abigailgem comments on If reason told you to jump off a cliff, would you do it? - Less Wrong

-12 Post author: Shalmanese 21 December 2009 03:54AM

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Comment author: Psychohistorian 21 December 2009 05:31:38AM *  12 points [-]

"Reason" does not appear to be the right term here. "Cleverness" comes to mind as a better substitute, though I suspect there are better terms. The banking crisis occurred because people thought they were too clever. The various problematic causes you mention all appear to overestimate their own cleverness. It's also unclear to me what it would mean for them to rely on reason less, and how this would cause their worldview to better match reality.

I think this might be best phrased as an objection to an overreliance on clever theories and a tendency to eschew evidence in favor of cleverness. Insofar as that is your point, it is an excellent if not novel one. But the way this is phrased is a bit more antagonistic than I think is merited, and seems to attack a type of thought rather than a specific error that a type of thought is prone to.

If my semantic distinction does not make sense, let me just explain my connotations. When I hear "reason," I tend to think of it much like "rational;" one definitionally cannot make a mistake through being too rational, in that rationality is the thing that having more of it causes you not to make mistakes. "Cleverness," on the otherhand, brings the same intellectual sleight-of-hand without any connotation of accuracy. The sentence, "Bob lost all his money because he was too reasonable," does not really make sense, whereas, "Bob lost all of his money because he was too clever," does. A good example of being too clever would be the demise of Vizzini from the Princess Bride.

Comment author: abigailgem 22 December 2009 02:26:49PM 3 points [-]

"cleverness" comes to mind as a better substitute

Or "Hubris". In the examples, the people go wrong not because they are using reason and they should not use reason, but because they falsely imagine they are capable of using reason sufficiently to deal with the particular issue.