In most area of life where gene pool survival is at stake, your emotion is “smarter” than your rational if, and only if, the goal is to maximize reproductive success. Hell, even religions provide better strategy than rational mind.
Maximizing reproductive success is an important goal because it explains why people behave the way they do. That is, those who are around now are descendants and hence similar to those who maximize reproductive success in the past.
That’s why religious people and emotional people breed more kids. That’s why John Galt doesn’t.
Exception is if you understand game theory or political theory, which often provide the same recipe your feeling would have told you to. Of course for rational mind to outperform emotion or religion, the goal must be gene pool survival. Most of us are not rationally maximizing our reproductive success. We just follow our feeling and got “accident” and somehow become fathers or mothers.
Most of what people do that you think is stupid is actually very smart if you presume that their goal is reproductive success and you know the actual game behind it.
Buying a swiss watch for $30k sounds stupid. But then it signals wealth that attract hot babes. Killing people for defying religious opinion sounds stupid. But then again it asserts control and humans naturally want power. Prohibiting commercialization of sex sounds stupid. However, the consequence of commercialization is extermination of those who can’t compete. Now look again at pictures of feminazis. Do they look very competitive to you? Most libertarian feminists are pretty and most radical feminists are ugly. Not a coincident.
The closest ancient philosophy that got it realistic is Yin Yang and Taoism. Javanese also have some good philosophy. I mean realistic doesn’t mean it’s smart. Among western philosophy I like game theory, and evolutionary psychology.
Math and engineering is fine but they don’t answer directly how to win the gene pool games.
Can You Be Too Rational? is a post from: Free Market Forever
