Kaj_Sotala comments on People who "don't rationalize"? [Help Rationality Group figure it out] - Less Wrong

12 Post author: Mercurial 02 March 2012 11:38PM

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Comment author: Morendil 03 March 2012 12:11:48PM 8 points [-]

there totally seem to be people who don't ever notice it in themselves

Count me in that group ("hardly ever", maybe).

I'm pretty sure that I do rationalize, but I can't recall any explicit occasions of catching myself in the act.

I'm pretty sure that I have abandoned beliefs in the past that I clung to for longer than I should have, but it's hard for me to come up with an example right now.

Perhaps we differ in the explicitness of the meta-cognition we engage in. When confronted with incontrovertible evidence of my errors, I tend to facepalm, think something like "stupid me", update and move on. I don't generally attempt to classify the mistake into a particular fallacy.

Can you share some of the examples you've been using to illustrate rationalization? I'll tell you if I get the same "can't relate to this", or if I can relate but failed to label the equivalent examples in my own past as rationalizations.

Comment author: Kaj_Sotala 24 April 2012 10:13:57AM 6 points [-]

Another example, from The Righteous Mind:

On February 3, 2007, shortly before lunch, I discovered that I was a chronic liar. I was at home, writing a review article on moral psychology, when my wife, Jayne, walked by my desk. In passing, she asked me not to leave dirty dishes on the counter where she prepared our baby’s food. Her request was polite but its tone added a postscript: “As I have asked you a hundred times before.”

My mouth started moving before hers had stopped. Words came out. Those words linked themselves up to say something about the baby having woken up at the same time that our elderly dog barked to ask for a walk and I’m sorry but I just put my breakfast dishes down wherever I could. In my family, caring for a hungry baby and an incontinent dog is a surefire excuse, so I was acquitted. [...]

So there I was at my desk, writing about how people automatically fabricate justifications of their gut feelings, when suddenly I realized that I had just done the same thing with my wife. I disliked being criticized, and I had felt a flash of negativity by the time Jayne had gotten to her third word (“Can you not …”). Even before I knew why she was criticizing me, I knew I disagreed with her (because intuitions come first). The instant I knew the content of the criticism (“… leave dirty dishes on the …”), my inner lawyer went to work searching for an excuse (strategic reasoning second). It’s true that I had eaten breakfast, given Max his first bottle, and let Andy out for his first walk, but these events had all happened at separate times. Only when my wife criticized me did I merge them into a composite image of a harried father with too few hands, and I created this fabrication by the time she had completed her onesentence criticism (“… counter where I make baby food?”). I then lied so quickly and convincingly that my wife and I both believed me.

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