413. A Rational Look at Irrationality with Steven Nadler

unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc

Humans have always had the propensity to be irrational. In fact, humans may be as irrational today as they were centuries ago. But with a more educated and technologically advanced society, why does this level of irrational thought and behavior persist?

Steven Nadler is a professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin. His books like When Bad Thinking Happens to Good People: How Philosophy Can Save Us from Ourselves and Think Least of Death: Spinoza on How to Live and How to Die encourage readers to examine their lives through a philosophical lens.

He and Greg discuss how social media has contributed to the perpetuity of irrationality in society, why more education doesn’t necessarily lead to more rational thought, and why philosophy should be more widely integrated into our education systems.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Episode Quotes:

Exploring Spinoza’s determinism

Nobody can be truly free from external influences because we have to live in the world. But you can liberate yourself insofar as your life is guided by reason and not by passion. Now, for Spinoza, the world is deterministic. Everything happens because of its antecedent causes. And this is as true as much for leaves falling off trees and rocks rolling down hills and for our bodies, which respond to the physical influences of the world. But it's also completely true with respect to the human mind. Our mental states, our thoughts, our beliefs, our desires also exist within a deterministic system.

Where do irrational beliefs come from?

02:46: I don't think that human beings are necessarily more or less irrational now than they were centuries ago. However, the difference is that irrationality can flourish more easily now with the advent of social media internet sites that traffic in irrational beliefs that encourage irrational thinking, and that make it very easy for a person to be overwhelmed by misinformation and thus form beliefs without any evidence and never really be exposed to counter-evidence.

Two kinds of bad thinking

07:08: In the book, we distinguish between two kinds of stubbornness or two kinds of bad thinking. We call the first, epistemic stubbornness, and the second, normative stubbornness. Epistemic stubbornness is where you adopt beliefs without sufficient evidence in favor of their truth. (08:19) What we call normative stubbornness is more a matter of behavior. And maybe here, temperament plays a bigger role. A person who is normatively stubborn applies rules without thinking the actions they choose and the courses of behavior that they adopt.

What Nadler says is one of the root causes of persistent bad thinking

11:46 Very often we know what the right thing to do is, we know what is good, but we act contrary to our better judgment. That's not just something that's a matter of our actions and behavior, but even in our minds, sometimes we know that a belief is not probably the right thing. It's probably not true, and yet somehow through peer pressure, for example, we feel compelled to go with the crowd, and we find ourselves believing things that we have no evidence for believing, and in fact stand in the face of contrary evidence.

Show Links:

Recommended Resources:

• Plato
• Ethics by Baruch Spinoza
• Meditations on First Philosophy by Rene Descartes
• A Treatise of Human Nature by David Hume
• Immanuel Kant
• Socrates
• Conatus
• Apology of Socrates by Plato
• Clytemnestra
• Achilles
• Stoicism
• Aristotelianism
• Thomas Hobbes

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at University of Wisconsin

His Work:

• When Bad Thinking Happens to Good People: How Philosophy Can Save Us from Ourselves
• Think Least of Death: Spinoza on How to Live and How to Die
• A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza's Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age
• The Best of All Possible Worlds: A Story of Philosophers, God, and Evil