The limits of reasonable

[firecat]

I am noodling about some conversation around a current event, but not directly addressing the event or the people who are involved in it.

http://tempest.fluidartist.com/moonfail-reasonableness/
(I agree with this post 100%.)

http://www.jimchines.com/2010/09/reason-anger/

There is some fascinating discussion in the comments of this post.

http://www.jimchines.com/2010/09/reason-anger/#comment-15949 D. Moonfire:
I try really hard not to only pay attention that are “reasonable”. I think it very important to read about unreasonable, insane, and otherwise brain-dead people from the simple point that I’m looking at them from my point of view. If I stuck with reasonable, then I’ll be just confirming the biases I already have (I believe the proper term is confirmatory bias or something like that). I won’t learn anything more and I’ll just put myself in a bigger hole that I’m already in....I think it critical to see the world from points of view that don’t agree with you, those unreasonable people out there.

Two things strike me here. One, I agree that if you only pay attention to people you consider to be acting reasonable, you'll end up with confirmation bias. Two, when you see "reasonable" opposed to "unreasonable, insane, and otherwise brain-dead," and you see "unreasonable" defined as "points of view that don’t agree with you," it's easy to see why conversations go astray. It's easy to end up with "Be reasonable" meaning "Agree with me" and "You're not being reasonable" meaning "You're not agreeing with me and therefore you're insane or brain-dead."

http://www.jimchines.com/2010/09/reason-anger/#comment-15990 Laura Resnick: It’s also worth noting that -emotion- is highly over-valued by many people, i.e. the notion that how strongly you feel about something has a direct corollary to how informed, valid, or inherently correct your opinions are.

I don't like the word "over-valued" there. What she's really talking about is public behavior, not emotion, and what she's really saying is "People who publicly express emotions are taken more seriously than people who don't." And personally, as a cold fish, I don't like that. But I don't know that this translates to publicly expressing emotions being "over-valued."

http://www.jimchines.com/2010/09/reason-anger/#comment-16307 Skennedy: Any motivations ascribed to thousands of individual comments and tens of thousands of opinions spread on peoples’ own blogs are straw men - easy to dismiss compared to the rainbow of actual diverse opinion.

YES YES FUCKING YES. But this reply is probably right:

http://www.jimchines.com/2010/09/reason-anger/#comment-16310 Resa: ...but humans are tribal creatures and tend to think in tribal terms...

I now have almost automatic reactions to phrases such as "those people": "which people do you mean, exactly? what makes you lump them together?") and I am glad of these reactions. But I probably retain more tribal-creature thinking than I am aware of.