Non Polemic: How do you personally deal with "irrational" people?

This is... an impressive list. I really mean it.

Some items are pretty much exactly what I need for my goals, and if I had a lot of time I could try a lot more. 

Sadly I need to get as smart as I can really fast. I do know a lot of things that are going in my "first century of life" list, though.

I don't judge other people for being stupid anymore than I would judge a dog for being stupid.

It's funny, I got to a similar moral conclusion about an hour before reading it in your answer. 

I think of dumb people more like kittens and less like bad guys.

This is an extremely useful way to think about it.

If you are right then you live in an extremely inefficient world and can make a killing.

I have had an insistent feeling about this for a while, but I just had vague ideas I couldn't focus on or test. This seems an extremely good point from which to start thinking about it.

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed person is dictator. It's good to be the dictator. If you're not dictator then either you are blind or you do not live in the land of the blind.

I guess it's not really relevant, but this is the first time someone manages to describe my exact feelings about this. Thank you.

(Not that I want to literally be a dictator, I'm stating it out loud just so I don't risk being misunderstood by someone else who hasn't had my exact thoughts) 

Teach yourself to read and write Chinese. (This is my favorite antidote for thinking you're smarter than other people.) Then read The Art of War in its original language.

I had tried to idly learn Japanese as a past time, it took me around five days to realise it was just wasted time if I couldn't dedicate some serious efforts to it. I think I was told by friends that Chinese is substantially harder. Could you give me an estimate of how much The Art of War loses when read in a good translation?

Which gives this person who is asking nothing. Just do what is fun for you wound be a better advice

"When you think about it, because of the way evolution works, humans are probably hovering right around the bare-minimal level of rationality and intelligence needed to build and sustain civilization. Otherwise, civilization would have happened earlier,"

I actually profoundly disagree with this both empirically and theoretically.

Civilizations are not some kind of natural inevitable 'next step' that must happen when you have a smart animal.  They are a thing that CAN happen in the context of a smart animal that is capable of inventing agriculture.  But there are other prerequisites.

I find the argument that complex culture is a thing that can happen in dense enough human populations, running away as it further densifies the population, persuasive.  The idea is that in a low density human population ideas sometimes fail to percolate down the generations, while in a dense enough social network innovations stick down the generations more frequently because losses are less likely.  It is possible that you can reach a 'tipping point' in a dense enough population at which point the ability to pass on new innovations allows a denser population still and further accumulation of complex culture.

There is a bit of a case study in Tasmania.  The native Tasmanian population had continuity with the aboriginal Australian population before the end of the ice age, when the two landmasses were united.  Ten thousand years later, upon European contact, the Aboriginal Australians maintained oral culture of events and places tens of thousands of years back, and had kept and expanded upon the toolset that existed in the united landmass... while the Tasmanians, with a smaller social network and a less dense population on that land, had lost large numbers of tools and skills including the ability to produce fire de novo (while still being able to propagate it).  

I think Neanderthals are also likely evidence pointing in this direction.  Their brains were more or less the same size as ours, and they had a common ancestor a full 500,000 years ago with us.  But they lived in the frozen wastes of ice age Europe, in small isolated subpopulations if the homozygosity of the neanderthal paleogenomes is to be believed, with LOTS of small subpopulation bottlenecks.  That's a perfect recipe for repeatedly losing your complex material culture down the generations.

Empirically, human brain size has also been on a downtrend for the past fifteen thousand years as agriculture and civilization has spread.  It is a simpler environment with fewer complex things you need to interact with on their own terms and significantly worse nutrition, so we give up some small fraction of our highly expensive intelligence over long periods of time.

When you think about it, because of the way evolution works, humans are probably hovering right around the bare-minimal level of rationality and intelligence needed to build and sustain civilization.

I think this will be a really helpful thought to keep in mind, thank you.

The next thing to remember, of course, is that you're a monkey too.

Also helpful, I think I was starting to think of myself as having done with all the basic biases.

My reaction tends to be more cosmic horror than anger/frustration though. I tried to express it here.

I guess I could try to see it that way, at least I wouldn't be angry at people who actually helped me improve back in the past. 

I sometime thought about what happened to them in the terms of "That stupid way of thinking got them, it will mess them up more and more if they don't get rid of them". 

It seems better to try seeing them as infected by a bad, harmful meme than to just get angry at them because they're suddenly being stupid.

So, the first thing I would say to your anger phase is, "Don't worry, you'll get over it."

That's a relief.

A sophomore in engineering can't feel angry that an undecided freshmen doesn't know calculus.

Yeah, I usually try to think like that, what I felt lately was more like... finding out that your calculus professor doesn't actually know how to do calculus in one case, and finding that the freshmen in a scientific faculty can't actually manage to understand simple Aristotelian logic... 

Usually I get most of my annoyance from listening to supposed experts who are making evident mistakes, or from listening to people who are particularly stupid.

Everybody is still building out their map, and just because you've luckily found yourself on a part of elevated territory and you're able to make a better map, doesn't mean those with a lesser view are worse. 

A really... sobering way to look at it, thank you. 

I had been trying to be as smart as I could for years even before finding rationality, but finding something that good, which jumpstarted my accuracy and intelligence a lot, was sheer luck.

Also I didn't really do anything to be born with an above average intelligence, I didn't do anything to be grown in a home where education was highly valued, so I guess that even trying to be smarter isn't such of an obvious idea to have.

I guess we could call it the self-made man fallacy, if you saw hard work working for you you feel like everyone else ought to just try and it would work as well for them too, but you don't notice the strokes of luck you had or that you still had an advantage to start with. 

And I knew all this stuff already, but... I don't know, I guess I still felt as if certain things were so obvious than anyone not figuring those out wouldn't have any excuses, since those things I always knew, so I've allowed my emotional response to be shaped by how this feels from the inside. 

Can I really be angry that her brain said, "Yeah, I'm going to believe what gives me massive amounts of comfort or am I going to believe something that could literally cause my death?"

Your friend isn't the kind of people I'd have got mad at, at least if I knew what you know about the things that trapped her into staying... which I just realised it's the correspondence bias word for word. 

If I can't see why people are missing the obvious truth (though I don't consider dropping religion as obvious, I know it can be pretty hard) I might just not know enough about how they learned to think or what harmful meme got their cognition before I met them or what do they think it would happen if they didn't believed what they believe... Even pure cognitive laziness has to be caused by something, I shouldn't just have written dumb on my model of their cognitive processes, as if dumbness was a simple mystical essence with no moving parts, I should have know better.

I've read about this exact mistake so many times that it's not even funny, I had to force myself to spell it out here even if I knew it's really a good thing that I've noticed and that I'm admitting it, because getting the basics wrong feels just so embarrassing.

Asking this question was extremely useful to me, it seems. I'll check out the book, seems pretty much what I was looking for.

My recommended first help would be: think less about stupidity of other people, and more about your own.

This is generally good advice and I do need to be more mindful of my own stupidity, but my problem isn't that I go searching for other people stupidity so I can get angry at them, more that... I'm getting more and more annoyed every time I accidentally bump into it and I'm trying to avoid reacting by shutting off everything and everyone. Though some of the advice I'm receiving looks helpful about not doing that.

... people usually behave quite reasonably in their everyday lives, and say utterly crazy bullshit about anything abstract or remote.

But historically, way more people got killed becaused they pissed off their neighbors by openly disagreeing with them about something; and it didn't matter who was actually right.

I guess that could explain the lack of critical sense they show about stuff they aren't expert on. I've never cared about simply agreeing with other people ideas if they didn't seemed right to me at first sight, and usually thought I were the one knowing best (even when deeply wrong about it) so that's not a factor my brain considers when trying to simulate other people. Thank you for this useful insight.

There is this "agree to disagree" bullshit, which would be intellectually lazy and kinda offensive against your fellow rationalists, but is a great peace-keeping tool between different tribes.

I hadn't thought of it that way. I was refusing to "agree to disagree" as if it was a moral rule, but I should stick with that if I see no chances I can actually persuade someone. To be more precise, I had figured out that between non rationalists it was often better to agree to disagree since it would be a lost cause, but I thought I just couldn't do that, no matter who I was talking to. 

I'm still a bit queasy about apparently supporting bad epistemology, so I think I'll try to state it like "We can't both be right, but I guess talking about it won't lead us anywhere, so let's just forget about it".

To certain degree, this is about the "near" vs "far" thinking (Robin Hanson writes a lot about it); people usually behave quite reasonably in their everyday lives, and say utterly crazy bullshit about anything abstract or remote.

When you think about incentives, here is the reason: in the "near" mode you are rewarded or punished by the natural consequences of your actions; in the "far" mode you are rewarded or punished by the social consequences of your statements.

This is very good.

"Can you say this in a more concise way?"

"No."

(When talking to non-experts, most points should become less concise than when talking to other experts, because to meaningfully communicate anything to a non-expert, you also have to communicate the necessary prerequisites that other experts already know.)

I hadn't thought about this possibility. 

I remember having noticed people explaining badly things I knew were actually right and had better proofs than what was being explained. If I wouldn't know about the evidence already I wouldn't have noticed they were misrepresenting the position, but the subjects I get angry on are rarely the kind of things where background knowledge is so complex you can't explain it properly to a laymen.

Some of what I got angry about were just plainly stupid ideas, it doesn't look plausible that the people talking had better reasons to sustain those and just weren't saying them, it clearly looked as if someone was trying to be clever rather than trying to think about the evidence, and those people were the experts of their side, not the village fools.

But I did get angry at people who were quoting research and studies I hadn't read, because, from the way they explained said studies, it was clear to me that research was plain rubbish conceived by someone who just doesn't understand what research and evidence are. 

But it's indeed possible that the people quoting it had just made a mess and understood nothing... 

I always tried to avoid being mislead because I didn't understood passages of the two minute version of an idea, if I wasn't understanding why they had said a thing I'd go read more on it. 

I never thought that people could go as far as completely botch the two minute version they had explained to me, even when they are supposed to have studied it, but it's clearly possible, even if not so likely.

I'll have to remember to check the original sources when I really should get something right.

Thanks for the link, the chewing example does feels similar to my experience, will try to think about that.

It is kind of a meme that people learn about rationality and then observe how irrational everyone else is . It is a lot easier to observe others' irrationality than your own. But probably one's own irrationality is more important. 

I've just felt how much this is true by thinking about some of the answers I got. 

There really is a huge difference between just "knowing" something (I'd have knew this even before being told in these replies) and actually realising that I was making stupid mistakes in how I thought about this very subject. 

I would have agreed to point 1. and 2. right away, and I wrote this question with 3. firmly in mind, so I thought I was being really rational about all this issue, since I actually knew I was just supposed to search for a way to solve the way I felt about it and not magically expecting people to change overnight, and I still had overlooked a mistake I was making about how I thought about "dumb people" that was causing most of my negative feelings.

About 4, heuristics, shortcuts and not wanting to think about something were all thing I understood and tolerated in other people. 

I felt angry when 

1) facing the sheer, total lack of judgement that some people show in areas where I felt they should at least try to have some, and 

2) facing the more questionable approaches to finding truth that supposedly smart experts use while talking about stuff they are thought to know. The kind of stuff you find in magic theories and psychoanalysis, only that apparently it has been creeping into all types of humanistic modern fields, and when before I could just vaguely recognise that something was just wrong with how they reached a conclusion, as soon as I finished reading about reductionism and all useful parts of cognition having to be Bayesian at some level, I could suddenly give that a name, and understand exactly what they were doing wrong and put it into words, so I got suddenly a lot more annoyed at them, as if it was the mistake that had just gotten dumber rather than me getting smarter.

I like how much your answer bears resemblance to advice on other subjects unrelated to rationality.

I was really puzzled reading that post, to me learning rationality always felt wonderful, my first round with it was like I had suddenly noticed I was living in a really small cage inside my head, and now I could suddenly open the door to get out and walk outside on my legs for the first time and then run. Now that I'm finally managing to continue I feel like the rest of the world just gets clearer and clearer to understand, even if I got these negative emotions as side effects. 

I can only assume I was the ideal subject to learn it, when I stumbled into it I was managing to self sabotage myself at everything relevant I tried to do in an obstinate attempt to not risk gaining any possible disconfirmation about my intelligence.

I had wrote more about it, but then I realised I should just write a coming of age or postmortem about this.

Back to the subject:

And if they make it to the other side, their lives enriched and empowered by reason, they will forget the hard path they walked and will wonder incredulously why everyone else doesn’t try using reason for themselves.

I guess this kinda describes what happened to me, it wasn't exactly a perilous path but I did put in a lot of work.

The way to progress in rationality is not to use explicit reason to brute-force every problem but to use it to integrate all of your mental faculties: intuition, social cognition, language sense, embodied cognition, trusted authorities, visual processing… The place to start is with the ways of thinking that served you well before you stumbled onto a rationalist blog or some other gateway into a method and community of explicit reasoners.

I'm really unsure about how I could try to integrate my intuitions into my explicit reason, at first sight they seem like incompatible processes since you can't really understand why you are having a particular intuition (if the post uses intuitions to mean the kind of ideas of judgements you can't explain at an explicit level). 

Or the suggestion is to apply explicit reason to check if the initial suggestions my intuitions give me make sense?

So far I haven't managed to intentionally use intuition to solve a single relevant problem, I think my mind mostly uses intuition when I don't have the time to make all the calls by explicit reason or by pre-selecting for good ideas and pointing out possible mistakes I then examine.

All in all, I don't think I trust my intuitions much because explicit reason improved my performances a lot and I feel very nervous about going with something I can't make sense of.

If anyone has thoughts on this or suggestions I'd love to hear them. The other mental faculties mentioned seem easier to integrate with explicit reason.

People just like their friends. It simply feels right. It’s what everyone does. The way out of the valley [of disintegration] is to not to reject this impulse [...] but to integrate your deep and sophisticated friend-liking mental machinery with your explicit rationality and everything else.

I know, I wrote this question also because I didn't wanted to risk feeling angry or disinterested toward my friends. Even if I know they are relatively "crazy" I don't feel at all like I shouldn't be friend with them anymore... 

I guess it would be a good idea to remind myself to notice and appreciate what I like about them and the warm things they do, even if they aren't at all related to being smart or rational.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

—George Bernard Shaw

I'm all for having an accurate map, and that does mean updating that map. But don't let that stop you from trying to alter the territory—and actually fixing problems.

If the world fails to meet your expectations, sometimes the problem is with the world.

When the world fails to meet your expectations then the problem isn't with the world.

This situation is an issue of emotional regulation (at the very least). I can recommend DBT as efficacious there.

Yes, that's exactly how I was looking at it, though I guess I didn't made a very good job at explaining that in my question. 

I mean, I still think the current lack of rationality in the world is a big problem, but it's not like I expect people to do better any time soon, I was just looking for ways to avoid feeling like I feel when I'm reminded of that. 

I'll look into DBT and try your advice, thanks.

Maybe it would help if you realized that most people most of the time are not interested in being explicitly rational.

I'm afraid that's the main reason I'm getting angry at them, the utter lack of trying at being intelligent when they have to choose what to do or believe. 

I never get angry at people for enjoying something stupid, or felt like they should treat each other are robots, or because they just follow (non evil) instructions, that I can understand.

I get angry only when it involves something where they really, really should try to get it right, and they don't even have excuses like being under stress or pressure, and they still don't try even just a little.

Though, now that I spell it out in more details, I realise (well, more remember, I already knew that) that people could focus on those other aspects you mention even when they shouldn't.

This was helpful, I hadn't noticed that I needed a more complex model of "being dumb" both to model people and to not get angry at them.

Unfortunately I had already selected what I'm exposed to as relations and media as much as I could a while ago, it wouldn't be easy to make a second selection.

I think I'm doing more or less okay in most of these (still room for a lot of improvement of course), my problem seems to be focused around:

1)

Another is expressing your views in a way that sounds palatable even to those who disagree.

I can only do this if I understand how someone thinks, and I have to get a better model of how people I usually wouldn't really want to talk to think. (I need for my goals to be able to influence those kind of people as well)

2)

Another is directing most of your effort and emotion toward things you can influence.

I'm pretty good at avoiding wasted efforts, not good at all at directing my emotions toward things that I can actually influence.

You can't learn these things from a book though, you have to practice them.

I'd say books make a stronger starting point for practice, but it hadn't occurred me I could just try and choose to not get angry. I've managed to regulate my emotions before this way, though I never tried on quick emotions...

I've gotten advice that should make not feeling angry easier, but will also give practice a shot. 

I should really make a habit to focus my emotions and attention toward stuff that actually matters, it screwed me up in a lot of ways already. Thanks.

I understand what you mean, but, under these lens, I'd be using "irrational" to describe thought processes that negatively affect attempts to estimate the foreseen benefits and costs of a decision, or that cause people to connect their foreseen benefits with actions that have no real reason to lead to those.

Also, the way the word is used on this site, "rationality" is also the art of managing to not have your short term benefits get in the way of the real long term benefits you'd rather choose, and in choosing which foreseen benefits and costs should matter most to you.

So the addict would be irrational if in his decision he considered only: "pleasure from drug + 10 utility", "temporary pain from stopping - 50 utility", rather than also "likelihood of slow disintegration of my life, 20% of -1000 utility", and "slowly decreasing effects from the drug and likelihood of having increasing future difficulties in obtaining drug, -80% of future "pleasure from drug +10 utility", because a) he's not considering at all the third factor because it's not certain, or b) he's considering only the first two because they are temporally closer, or d) he thinks what has seen for every drug addict he knows that's further in the temporal curve won't hold true for him without having a good reason to think so. (this is not a good model of drug addiction I think, I was just trying to describe what I mean).

Still, this is not the kind of irrationality I was getting mad at, I think I was getting mad mostly at irrational decisions and thoughts that didn't had evident "strong causes", addiction and social pressure are strong causes.

Going down that rabbit hole was in my plans, I'll check out behavioural economics.

That's an interesting thought, I was aware that most fiction kept saying to people that Kirk beats Spock, I hadn't noticed that even the character arcs of rational or smart characters are almost never about them getting smarter or improving their minds...

I think I saw that in a very few manga, even those that have a genius main character doesn't think about him getting more rational or smarter at all, he's just a genius from start to finish, any progress he makes are usual on other sides of himself...

It seems this is really something that's lacking from our culture.