Query: by what objective criteria do we determine whether a political decision is rational?
I propose that the key elements -- necessary but not sufficient -- are (where "you" refers collectively to everyone involved in the decisionmaking process):
you must use only documented reasoning processes:
use the best known process(es) for a given class of problem
state clearly which particular process(es) you use
document any new processes you use
you must make every reasonable effort to verify that:
your inputs are reasonably accurate, and
there are no other reasoning processes which might be better suited to this class of problem, and
there are no significant flaws in in your application of the reasoning processes you are using, and
there are no significant inputs you are ignoring
If an argument satisfies all of these requirements, it is at least provisionally rational. If it fails any one of them, then it's not rational and needs to be corrected or discarded.
This is not a circular definition (defining "rationality" by referring to "reasonable" things, where "reasonable" depends on people being "rational"); it is more like a recursive algorithm, where large ambiguous problems are split up into smaller and smaller sub-problems until we get to a size where the ambiguity is negligible.
This is not one great moral principle; it is more like a self-modifying working process (subject to rational criticism and therefore improvable over time -- optimization by successive approximation). It is an attempt to apply the processes of science (or at least the same reasoning which arrived at those processes) to political discourse.
So... can we agree on this?
This is a hugely, vastly, mindbogglingly trimmed-down version of what I originally posted. All comments prior to 2010-08-26 20:52 (EDT) refer to that version, which I have reposted here for comparison purposes and for the morbidly curious. (It got voted down to negative 6. Twice.)
For what it's worth, here are the references. I'll add a link here from the main post.
"Spot the Loonie!" was a Monty Python satire of a game show. I'm using it here to refer to the idea of being able to tell when someone's argument doesn't make sense.
"How to Identify the Essential Elements of Rationality from Quite a Long Way Away" refers to the title of a Monty Python episode whose title was, I think, "How to Identify Different Types of Trees from Quite a Long Way Away".
Counter-suggestion: Only use references that you either expect everyone to pick up on, or ones which are mostly invisible to people who don't recognize them. It's tasteless to add incongruous references and then expect people to follow your link which describes the clever aside you just made.
0woozle
I can certainly attempt that. I considered doing so originally, but thought it would be too much like "explaining the joke" (a process notorious for efficient removal of humor). I also had this idea that the references were so ubiquitous by now that they were borderline cliche. I'm glad to discover that this is not the case... I think.
Query: by what objective criteria do we determine whether a political decision is rational?
I propose that the key elements -- necessary but not sufficient -- are (where "you" refers collectively to everyone involved in the decisionmaking process):
If an argument satisfies all of these requirements, it is at least provisionally rational. If it fails any one of them, then it's not rational and needs to be corrected or discarded.
This is not a circular definition (defining "rationality" by referring to "reasonable" things, where "reasonable" depends on people being "rational"); it is more like a recursive algorithm, where large ambiguous problems are split up into smaller and smaller sub-problems until we get to a size where the ambiguity is negligible.
This is not one great moral principle; it is more like a self-modifying working process (subject to rational criticism and therefore improvable over time -- optimization by successive approximation). It is an attempt to apply the processes of science (or at least the same reasoning which arrived at those processes) to political discourse.
So... can we agree on this?
This is a hugely, vastly, mindbogglingly trimmed-down version of what I originally posted. All comments prior to 2010-08-26 20:52 (EDT) refer to that version, which I have reposted here for comparison purposes and for the morbidly curious. (It got voted down to negative 6. Twice.)