Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters

by Steven Pinker

Conspiracy theories, by their very nature, are adapted to be spread.

Reaffirming Rationality

But for all the vulnerabilities of human reason, our picture of the future need not be a bot tweeting fake news forever. The arc of knowledge is a long one, and it bends toward rationality.

cluster of good cognitive habits, which Stanovich calls the Rationality Quotient

We are not helpless against the onslaught of “post-truth” disinformation. Though lying is as old as language, so are defenses against being lied to;

Since no one can know everything, and most people know almost nothing, rationality consists of outsourcing knowledge to institutions that specialize in creating and sharing it,

Rationality should be the fourth R, together with reading, writing, and arithmetic.

The media can become either crucibles of knowledge or cesspools of malarkey, depending on their incentive structure.

Wikipedia,

impartiality the core of rationality: a reconciliation of our biased and incomplete notions into an understanding of reality that transcends any one of us. Rationality, then, is not just a cognitive virtue but a moral one.

When humans set themselves the goal of improving the welfare of their fellows (as opposed to other dubious pursuits like glory or redemption), and they apply their ingenuity in institutions that pool it with others’, they occasionally succeed. When

they retain the successes and take note of the failures, the benefits can accumulate, and we call the big picture progress.

My greatest surprise in making sense of moral progress is how many times in history the first domino was a reasoned argument.

Eventually the conclusion was absorbed into the conventional wisdom and common decency of a society, erasing the tracks of the arguments that brought it there.

We are a species that has been endowed with

an elementary faculty of reason and that has discovered formulas and institutions that magnify its scope. They awaken us to ideas and expose us to realities that confound our intuitions but are true for all that.