Quote:
Originally Posted by loquitur
Filtherton, I'll agree that you can't presume rationality based on the bare fact that a crowd is acting uniformly, without looking at what the particular behavior is. Ambulating by putting one foot in front of another isn't a rational choice, it's how people walk. But people's reactions to certain social stimuli is a totally different story.
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Here's what I think: I think we're getting caught up in a semantic argument about what it means to be rational. I get the impression that you think that "rational" status is something that need only be imposed on an actor post action, so that if someone's behaviors seem rational, then they are labeled rational. I can be fairly dense at times, so let me know if I've got you all wrong.
I think that people have many diverse reasons for doing the things that they do, and that many of these reasons wouldn't stand up well to close scrutiny. I include myself in this. I understand that these things may be considered rational in a local sense, that is, rational if you take into account the limited information processing capabilities of humanity and assume that everyone is doing the best they can with the information they have. This would mean that everyone is at least locally rational, but it would also destroy the notion that rational people are predictable, because as far as I can tell, outside of generalities or statistical distributions, they aren't.
It would be more appropriate to say that the collective behavior of rational people can be predicted sometimes, assuming we know enough and nothing odd happens in our period of interest.