion of empathy and emotion from the decision-making process as irrational. Up to this point she'd been reacting instinctively and emotionally to the external pressure to make her son stop licking his hands, without considering whether that was really a worthwhile goal or what it might cost in terms of their relationship. Taking her empathy and emotion into account was the rational choice, and allowed her to set aside the peer pressure and clearly see and evaluate how her actions thus far failed to satisfy her own priorities and goals. At that point she rationally chose to stop forcing the issue.

> Sometimes there are multiple truths out there that you are going to have to choose between, with nothing to help to distinguish them.

The "colloquial term at hand" is false dichotomy. You are never forced to choose one potential truth over another. "I don't know" is a perfectly acceptable response. Naturally you still need to decide on a course of action despite not knowing where the truth lies, but that doesn't require committing to a particular version of the truth and rejecting all others as false.

> The over-rational mindset will concoct meaningless and even counter-productive forms of "rationality" to paper over their fundamental ignorance.

When one is actually ignorant, admitting ignorance is the rational choice; proceeding as if one were not ignorant (for example, by choosing one version of the truth over another when there is nothing to distinguish them) would be the hallmark of an irrational mindset, not an "over-rational" one.

[vinceguidry]

> I see the original exclusion of empathy and emotion from the decision-making process as irrational.

This is because you're reifying rationality onto past events, conflating correct with rational. When she made the decision to stop, she didn't have a rational basis to make that decision, rational means you can connect a decision to logic. She didn't discover that logic, those reasons, until a full year later. That's when she finally had all the pieces.

> doesn't require committing to a particular version of the truth and rejecting all others as false.

This is a non-sequitur. Whatever you choose is going to have consequences. The very course of action is what does the rejection of all the other forms of looking at it, not your mindset. Your actions belie what you consider to be important.

> When one is actually ignorant, admitting ignorance is the rational choice; proceeding as if one were not ignorant (for example, by choosing one version of the truth over another when there is nothing to distinguish them) would be the hallmark of an irrational mindset, not an "over-rational" one.

What if you don't even know what you're ignorant of or that you are in fact ignorant? This is how this ties back to money, job, marriage. You can have these things, and be happy, or you can have these things, and be unhappy. I'm arguing that the reasons why you chase them are important, and you have to make the decision anyway.

If you are comfortable with irrational ways of gathering information, like listening to your gut, then you're way better off than trying to force rational ones.

So is your next argument going to be that "going by your gut" is a rational approach?

[vinceguidry]

> There was nothing incorrect or irrational about the actions the mother initially took.

I didn't spot this the first time, let me address it now. The actions were rational, because they were grounded in reasons that usually work for that kind of situation.

They were incorrect because they didn't have the desired outcome. When she corrected her course of action, they started to have the desired outcome, and the whole thing became clear a year later.

When she corrected course, she used an irrational basis to make that determination. What makes it irrational? The decision to not try to solve a problem is inherently irrational.

There's nothing wrong with using irrational bases for decision-making. What's wrong is making incorrect decisions. If you're irrational, and wrong, then that's a bad thing. If you're irrational and right, then that's a good thing. It's better to be rational and right, but in the absence of the foundation for reason, when you can't determine how things work or why, you're forced to operate along irrational lines.

I'll allow that her course correction was at least somewhat rational, after all we can articulate and understand her reasons, which we couldn't if they were totally irrational. But they're less rational than her earlier approach. Your perception that her second approach was more rational is the conflation of rationality and correctness. It was more correct. It was less rational. Reason could only enter the picture again when she had concrete evidence.

The only reason her story is salient at all is precisely because it messes with our conception of rationality.

[mancerayder]

Perhaps the starkest example of this phenomenon is when atheists lament that there aren't any atheist churches. 50 years ago, if you were an atheist, you still went to church. They were still the pillars that communities revolved around, the very loom of the fabric of society.

Nowadays, we've thrown away every last bit of symbolism that brings people together and wonder why we're so lonely. If things aren't perfectly rational, people's minds rebel immediately and harshly, like it's my fault you don't understand a concept requiring depth of study to really grasp.

You had me up until here. First of all, who's lonely, who's "we"? In a conformist society, those who think differently can find it more lonely, by definition. Second, atheists went to Church? Well was that because if they didn't, they were ostracized -- and, well, lonely?

Children of higher intelligence (we do believe that it's possible that we're not all blank slates at birth, right?) tend to find it more lonely than children of average intelligence.

If you consider yourself an exceptional (in some way) person -- rightly or wrongly -- you'll find things more complicated socially.

Now I think you're onto something with the rationality bit, but not in the Nietzschean way you're alluding to (religion and community). Instead, well look at how we create our social bonds in the U.S.: use-value.

Have you ever been in a position of power, and found that suddenly everyone wanted to be your friend?

Or, have you read what men and women write on dating websites in terms of what they want? These to me are more evidence of a "rationality militates against happiness" than your strange atheist example.

[vinceguidry]

> Second, atheists went to Church? Well was that because if they didn't, they were ostracized -- and, well, lonely?

American distrust for religion began in the sixties and seventies. Before, it was a normal and accepted part of life. People wanted to go to church. Even if you didn't believe in it you still wanted to go. It's hard to believe but that's how all of the world's societies were up until very recently. Religion aided life, not hindered it.

The Enlightenment was a comparatively small movement that really only took root in the intelligentsia. You would have had to pry religion out of the cold dead fingers of the common folks.

Now, even religious folks often stay home on Sunday.

[hindsightbias]

> that there aren't any atheist churches.

That isn't a rational response, that's an irrational response to an emotional need they apparently do acknowledge. My grandfather and uncles literally built their churches with their bare hands and wallets. If you're an athiest and want a church, well, the rational response would be go out and build one.

Or at least join the Unitarians. Most of them don't care.

[gerbilly]

I agree that we overvalue reason.

To reason about something you have to reason from premises. But where do the premises come from?

I'm sure many of us have had that experience, when dealing with a difficult problem, where an insight comes to us out of the blue.

Where did that new insight come from, certainly not through rational deliberation. In fact, often it's not until we stop reasoning that the insight is free to appear.

Often we can't explain where the idea came from, it seems to be from some subconscious (irrational?) part of our mind.

Once we have the insight (a new premise) then we can start to reason from it. But in my opinion, reason comes in only after our mind has done the real work elsewhere.

[EnFinlay]

Have you read Voltaire's Bastards? https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6584.Voltaire_s_Bastards

It is an in depth criticism of the overly rational. A lot of it went over my head or didn't make sense because I don't have a strong background on some historical/philosophical touchpoints, but I thought it was a great read.

[lotsofpulp]

How is not addressing the cause of the hand licking rational?

[inimino]

The cause was not known; this is the point of the story. Hypothesis generation is not a rational process.