Powerful Rationality

Powerful Rationality

Being rational is a start, but is not enough. You can avoid illogic but still not get anywhere, like someone who travels safely by simply never going anywhere. That is different from travelling safely while going all over the world. Being powerfully rational means not just using logic and avoiding logical inconsistencies, but using logic to build complex arguments and gain new insights.

Powerful rationality starts with abstraction, which enables us to use better logic. I think it then has three main components: paths made of long chains of logic, packages made of a collection of concepts structured into a new compound unit, and pivots using levels of abstraction to build bridges to previously disconnected places.

Abstraction is the discipline of separating out relevant details from irrelevant ones, and finding the principles that are really behind a situation in such a way that we can try to apply logic.

It is then important to be able to follow a long chain of deductions, both forwards and backwards, and not just a single step like a child who can’t get further than “If I don’t get ice cream I will scream.” We follow logic forwards, to comprehend all the consequences of one’s thinking, and backwards, to construct and understand complex justifications of things. This includes being able to axiomatise a system down to very fundamental beliefs, rather than just believing things because you do, and it also includes being able to understand someone else’s beliefs. If you can’t follow long chains of logic backwards you will be stuck taking almost everything you believe as a fundamental belief. This isn’t exactly illogical, but it’s not very insightful either, and hardly leaves open the possibility for fruitful discussion. “Why do you think that?” “Because I do.” I think powerful rationality involves being able to unpack your reasoning down to a very small number of core beliefs, and being able to answer “Why do you think that?” down to very deep levels. Just like mathematicians should be able to fill in their proofs to as deep a level of “fractalisation” as anyone might ask, we should be able to do that with our beliefs too.

Building inter-related ideas into compound units is an important source of power in logic. The ability to think of a group of things as one unit is something we do naturally every day, when we think of a family, a team, or compound nouns for animals: a flock of birds, a swarm of bees, a herd of cows. We think of a school (and all the people making it up), a business, a theatre company. I much prefer using singular verbs with these compound nouns, as I really am thinking of them as single units. I will say “My family is going out for dinner” rather than “my family are going out for dinner”.

Packaging complex systems into single units should not mean forgetting that the system is made of individuals. Powerful rationality involves understanding the way in which the individuals are interrelated, forming the whole system, as discussed in Chapter 5. A system of interconnected causes can seem daunting. However, if we develop our logical power so that we are able to comprehend and reason with those complex systems as single units, then it will no longer seem complicated. Grey areas are encompassed in this idea about complex systems, as they consist of situations where instead of getting a simplistic yes or no answer out, we have a whole range of related answers on a sliding scale. This is like having a range of probabilities for different possible outcomes, rather than trying to predict one outcome. It might seem hard to understand a range of probabilities rather than one prediction, but a powerfully rational person will then develop the skill of understanding the more difficult concept, rather than giving up and resorting to the simplistic one. The same is true of grey areas.

We tend to look for a single cause or a single answer to a question. One way to find one cause for a complex situation is simply to ignore all the others, as people frequently do when blaming an individual for a complicated situation. However, another way to find a single cause is to package the whole system up and be able to regard that as “one cause”.

This enables us to think more clearly and also move to different levels of abstraction. Analogies use abstraction to make pivots to other situations, as discussed in Chapter 13. I believe powerful rationality involves great facility at moving between different levels of abstraction to make different sorts of pivots, to move between different contexts and see many points of view.

Powerful rationality involves being able to separate axioms from implications, which is related to being able to separate logic from emotions. This doesn’t mean suppressing one or the other, but understanding what role each is playing in a situation, and what each is contributing. It involves finding logical justifications or causes of emotional facts, including other people’s. This leads me to an even more important aspect of rationality: how to use it in human interactions.

I think there is something even better than being a powerfully rational person, and that is being an intelligently rational person, which is someone who is not just powerfully rational, but uses that power to help the world, somewhat in the way that the best superheroes use their superpower to help the world. And the best way I think that we can use this superpower to help the world is to bridge divides, foster a more nuanced and less divisive dialogue, and work towards a community that operates as one connected whole.