Francis Luong

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Rationality: Willingness to Observe and Not Being An Arrogant Fool

Rationality depends on 2 things:

  1. Being willing to look a phonemena and make observations about fact.
  2. Accepting/learning that it is possible to look at coincident facts in some phenomenon and come to the wrong conclusion about causality at work in that phenomenon.

If either of these 2 aspects are absent you can still make assertions but you may not say that the assertions are rational.

Rationality is thus at odds with hubris, which assumes your own infallibility.

It is also at odds with faith.

An application of rationality to an assertion which begins as faith can be regarded as rational but can no longer be regarded as faith, which eschews the need for evidence. The more one rejects the need for evidence, the more one's faith is said to be strong.