Rationality is important, weakly correlated with intelligence – and trainable.
Originally shared by Tom Nugent
” As the psychologist Keith Stanovich and others observed, even the Kahneman and Tversky data show that some people are highly rational. In other words, there are individual differences in rationality, even if we all face cognitive challenges in being rational. So who are these more rational people? Presumably, the more intelligent people, right?
Wrong.”
Development of a Rationality Quotient (RQ) would be extremely useful, just as Emotional Quotient (EQ) has helped broaden our perspective on intelligence.
I have seen a huge difference between what I call practical people vs intelligent people. Sometimes intelligent people are practical, and sometimes practical people are intelligent, but they do not always cross over. I suspect that rational people may be practical people.
It fascinates me to see the difference between those who are practical and intelligent vs those who are practical but not intelligent. I find myself more comfortable talking to practical people (no matter their intelligence) because even when we disagree, we usually can come to a pragmatic conclusion, whereas with intelligent people (without practicality), it seems to become a battle of “I know I’m smarter, so I’m not listening.”
And now for the mind-blowing question: how do we know that those who conducted this study did so rationally? How do we know that their own biases and intuition didn’t cloud their results? Bottom line: what is the evidentiary foundation for presuming that rationality (as defined by the self-proclaimed “rationals”) is a preferable way of making life decisions than intuition? After all, it seems as if the human race has done quite well for millenia while lugging the intuitive millstone around its neck. Or maybe the study presupposes (“rationally”, no doubt) a false either-or proposition: that reason and intuition can’t work hand-in-hand.
The study of irrational bias is fairly advanced at this stage, Eduardo Suastegui. I don’t think we can dismiss it out of hand. Nor are we talking about logic vs intuition, Spock vs Kirk, here. It’s about eliminating habits of thought and mental glitches which consistently return bad or inaccurate answers.
Maya Davis, I suspect you’re right. I’m in IT, but I work a lot with engineers and tradespeople, and I always enjoy their pragmatic approach to problems.
Mike Reeves-McMillan advanced enough to preclude intuition? If we hold that rational thinking and decision-making is based on following cold facts, data, and (yes) logic, what happens when we have insufficient evidence on which to base our conclusion? Do we freeze in place?
Some examples… I know very few people who would choose a mate on a purely rational basis. I know more than a few that would not count life worth living in light of all the evidence of a messed up world. And how does one create art without intuition?
You mentioned engineering, and yes, while there’s much science and evidence-based thinking, many problems cannot be solved purely on a rational basis. If you look at people-interface design (e.g., that wonderful iPhone) you will find a great deal of intuition (to make the interface intuitive!) in the design process. In complex systems, scanning through the entire solution space is prohibitive, and intuition (often guided by experience) ferrets out the most likely to succeed (often in “brainstorming”), with an evidence-based approach used from then on to trade-off for the optimum approach, and/or to evolve it further.
All that to say, we need rational thinking and we need intuition. Believing otherwise might well be the most irrational (and counter-intuitive!) conclusion we can reach.
And let us not get into all the bad decisions we can make if we insist on a purely rational approach to life.
Eduardo Suastegui in your argument, are you presuming that intuition is the same as intelligence?
Maya Davis No.
I think you’re working with a false dichotomy there, Eduardo Suastegui. Nothing about this is saying that you must be coldly and rigidly logical at all times. It’s talking about eliminating known biases in the ways we think which produce suboptimal results. Intuition, as such, is not one of those (though intuition unchecked by analysis can be).