{"id":73225,"date":"2012-08-12T00:38:56","date_gmt":"2012-08-12T08:38:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/?p=17735"},"modified":"2012-08-12T00:38:56","modified_gmt":"2012-08-12T08:38:56","slug":"the-perils-of-reason","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/2012\/08\/12\/the-perils-of-reason\/","title":{"rendered":"The perils of \u201creason\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/files\/2012\/08\/beliefs.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-17737\" title=\"beliefs\" src=\"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/files\/2012\/08\/beliefs.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"209\" height=\"240\" \/><\/a>In my <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/2012\/08\/the-scourging-of-sam-harris\/\">post below<\/a> in regards to Sam Harris&#8217; recent interactions on the web I <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/2012\/05\/reason-the-god-that-fails-but-we-keep-socially-promoting\/\">reasserted by suspicion of reason<\/a>. This naturally elicited curiosity, or hostility, from some. I&#8217;ve <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/2012\/05\/reason-the-god-that-fails-but-we-keep-socially-promoting\/\">talked about this<\/a> before, but the illustration to the left gets at my primary issue. <strong>When individuals are reasoning alone they often have a high degree of uncertainty as to their conclusions.<\/strong> But when individuals are reasoning together they seem to converge very rapidly and with great confidence upon a particular position. What&#8217;s going on here? In the second case it isn&#8217;t reason at all, but our natural human predisposition toward group conformity. There&#8217;s a huge psychological literature on this, so I won&#8217;t belabor the point. When people brandish &#8220;reason&#8221; and &#8220;rationality&#8221; explicitly I&#8217;m somewhat skeptical. <strong>If rational conclusions are so plain and self-evident why are we even asserting the primacy of reason?<\/strong>\u00a0If something really is so clearly reasonable you usually don&#8217;t go around trumpeting how reasonable it is.<\/p>\n<p>Another pitfall of reason is that it lulls use into the delusion that we have a transparent understanding of our own motivations and logic, as well as the motivation and &#8230;<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~r\/GeneExpressionBlog\/~4\/CtB7pzsZjys\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\"\/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In my post below in regards to Sam Harris&#8217; recent interactions on the web I reasserted by suspicion of reason. This naturally elicited curiosity, or hostility, from some. I&#8217;ve talked about this before, but the illustration to the left gets &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[152],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-73225","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-philosophy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73225","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=73225"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73225\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":73318,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73225\/revisions\/73318"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=73225"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=73225"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=73225"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}