Stop Being Reasonable: six stories of how we really change our minds

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Some of them are stories of revelation, like the moment when Susie discovered her husband had been telling a criminal lie since he was twelve years old and began to fear for herself and her young child, or when Peter opened his ailing mother’s mail for her and discovered she wasn’t who he’d thought she was, or when Dylan quit the strict apocalypse-heralding religious sect he’d been raised in after more than twenty years as a believer. Others are stories about not knowing what to believe, like the shifting cognitive sands Upper-Class English Gentleman Alex found himself in when he finished a stint on a reality TV program that had trained him as a London bouncer, only to realise he was no longer entirely sure which of those two identities he’d been faking. Or there’s the confusion former Navy pilot Nicole has spent years in after alleging as a six-year-old that her mother had abused her, then reading an exposé about her own case many years later that argued the abuse may never have occurred. The version of the titular 'reasonableness' in the crosshairs at all times remains nebulous despite the philosophical namedropping (many such names themselves recognize that reason is not a mere logical monolith, but nevermind). The push to "stop being reasonable" thankfully ends up not as a push to a do-and-say-whatever-you-want set of norms but a pull away from an exaggerated or aloof ideal of what reason-theater looks and feels like. There’s nothing wrong with living at home if it works for your family: I’ve said before that splitting generations between residences is a relatively recent invention and it’s not a coincidence that we spend more on property when we think living separately is the only way to have dignity. The argument isn’t that you should move because that’s what society wants, or that there’s anything wrong with accepting parental assistance when it’s enthusiastically offered. I bought a robot vacuum cleaner and I like to follow him around and tell him he’s missed a spot. Amazing. Let’s get to know you better. What is a standard day in your life?

Unfortunately reasoned conversation or punitive cutting-off are only rarely tools of conversion. But here’s something you might be able to exploit: very often, people’s beliefs respond to the emotional experiences they have in everyday life. I wonder whether you could surreptitiously give him experiences that might work like counter-evidence to the ways he’s thinking. Can you get him into an all-gender sporting league, or into volunteering in a way that uses your hands: an environment with people of all ages, not split by gender, where people have to be hard-working and cooperative? Can you insist on modelling what it looks like to have female friends, so women aren’t just something imaginary to be generalised about with other men online?I obviously misunderstood. I thought I was invited to dinner, but it turned out to be a late afternoon tea. Instead of a 3 course dinner I was given a cup of tea and a plate of Tim Tams. Figuring out what you should want (not what you do want) is a miserable experience, because there are too many plausible responses. Family, money, prestige, doing certain kinds of good in the world, creative fulfilment – when you’re running at the question by asking what would be objectively best, it’s impossible to figure out a standardised unit with which to weigh these things against each other. If “what should I do with my life” gets read as “what would it be best for me to aim at”, you’re functionally asking yourself to solve an aeons-old question about the best use of a human life. No wonder it feels impossible to answer. Towards the end of this book, the author laments "turning on the TV and finding a climate of public argumentation that treats changing minds as combat or worse, entertainment – by trading on the lucrative fiction that being reasonable is just being really good at arguing" To me, this sounds a fair thing, particularly as at the start of the book she identifies herself as a debater in her oyuth. Eleanor says: Listen, I’m a writer and my best friend just bought a house, so I know the place you’re coming from, and from that place I’m telling you, eye to eye: when the pandemic is over you have to leave your parents’ house.

I have long been a believer that if only I could leapfrog over emotion could I be an unstoppable powerhouse for progress. The social constructs laid out as the foundation of this book suggest I am not alone. It is this thinking that reason is the apogee that has "altogether more to do with selling us... an anaesthetised dream if an optimised future where... nothing hurts". But is this even real? Without those specifics, it’s hard to give you the “win-win”. I will say that when your spouse tells you something is going to affect them so negatively that they’d rather leave the marriage, you have to listen. That’s just a condition of being married. The term “win-win” is in this regard a little misleading: marital compromise is not just a matter of weighing one person’s interests against another’s, like strangers in court. There’s a third thing, the marriage itself, which needs to be weighed. Really what you want is a win-win-win. Everyone I know is irrational, and I want to fix them. (c) An expo on rationality, its uses and misuses.

She really knows her stuff,” wrote one student, who was grateful for the slides she created to help students visualize concepts. “I found that precepts provided exactly the interaction and reinforcement that I needed to better understand the material. Jessica brought energy and animation (quite literally) to material that was previously just words on a slide, and I appreciate all of the effort she put in to help us learn.” Jeewon Yoo As a couple, then, you need to balance two very legitimate needs: your need to rebuild without the fear that you’ll be known for your worst, and her need to process her experience. Let’s jump over to COVID and restrictions, the impact these are having on our lives, our interactions, how we work and so on. What do you hope we learn or gain from this experience?