Nothing Rational About It


“It is one thing to accept something in practice, another to justify it rationally.”
-         Isaiah Berlin

It’s no secret that rationality can’t always give you reasons for deciding what’s right and what’s wrong (Though rationality can help you decide whether or not to follow what is termed by the majority as right or wrong). In most cases, that doesn’t matter. Is stealing ok? You don’t need rationality to provide an answer to accept that it’s not ok. Morality, social norms, jail time are acceptable reasons (well ok, jail time would be a rational cost-benefit analysis based reason, but even the others are acceptable reasons to not steal).

But what about something like athletes taking steroids to win? Lance Armstrong is the poster boy for drugs in sports these days. He is getting stripped of his many wins and the runner up declared the new winner (As an aside, that “solution” made me wonder: in sports like cycling or shot-put, everyone competes with everybody else. So if the winner turns out to be a cheat, you just push everyone else’s rank up by one and some degree of justice can claim to be done. But what about sports like tennis? If it turns out, say, Roger Federer was taking drugs, who is shown to be the winner? After all, Federer beat 7 guys for each of his Grand Slam trophies. Every one of those 7 guys is entitled to say he might have gone on to win the title…but that’s a topic for another blog, perhaps).

Coming back to rationality not always being enough, I like this xkcd comic  copied below that shows how irrational our disapproval of doping is:


Makes you think, doesn’t it?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why we Deceive Ourselves

In their book, The Elephant in the Brain , the authors describe this weird aspect of deception that we practice: deceiving ourselves! That is so weird: “If our minds contain maps of our worlds, what good comes from having an inaccurate version of these maps?” The Sigmund Freud school of thought treats self-deception as a defense mechanism, “a way for the ego to protect itself”. The mind seeks to protect itself from anxiety and other negative emotions. Many object to this reasoning: since accurate information is so critical to our survival, surely distorting information would be dangerous. Wouldn’t the goal of protecting our self-esteem have been better achieved by making the brain’s self-esteem mechanism stronger instead? The new school of thought explains self-deception as “primarily outward-facing, manipulative, and ultimately self-serving”. This is based on Thomas Schelling’s work on game theory: “In a variety of scenarios, limiting or sabotaging yourself is the winn...
Read more

Europe #3 - Innsbruck

The last city we visited in Europe was Innsbruck in the Austrian Alps. After the cold and windy experience (at times) of Paris and Netherlands, Innsbruck was a wonderful change – it didn’t feel that cold, it was not windy all of which made it easy to walk around. Something absolutely necessary given how scenic the place is.   Since the hotel check-in time was much later in the day, we left the baggage and went to the Swarovski HQ-cum-museum about an hour by bus from Innsbruck. The crystal exhibits were brilliant – colorful, bright, shiny. Jewellery aside, it was a display of what one can do with crystals. While my wife and daughter loved the jewellery, I liked the superhero themed exhibits of Batman, Spiderman, the Hulk, and Star Wars. We didn’t buy anything there, though we did buy stuff in the Swarovski store in Innsbruck – jewellery, not the superhero stuff.   Innsbruck is a major tourist attraction during the skiing season but now in summer, we saw many groups of ...
Read more

The Thrill of the Chase

So many people complain about the difficulty in making decisions while shopping. Do you buy Brand X that gives 20% extra free? Or Brand Y that has 10% off? Or Brand Z that gives something else free with it? Do you buy that flat screen TV today or wait for the sale at Diwali? Now since the customer is king, shouldn’t companies be simplifying pricing choices? Like maybe offering consistently low prices all the time? Not so fast, as the US store, JC Penney discovered to its cost. Turns out that while people do complain about pricing choices, they are irrational. Also, they enjoy the thrill of the chase. Huh? The word “sale” acts like a siren call for many people: it lures them in to make that purchase. Consistently low prices don’t do the same. Besides, if a competitor lowers their prices just one time of the year, and Poof! Suddenly that low price claim becomes suspect in shoppers’ eyes. Then there are those sites that offer coupons: have lunch at Restaurant A on Wedne...
Read more