[hliyan]

I've always considered "pattern recognition for the purpose of prediction" a core function of the human brain that precedes language, rationality or any form of logic. So it feels counter-intuitive to me to label this meta-rationality or even associate it with rationality. I subscribe somewhat to the idea that much of our rational decision making is ex post facto, i.e a verbal narration that comes after the decision making to explain the decision. The actual decision making being an opaque process that takes place inside our brain's neural network. Confession: I lost the author about halfway through the article.

[diab0lic]

This ex post facto explanation is referred to as rationalization and is ironically irrational. If you’ve already made a decision you’ve forfeited the option to do so rationally.

I do agree that most of what gets labeled rational is in fact ex post facto rationalization. I do it myself all the time, haha.

[rrmm]

Ex post facto rationalization is a major annoyance of mine. Let's just be honest with ourselves and recognize that lots of what we want isn't rational. That's ok, use your rationality to keep yourself from making huge, dumb mistakes, but don't pretend you're doing it for "rational" reasons or through a "rational" process.

But I'm kind of over-strict about it and like to reserve "rational" for processes you can do with first-order logic. Given the complexity and lack of information in real life, that happens almost never. Of course this is not a terribly rational point of view.