Applying Rationality: Developing better principles...   By Desmond Hughes

On the flipside, many have used opportunities from the pandemic to exploit their fellow humans for political gain to exert excessive or abusive power over citizens, commit violations with impunity, shun, cast aspersions or humiliate humans infected with a virus, or financially exploit fear through the sale of ineffective protective items or even re-use infected items for sale to innocent victims of fraud.

All in all, we can see at each stage of challenges to human existence or operations, that there are good players and bad. Perhaps this has always been the case and each day that passes is a simple re-framing of history in new modern clothes – a world with Electric Vehicles, 5G, 3D Printers and scientists and medical experts who can produce vaccines for a global pandemic in less than a year from the outbreak.
During this time, many have turned towards notions of demanding greater freedoms, after facing excessive and irrational restrictions on freedoms with superbly blunt societal management tools such as ‘lockdowns’, ‘curfews’, mandatory vaccinations and restraint on travel and access to family and support systems. These freedoms include work-from-home rights, recently championed with vigour in Portugal with strong legislation protecting workers’ free time, and an emphasis on access to ‘wellbeing’, either in the simple form of additional time to exercise, or with more sophisticated forms of delivery through meditation, coaching, counselling, and a variety of remedies designed to mitigate the stress that modern humans are under.

This behaviour is a new form of rationality, combining short term gratification with a longer term view that short term gratification should remain partially important, because death’s door is never far away.

Rationality could therefore be viewed as a series of bets based on a set of beliefs, values and principles and the reality of a situation. If you knew you had a short time left to live, would you take that time to exploit as many people as you could, or spend time with loved ones and still make an effort to be a better person before you depart?

One part of Pinker’s book, which remains important in all critical thinking, is Bayesian reasoning – that is including a ‘base’ in your calculation which will or could fundamentally change the outcome and therefore a decision based on probable or actual outcomes. In order to obtain an ‘accurate base’, it is important to conduct multiple experiments in similar, equivalent and different circumstances, and critically analyse outcomes.

This type of reasoning is fundamental because if we are to be judged by others in a court, in society, advised on our legal rights, or made subject to new laws and regulations to address societal needs or state exploitation of society, the ‘base’ requires an understanding of the degree of uncertainty in a calculation and not simple maths.

The next time we find ourselves thinking that someone else definitely is acting irrationally, we should check ourselves, assess our inhehent weaknesses and bias, re-assess and re-configure our ‘experimental analysis’ of others, obtain more information, verify, use an appropriate base to make a conclusion and be willing to potentially change our minds if the facts or circumstances change.

This is why some criminals deserve second and third chances in society, why bankrupt people will not always fail in business, why overweight people are not inherently ‘lazy’, why those infected with a virus don’t “deserve what they got and must have made a mistake we wouldn’t have made”, why those that suffer violence didn’t necessarily provoke it, and why people are innocent…until proven guilty.