Make an irrational list
It can be useful to make a list of all the things you’re currently unable or unwilling to be rational — i.e., non-preferential — about.
For me, that list looks like this:
Israel — I’m Jewish, and my grandparents survived the holocaust, so Israel is where the good guys live, period. I’m sure there’s lots of evidence of bad behavior, and I’m just not interested.
Jesus Christ — We’ll talk more about faith and other trans-rational stuff later, but in the meantime there are some questions I’m deliberately not probing too deeply because I am working on building my trust in Jesus to sort it out, and being patient with that process. The biggest ones are probably: 1) do Christians reincarnate? 2) is Gandhi in hell? one of the most Christlike people of the last century, but was decidedly not a Christian
Conspiracy theories — I am so angry at corporate media for suppressing the world’s best information on every topic, that I’m giving conspiracy theories extra weight as revenge. It’s working pretty well, but I’m not being as level-headed about it as I could be.
Awesome people — For a long time I needed to believe I was Special in order to maintain any shred of love for myself. As a result, I still often don’t give other humans the credit they deserve for being awesome (because if I did, I’d realize how special I’m not). Finally starting to outgrow that.
Crypto — The best argument against crypto I’ve ever heard was only a few months ago, in February — someone pointed out that the ominous World Economic Forum slogan “you’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy” is perfectly consistent with everyone putting their money into, uh, “digital assets,” only to have them become worthless in the end. I try not to think about that too much. I’ve literally built my career on crypto — if I’m this mistaken about its fate, thinking about it in advance won’t help too much.
Okay that’s enough.
The point is, you can’t fight all the battles. It’s fine to admit what you’re presently unwilling or unable to be rational about, and work around those for now.
Definitely better than pretending to be rational about everything, then being an obvious hypocrite and giving rationality a bad name.
Mike, given I had just read this I can't let the phrase "the ominous World Economic Forum slogan" go! This is from Jamie Wheal:
"(That WEF meme, BTW, featured above, is inaccurate and hysterical. The phrase "You'll own nothing..." was part of a 2016 slide deck of Top Ten futurist predictions, which included other less sinister sounding statements like "we'll need to get much better at welcoming climate refugees." And it wasn't even WEF chairman/Supervillain Klaus Schwab who said it. It was coined by a Danish woman politician and concluded with "and many of your packages will be delivered to your front door by drone" which when you think of subscribing to Spotify and Netflix instead of owning CDs and VHS, AirBnB couchsurfing and Uber ridesharing instead of home and car ownership, is a pretty obvious prediction)."
That rings true to me...
BTW the newsletter that comes from https://www.flowgenomeproject.com/post/intelligent-design-or-malevolent-design is in many ways in very good conversation with your piece!
The "irrational" list could also be described as your axioms list. If something can be proven, then it can't be an axiom. And if it's something you believe without evidence, then the belief takes on the role of being a first principle that you use to derive other knowledge from.
If you want to take that train of thought further, I have a post about it:
https://blurry.substack.com/p/axioms-and-consequences