quarrel | rationality

From time to time throughout my childhood, my mother would need to fill a pot with water while someone was taking a shower. Now, she couldn’t run the spigot full blast without making the water in the shower nozzle too hot. Her solution to this problem was to run it at full for a few seconds, then shut it off, then run it at full, then shut it off, and so on and so on until she had all the water she needed. More than once I explained that she should just run the tap half-open. This would fill the pot just as fast and disturb the shower temperature even less. She would try my way to humor me but then revert to hers. My way felt too slow.

In her own way, my mom was being rational. She had something she needed to do and a restriction on how she could do it. But then she reached a poor conclusion (that to disrupt the shower the least, she has to finish as soon as possible, which means the best solution must involve running the faucet at full speed), and she rejected a different, more rational conclusion with a subjective judgement.

Basically, she acted human.

People do this all the time. It’s how we are. It’s frequently the quickest way to make a decision and it’s required, to some degree, to make any. At some point, if you want to decide anything, you need to cut off your search for more input at an arbitrary point, and you need to trust your instincts.

Like the medical doctor and neuroscientist who arose from a coma to write a Newsweek article about how he now has incontrovertible proof there is an afterlife.

Or an associate professor with a Bachelor’s in Comparative Literature and a Ph.D. in German Literature who wrote a book (excerpted here) about how reading on an e-reader isn’t really reading.

Maybe someday I’ll be smart enough to do that too. Let’s just hope that I don’t need any water before then.