Remember last week when I told you about this guy over at HuffPo who was all excited about an experiment on spooky distance healing? Remember how the "study" used glorified Scientology E-meters and ginned up the negative data to make it look good? Remember how this guy abused the word quantum until it begged for mercy?
Well, they let him write again. Very sad. But at least this time his article has an appropriate title: Why Rational Thinking Is Not All It's Cracked Up To Be.
It's like this: if you have a car, but you've never learned to drive, and aren't even sure what a car is for, you will probably think that this "car" is a pretty useless hunk of metal. And you'd be half right. It's actually the combination of person and car that is useless. So it is with Dr. Pillay and rational thinking. Since he doesn't get it, he figures rational thinking must be useless. In fact, it's Pillay plus rational thinking that fails.
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I especially liked this part:
To summarize: People do not always think rationally. How do we know this? By scientific studies based on thinking rationally about the problem!
I really can't figure out exactly what sort of lesson we're supposed to take away from Pillay's post. How am I supposed to apply his "insights" into the human mind to my life and work?
OK, I am so stealing that double-facepalm picture! ZOMG!
I read the piece and don't find that much objectionable in it. The problem is that the headline implies a position of "So-Called Rational Thinking Isn't A Very Good Thing" but the article actually seems like a prologue to an argument for the scientific method. Feynman said it much more succinctly as "The first principle is not to fool yourself, and you are the easiest one to fool."
I think Dr. Pillay might not be as familiar with American idiom as he should be if he's going to write headlines in informal English.
Re: #3 - yes, the case is an argument for the scientific method, because, well, that's rational thinking. He has presented a huge gigantic strawman worthy of a Celtic druid sacrifice about all the cases where people think and act irrationally, and then blames all of that on "rational thought".
"Irrationality sucks but is everywhere even by people who think they're being rational, therefore rational thought sucks."
It is right to look with skepticism at the arguments of someone claiming to be "thinking rationally" about a problem, but that is not the argument he is making.
Hey what gives with the reason bashing. This piece and the David Brooks bit.
Synchronicity or marketing?
Silly people. When you bash rationality, you then wea[ iu0tu dka8 ** iuj[aeu u[f]agj!!!!111!
I just read it twice again, trying as I did before to not let his previous woo-woo column color my rational thinking about what he actually wrote. All I get is the unremarkable message that even when we think we're being rational and objective, there's a good chance that we're not. To which I say, "Yes, and . . . ?"
Again I suspect that despite his professorship, familiarity with the English language is not his forte. If you look at his HuffPo bio, it's loaded with "inappropriate" quotation marks and other syntactical clangers.
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So!!! You like RATIONAL THINKING eh? Well then, perhaps you would like to read Abel PharmBoy's comments that ALL Homeopathy practitioners and researchers, MD's included, are engaged in fraud. Yes, he said fraud and I asked him if he were sure he wanted to make that statement. He was.
http://scienceblogs.com/terrasig/2009/02/homeopath_to_be_awarded_honora…
Here is the exact exchange:
"So, do you REALLY want to make the assertion of FRAUD applied
to EVERYONE involved in Homeopathy??"
[One word response from Abel Pharmboy follows]
Yes.
You correctly call into question the E-meters and questionable utilization of the word "quantum" applied to "scientology" and I reject similar "explanations" in which "quantum" anything is used to explain Homeopathy.
But to impugn both the motivation and intent of genuine scientists and genuine MD's and other health professionals who practice Homeopathy by telling us that they are engaged in "fraud" is dangerously irrational - the kind of leap of illogic unexpected from people characterizing themselves as scientists.
For this reason, I would like to see your condemnation of Abel Pharmboy's characterization of Homeopathy practitioners and researchers. Lacking that, how can we maintain any credence at all for either your positions or his on anything?
What you want, James, doesn't concern me. Morally speaking there are two type of homeopaths:
1) those that believe in what they are doing---they should know better, but morally, it is a mitigating factor.
2) those that don't really believe it---nearly criminal.
Good analogy with the car and driver. Succinct. I'm stealing it, if I may. Also going to steal your Picard/Riker poster too...I promise only ever to use them for good. :)
Orac, on Respectful Insolence, dissects the article in a bit more depth for anyone who isn't quite sure where Dr. Pillay's article goes wrong.
You know, reading through the linked article, it seems like such a waste. Pillay has all the tools for being a good skeptic in his toolbox, he just isn't using them properly. Maybe with time, if he's taught to tell the difference between a screwdriver and a screwball, he can come around.
Info! where the hell have you been hiding?
I just read Pillay's article. It is a weak and disingenuous attempt to characterize rational thinking as inadequate. His closing, "we need to learn to accept and be more open about how our emotions influence the ways in which we think, since that is the reality anyway" gives it all away. The guy basically says, we should trust our emotional influences in coming to sound conclusions. I wonder how this works with a few billion emotions.
Why don't people get scientific method and rational thinking?
Sigh!
I must stealz dis.
There's emotion now and emotion later. Thanks to my brain's ability to imagine various future scenarios and thanks to rational methods of sorting out cause-and-effect and assigning probabilities, I can make decisions involving both. Yay!
Srsly, iz no dichotomy.