Everyone on this site obviously has an interest in being, on a personal level, more rational. That's, without need for argument, a good thing. (Although, if you do want to argue that, I can't stop you...)

But...

As a society, we're clearly not very rational, and it's becoming a huge problem. Look at any political articles out there, and you'll see the same thing: angry people partitioned into angry groups, yelling at each other and confirming their own biases. The level of discourse is... low, shall we say.

While the obvious facet of rationality is trying to discern the signal above the noise, there's definitely another side: the art of convincing others. That can swing a little too close to Sophistry and putting the emphasis on personal gain, though. What we really need to do is outreach: promote rationality in the world around us. There's probably no-one reading this who hasn't been in an argument where being more rational and right hasn't helped at all, and maybe even made things worse. We've also all probably been on the other side of that, too. Admit it. But possibly the key word in that is 'argument': it frames the discussion as a confrontation, a fight that needs to be won.

Being the calm, rational person in a fight doesn't always work, though. It only takes one party to want a fight to have one, after all. When there's groups involved, the shouty passionate people tend to dominate, too. And they're currently dominating politics, and so all our lives. That's not a status quo any rationalist would be happy with, I think.

One of the problems with political/economic discussions is that we get polarised into taking absurd blanket positions and being unable to admit limitations or counter-arguments. I'm generally pretty far on the Left of the spectrum, but I will freely admit that the Right has both some very good points and a role to play: what is needed is a good dynamic tension between the two sides to ensure we don't go totally doolally either way. (Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis etc.) And the tension is there, but it's certainly not good. We need to be able to point out failure modes to ourselves and others, encourage constructive criticism.

I think we need ways of both cooling the flames (both 1-on-1 and in groups), and strategies for promoting useful discussion.

So how can we do this? What can we do?

rosyatrandom

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