Thinking, Fast and Slow was the catalyst that turned my rumbling dissatisfaction into the pursuit of a more rational approach to life. I wound up here. After a few years, what do I think causes human irrationality? Here's a listicle.

1. Cognitive biases, whatever these are
2. Not understanding statistics
3. Akrasia
4. Little skill in accessing and processing theory and data
5. Not speaking science-ese
6. Lack of interest or passion for rationality
7. Not seeing rationality as a virtue, or even seeing it as a vice.
8. A sense of futility, the idea that epistemic rationality is not very useful, while instrumental rationality is often repugnant
9. A focus on associative thinking
10. Resentment
11. Not putting thought into action
12. Lack of incentives for rational thought and action itself
13. Mortality
14. Shame
15. Lack of time, energy, ability
16. An accurate awareness that it's impossible to distinguish tribal affiliation and culture from a community
17. Everyone is already rational, given their context
18. Everyone thinks they're already rational, and that other people are dumb
19. It's a good heuristic to assume that other people are dumb
20. Rationality is disruptive, and even very "progressive" people have a conservative bias to stay the same, conform with their peers, and not question their own worldview
21. Rationality can misfire if we don't take it far enough
22. All the writing, math, research, etc. is uncomfortable and not very fun compared to alternatives
23. Epistemic rationality is directly contradictory to instrumental rationality
24. Nihilism
25. Applause lights confuse people about what even is rationality
26. There's at least 26 factors deflecting people from rationality, and people like a clear, simple answer
27. No curriculum
28. It's not taught in school
29. In an irrational world, epistemic rationality is going to hold you back
30. Life is bad, and making it better just makes people more comfortable in badness
31. Very short-term thinking
32. People take their ideas way too seriously, without taking ideas in general seriously enough
33. Constant distraction
34. The paradox of choice
35. Lack of faith in other people or in the possibility for constructive change
36. Rationality looks at the whole world, which has more people in it than Dunbar's number
37. The rationalists are all hiding on obscure blogs online
38. Rationality is inherently elitist
39. Rationality leads to convergence on the truth if we trust each other, but it leads to fragmentation of interests since we can't think about everything, which makes us more isolated
40. Slinging opinions around is how people connect. Rationality is an argument.
41. "Rationality" is stupid. What's really smart is to get good at harnessing your intuition, your social instincts, to make friends and play politics.
42. Rationality is paperclipping the world. Every technological advance that makes individuals more comfortable pillages the earth and increases inequality, so they're all bad and we should just embrace the famine and pestilence until mother nature takes us back to the stone age and we can all exist in the circular dreamtime.
43. You can't rationally commit to rationality without being rational first. We have no baptism ceremony.
44. We need a baptism ceremony but don't want to be a cult, so we're screwed, which we would also be if we became a cult.
45. David Brooks is right that EA is bad, we like EA, so we're probably bad too.
46. We're secretly all spiritual and just faking rational atheism because what we really want to do is convert.
47. There's too much verbiage already in the world.
48. The singularity is coming; what's the point?
49. Our leaders have abandoned us, and the best of us have been cut down like poppies.
50. Eschewing the dark arts is a self-defeating stance