↖ Homepage of the site 'What to do with your life?' Why do humans reason massively wrong?1. Because they confuse reasoning and rhetoric. What is rhetoric?It's the art of gaining the upper hand in a verbal contest. We are particularly attached to it in public, because it corresponds to positioning ourselves above others in terms of social rank. In other words, in public, we generally don't seek to be right so much as to have the upper hand. What is backwards reasoning?In correct reasoning, we conduct an exhaustive analysis of the situation, which eventually highlights a conclusion that we discover. What is a heuristic?A heuristic is a method that allows you to find a not too bad solution to a complicated problem, with much less effort than discovering the optimum solution would require. Take for example the traveling salesman problem. A traveling salesman must visit prospects in, for example, 100 cities, and is looking for the shortest route to get there. Finding the actually shortest route is not possible for this traveler, who will be led to adopt tricks (heuristics) to make it simpler. In our lives, we constantly apply heuristics. The problem is that the less competent we are in an area, the more we apply simplistic heuristics to it. Ultimately, our natural functioning leads us to easily find bad solutions. The interest of heuristics is twofold for the individual: Go deeperRefer to question 'What is a human?' which provided another light on the low quality of our reasoning. Refer to chapter 4'The decision-making process, or the reign of the irrational' from the book From capital to reason. ↣ Wikipedia article regarding cognitive biases
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