Ep. 40 - Awakening from the Meaning Crisis - Wisdom and Rationality 

This is my favourite corner of the internet. I have an engineering degree, which means I had virtually no liberal arts education. It’s so lovely that such high quality education is available online, on demand and for free (or via voluntary payment). Truly a revolution that’s quietly occurred over the past 10 years. Thanks for all of your work, John.

I am up to ep.40, and watching it I've just realised yet another reason why this series is so amazingly great - it's the masterful way in which John strikes a balance between breadth and depth in the structuring of the material. The result is a presentation which is broad enough for a layperson to connect with, whilst at the same time, deep enough to offer actionable solutions and insights. This is a true masterpiece of a presentation!

Yay! Reached episode 40 thank you for being such an awesome guide and teacher !

Yes!! Getting a bit anxious for each episode as we witness the synthesis that's John's building!!

I see what you did there John. On Physicists & Philosophy. Good job 👏

Just finished this episode after listening to Paul Conti on Lex Fridman's podcast. He explains narcissism as the maligned expression of envy, rooted in incompetence. If competency, as John suggests, is a result of wisdom rooted in rationality, it seems like rational thought, or the lack thereof, is the root of narcissism and perhaps other personality disorders. It seems to jive with my experience of narcissists-they're the most frighteningly irrational people I've ever met.

Just checking in. Damn this has been a wild ride. There is so much to be grateful for in this series chief among then John's dedicated to convey as clearly as possible his theory. It's really refreshing to hear someone be so dedicated to understanding and truth that they are willing to put in the grind to discover it. You rock so hard John, I can't wait to round out the final 10. You also sold so many books lololol.

Wisdom makes credible without taking credit

Speaking to this issue of what gets transferred in expertise, Alasdair MacIntyre made the point in After Virtue, that professionalism and expertise within a profession were supposed to provide one, not with transferable expertise in a given domain of accomplishment, but with transferable virtues in the soul. So that, for example, while the precise perceptions and actions developed in tennis might not transfer to another sport, the virtues of perseverance, discipline, attention, Etc would transfer.

Knowledge > Application > Relevanz Realisation > Wisdom

Somebody PLEASE give JV a FRESH marker EVERY episode!

Regarding critical detachment: my sense is that highly rational people don't have strong beliefs of any kind precisely because they are rational. This is why critical detachment is effortless for them; they are already detached from the products of their cognition to begin with. Developing this a bit further: when an otherwise rational person does hold an odd strong belief, they will be very irrational in their cognition related to that belief.

I would love to redo the persistence of belief experiments described 35:00 ish to 42:00 ish, but instead of *distracting* the participants after they find out that everything they've just experienced was bullshit, invite them to process whatever feelings of betrayal they have around that, and to reconcile it. My guess is that there would be a bunch of complex feelings, including perhaps an amount of disgust that would usually be impolite to express in front of the experimenters, that would be needed to really reckon with the fact that they were given fake feedback from people they'd trusted... and that this thus might not be a problem of rationality so much as a problem of emotionality. And yes, we could argue that a rational person would nonetheless override these recent experiences they have been told are bullshit (told, I note, by the same people who lied before!) but it seems to me that the process here of coming to a new sense of things is not primarily made of reasoning, but of working out matters of intuitive trust. And if that didn't help, I'd eat my hat. Other commenters - let me know if you have access to a good context to run this variation on the experiment and want help designing it!

I'm always looking for new interesting lectures on Psychology/Philosophy, please let me know if you guys have any recommendations, would be highly appreciated

Remind me what the title(s) of the work of McGee and Barber was, please. Clicking through every RU-vid link in the series to find this stuff is pain.

I have to ask: have you ever brought up this question about expertise being limited in its domain when you're speaking with Jordan Peterson?

Excellent lecture and that means I have some "questions" First I wonder if by putting people in an experiment, where they have no preformed opinions. if we create an environment where the acceptance of the limited data that they have available doesn't that make their conclusion rational ? Specifically is not it "rational" to conclude on the basis of the experience that they are competent or incompetent? Secondly, maybe it is not the question of people being rational/irrational but that they are potentially rational. How would a person who has gone through some form of anagogic process do with these circumstances?

Is Joyce, in *Finnegans Wake*, pointing out a different order of performance errors that transcend language itself?

Click, like, & listen!

Nooo….I wasn't done listening and this episode is over already?! That's not rational, I needed this process to continue on. Haha. I was thinking, despite low Rationality or Expertise in these things, perhaps, one process of gaining Wisdom/Rationality is at the hands of The Irrational/Mob, which is a kind of participatory process for all, be it good or bad. Id est, a mob demanding a man be crucified to satisfy their needs to blame someone, whether it's rational or not. And this seems to explain The U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights, why it allows for the possibility of irrational behavior such as could occur by exercising free speech or a fire arm....yes, someone could produce a negative result, however the process of Wisdom requires exposure to this and can only counterbalance The Irrational if allowed freedom to do so, even through possible pain. It may seem irrational to presume one is innocent, not guilty of a crime or accusation and risk setting them loose, however, that process is the only way to protect the process of Rationality. It requires Critical Detachment to enact, though.

If anyone needs a transcript we've made them for this & all episodes here: www.meaningcrisis.co/ep-40-awakening-from-the-meaning-crisis-wisdom-and-rationality/

The lasts few episodes this series has really opened up for me. Before then I had quite a few episodes which I found hard to follow and still feel like I'm gonna have to watch a few times in order to really get a grip on all the content. This episode for some reason felt joyful and transformational to watch. The experience of watching the series has shifted and it gets more rewarding for every episode. For me I think it's partly due to getting to know John; his way of speaking and his arguments. I feel like I'm a bit more fluent in the 'Vervaekean' language now and I look forward to following along further. John, thank you for this incredible series. If you'd given me years to try to synthezise these thoughts I don't think I would have been able to. My ZPD is tingling. If there is one thing I would ask of you it would be to not be apologetic or too cautious concerning what people will make of what you say. The clarity of thought and honest attempt at honesty is enough by far. The true audience hears you.

There's an essay by David Foster Wallace called How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart, in which he explores the whole issue of domain specificity in expertise, specifically with regards to the genius of truly great athletes, short and brilliant read (imo)

Finally, Wisdom and Rationality unified. Ep. 40 should be wonderful.

I loved the first 20 episodes of the series, had more and more difficulty understanding the subsequent episodes up to 39. But that episode and this episode are amazing. I have been talking about this with people, but now I feel like these discussions were a bit like 2 guys banging on a stick compared to your analysis.

I can be an experts in tennis and no matter how good I got at tennis I still got a divorce....

The observation at 36:15 reminds me of a term you used in Episode 6, Akrasia. Lack of character, Lack of rationality. These statements can be applied when looking at performance, no matter how competent one is. "actions speak louder than words", but is it really that black and white? What if someone with character and rationality is extentially entrapped? Or would that constitute a sense of self that is out of touch with reality? Am I assuming inhearant good? I think there is something more here, I just don't know what. I am eager to continue this series. Thank you John.

For some reason, this episode in particular showed me how profoundly cognitive science bridges between disciplines. The philosophical arguments proposed by Cohen and Chomsky appear impenetrable on their own… but an understanding of cognition helps to reveal the deep errors in their thinking. I am not totally sure what JV will talk about in the next lecture, but with all the tools he’s introduced so far, I have a sense where he might be going :) and that is a new and wonderful feeling!

Wisdom can walk with us in the way we find ourselves walking

If you understand this lecture then you are now asking yourself: how do I make that mistake? If you are wiser now that you know these principles, watch it again.

25:02 , man. Bigtime

Thanks John.

I hope a whole series similar to this one (erudite but also no-nonsense, genuine, matter of fact, serious, and without pompous pretenciousness) is launched on the subject: "professionalism and expertise within a profession are not Transferable to fields outside that profession". Experts are scholar-experts within their fields and their opinions should be considered "expert opinions". Outside their or our field of expertise, their opinions, our opinions, are valid as concerned citizens. As valid as everyone else's opinions, but of equal weight. We are all experts in our own lives: living through our societies and economies embeded in our context. Our opinons should matter in a pluralistic open society. With equal weights outside an specific expertise. It makes no sense to have synthetic biologists give ethical, moral, political opions on, say, agriculture or medicine; creators of genetic engineering tools give opinions of asymmetric weight on ethical and society-wide considerations; nuclear physicist about the politics of war; and so on.

I got trouble following and reviewing some past episode. But this episode got me up again. Thank you for your time.

30:50 damn, this explains a lot, I will stop trying to persuade some people with arguments, I always felt like they are stuck in a lower level, you just explained it perfectly

Great episode John. This now has a feeling like it is floating towards notions of free will and natural law, as envisaged by the Ancient Greeks, and incorporated into theology. Is that the intention?

41:00 John gives a recap on why he is focusing on Rationality

Thank you Jhon for sharing your work.

Thank You Very Much!

So, if I am presented with evidence for seemingly illogical beliefs (or, points of view that are frowned upon/ridiculed/debunked by logical minds), but I do not adhere to those beliefs because I want to be ‘logical’, that means I am acting irrationally? Trying to avoid foolishness is making me foolish? (insert emoji of sweating face with a nervous smile)

Really helpful explanation of the "Why" around the 41:00 mark!

This is the first episode where the techniques of psychology are seriously put into doubt. You're telling me that you test people about their ability to distinguish between authentic and inauthentic comunication, tell them they are random and then accuse them if some kind of belief persistence deficiency? You broke their good faith relationship. Why wouldn't they continue to persist in their belief?

There is so much I see wrong or incomplete with the suicide-note experiment as described. As you hint at toward the end of this lecture, rationality is a performative process-and yet this experiment pointedly interrupts people's ability to perform the process by distracting them with other activities. It's kind of like opening a computer file, deleting the contents, but then killing the app before it can save to disk. Further, it assumes (as you also hint) that rationality is entirely propositionally rather than experientially based: the subjects had many temporal experiences of being told they were right or wrong, and one temporal experience of being told the whole thing was a sham. To use another analogy I've seen applied to learning, they've (perhaps) had a deeper neurological "groove" carved out through repeated scratches that one countervening scratch isn't going to alter much. Further experiments are needed, in which participants are given time to reflect on the revelation that the whole thing was a sham (of varying amounts up to, and possibly beyond, that of the initial phase of the experiment), in which they are told repeatedly that the thing was a sham, and in which they repeat the whole thing with now random outcomes, to see how those affect their judgements of the followup hypotheticals. As a perfomative process, rationality takes time, and depending on the exact neural mechanism, possibly repetitions of experience; these test subjects were not given that time. I suspect you may be discussing this in the next lecture, of course....

Interesting definition of rationality as overcoming self deception and I am thinking about this. Perhaps another ways of defining rationality might also be the constraining process preventing the will from going beyond the intellect?

It brings me great joy to see normative used in this way. Normal meaning common is not the same as normal referring to what makes sense to do.

I appreciate YOUR time JV ❤️🍄

Failures of egocentrism

Thank you so much John!

Just curious Mr. Vervaeke, do you consider yourself an expert in Christianity?

Thank you

Im only on e.20 , wait!

Well, simply awesome. And that's even though I was familiar with most (not all) of the arguments and examples discussed. But they were presented so clearly! Also loved the Euthyphro argument applied to rationality. It's always amazing to me how many people will totally refuse to acknowledge its power (nicely illustrating some of Prof. Vervaeke's examples of human irrationality). Thank you professor, for the whole series so far and especially for this one.

26:42 The leap itself is not the mis-leap. Leaping too far is the problem. That is, leaping straight through post-mind (my term) into the world, is what get’s us in trouble. The pressure to do this is obvious. We don’t just value the correct response but more the first correct response. Kahneman’s system two is really just his system one contained. That is, where we restrict the leap, the next leap will build on it. Or straight up better it. Or, it will simply move us on. The real work is done prior. Apparent wisdom, in this case anyway, just depends on whether you open your mouth at the right time, if at all, or not.

Beautiful last 20 minutes thank you