Recipe for Modernism

Here is the recipe: Look at a complex and confusing reality, such as the social dynamics of an old city Fail to understand all the subtleties of how the complex reality works Attribute that failure to the irrationality of what you are looking at, rather than your own limitations Come up with an idealized blank-slate vision of what that reality ought to look like Argue that the relative simplicity and platonic orderliness of the vision represents rationality Use authoritarian power to imp...

 Logic as Magical Thinking

These battles over definition are not taking place in the same universe as the one in which men throw around these terms online. But for the Logic Guys, the purpose of using these words — the sacred, magic words like “logic,” “objectivity,” “reason,” “rationality,” “fact” — is not to invoke the actual concepts themselves. It’s more a kind of incantation, whereby declaring your argument the single “logical” and “rational” one magically makes it so — and by e...

 Farmers Hurt Themselves Financially to Avoid Paying Taxes

gonzoflip 1 hour ago | unvote [-] I have family that farms in Iowa and I also worked in the agriculture industry there for a while after leaving the military. One thing that increases the stress on the farmers is the way they avoid income taxes at all costs so they rarely save any of the profits from good years to help them float during the bad years. This is all anecdotal but I have personally talked with several farmers that would rather buy new equipment they say do not even need than pay...

 Hold Expertise in Esteem

Facts, evidence, reason, logic, an understanding of science -- these are good things. (Applause.) These are qualities you want in people making policy. These are qualities you want to continue to cultivate in yourselves as citizens. (Applause.) That might seem obvious. (Laughter.) That's why we honor Bill Moyers or Dr. Burnell. We traditionally have valued those things. But if you were listening to today's political debate, you might wonder where this strain of anti-intellectualism ca...

 Rational Ignorance

Of course, it is a cliché of our times that we suffer from information overload because of the ubiquity of electronic media. And for fifty years, cognitive scientists have been harping on the limitations of the brain in processing information. Some have argued that Grice’s cooperative maxims are a way to manage the flow of information in a conversation, maximizing the rate of transmission of usable knowledge. But the ultimate reason our speech is so indirect may lie in a different danger ...

 Human Combinatoric Reasoning

Humans, of course, were not created in a state of Original Reason. We descended from apes, spent hundreds of millennia in small bands, and evolved our cognitive processes in the service of hunting, gathering, and socializing. Only gradually, with the appearance of literacy, cities, and long-distance travel and communication, could our ancestors cultivate the faculty of reason and apply it to a broader range of concerns, a process that is still ongoing. One would expect that as collective rati...

 The Rational Versus the Irrational

Only two possible escapes can save us from the organized mayhem of our dark potentialities-the side that has given us crusades, witch hunts, enslavements, and holocausts. Moral decency provides one necessary ingredient, but not nearly enough. The second foundation must come from the rational side of our mentality. For, unless we rigorously use human reason to discover and acknowledge nature's factuality ... we will lose out to the frightening forces of irrationality, romanticism, uncompromisi...