#rationality

Mood evidently affects the operation of System 1: when we are uncomfortable and unhappy, we lose touch with our intuition. These findings add to the growing evidence that good mood, intuition, creativity, gullibility, and increased reliance on System 1 form a cluster. At the other pole, sadness, vigilance, suspicion, an analytic approach, and increased effort also go together. A happy mood loosens the control of System 2 over performance: when in a good mood, people become more intuitive and more creative but also less vigilant and more prone to logical errors. ↗

— Daniel Kahneman

#gullibility #mood #rationality #intuition

There are some doubters even in the western villages. One woman told me last Christmas that she did not believe either in hell or in ghosts. Hell she thought was merely an invention got up by the priest to keep people good; and ghosts would not be permitted, she held, to go 'trapsin about the earth' at their own free will; 'but there are faeries,' she added, 'and little leprechauns, and water-horses, and fallen angels.' I have met also a man with a mohawk Indian tattooed upon his arm, who held exactly similar beliefs and unbeliefs. No matter what one doubts one never doubts the faeries, for, as the man with the mohawk Indian on his arm said to me, 'they stand to reason.' Even the official mind does not escape this faith. ("Reason and Unreason") ↗

— W.B. Yeats

#faery #fairy #fey #heaven #hell

We don't see very far in the future, we are very focused on one idea at a time, one problem at a time, and all these are incompatible with rationality as economic theory assumes it. ↗

— Daniel Kahneman

#economic #economic theory #far #focused #future

If you're going to vote on a television contract, there is a certain rationality to saying that the same structures that are applied to Health Plan participation should be placed on the right to vote on a strike. ↗

— Dick Wolf

#certain #contract #going #health #participation

He remembered having said to his uncle (with a solemn dogmatism better befitting a much younger man): "Surely it is possible to love with the head as well as the heart." Mr. Delagardie had replied, somewhat drily: "No doubt; so long as you do not end by thinking with your entrails instead of your brain. ↗

— Dorothy L. Sayers

#rationality #wit #love

A bitter thing cannot be made sweet. The taste of anything can be changed. But poison cannot be changed into nectar. ↗

— B.R. Ambedkar

#human-nature #rationality #society #change

My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures, instead of flattering their fascinating graces, and viewing them as if they were in a state of perpetual childhood, unable to stand alone. ↗

— Mary Wollstonecraft

#double-standards #empowerment #equality #feminism #flattery

Your strength as a rationalist is your ability to be more confused by fiction than by reality. If you are equally good at explaining any outcome, you have zero knowledge. ↗

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

#rationality #reality #thinking #equality

Some may wonder whether part of the harvest of this invisible pollution (electromagnetic radiation) may be the comparative rarity of visionary experience in the modern world, and the predominence of a removed, overanalytical, repelling 'onlooker' intelligence in its place, resembling that of the (Martin) Amis hero (who will not see because he cannot feel). If this is so, such an intelligence has produced conditions favoring its evolution and survival. ↗

— Peter Redgrove

#em-pollution #martin-amis #rationality #experience

Religious belief is without reason and without dignity, and its record is near-universally dreadful. ↗

— Martin Amis

#atheism #dignity #irrationality #reason #religion