It can, but it's a long process, and it does seem quite rare. It's a depressing realization I've come to a well
How much of whether you're right or wrong on a given issue is not down to knowledge, intelligence or rigor - but to pre-set biases that happen to be set the right way or the wrong way. How the same knowledge and intelligence that can guide you to truths can instead lead you to be more entrenched in wrongs, and just how hard it is to know the difference.
You can try to be better than that, but even if you do, you aren't going to escape your own nature. And most people don't even seem to try.
It's open-ended, anyway. I mean nobody's rationality is ever perfect, or even very good, except relative to others.
The important realization I had is that this is true even for fairly rational people. If you've ever encountered someone who tends to listen more to one source than others, they are exhibiting the exact same behavior this thread is complaining about. And in my experience, this happens to everyone, even the most rational people I've met.
That's what I'm talking about. That one person who seems way more rational than most might be 95% irrational - just outperforming the "97% irrational" baseline. And those 2% that make up the difference? How much of this is teachable skills, things you and me could learn and apply, and how much of it is just some weird brain wiring?
That appearance of reason may be deceiving too. You'd expect an atheist to outperform the average by a lot - but is this true? How many atheists are atheists because they carefully examined the case for God's existence and found it lacking - and how many are instead atheists because of something like an innate contrarian streak, or just because of conformism paired with non-religious upbringing?
I happen to remember the reason why I ended up an atheist quite well. I just didn't like the idea of God existing, at all. I didn't get there by being reasonable - I got there by being lucky.
That doesn't mean it's correct. It doesn't even mean it's objective. The best you can get is a consensus among a subset of humans that certain things happen because of certain other things, and certain models can predict some of these things with limited accuracy.
This turns out to be useful for human experiences, as far as it goes. But we literally can't imagine what connections we're not aware of, what formalisms and models we can't create because our brains are too limited by their evolutionary wiring, and what experiences we're not having because same.
You could argue that these invisible imperceptible things can't affect us, by definition. But we don't know that's true. There could an entire universe of influences and abstractions we're not aware of.
And there probably is. Realistically, what are the odds that our not very large or clever brains really do have the potential to understand the entire universe?
What we think of science is more like the gap between the smartest 1% and the rest of the population. Science is a good way to make those 1% insights sticky and useful to everyone else.
But it's highly presumptuous to assume that human cognition has no limits, and the universe fits comfortably inside our brains.
My belief on this is not entirely rational, of course, but it seems to me that there's probably a sort of Turing-completeness for intelligence/understanding, where as soon as a mind starts being able to understand abstraction, given enough time and resources, it can probably understand the entire universe.
It would also be presumptuous to say that brainfuck is equally powerful to every other programming language that exists, and yet we know it to be true. The fundamental reason we can prove that Turing-complete languages are equivalent to each other is that we can build the same abstractions in both, so intuitively it feels like a similar principle holds for human intelligence.