While Odysseus had himself tied to the mast and rationally relinquished his option to act, his sailors plugged their ears with wax and rationally relinquished their option to know. At first this seems puzzling. One might think that knowledge is power, and you can never know too much. Just as it’s better to be rich than poor, because if you’re rich you can always give away your money and be poor, you might think it’s always better to know something, because you can always choose not to act on it. But in one of the paradoxes of rationality, that turns out not to be true. Sometimes it really is
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