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The hazardous business of recognising truth against fiction.
(From Lloyds List)
Byline: A rational person can be out of step, writes Peter Mackay
IT IS bad luck to be superstitious. On the other hand, irrationality appears to pay. While the universe operates on rational lines at least, we think it does humans generally do not.
So the individual who tries to live a rational life will be out of step with the rest of the population, the only recompense being a self-satisfied feeling that 'everyone else is wrong'.
The gulf between human behaviour and mathematical rationality is one of the reasons why markets tend to work in an irrational, and therefore unpredictable, way.
In his 1992 book Irrationality, recently reissued in Britain, psychologist Stuart Sutherland proposes that we are for the most part credulous fools who would do well, in most circumstances, to stop and think before we go and do something stupid.
It is advisable to apply this approach to the mundane does this tie go with this suit? as well as to bigger questions relating to career, health care, lifestyle choices or religious conviction.
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