This is obviously a tricky question, so i don't expect any answers here. I've just been reflecting on it lately and it's burning deeper and deeper into my mind.
Fundamentally it's a question of whether human irrationality will always exist, or if we're getting (what some would describe as) "better at making decisions."
Normally I'd be deeply on the side of "irrationality is a fundamental part of human nature," pointing to the persistence of storytelling (religion), shortsightedness (greed/sloth/well any of the 7 sins actually), incapacity to get a grasp on what we "want," (see
http://predictablyirrational.com), a host of neuropsychological research on how our decisions mean extremely little, and so on.
But two things come to mind lately that have made this a deep question for me: 1) the scientific revolution as an (ostensibly) obvious victory for rationality, and 2) Dan Gilbert's call to action at the end of this video, where he essentially says we must become more rational for the sake of our survival as a species:
Bernoulli's gift, Bernoulli's little formula, allows us, it tells us how we should think in a world for which nature never designed us. That explains why we are so bad at using it, but it also explains why it is so terribly important that we become good, fast.We are the only species on this planet that has ever held its own fate in its hands. We have no significant predators, we're the masters of our physical environment; the things that normally cause species to become extinct are no longer any threat to us. The only thing -- the only thing -- that can destroy us and doom us are our own decisions. If we're not here in 10,000 years, it's going to be because we could not take advantage of the gift given to us by a young Dutch fellow in 1738, because we underestimated the odds of our future pains and overestimated the value of our present pleasures.
I wonder what the folks over at
http://www.lesswrong.org would say. This is an organization that I consider to be the Roman Catholic Church of rationality; in this crowd, irrationality is a sin.
So. Are we becoming more rational as a species?
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