The Difference Between Being Rational and Being Right
Can you be rational even if you're wrong? Interestingly, yes...
As philosopher Kenny Pearce explains,
Rationality isn’t a matter of being right all the time; it’s a matter of doing the best you can with what you’ve got. For comparison, even the best poker player will sometimes lose if she’s dealt a series of bad hands. Being an excellent poker player is about doing the best you can with the cards you’re dealt. Rationality is like that as well.1
People are thrust into different intellectual environments, working with different assumptions, background theories, and degrees of knowledge. Nobody has access to perfect information all the time. Somebody could always be missing some essential piece of the philosophical puzzle but still be thinking well enough with the pieces they have, in which case, they are being rational, even if they are not correct – that is, even if they haven’t put everything together rightly.
This point is important because it should cause people to understand how somebody can be rational even when they don’t agree with you. Moreover, this should encourage those of opposing viewpoints to come together and argue it out. After all, to be a philosopher is to argue (= give reasons for one’s belief). Argument is the philosopher’s love-language. It’s how you know that they care.
To drive the point, consider a thought experiment from economist Daniel Kahneman. Imagine a person named Bruce who fits the following description: a quiet soul who loves numbers and has great attention to detail. He wears glasses, excelled in mathematics, and is introverted. His favorite book is East of Eden. Bruce has two cats.
We can then ask whether we think Bruce is more likely a librarian or a farmer.
Kahneman tells us more people are likely to answer that Bruce is a librarian given Bruce’s description and how this better fits the stereotypical personality type.2 Seems reasonable enough. However, the inference is hasty because it fails to consider relevant information: namely, what is the ratio of librarians to farmers in the overall population. In other words, while what one would expect personality-wise from a farmer vs. a librarian is a consideration, it is not the only consideration. If we know there is a 20x higher likelihood that any given person is going to be a farmer than a librarian, this fact must also be considered.
Imagine now a representative sample of 200 farmers and 10 librarians. From there, suppose we assume 40% of librarians are likely to match the description of Bruce, whereas only 10% of farmers are. In which case, from our sample, we expect 4 librarians and 20 farmers to be “Bruce-like”. Run the math [4/(4+20)], and the probability that any random person who fits this description is a librarian is only… 16.7%.
The point is that even if you think that a librarian is 4x as likely to be “Bruce-like” than a farmer, that’s not enough to overcome the fact that there are just way more farmers — a fact that must be considered because it is highly relevant.
Takeaway? Rationality is not just about knowing facts but knowing which facts are relevant (and to what degree). Obviously, most people probably don’t know, nor should they be expected to know, exactly what the ratio between farmers and librarians is in the general population. However, it is probably not unfair to assume that most people have some broad understanding that there are far more farmers than librarians (at least in America), and the question is to see whether people think to consider this fact when asked about Bruce’s occupation.
Finally, notice this. You would be rational — given everything just considered — to assume Bruce is (probably) a farmer, though it may still be contingently the case that Bruce is, in fact, a librarian. Conversely, you may assume — perhaps irrationally, given everything we’ve discussed — that Bruce is a librarian, but still be right.
There is thus a difference between being rational and being right. Which means a person could be rational even in being wrong because they could (through no fault of their own) be missing information and yet, given the information they have, could be making the most of it.
The upshot of seeing rationality this way is we can be more charitable toward those we disagree with. We don’t have to hold that just because a person is (in our estimation) incorrect that they are irrational. Perhaps they are missing information, have been fed faulty information, etc.
All this is to say we should not only seek to do the best we can with the hand we’ve got but to get the best possible hand — that is, to do the best with the best. This means not just studying logic but seeking the most relevant information so we aren’t working with a less than stellar deck, proverbially speaking. One of the ways to ensure this is done is to understand why somebody of a differing perspective believes what they do, and genuinely trying to see through their particular paradigm. There is a word that has recently become popular to describe this approach – they call it, “Steelmanning.”3
- Pat
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I borrow this illustration from 3Blue1Brown (an excellent mathematics YouTube Channel),
The reference is in opposition to strawmanning, where a person deliberating presents an unfairly weakened, or caricatured version, of their opponent’s position, for easy rebuttal. To steelman then means to seek out the strongest possible presentation of somebody else’s point of view – and to really try to understand it – before lobbing objections.