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Unraveling the Enigma of Reason - Scott H Young

scotthyoung.com · 2,510 words · saved by 1 readers

My favorite book of last year was Dan Sperber and Hugo Mercier’s The Enigma of Reason. I covered it in my book club as a podcast, but the ideas are so interesting that I wanted to take a second chance to explain them. The basic puzzle is this: The answer to both of these puzzles, which has far-reaching implications for how we think and make decisions, is that we’ve misunderstood what reason actually is. The classic view of reason is that it is simply better thinking. Reasoned thinking is better than unreasoned thinking. Being able to reason means being smarter—a kind of universal cognitive enhancement that is good for all types of problems. Sure, we don’t always use it and it can be slower than intuitive judgements, the classic view goes, but reasoning is always good. Sperber and Mercier, argue, in contrast that reason is actually a very specialized cognitive adaptation. The reason other animals do not possess reason is because they don’t have the unique environment human beings exist

My favorite book of last year was Dan Sperber and Hugo Mercier’s The Enigma of Reason . I covered it in my book club as a podcast, but the ideas are so interesting that I wanted to take a second chance to explain them. The basic puzzle is this: If reason is so useful, why do human beings seem to be the only animals to possess it? Surely, a lion who had excellent reasoning abilities would catch more gazelles? Yet human beings seem to be alone in the ability to reason about things. If reason is so powerful, why are we so bad at it? Why do we have tons of cognitive biases? Reasoned thinking is su

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