Comment by fastball | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fastball | Hacker News Reader

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Correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like you're making the argument that there is no such thing as "rational behavior", at least that can be measured somewhat objectively. If that is the case, I must disagree.

Rational behavior is behavior with purpose. It is acting out of self-fulfillment / self-interest / self-preservation in a logical (or internally consistent) way. "I want this, so I am going to do these things because they will help me achieve this goal".

Irrational behavior is when your behavior does not serve to fulfill any sort of goal whatsoever, or if the behavior is totally at odds with your desired goal.

A dog is rational when he wags his tail to entice gifts of food (because his desire is food). A dog is irrational when he bites the hand that feeds him (because he is a dog and still wants food).

Using this formulation of "rational behavior", mentally ill people frequently fall into the "irrational" group, as they will frequently do things for inexplicable and/or random reasons, which do nothing to serve their purported goals. Obviously this depends massively on what type of mental illness we are talking about, but I think Terry's schizophrenia/bipolar disorder generally qualified, as it led to frequent internally-inconsistent behavior.

That’s not what I’m saying.

I’m saying rational depends on perspective. For a person with mental illness, it might be rational the way they act because their brain for example works differently, they experience things differently, and from their experience, what they do might have purpose, it might serve to meet a goal, it’s rational. But since their experience perhaps is skewed from our reality, from our perspective, from our experiences, the behavior looks irrational.

I'm not sure how my re-statement of your initial comment is any different from what you are saying, but regardless, I still disagree with the idea that "rational depends on perspective".

Internal inconsistency can be objectively measured: "you said you wanted pizza but now you are ordering a burger". I would argue that internal inconsistency is the opposite of rational behavior. Therefore, if mental illness causes internal inconsistencies, it is causing irrational behavior.

Having a mental illness doesn't mean that purported goals cease to exist. You can still ask a person with schizophrenia "what do you want", and they will give you an answer, because they are a person and not an animal.

Taking this back to TempleOS: Terry seemed to want to be known as the greatest programmer on earth. At the same time, his mental illness caused frequent outbursts that were off-putting to many people. It is hard to have a positive reputation as the greatest programmer when your behavior pushes people away from you. I would qualify such an inconsistency as "irrational", would you not? Using racial slurs in an online outburst is not "rational" behavior if your goal is to be respected as an amazing programmer.

And I’d argue that rationale depends entirely on how you react to your experiences. Your experiences can be objectively wrong compared to our shared reality, but true to your internal reality, and if you behave rationally according to your internal experiences, then thats rational behavior.

Your experiences might not be real or factual, but that doesn’t mean you can’t act rationally to them. Factual and rational are not dependent on each other. You can for example act rationally on the basis of a lie you were told. Doesn’t make your behavior irrational.

Ok, but if your experiences are objectively wrong compared to our shared reality, "we" can make value judgements in the context of our shared reality as to whether the behaviors based on your objective experiences are rational or not.

Sure, you can say "he is behaving rationally thru the lens of his own perspective" if you want, but that means the rest of us in the shared reality can say "these behaviors are irrational thru the lens of our shared reality". And since we're still here, and he is unfortunately not, I think "our" perspective is the one that matters at this point.

> Ok, but if your experiences are objectively wrong compared to our shared reality, "we" can make value judgements in the context of our shared reality as to whether the behaviors based on your objective experiences are rational or not.

Well, sure, but if we take some definitions of rational:

> Consistent with or based on reason or good judgment; logical or sensible.

or

> Having or exercising the ability to reason. synonym: logical.

I'd say rational doesn't care about factual or not, or others experiences or not. Rational is entirely dependent on how you react to what you experience.

> Sure, you can say "he is behaving rationally thru the lens of his own perspective" if you want, but that means the rest of us in the shared reality can say "these behaviors are irrational thru the lens of our shared reality". And since we're still here, and he is unfortunately not, I think "our" perspective is the one that matters at this point.

I think that's a wrong conclusion.

He was mentally ill. This perhaps skewed his experiences according to our shared reality. His experiences was not factual, one could say. Were his actions irrational? I don't think we can say that from what we know because he might have been acting rationally. The problem might just have been how he was experiencing things, which makes the basis of his actions not based on something we can say is factual or "real". However, if he was acting rationally on his experiences, even though his experiences were "wrong", he was still acting rationally.

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