Stop Being Reasonable: six stories of how we really change our minds

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I will soon have to tell my wife that her mother texted, and that she has Alzheimer’s. Do I also have to tell her about the part with the letters? Or, for the sake of peace, can I skip that part? I don’t feel comfortable with it, but I don’t want my wife to be hurt again. Jeewon Yoo is expected to graduate this year with a Ph.D. in English. He served as the lead instructor for “ Art of Comedy” and as an AI for “Sally Rooney and Her Contemporaries.”

It does seem interesting, however, that some of this comes at the heels of the now diminished New Atheist movement which emphasized some of the practices under fire here: focusing on logical form and facts, public debate and reasoning, etc. This emphasis itself being a reaction to too many of the public being mislead about important scientific facts and how to reason from A to B. Now that that movement's time has passed, it does seem a bit unfair to say, in essence, "That's all fine and great, but nobody's really persuaded by this stuff anyway." That was the point.

Eleanor Gordon-Smith

Students were grateful to Hommel for his proactive assistance and well-organized material. One called him “the most helpful, patient and understanding preceptor I've had. He did not just give answers — he worked to make sure everyone understood the topics on a fundamental level. It would have been a much more difficult — and much less pleasant — class without him.” Hannah McLaughlin The endless chasing of the slightly-better external environment can really make things worse. It can manufacture dissatisfaction with a situation that would have seemed totally fine and lovely if we hadn’t thought of it as second best – and second best not to a specific picture of a better life, but to the vague idea that things could be better. To crib an insight from the Buddhists, past a certain point – if your needs are satisfied and you have love, projects, safety, fun – the route to making things feel better is not in fiddling with the external environment. It’s in fiddling with how you react to it.

In Stop Being Reasonable, philosopher and journalist Eleanor Gordon-Smith tells six lucid, gripping stories that show the limits of human reason. Perhaps a more rounded conclusion would have been nice (what does it say about Russian interference in western politics, social media marketing etc?), but then she has mostly avoided being too academic in her style here, so perhaps that is deliberate. One other observation that has only occurred to me as I'm writing this review is the fact that this is an empirical philosophy approach - I was recently told that is fairly uncommon.I love her commentary on “reasonable debate” and how dumb we’ve let things get as a society based on our own assumptions of knowing where the line is. Especially when people have been moving the goal posts to let in more and more reprehensible commentary publicly. I cross-specialise in ethics, language, and epistemology [the study of knowledge]. In all three areas I am interested in the powers we can only have because we are social creatures. I work on moral powers that we can only exercise in social settings – such as consent, and promise – how linguistic meaning can be constructed and destroyed by social relationships, and how being embedded in societies can facilitate or disrupt our processes of gaining knowledge. The uniting theme across my work is that we depend on each other for many of our most important abilities and powers, such as speaking, learning, or coming up with moral frameworks, and yet a lot of the time other people are very bad. So what are we to do, if we rely on each other for our most foundational abilities but frequently “each other” is the source of our problems? So far I only have the question. But that’s where all good philosophy starts… Sounds like a phenomenal place to start. Now let’s have a fan-girl moment. Who is your favourite philosopher? Fintan O’Toole, Visiting Leonard Milberg ’53 Professor of Irish Letters, praised the way Yoo “communicated with confidence, charm and clarity. He engaged with the students in a way that was always lively, warm, and encouraging, but also challenging and stimulating.” I’m less worried about his political views than I am about his views on masculinity. His political beliefs are ultimately up to him, and politics are for many people oddly independent of their actual character. But a dismissal of women, or a narrative that men have been made victims of feminist progress – that can be much harder to shift. One useful way to start might be to look deeply at why this “hobby” has such enduring appeal. Is it a feeling of danger, youthfulness, losing oneself, risk, reinvention? (I guess these apply equally, whether it’s sex or actual motorcycling.) If you can get to the root of why it appeals, you’ll get two useful things. The first is one you won’t want to hear. It’s to try finding something else that scratches the same itch.