Why so serious?
Ah. In that case, you're just plain wrong; a standard of rational decision-making is actually rather hard for humans to maintain, and often counterintuitive to the point that people will stick to their irrational conclusions even when faced with clear evidence that they are wrong. Curiously, intelligent people don't seem to be particularly less susceptible to this, either.
Consider the Monty Hall problem
, for example. The actual principle is not complicated at all - in fact, it's extremely simple - but most people will still intuitively make the wrong call. People with Ph Ds will argue, at length, defending the irrational choice. We make these sorts of irrational judgements all the time, but because we're also bad at self-awareness and debugging our own decision-making processes, we don't notice them.
As for the rational person seeming alien to the rest of us, I really don't see how that would be the case. A rational person, in the real world, isn't a Straw Vulcan.
edited 9th Nov '11 10:04:40 PM by MostlyBenign
Okay then, maybe we are bad at it. Honestly I was aware of all that, I just hadn't made the connection.
And I realize that a rational person would not be a Straw Vulcan. They would be a dick. An utterly sociopathic dick.
I'm convinced that our modern day analogues to ancient scholars are comedians. -0dd1
Why so serious?
Having had a good night's sleep, I realize that we're probably talking about different things: I'm talking about the employment of rational decision-making to maximize personal utility, whereas you are - apparently - using the more specific form used in rational choice theory, which explicitly only addresses extrinsic costs and benefits (i.e. provided that I can avoid punishment, it would be rational for me to kill a person for pocket change, since my possible emotional reaction about killing someone doesn't enter into the equation)?
In that case, I understand the confusion, though I don't think that particular definition of rationality is applicable to people on an individual level, since unless we're sociopaths - hell, even if we are sociopaths - our motivations and goals are too complex and vaguely defined for it to have any predictive value.
edited 10th Nov '11 2:35:06 PM by MostlyBenign
No, I didn't mean that we were BAD at it. A human that really wanted to be rational could be fairly easily. It's just that that human would seem utterly alien to the rest of us, because most of us don't WANT to be rational in the economic sense most of the time.
I'm convinced that our modern day analogues to ancient scholars are comedians. -0dd1