[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?

[nybble41]

> 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 explained the rational basis in her write-up, which you quoted. The rational basis at the time of the decision was that her actions appeared to her as bordering on those of an abusive parent, which was not her intent, and consequently that stopping her son from licking his hands wasn't worth the cost. Based on these facts she made the rational decision to stop.

> Whatever you choose is going to have consequences.

Choices do have consequences, but there is no need to choose between "multiple truths"—only between multiple actions. If two or more "truths" are equally consistent with the facts, equally valid, then there is no reason why you can't defer judgement pending additional information. The fact that you chose to act in a way consistent with one version of the "truth" and not the other in a particular situation does not imply that you believe the first version to be true and the other false. You could turn around and choose the opposite action the next time without the slightest hint of hypocrisy.

The key point I'm trying to make here is that, having chosen to act in a way consistent with one particular version of the "truth", one should not then lie to oneself and pretend that this version is true, excluding all other possibilities, in the absence of evidence. It's OK (and rational) to admit that your action was chosen arbitrarily, and that you still don't know which version of the "truth" is real.

> What if you don't even know what you're ignorant of or that you are in fact ignorant?

Then the first step is to admit that you have a problem. Recognizing "unknown unknowns" is a hard problem, but it's an important skill to learn.

> If you are comfortable with irrational ways of gathering information, like listening to your gut...

If it has a history of providing useful information, it isn't irrational to pay attention even if you don't know how that information was obtained.

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

Just "going by your gut" without considering other factors isn't any more rational than acting purely on instinct or emotion. It is, however, one component you can use as input to make a rational decision. Acting rationally does not mean you disregard instincts or emotions or "gut feelings" or any of the other hard-to-quantify aspects of our existence. These things are important and exist for a reason. They aren't always right, however, and that's where rational thought comes in. Giving full reign to one's impulses and emotions, without filtering them through the lens of reason, is harmful both to oneself and to others.

[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.