Learning Rationality is having a breakout moment. Illustration by Francesco Ciccolella In a blog post written this summer economist, Arnold Kling, noted that "an unusually large number of books about rationality were being published this year, among them Steven Pinker’s 'Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters' (Viking) and Julia Galef’s 'The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don’t' (Portfolio). It makes sense, Kling suggested, for rationality to be having a breakout moment: 'The barbarians sack the city, and the carriers of the dying culture repair to their basements to write.' In a polemical era, rationality can be a kind of opinion hygiene—a way of washing off misjudged views. In a fractious time, it promises to bring the court to order. When the world changes quickly, we need strategies for understanding it. We hope, reasonably, that rational people will be more careful, honest, truthful, fair-minded, curious, and right than irrational ones." In this thoughtful article, Joshua Rothman, the ideas editor of newyorker.com, explores why rationality is beyond the reach of so many. One of the takeaways that sticks with me is the observation that "Introspection is key to rationality. A rational person must practice what the neuroscientist Stephen Fleming, in 'Know Thyself: The Science of Self-Awareness' (Basic Books), calls 'metacognition,' or 'the ability to think about our own thinking'—'a fragile, beautiful, and frankly bizarre feature of the human mind.'” Article: Why Is It So Hard to Be Rational?