The Problem of Irrational Thinking

(Cartoon from the blog of James F. McGrath, here)

It's easy to dismiss irrational thinking.

Someone goes into a school and murders some kids. We think, what a tragedy. That's terrible. He must have been nuts. My kid/wife/mother/father would never do anything like that.

We preserve our own perception of ourselves by marginalizing the perpetrator.

When a large number of people do the same thing. Or people who are obviously not crazy, we marginalize them differently. If a large number of suicide bombers blow away civilians, we say either they're misled by something evil or or evil themselves.

The words "crazy" or "evil" now become a label, a box into which we can safely put an incomprehensible act and no longer think about it.

Recently, a young girl killed herself because she thought the world was coming to an end because the Large Hadron Collider was coming on line. See the link here. Thousands of people in east India are rushing to temples to pray and fast to prevent the end of the world. No doubt those that run the temples will take credit when the world doesn't (didn't, since it's now 9/12 and the collider came on line 9/10). No doubt, also, many westerners will dismiss their anguish as misguided. Probably many of those same westerners will then write their congressmen that evolution should not be taught in schools since it is so clear we didn't descend from apes. (In point of clarification: we didn't descend from apes. We are apes. But that's another column.)

The point I'm trying to make (and which was probably made better here) is that irrational or uncritical thinking is not benign. Whether it drives supporters of Hillary Clinton to support Sarah Palin on the mere biological fact both are women or prevents parents from vaccinating their children to protect them from polio because they think their children might become autistic, uncritical and irrational thinking have consequences. People make bad choices. Some of those bad choices are fatal. We lose thousands to quackery worldwide. (See here.) We lost nearly three thousand people on 9/11 due to uncritical acceptance of an irrational idea. (See here.) We lost over four thousand Americans and well over a hundred thousand Iraqis in an irrational response. (See here.) We might lose millions or billions (I am not exaggerating here) worldwide if we ignore the issues of global warming as alarmist or misguided.

We don't like to think critically. It hurts our pride and our self esteem.

But to not do so smacks of hubris.

And could be fatal.

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Links of Interest
The Stroking Nerve
The Evolution of Hands and Feet
Wolves for Obama
Higgs Boson! $9.75! Buy Now!
The Edge of Research in Microbiology
My Favorite Dinosaur: Parasaurolophus
Lies Anti-Evolutionists Told Me and here
Who Did 9/11?
Educational Attainment Scores by State
How Dinosaurs Won the West
Lost Bid for World Speed Record for a Wind Powered Car Blamed on Global Warming
Uncritical Thinking Kills
Madonna and Horsefly
Contaminated Soil Cleanup by Earthworms
LHC Rap