The last time I had good taste of rationally correct arguments in general public was at Roorki railway station on way back to Chandigarh from my home town Lucknow. I got down to the station to stretch my body and look around the course of life. Suddenly I heard an old man dressed like a 'Sadhu' (saint) wearing saffron clothes preaching an innocent guy. From the outlook, I was convinced that he must have been infiltrating some religious nonsense into a budding brain. Out of curiosity, I moved nearer to the site to a distance just enough to hear the conversation. The first few words I heard were 'dharam' (religion), 'pooja' (worship) and 'daan' (donation), further solidifying my doubts. Hold on, before jumping on to the conclusion, I quickly learned that it wasn't routine religious preaching, but a fair criticism of the same. He was criticizing how religion (he was peculiar about Hindu, but that's irrelevant here) harasses innocent poor people. I have had heard of religion being divisive, preaches to compromise, promotes helplessness and slavery, stagnate the rational thinking and blah blah blah. Here was a different point. Being a Sadhu, he knew the physical, emotional, psychological and financial expenditure to fulfill the rituals of religion. He cited the examples of rituals followed on the occasions of marriages, or someone's death in very detail, followed by his interpretation on how this is affecting the society, well for the bad. Delivered in his very desi accent, the whole conversation appeared very effective. Loud horn from the train engine and I was back to my seat.
I miserably fail to understand the major limitations in being rational. Is it the childhood training? Is it society and religion? Is it education? This sadhu had defied all. He dint look educated and appeared indulged into religious rituals. Yet, he appeared rational. May be he was an outlier, let's buy that. However, what explains the rational poverty, if at all, in the society I live in, which is educated at the highest level? Is it really lacking or people suppress their own rationality in self-interest to benefit from the system. Or is it a feedback between the two, which throws this strange combination of being highly educated, but irrrelational individuals? Let me not declare that this indeed is the case. Let us assume that this might be the case for the sake of discussion. Rationality means acting by reason. Reason is developed to connect and act as per reality of cause and effect in the nature. If the rationality is based on beliefs and assumptions that have little to do with the cause and effect relationship, it can have dire consequences. The highly educated people, therefore, are expected to have good sense of rationality because of their understanding of cause and effect. Why do I, then, see educated but irrational individuals in my proposed assumption? One explanation could be their context dependent rationality. After all, we are not practicing our rationality all the time and on trivial and mundane issues of private nature we might not invoke it. However, the real test of rationality is in social context. How would someone sound irrational in social interactions, meetings and administrative deeds? Well the principle of such seemingly irrational outlook might underlie in the concept of rationality itself. They still follow the reasoning and they are still rational, but TO THEMSELVES, i.e., some kind of personalized version of rationality, known as instrumental rationality in the dictionary of philosophy. This type of rationality is concerned with the opting and implementing actions that maximizes the possibility of outcome that are priortized higher in one's objectives.The rationality we should bother about is the other one, possibly more relevant in the the context, known as epistmatic rationality, which deals with the achieving accuracy in once understanding based on evidence and implementing the logically correct, cognitionally unbiased and truth centric acts. This type of rationality mitigates the falsehood and self-interest based actions, which have some scope in instrumental rationality.The epistamic rationality can be a subtype of broader and pervasive instrumental rationality, wherein we insulate our deeds from falsehood and self-interest and project our goals accordingly. Here is the news: What we see in the society is , presumably, the Gaussian distribution of the balance between the two. The Gaussian curve would tend to be more skewed towards instrumental rationality as we increase the competition among individual for resources. That's because instrumental rationality associates with the individual's survival. Competition is intrinsic in Indian societies. Right from school days, we are expected to compete, rather than co-operate,with our colleagues.
Therefore, one can predict that if resources are limited and individuals have higher ambitions, the epistmatic rationality will have little scope and the instrumental rationality will prevail. I work in such a place, that sadhu does not.
I miserably fail to understand the major limitations in being rational. Is it the childhood training? Is it society and religion? Is it education? This sadhu had defied all. He dint look educated and appeared indulged into religious rituals. Yet, he appeared rational. May be he was an outlier, let's buy that. However, what explains the rational poverty, if at all, in the society I live in, which is educated at the highest level? Is it really lacking or people suppress their own rationality in self-interest to benefit from the system. Or is it a feedback between the two, which throws this strange combination of being highly educated, but irrrelational individuals? Let me not declare that this indeed is the case. Let us assume that this might be the case for the sake of discussion. Rationality means acting by reason. Reason is developed to connect and act as per reality of cause and effect in the nature. If the rationality is based on beliefs and assumptions that have little to do with the cause and effect relationship, it can have dire consequences. The highly educated people, therefore, are expected to have good sense of rationality because of their understanding of cause and effect. Why do I, then, see educated but irrational individuals in my proposed assumption? One explanation could be their context dependent rationality. After all, we are not practicing our rationality all the time and on trivial and mundane issues of private nature we might not invoke it. However, the real test of rationality is in social context. How would someone sound irrational in social interactions, meetings and administrative deeds? Well the principle of such seemingly irrational outlook might underlie in the concept of rationality itself. They still follow the reasoning and they are still rational, but TO THEMSELVES, i.e., some kind of personalized version of rationality, known as instrumental rationality in the dictionary of philosophy. This type of rationality is concerned with the opting and implementing actions that maximizes the possibility of outcome that are priortized higher in one's objectives.The rationality we should bother about is the other one, possibly more relevant in the the context, known as epistmatic rationality, which deals with the achieving accuracy in once understanding based on evidence and implementing the logically correct, cognitionally unbiased and truth centric acts. This type of rationality mitigates the falsehood and self-interest based actions, which have some scope in instrumental rationality.The epistamic rationality can be a subtype of broader and pervasive instrumental rationality, wherein we insulate our deeds from falsehood and self-interest and project our goals accordingly. Here is the news: What we see in the society is , presumably, the Gaussian distribution of the balance between the two. The Gaussian curve would tend to be more skewed towards instrumental rationality as we increase the competition among individual for resources. That's because instrumental rationality associates with the individual's survival. Competition is intrinsic in Indian societies. Right from school days, we are expected to compete, rather than co-operate,with our colleagues.
Therefore, one can predict that if resources are limited and individuals have higher ambitions, the epistmatic rationality will have little scope and the instrumental rationality will prevail. I work in such a place, that sadhu does not.
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