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roland comments on Striving to Accept - Less Wrong
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"There are a lot of people who consider fear of the dark to be irrational. IMHO it's simply an adaptation to the primivitve environment where nightly predators abounded."
The possibility that it was adaptive in our ancestral environment doesn't mean it's not irrational.
It doesn't even mean that it was rational in our ancestral environment, at least not in the sense that it was explicitly justified. At most, it was potentially justifiable if anyone had tried to understand it.
In order for fear of darkness to become ingrained it had to offer a fitness advantage to us otherwise the genes for that wouldn't be common. So, it increased your likelihood of survival, and if you value your life and health it is in fact rational. Keep in mind, that what fear really does is it heightens your alert levels and makes you focus much more attention on the environment(when the right conditions are met) then you would otherwise have done.
Btw. my definition of rational here is: whatever makes you win.
"Btw. my definition of rational here is: whatever makes you win."
That's not a very useful definition. Aside from being purely Consequentialist, it means that we can't say whether a strategy is 'rational' unless we know whether it will work out, and that sort of knowledge is very difficult to acquire.