One of the most inconvenient truths for me is that we are much less rational than we think. We don’t judge rationally, we rationalize. Our decision processes are mostly sentimental. Most of the time, half of our brain reaches a decision quite quickly, and then the rational part comes in and tries to make sure there aren’t many obvious flaws.
It takes serious work to distance yourself and identify your biases and double standards. And you can’t do it without reliable information, that’s why fake news have disrupted our judgement so thoroughly. Flat-earthers are close to impossible to convince they’re wrong because they are so emotionally invested in their belief that even a few poor arguments are enough to make them disregard all our scientific progress.
More inconvenience: Being rational wouldn’t be good for you anyway. Most of the world is complex. Politics are complex, machines and systems are complex, human relationships are complex. Even if you had all the necessary information, you couldn’t process it in real time. But often you need to do so, because something is always happening and people expect you to take a stance. You need to have rules of thumb, shortcuts to quick answers. We call them principles, gut feelings, “the ways of our people”, and they have been bestowed upon us through hundreds of years of experiences, trials and failures. You can’t prosper without them, you can barely survive.
I signed a pledge when I was a student to do this. I wanted to make helping others a big part of my life, but also wanted a relatively normal life and career. I found it reasonably easy to do by not inflating my lifestyle too much from when I was a student, basically just acting as though I’m on a lower salary.
Also, I listened to Peter Singer, author of The Life You Can Save, on this podcast and it really changed the way I think about charity. Would recommend.