So, should I seek for reasonableness or rationality to prevail, whenever the rational is outside the Overton window? My dilemma is that I find more pleasure on being rational, so rationality stands I should seek for rationality, whereas the reasonable thing to do would be to stand with reasonableness and shut up.
The point is: whenever I can't decide on one over the other, which criterion should I use to make the decission, since each seems to point towards itself? This is fun.
Sansa: "It can’t be worse."
Theon: "It can. It can always be worse."
Part of the reason I supported the overthrow of Saddam Hussein was because I thought he was so bad that the alternative had to be better. I didn't take enough time to consider worse alternatives to him.
"In King's Landing, there are two sorts of people. The players and the pieces."
"And I was a piece?" She dreaded the answer.
"Yes, but don't let that trouble you. You're still half a child. Every man's a piece to strart with, and every maid as well. Even some who think they are players."
Talk between Sansa and Petyr - A Song of Ice and Fire: A Storm of Swords
The old introduction may be obscure, but at least it is informative. A visitor can follow the links …
I can’t tell from Nancy’s anecdote, but it is possible that her friend couldn’t follow the links on the home page, because she was actually on the Google search page:
Welcome to Less Wrong
lesswrong.com/ ▾
Less Wrong is an online community for people who want to apply the discovery of biases like the conjunction fallacy, the affect heuristic, and scope insensitivity ...
The sentence’s wording without links is important because Google quotes it in plaintext.
Well, the sentence's wording without links is important, but maybe if your friend suggests a site, you can try not being so lazy as not clicking the link to the page.
At around three years old one of the staff at preschool suggested that I had Aspergers or ADHD after I had gotten into trouble for playing with the fire extinguisher. I was formally diagnosed on the autistic spectrum at age four/five. I took two separate verbal ability tests at age 4y7m as part of the assessment process to receive a diagnosis and scored respectively in the 4th and 96th percentiles. Wildly discrepant, but not in the gifted range.
In my case social isolation was due more to a lack of interest in socialising than to a lack of innate ability. I was comparatively sociable during my primary school years, though I had a few periods of selective mutism, and in earlier childhood I'd play with more boisterous older children but refused to interact with other children my own age. When I got older my peers were no longer interested in playing running-around games and switched to spending all their time chatting about topics that I had no interest in. So I became a loner and developed social anxiety issues.
Some symptoms didn't apply to me; I never had difficulty with understanding pragmatics or sarcasm or with theory of mind and I never had enough difficulties with abstract thought to prevent me from studying philosophy or category theory.
However I was/am hyperactive, hypersensitive to sound, lined up toys, would scream at any attempt to have my hair brushed, refused to wear shoes and socks until I was given seamless socks and rocked or stimmed when stressed. I have atrocious handwriting, can't really catch a ball and once accumulated so many bruises that a teacher called social services. I frequently space out, which could be interpreted either as a sign of autism or of the ability to think about something more interesting than my immediate surroundings. Additionally, I have narrow obsessive interests in life, the universe and everything in the complement of the set of things that non-nerds are interested in.
NB I deviate from the nerd stereotype insofar as I am blonde, like being outdoors and run ten miles a day.
I suspect that the clumsiness is a sign of cerebellar problems, and the sensory differences are down to 'weak central coherence' - being more conscious of the lower levels of sensory processing.
And have you found a way to overcome this social isolation? I have trouble finding interest in meeting people myself, although I do not have it as hard as yourself, as it seems.
PS: I did not know non-blondeness was a necessary condition for being nerd.
I have yet another possible reason for these social difficulties one tends to experience: If you are smart, you have to hide it. It sounds plain, but you may be able to remember someone making fun of you in your childhood for using "fancy words", excelling at math or literature or something like that. I am not sure if I can fully identify the cause of this behaviour on others (maybe a defense mechanism) but I find it to be empirically true. Personally, I went most of my very early life complying with the constant need of feigning modesty, which made me reluctant to participate in quite a lot of conversations, and I thus believe it to have been an obstacle for my social interactions.
I notice that you often wrote "intelectually gifted", but never "intelligent" nor "smart". Is it just eloquence, or might that be a way of modesty that -such as myself- you have got used to?
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In hindsight, writing a post about Rational vs Reasonable has the unfortunate effect of causing people to ask which is better and how to choose between them, as well as risking causing people to accuse people of being reasonable rather than rational and things of that nature.
These are not good outcomes.
There's a very general issue with "X vs Y" posts, which is that they make the distinction look contentious rather than merely useful. Brienne wrote about this in connection with her Ask Culture vs Guess Culture. A similar failure mode occurs when people debate epistemic vs instrumental rationality.
As nyralech replied, the answer is to use what best serves your goals. The two are not opposed; nor are they allied; nor is it a balancing act between them. Where being reasonable does not serve rationality, the Way opposes your reasonableness; where being reasonable does serve rationality the Way opposes your unreasonableness. "The primary thing when you take a sword in your hands is your intention to cut the enemy, whatever the means." etc.
I'm sorry; re-reading my comment, I think it wasn't clear. I didn't intend to ask which is better, but to arise the following question: Is it possible that whenever I have to decide between rational or reasonable predominance, that decission entails an a-priori decission of one over the other, since each criterion might point towards itself?... it just seemed fun to think about it.
By the way, I'm curious about the Way to which you are referring with a capital W. Is that something like rationality commandments?