Thread by @simonsarris

It is the mysterious forces of the world, further pleated by human irrationality, that make many things worthwhile.

Fact helps you know, but fiction helps you ponder.

Many difficult things are easily grasped by intuition. We downplay this in the modern world where reason, a fine faculty on its own, is given a kind of weird supremacy through "rationalism"

"Rationalism" is this strange attempt at vacating all faculties, motivations, desires, intuitions, etc to replace with the single faculty of reason. Applied by itself it is a cognitive stupor, the drunken delirium of reason.

I can forgive a "rationalist" as a phase of youth, since all of youth is a stupor of one thing or another. But after that it becomes cringe, or a kind of heartlessness, or simply the absence of wisdom.

Not all things require rationality, and rationality often stands in the way of art and personal matters. You cannot reduce your family life or your personal values to unit economics, for instance. Here instead you need to ponder beyond reason, and your intuition is to be flexed.

How to build intuition? The most natural way is through repeated exposure to difficult situations. But experience is slow and fraught, so with great wisdom, we have invented stories. Fictions. Myths!

It is through these that we first build a proper intuition about the world.

I think we are in a very sorry state that we prize abstract thinking over story telling. It leads to a downplaying of these things. It also leads to egregious societal-scale errors by rationalist people who try to re-order the world.

Sometimes we have an extraordinary human who is able to articulate with considerable genius what a purely rationalistic schemes might be destroying, while their inventors ignored any intuitive thoughts for being irrational. But these defenders of intuition are sadly rare.

One such example is Jane Jacobs, who was able to articulate what some full-steam-ahead rationalist urban planning was doing to the US.

I wish we did not need to wait for very brilliant people to put the brakes on such things, though. I wish we had more respect for...

...our own intuition. More respect for the "irrational" feelings that we do not have the words to articulate.

The best way I know how to articulate these things is through stories. Read more stories, I urge you, and ponder.

I hope as always my own sleepy words are clear enough. Forgive all typos, and wish me a good night.

Good night, all!