My Third Law November 8, 2005
Posted by Sina in : Daily , trackbackI’ve been doing a lot of thinking recently. I’ve come up with some stuff. Before I share that with you, let me introduce a postulate that I will need.
Persig’s Postulate: The number of rational hypothesis that can explain any given phenomenon is infinite.
Now let me give you a corollary of this postulate that I formulated:
Corollary: The number of rationalizations (ie. excuses) that a person can give to explain a mistake is infinite.
To prove this, just notice that an excuse is a hypothesis and a mistake is a phenomenon.
So what does all this mean explicitly? Let me show you by making use of this corollary to finally write my third law, which follows directly:
Sina’s Third Law: Humans can rationalize anything.
Notice that we can obtain the corollary:
Corollary: Humans will rationalize anything.
Proof? Of course we assume utility maximization of individuals. Now suppose there is some ‘thing’ believed by some individual which that person will not rationalize (whether or not the ‘thing’ is actually rational or true is not relevant here). Then this thing is irrational to this person, and is thus not optimal. So the person is not maximizing her utility, which contradicts our assumption.
Some examples: a person rationalizing eating cake when they’re on a diet, a student rationalizing skipping class, a lover rationalizing hurting someone they love, a cheater rationalizing cheating, the Nazis rationalizing the holocaust, etc.
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