The Rational Question
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Happy Friday!
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Now, for the first time in a few months, on to the newsletter!
The major thing I’ve been working on lately, is the question of how rational people are.
Take a look at these three pieces of “folk wisdom”:
People believe what they want to believe anyway.
People have hundreds of biases, they are not rational, duh have you even read anything in psychology ever lol.
People are gullible, easily fooled by demagogues, fake news, and so on.
Could those be all wrong?
Motivated reasoning (and belief polarization) are much rarer than previously thought.
The biases and heuristics program has huge replication problems. It’s also questionable what a failure to see through some “gotcha” logic puzzles on a questionnaire, actually says about real-life human reasoning. And for some “biases”, such as the sunk cost fallacy, it’s dubious whether they’re actually irrational.
Actually, changing people’s opinions is very hard. Campaigns and manipulation efforts almost always have zero effect. Fake news is overrated.
More on these things in the next weeks!
Enjoy your weekend,
Maarten