Rationalization as a Source of Informal Fallacies
Many informal fallacies are downstream of rationalization: a form of intellectualization deployed in response to cognitive dissonance, covering justifying, explaining, excusing, defending, and reasoning out a position after the fact rather than arriving at it through reasoning.
This overlaps with Coping Mechanisms and Denial:
- Dismissing something desired as undesirable.
- Reframing a negative outcome as positive. This differs from cognitive reframing, which doesn’t mask or deny the underlying emotion.
- The Sunk Cost Fallacy, which rationalizes continued investment to avoid admitting a prior loss.
Ideology Without Epistemic Humility
Following religion or Ideology without a commitment to epistemic humility, serious intrigue, a wanting to get it right, or practice is performative.
“A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.”
Most people’s religious orientation is inherited from their birth environment. It’s the first encounter with death anxiety that pushes someone toward either ignorance or questions, and religion can answer both. Someone who calls themselves religious but doesn’t practice is the clearest case: they’re not pursuing an answer, they’re hoping to stay on the good side of a higher order to manage their own impermanence. Rather than reasoning, most people are just rearranging the assumptions and prejudices they absorbed from their surrounding community.
Death Anxiety, Identity, and Runaway World Models
People’s relationship to their death anxiety, their attachment to identity, and their dependence on physiological chemicals limit their ability to genuinely engage with the information or evidence in front of them, and distract them from reasoning well. This can compound: people adopt increasingly inaccurate world models as they double down on their position, effectively a maladaptive coping strategy, which can eventually lead to disaster and catastrophe. People thinking in the short-term and appealing to the majority.
Many religious wars, civil or foreign, have produced poverty, famine, disease, and the destruction of hard-won constructions. Many times a building has be burnt down rather than considered for re-purposing. Holding a world model in which something is worth fighting for, and that fighting for it will improve your life rather than lead to disaster, is a poor model — unless there’s a genuine resource deficit. Even then, there’s usually a coupling between a people’s deity and their resource availability, since the deity’s perceived fortune tends to track what’s actually available to them.
Assessing Death Anxiety in Others
When meeting someone, it’s worth assessing their level of death anxiety and whether they believe in karma, a higher power judge or the Just World Fallacy. Most people are coping through dissonance with the notion of a divine order or judgment, since it’s just as terrifying to imagine there is no judge or judgment at all, or judgment whose mechanism you can’t know.
Some people fear life as much as they fear death; for some, the two are the same thing given there is an almost contractual nature to mortality: if you are alive, you will die.
People need a narrative, and they pick whichever one is convenient for getting on with their lives and escaping distress and dissonance, or for advancing their interests — and they switch between narratives as needed. Assessing someone’s attitude toward their health, love, and self-betterment matters for the same reason: we have a long time on this earth, and for as long as we keep seeking new things in it, we will keep encountering challenges.
Rationalization
An excellent example of how the brain rationalizes is the split-brain research of Michael Gazzaniga and Roger Sperry. In patients whose corpus callosum had been severed to treat severe epilepsy, the two hemispheres could no longer share information directly. Researchers exploited this by flashing an image or instruction to only one visual field, routing it to a single hemisphere. In one case, the instruction “walk” was shown only to the right hemisphere (which controls the left side of the body and has minimal language capacity), and the patient got up and started walking. Asked why, the left hemisphere — which controls speech but had no access to the instruction — instantly fabricated a plausible reason, such as “I wanted to get a soda,” with no hesitation or awareness it was invented.
Gazzaniga called this left-hemisphere function the “interpreter”: a module whose job is to construct a coherent narrative for behavior even when it has no access to the actual cause. This suggests confabulation isn’t confined to brain-damaged patients but is a constant, ordinary feature of cognition — people are always generating plausible-sounding reasons for their actions and feelings after the fact, whether or not those reasons are the real cause.
Opponent Processing and Dysrationalia
In a healthy brain, opponent processing between the hemispheres approximates the more correct behavior and interprets its outcome more accurately given situational awareness. But that same mechanism is also why reasoning is fallible: dysrationalia — the inability to think and behave rationally despite adequate intelligence — is built into the brain’s architecture, not a defect layered on top of it. The observer is always embedded in the system it’s trying to model — per the embedded observer problem, no system can prove it has captured everything relevant from outside its own observation — so perfect rationality is structurally unreachable, not just practically hard. Evolution couldn’t select for an accuracy it could never verify; it selected for heuristics adequate to keep acting under permanent incomplete information and scarce resources. That’s also why dysrationalia is generative rather than purely a cost: it’s what makes collective trust possible, and what lets people get on with building and iterating rather than stalling in analysis paralysis or unresolvable skepticism, since waiting to resolve the uncertainty first was never actually an option.
As people grow less directly economically dependent on each other, alienated by the widening gap between labor and subsistence, they turn to auto-exploitation to secure themselves against that uncertainty — which requires acknowledging and overcoming their own individual dysrationalia in order to have a more accurate world model than competitors.
The Need for Rationality in the Age of Generative AI
AI models are fallible, and no one holds a concentrated stake in the outcome of their performance — accountability is globally diffuse. The risk isn’t that AI can actually replace evaluators who carry real accountability; it’s that the leaders deciding where to cut may believe it can, and will act on that belief whether or not it’s true. Combined with AI’s enormous generative capacity, this makes the human labor of overcoming complacency and dysrationalia to select good output from generated output more valuable, not less: without it, we get sloppy decision-making and the propagation of dis-, mis-, and malinformation. Market competition and evolution will always apply some corrective pressure through brute selection. But depending on how broad and deep these models’ capabilities and applications become, relying on that default selection pressure alone, inside an already hyper-competitive environment, could produce serious collateral damage, uncertainty, and analysis paralysis — which makes investment and decision-making harder across the board.
In such an economy, the wins get bigger, but so do the losses, and people’s desire for stability and well-being increases — not least because a swelling set of other, more complicated pressures pushes some toward mental disorder. This is where radical responsibility applies: in a hyper-competitive world where everyone is occupied fighting for their own interests, no one is coming to help you. The response is to build genuine relationships, practice collectivism without the dysrationalia, appeal to shared interests like health and well-being, position yourself around healthy people, and learn to take care of yourself rather than fall into vices.
Before AI, people may have been willing to tolerate disorder and discomfort through auto-exploitation to advance their lives. Now, life is becoming uncertain enough that auto-exploitation may no longer be justified at all — or it gets adopted so aggressively that it does real damage to well-being. The software engineering job market is a live example.
You Live in an Adversarial Environment
Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir Technologies, argues that the distinction between military lethality and commercial viability has vanished — value creation is now the sole determinant of survival in both arenas. He contends that the same AI-driven capabilities that enable precise, rapid targeting on the battlefield — such as those used in the Middle East conflict and against Iran — are identical to those required to achieve outsized alpha and operational efficiency in the commercial sector.
The same technologies used on the battlefield are being used to exploit your psychology and erode your options, decision-making capacity, and agency.
How dangerous this actually is — a consumption-driven economy folded into an environment of commercial warfare, where perverse incentives reward short-term value creation amid increasing complexity — is unknown. But if our leaders, founders, CEOs, influencers, and media are taking this dynamic seriously enough to act on it, the danger likely sits at the higher end of that range: emergent collectivism built on empathy or altruism will decline, and where collectivism does persist, it will form around dysrationalia and myth — shared hope against misery, suffering, and death, not accurate shared assessment.
Given the fertile soil of elite overproduction, your value is increasingly expendable to employers who believe AI can do anything a degree once guaranteed — so you have to differentiate, and make that differentiation visible, which means auto-exploitation. Fail to, and 你会变成一位美团外卖员的人 (you’ll become a Meituan delivery driver) in a world where fewer people are ordering out, not only because it’s expensive, but because cooking your own meal has become one of the few remaining ways to feel a sense of agency. And when people do order delivery, it’s because doing so has become competitively priced against groceries and cooking — which means delivery drivers aren’t making much money at all.
This isn’t a knock on delivery drivers — it’s meant with real respect for the work; it was startling to learn that around 20% of Meituan delivery drivers hold a degree, and the hope is that they, and everyone like them, find work that actually uses their intellect and sustains them. The point is narrower: being well-educated is no longer protection against ending up in an over-saturated, low-wage service economy, and that’s a hard thing to reckon with.
Despite the adversarial environment and how many people want their life to involve cold calculations to success, generosity of labor or money is also what makes the difference. And the truly successful people are the ones that can live their life peacefully appreciating what youth they have left.