Who is your favorite rationalist?

Me. Is this a trick question?

I hope this isn't too politically volatile, but Milton Friedman.

I don't mean this in the sense of "Oh, his views are so wonderfully rational compared to everybody else's!" Rather, he actually influenced me in how to think.

Capitalism and Freedom had a sort of pattern where he would take something conventionally considered an insoluble social problem, poke at it for a minute, and easily come up with at least one conceivably practical improvement. It would be original, but only because nobody else was bothering to poke around. (In Friedman's case, the goal was usually to refute the idea that "It's impossible to improve X without government." But the thinking style could be applied to a variety of goals. A claim of impossibility should be shaken a little bit before accepted.)

In everything I've read of his, technical and non-technical, there's a certain cheerful, reasonable attitude; he seemed to think that humans are good at problem-solving, that we actually can think and that it's worthwhile to try. That made a great personal impact on me, at a point in my life when I believed the contrary.

Radley Balko is another notable public rationalist. His blog specializes in justice system outrages, with a fair amount about how little science there is in a great deal of forensics, and a lot about many people's inclination to not take police misconduct seriously.

I wouldn't necessary call him a hero, but Billy Beane, general manager of the Oakland A's, is certainly a true rationalist. He is the protagonist of the nonfiction book Moneyball by Michael Lewis.

Before Beane, decisions about what baseball players to draft were mostly made by professional scouts. These guys spent their time driving across the country to find young players and watch them play. Serious attention was paid to how a player "looked" - his physique, his grace, and his personality (aggressiveness was a big plus). Statistics were factored into the decision, but not given much weight, since 1) statistics about a player's high school career didn't imply much about his professional career, and 2) people weren't counting the right things. For example, batting average turns out to be much less important than on-base percentage (the latter takes walks into account, the former doesn't).

Billy Beane helped to change that. He was able to turn a team with a relatively small budget (the A's spent about a third of what the Yankees spent on salaries) into a consistent winner. Like Munger, he looked for value: players who, because of inadequacies in other teams' evaluation methods, could be hired cheaply relative to their talents.

I feel a kinship with E. O. Wilson, because of something he wrote in Consilience: He was raised in a conservative Christian family and culture; he became an atheist, but now feels he can never be fully at home in either of those worlds. Or, it's like being part of bigger family whose members hate each other.

The Munger quote you're looking for is this;

"A great business at a fair price is superior to a fair business at a great price."