This reply somehow gets and misses what I was trying to get at.
No, of course I don't believe rationality is like that. The implicit point was that many people in tech do have an attitude like this. They overvalue their "objective" rational reasoning, ironically due to irrational needs.
I think people say that others dont act rationally, when really they just don't understand the other person's goals and how their behaviour contributes to their goals.
If i pass up $100 to get a burger, am i acting irrationally? It depends if i'm hungry. It depends how much $100 means to me (Am i bill gates?). Its impossible to say from the outside. I'm convinced much behaviour is basically the same except much more complex with multiple conflicting priorities.
-Job loss
-Romantic losses
-Self compassion
-Self care
Conceptually, think about how many times your friends have an issue that seems trivial for you (on the outside) to fix. Surely the same applies to you. Especially if you're high functioning, by definition anything left to work on is relatively outside your awareness and can't be solved from the "inside".
Some 80% or so of worlds’ problems are human interfacing problems than mathematical-engineering challenges, and its best to exploit native ability to handle it that we all received when born.