I don't completely agree. (I know... How meta.)
I have worked to be as rational as I will personally tolerate, and it has been difficult, but I've achieved some success. The key is to divorce your identity from your beliefs about the world, and to realize that the opposite of never admitting you're wrong is "always being right", which is of course impossible, so if you are TRULY interested in becoming MORE right, then the only reasonable option is that you must sometimes lose arguments (and admit it to both of you).
Are most people interested in doing this? No, and in that sense you have a point. But it's available to everyone, and who wouldn't want to be more right?
The other difficult thing to do is to aim this at yourself with full candor and work through that. Interestingly, now that ChatGPT has access to all the conversations you've had with it, and assuming you've opened up to it a bit, you can ask it: "You know me pretty well. Please point out my personal hypocrisies." If you want to make it more fun, you can add "... as Dennis Leary/Bill Burr" etc. What it said when I tried this was fascinating and insightful. But also difficult to read...
> divorce your identity from your beliefs about the world
I understand not totally subjugating your personal identity to ideology, but I'm struggling to see how someone could practically completely separate these two things. To use a somewhat trite but personal example, I'm gay, so that aspect of my identity will necessarily affect my perspective on certain issues. Conversely if someone were to convince me rationally that homosexuality was wrong, it would necessitate a pretty dramatic change of my identity no?
Not every issue exists on that clear a spectrum, but you can imagine the views necessitated by different pieces of personal identity adding up over a lifetime.
Fortunately for you, there is no good argument that homosexuality is wrong. But honestly, it does take a certain nontrivial amount of understanding to realize that- an understanding of things like: the list of the most common informal logical fallacies (or... all of them, because why not, and once you learn them, you see them everywhere). And those aren't someething that is typically taught in school (I had to pursue them on my own time).
(A while back I found a personal webpage that systematically shot down every single homophobic argument using reason and those fallacies... and I haven't been able to find it since, unfortunately.)
So, among many other injustices that might be rectified (or at least ameliorated) by a broader understanding of fallacious arguments, homophobia would definitely be one of them.
(Also, personal note, I'm sorry about any injustice you've had to endure because of your orientation and others' lack of understanding.)
One thing that helped me was reading a book on good political discourse. It basically said what the GP said, that good discourse is about exploring the world. It also pointed out that vilification in its many forms is counterproductive. It undermines trust.
One of the examples used was of a party that I did not agree with - that most people didn't agree with. You'd see mainstream politicians declaring them to be bad people.
But the book pointed out that before this party existed, nobody was representing the people who were now voting for it. If you believe in democracy, how can you be disrespectful of representation?
Suppressing my value judgement also later helped me see that when the party got into a coalition and managed to get some of their politics put into law, some of those laws actually did help the rest of us, because they addressed issues that the other parties were not willing to address.
One thing I think that can help in this is trying your identity to being someone who strives to be as open minded and introspective as possible. You can turn changing your mind into a psychological reward, rather than an ego loss.
Out of curiosity, why do you think being as rational as you possibly can is a goal in and of itself. Mark Manson has a whole bit on this, in The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck if I recall correctly, that lobotomized people would fit that description pretty well, purely rational. Except it turns out that once you take the emotional side out of the person, what's left is merely a hull that doesn't care about anything, because rationally, why would you. I don't think being more right is a noble goal. We all know the type, people who pick at every little thing to be technically right, but mostly they're just asshats who miss the forest for the trees.
What definition of rational are you using? Being a rational actor typically means displaying consistent goal-oriented behavior. Being lobotomized seems pretty irrational. It reduces your power and makes you less able to achieve goals (if you can achieve them at all), including basic self-care.
>Except it turns out that once you take the emotional side out of the person, what's left is merely a hull that doesn't care about anything, because rationally, why would you.
That's not what rationality is. What terminal goals one should have, which in humans is informed by emotions, is not a concern of rationality. Rationality concerns how to achieve terminal goals.
If you think rationality is a lobotomy, maybe your emotions are running a dictatorship?
Being right doesn’t make you an asshat. Refusing to correct yourself when proven wrong does.
> I don’t think being more right is a noble goal.
That’s a pretty telling sentence. If someone doesn’t value being more correct, what kind of compass are they using to navigate the world... Vibes?
Rationality isn’t about amputating emotion. It’s about not letting your emotions pilot the plane blindfolded while high on conspiracy podcasts telling you which way to bank.
Emotions are data. Rationality is how you integrate them, not ignore them. A rational person doesn’t become unfeeling; they align their feelings with reality, and update when their model of the world is provably flawed.
The lobotomy comparison is just absurd: actual rationalists care deeply about things- they just make sure their caring isn't built on delusions. That’s why rational frameworks helped de-stigmatize homosexuality, dismantle phrenology, and challenge witch trials. Emotional reasoning alone got us the burnings, not the liberation. Emotional reasoning got us Turing's chemical castration, not gay marriage rights.
A rationalist by YOUR definition wouldn't even care enough to fight homophobia with reason. See the difference?
Also, literally the entire system of justice (an exemplary combination of rationality and feeling) doesn't make sense, given your anti-justification for rationality. The accused looks like a rapist, I just know it, he's just got that look in his eyes. Let's go with that. Judgment for the plaintiff!
Also: Being “technically right” is only annoying when it’s used to score points. Being functionally right- especially when it affects policies, freedoms, or lives- is kind of the point of civilization.
Being caring and kind are simple examples of moral compasses that are considerably better than being as right as you can be. Your comment is a great example of the kind of person I'm trying to exemplify, you make up a lot of nonsense no one ever said just to argue how much more right you are against it.
We agree inasmuch as I eventually learned to appreciate nice-but-dim people over intelligent-but-needlessly-arrogant people.
But that ends as soon as there are stakes and the resolution depends on intelligent recognition of data or arguments.