For example. I tried to talk sense into him.
scineram just pointed out another form of irrational behavior, known as rationalizing, and done by sane people every day.
a fellows emotions, say, want him to be a communist so that he can soak the rich etc. he reads mises and his logic realizes that communism is a fairy tale. so he rationalizes and finds some ridiculous flawed logic to refute mises, telling himself he has done the rational thing.
or a wife who knows hubby is a rat, but explains away his behavior to herself
it is a coping mechanism or whatever, but its irrational to me. it is fooling oneslf into thinking fantasy is reality. sorry, thats irrational
Rationalizing is a means to an end. The act of rationalizing makes the wife more comfortable. This can be viewed as irrational because she is denying reality, and it can be seen as rational because she wants to immediately remove the displeasure of the idea that her husband is a rat.
If the man wants to be cured and knows with complete knowledge the outcomes of praying versus blood transfusion and knowingly chooses the less efficient, that does not mean he is being irrational. His act of choosing the less efficient had a purpose, so how could you say its irrational. The fact that the fixing of his disease is not his highest priority is no reason to call him irrational.
clearly cantor > vorlath.
If a man in a strange suit jumps of a cliff, he may seem irrational to the irrational and stupid, but to someone who is rational and intelligent, it is obvious that he is being rational.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4U6T_BB1N8
In other words, you need to be really smart before you can use the word “rational” the way you use it. And by really smart, i mean omniscient, or at least post singularity AI. Until you understand the universe completely, you cannot know wether someone is plain wrong, or just unsure and gambling.
It is the hallmark of “rational” people that they never even consider that “cranks” may just be trolling them, for example. Until you crack the encoding a human brain uses, and look directly into whatever makes a human think, you will never truely know what is driving them. Psychology and neural sciences have made great advances, but they are still not even close enough to explain anything. Once they do, we may be forced to alter our world view so fundamentally that it stops mattering anyway.
There is great wisdom in using the word rational the way Mises uses it. Economics isnt psychology and if you try mixing the two, you get Keynesianism.