They might ask why you need a group in order to be rational, or they might say that they don't believe that people are inherently rational.

Isn't that the point? We aren't inherently and automatically rational, so we're trying to get better at it.

Thinking about evolution has driven it home for me. You can explain evolution to a third grader, but it took all of humanity tens of thousands of years to come up with the theory. We're really pretty damn stupid, for all our airs about being able to push around all the other animals. I've been reading a book:

Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing?: 23 Questions from Great Philosophers, Leszek Kolakowski.

Lots of tiny, bite sized chapters, with the "important questions" raised by philosophers over time. Perfect for a bathroom read. But I'm struck by the nonsense and gibberish that has passed for philosophical thought through the centuries. What a load of crap.

On the bright side, when we do figure something out, we can explain it to third graders. Understanding good ideas isn't hard. Coming up with them is. There is huge mileage in applying the most basic of ideas.

If I start getting confused about an inference problem, I just start writing it out in Jaynes notation. Poof. Technical problems evaporate. Apply indexing or think about orders of abstraction per Korzybski, and poof, problems disappear. There are plenty of great ideas that a third grader can understand that I don't know about yet. That's why I'm here.