The Most Rational Person in the World

I wrote this post on stage in Speedhaven at Minifest, a pre-LessOnline/pre-Manifest mini-conference in San Francisco. Unfortunately, I didn’t win, and nobody even clapped for my post, but it was fun anyway, because I got to try writing something in five minutes, which was an interesting exercise.

Contrary to the statement I heard earlier, I have not discovered the most rational person in the world.

But maybe it would be worth it to discover such a person.

How would we go about doing that?

I propose that we create a kind of contest, competitive rationality.

It could be structured like a sports competition, where each round filtered into the following rounds, and eventually, you would discover the most rational person.

How would we judge the rationality of each contestant?

I propose that we ask them problems that they would answer, either in prose or by multiple choice.

Those who had the highest proportion of correct answers would be judged the most rational.

Then the winners would compete with the winners of the other competitions.

In this way, we would discover the most rational.

But what is the utility of this contest?

It seems as though it discovers book-knowledge, not street knowledge.

It might not teach us how to live more rationally – it might simply teach us how to have rational beliefs or understand the principles of rationality.

I propose instead that we have a contest based on how participants live their lives.

We monitor the decisions that they make day to day and judge the rationality with which they conduct themselves.

Similar to the rational belief contest, those who defeat each other filter up into the ultimate winner of the contest.

In this way, we discover the most rational person in the world.

We can all use the winner as our role model and emulate them to conduct our lives more rationally.