What Did “Rationality” Mean in My Previous Post, Anyway?#

After reading this person’s comment, I really did suddenly see the problem. Writing the previous post felt great, sure, but the word “rationality” referred to different things in different paragraphs

I completely missed that when I first wrote it, because in my head they apparently were all one big lump to begin with, haha

Following the three categories that commenter laid out for me, they roughly break down into:

• The sciences, or my preference for objective, scientific knowledge and its methods
• Efficiency as a value: my habit of weighing inputs against outputs, optimizing my time, and pursuing whatever is “more effective”
• Rational thinking itself: reasoning, analysis, verification, and revising judgments in light of new information

And there is the problem: I called all three of these “rationality” in my previous post

For example, when I wrote about liking math, physics, and the universe as a kid, and disliking things I considered “subjective,” a large part of that so-called rationality was simply a preference for science and objective knowledge

Later, when I described my efficiency-obsessed brain counting, recording, and measuring my behavior, “rationality” had started to mean valuing efficiency

And toward the end, when I said that “rationality and sensibility began to coexist,” rationality had become a way of analyzing and thinking about the world

These three things kept switching channels throughout the post, haha

While writing, I didn’t find any of it strange, because they had grown together throughout my life

Liking objective knowledge, analyzing things, quantifying them, pursuing efficiency

Over time, I stuffed them all into a box called “rationality,” then stuck a label on the outside:
RATIONALITY

Looking back now, that was a bit hasty, alas

Rearranging My Values#

Once I separate those three things, the whole “going from over 90% to 66.7%” in my previous post starts to look a little odd from the outset

What actually changed may not have been “the proportion of me that is rational,” but the order of my values

As a kid, I valued things that were objective, certain, provable, quantifiable, and had clear answers

A math problem has a correct answer. A program either runs or gives you an error

Those things gave me a very definite sense of security

By contrast, questions like “what do I like?”, “does this painting look good?”, or “why did someone make that choice?” seemed terribly vague to me back then

No universal answer, no standard score, and different people could even reach completely opposite conclusions

So I naturally put the first kind of thing very high on the list, and ranked the second kind below it

But once I started making games, writing, creating things, and talking with more and more people, I found that many of the things I truly wanted to do could not get around those questions

Whether a game is fun isn’t a purely technical question. Whether a story makes me care about a character is a fairly vague experience too:
Some people can establish a character in a few minutes, while others leave you wondering what that character was there for from beginning to end, haha

Whether an article makes me feel “yes, this is what I wanted to say” doesn’t seem to have a universal metric either. Especially now that AI assistance is inevitably part of my writing process, whether the result really says what I mean and reads right to me is still something only I can judge

Even the question of why I want to make games isn’t itself the conclusion of some rational deduction

I just want to. I like it. I want to create a world people will remember. It is that simple, though actually doing it is hard, haha

Looking back, then, the change I went through may not have been:

I used to be rational, and now I have become emotional

It was more like:

I used to recognize only a narrow set of things as valuable, and now I am willing to recognize more things as valuable in themselves

My old self might have asked, “What use is this?”

Sometimes, my current self answers, “Because I like it”

And somehow I find that answer sufficient. That really does sound more like rearranging my values than watching a stat called “rationality” drop from 90 points to 66.7

Seen that way, the 66.7% in my previous post looks completely subjective, alas

The Straw Vulcan#

That comment also introduced an interesting concept I hadn’t known before: the straw Vulcan

Put simply, it is like setting up a straw man beside a real target, making it look similar, knocking it down, and claiming you hit the actual target

The straw man in my previous post seems to have been this version of “rationality”: a truly rational person should be calm, emotionless, unaffected by personal preferences, and always act according to the optimal solution

A bit like a robot in science fiction: “Calculations indicate that this plan has the highest probability of success. Executing”

Meanwhile, the human beside it is crying, “But that’s your friend / parent / lover!”

The Vulcan, expressionless: “Emotions are meaningless”

That sort of thing, haha

I portrayed rationality as something that rejects emotions and subjectivity, trusting only technology, data, and efficiency

Then, in the second half of the post, the hero, “sensibility,” charges in and tells it: the world doesn’t work like that! Emotions have value too! The big rational villain goes down, and sensibility wins

But thinking about it now, here is the problem: why does real rationality have to fight emotions at all?

Suppose my goal is simply to make a fun game

Playtesting, observing player feedback, analyzing why combat feels boring, adjusting the mechanics: all of that is rational too

Or suppose my goal is simply to spend time with someone I like

Thinking about how to start and maintain a relationship, communicate effectively, and avoid hurting them through my behavior is perfectly rational as well

Rationality doesn’t generate these goals out of thin air, but it can help me ask: are the things I am doing actually taking me toward where I really want to go?

So perhaps the problem wasn’t that “real rationality is bad,” but that I had quietly attached my own set of values to it:

• Objectivity is best
• Efficiency comes first
• Emotions are noise
• Subjective experience is unreliable
  Then I called that entire package “rationality”

Of course sensibility would conflict with it

I had already written the script and assigned the roles from the beginning, haha

Did I Really Expand My Model?#

Now for a question I find more interesting, and a little more likely to set off my defenses. In my previous post, I rather liked explaining the change this way:

I haven’t abandoned rationality; my cognitive model has just grown larger

The old model could accommodate only data, efficiency, and objective facts. Now I have added variables like emotions, subjective experience, and human nature

It looks very reasonable. I even felt a bit impressed with myself, haha

But that comment offered another explanation: what if this wasn’t simply a “model upgrade”? What if my preferences changed first, and I then built another theory to rationalize my current preferences?

Reading that really left me three parts puzzled, three parts defensive, and four parts deep in thought

Because it looked surprisingly similar to the way of thinking I had criticized my childhood self for in the previous post

As a kid, I liked the sciences and disliked some things I wasn’t good at

So I concluded, “Objective things are superior to subjective things”

A worldview that was very convenient for me

Now I like creating things, subjective experiences, and talking with people, and I have begun to place more importance on emotions

So I have concluded, “Rationality and sensibility should coexist”

I used to like A, then build a theory proving that A was better. Now I like A+B, then build another theory proving that A+B is better

Turns out I’m still the same kid I always was, unchanged, haha

And honestly, I can’t fully answer that question yet

But I do think a change in values and a change in one’s cognitive model do not have to be mutually exclusive

My priorities have indeed changed; that is a fact. At the same time, my understanding of the word “rationality” really has changed too

I used to mix up rationality, objectivity, efficiency, and the sciences. At least now I am trying to separate them, and that is itself a conceptual correction

So perhaps it is neither “I have simply become more emotional”

Nor “I have simply become more rational”

My preferences, values, and ways of understanding things have all changed together

As for how much of that is actual progress in understanding, and how much is my current self writing a prettier explanation for myself… impossible to quantify

After all, if I confidently announced right now, “I see through all of it now!”

Then a few years later, some future version of me would probably dig up this post: “Why were you so confident again? Now I have to clean up after you again”

Pretty funny, really

Maybe Rationality and Sensibility Were Never Opposites#

The more I write, the more I think my most basic mistake was this:

I always assumed “rationality” and “sensibility” were opposite ends of a single axis, sharing one pie between them

That is why my middle-school self could so naturally answer:

I am more than 90% rational

Later, I very seriously revised that number to:

66.7%

Looking at the question now, I can barely keep a straight face, because I no longer know what that percentage was supposed to measure, alas

A person can have a deeply emotional goal and pursue it very rationally

Liking a character is a feeling. Analyzing why I like them is thinking

Wanting to create a character players will care about is a value-driven goal. Studying characterization, dialogue, narrative structure, and player feedback is a method

These things can absolutely coexist, and very often they should

Without feelings, I might not know why I want to do something in the first place. Without rationality, I might never work out how to actually make it happen

So instead of saying:

Rationality is responsible for suppressing sensibility

My current self would rather say:

Feelings tell me what is worth pursuing
Rationality helps me see reality clearly and judge how to get closer to it

Of course, that sentence surely has its own problems too

Desires can themselves be influenced by reasoning, rationality isn’t merely a tool, and feelings can sometimes help us understand the world in return

But at least it is closer to my current understanding than “rationality and sensibility fight, and we see who wins”

And writing this suddenly reminded me of a line from the previous post:

I started letting objective technology serve subjective experiences

At the time, I simply thought it fit the way I was making games. Looking at it again, it turns out to be a pretty good example

Technology doesn’t lose its objectivity by serving subjective experience. Subjective experience doesn’t lose its warmth and color because it uses technology

They are each doing what they are good at

Perhaps so-called “coexistence” was never about two enemies finally calling a truce

It was about finally realizing that they were never on the same axis