I would suggest it's easier to define "rational" in the context of human decision making as an evaluation of the process, rather than the choices. A rational choice is one which is made after a conscious weighing of the options and their probable outcomes against the information that is known. An irrational choice is one made less consciously.

Even with this definition the boundaries are going to be fuzzy, but you avoid this argument about who arbitrates which values are rational and which are not. By this metric any of zurvan's list of decisions could be made rationally or irrationally, but it is easy to suggest that in a majority of cases where humans make these kinds of decisions they are making them irrationally.

OK, so the proposition is:

1) Every human acts rationally

Clown is interpreting the negation of this to be

2) Every human acts irrationally

and thereby concludes it to be false because he (or someone else going through this reasoning process) is acting rationally in trying to disprove (1).

This is fallacious because (2) is not the logical negation of (1), instead it should be

(3) Some humans act irrationally

(See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_quantifier -- Negation)

So it is fully consistent that a human acting rationally could seek to prove the proposition (Some humans act irrationally) which is the negation of (All humans act rationally), and in order to do so he should go about demonstrating that the choice made by some human H in situation S was made without full conscious consideration of the consequences of the choice. Parents do this all the time, and so do Court Judges, so I would consider it duly proven.

The praxeology definition of rational, as far as I can tell, is simply that a person acts in order to fulfill the most pressing need in that person's mind, based on availability of scarce resources to fulfill those needs, etc.

I'm not sure I totally buy into the definitions I've read though. For example, this morning I was sitting on my duff watching TV. I could either: A) continue watching TV or B) get on the exercise bike and work out for 15 minutes or so.
I *know* that I would have more "happiness" or whatever you want to call it after working out - I'd feel better physically, I'd feel better emotionally for fulfilling the need to exercise to improve my diabetes. The improvement would be well worth the labor I would put into it, in my mind.
But, instead, I sat on my butt and continued watching TV. I'm pretty sure that means I didn't "act rationally" in terms of praxeology. Now, there may be a lot of things you can claim around that, but I'm going to need a lot of convincing that praxeology is somehow a useful model of human behavior in all cases. And if it's not, then it's just a model that has some degree of accuracy, just like all the other models.

If you attempt to use my intellectual property without my permission, there will be violence. How is that different?

The map is not the territory. It can tell me how to get to Fresno, but I would be insane to say that the map IS Fresno. I'm perfectly happy with praxeology as a useful way of thinking about complex problems. But acting like we can't even define what rational behavior is, is silly. If you sat on the couch instead of exercising, you demonstrated that you valued that more than the results of working out. I don't know how that is a difficult concept unless you are being purposefully obtuse.

The scarcest resource is time.

Appeal to authority: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property

and

ibid.

This is fascinating. I never thought of it exactly that way, but wouldn't the same arguments against corporate monopoly also apply to intellectual monopoly? I'd be against either one if they were statist, but for either one if they were free market.

The only problem here is that I claim that only the person acting can know if they are acting rationally. And because said person cannot disprove that he himself is acting rationally without doing so it has to be true. And because no single person can do so it's true for all of mankind.

Convince me that this is not the case, explain to me how you go about judging the rationality of someone else's actions.

Once again we'll run into problems in the argumantation because I don't think IP needs to be enforced by the state at all.
Land ownership is also a temporary monopoly over the use of the land, I still don't see a difference between property and intelectual property.

Again, you've made it such that if a person ever acts rationally, they always act rationally. Could someone not rationally conclude that previous actions were not rational?

People keep telling me that.

Well Zurvan let's assume for a second all of Austrian economics is useless.
Surely you also disagree with all other economic theories that make use of the concept of h0mo economicus on similar grounds that you question the action axiom?
What economic theories do you actually subscribe to then?

So I'm assuming you are accepting my definition of rational? In that case, the usual method to ascertain the rationality of someone else's decision process is to ask them questions about how they arrived at the choice they did, and then examine the answers in light of the information they had at the time the choice was made, and other choices they've made in the past, and what they express their values to be. If you find inconsistencies in their answers (they made a choice which is logically inconsistent with their expressed values, or claim a choice to be based on information they could not have had at the time), than that decision was not fully rational.

For many kinds of decisions, a normal human's ability to rationalize choices after the fact will make this process inconclusive, because of the asymmetry of knowledge between the questioner and subject as you note (Although I'm not sure this asymmetry should be assumed to be absolute, but let's not digress). But even so it's not all that difficult to find examples of people making decisions that do not cohere with their own expressed values.

The counterargument that a person's expression of their values may not reflect their "true" values does not work because we defined rational to require a conscious process, and therefore a person who is not conscious of their true values cannot act rationally at all under the definition for rational selected.

We may be getting afield here though since the original formulation used "purpose" instead of rational. I actually don't think the idea that people act towards a purpose is a completely useless premise. It's just not axiomatic in a fundamental sense, and conclusions derived from it don't deserve to be granted an unassailable status.

I don't have enough information about economics to comment on the effectiveness of any model.

However, the basic tenet of Austrian economics strikes me as wrong. Which is the argument I've been making in this thread.

As for economics as a whole, my gut tells me that large scale statistical analysis and models built with that data is likely to be pretty accurate. To my knowledge, there hasn't been anything developed to this point that is sufficiently complete.

But, just because it hasn't happened doesn't mean it can't. I suspect this is the sort of problem that's well suited to quantum computers, and with some of the recent advances, those are looking more and more plausible.

I would not be surprised to see a relatively functional economic model in the next 50 years, based on mathematics. This will probably require a massive change of thought process on the part of Economists.

I want to qualify that Economics will (probably) never be as predictive as classical Physics.. more like quantum physics where outcomes are represented on a probability curve as opposed to a number.

Aha, finally someone noticed

I would still suggest that rationality is important because a lack of rationality also implies a lack of predictability at the scale of the individual, which is the scale focused on by praxeology. Not that the premise that people "act for a purpose" is worthless if we consider the purpose to be unpredictable, the argument towards the law of marginal utility is decent I think (I haven't made a concerted effort to poke holes in the derivation), and an important conclusion. But if purposes are irrational and unpredictable that certainly limits the scope of application of the premise.

i finally finished the whole kennedy/bush conspiracy video

it was pretty good

the authors obviously were slanted, and im not sure how much of the evidence he presented is really legit, but even if a decent amouint of it is, it's a distinct possibility

anyway, it was a good watch dustin, thanks

Done!

You can quibble with some of my objections, and I do in fact think that what Rothbard develops in these 30 pages is mostly right. But two things should be clear from the above. First, any claim that praxeology is prior to experience is ridiculous. The number of non-trivial assumptions/axioms Rothbard needs is very high. Second, to claim that Austrian economics is so firmly rooted in irrefutable logic that you're entitled to ignore empirical results is unjustified.

bobman, that is fantastic amazing stuff and I greatly appreciate the effort. It will help me tremendously not only in evaluating this text but you have demonstrated for me some valuable ways of approaching texts in general. I will be rereading these pages with your notes by my side. I know what some of your objections mean and some are unclear to me but I'll work on it.

POTY.

What amp said.

I haven't had the time to fully digest the last 40 posts or so, but let me just say I POG and everyone who contributed to those last 40 posts. Some great stuff going on.

Re: Rational/Irrational decision making. There's a difference between making a decision for any reason ... which would technically be making a rational decision, if my belief that all rational thinking really means is to make decisions based on a reason of some sort or another ... and making a decision for logically and/or morally correct reasons. If your definition of "rational thinking" is the latter, well, you can see how, for each individual, the goalposts can move quite a bit. What's logically or morally correct to me, may not be to Clown, and what is to Clown may not be to Amp, and so on.

People always act for a reason. They don't always act for reasons I find good, or for reasons the majority of people would find good. In fact, the reasons individuals do what they do can often be quite terrifying. And depending on your interpretation of "rational", those "terrifying" reasons could still be "rational."

It's funny ... the human race often disgusts me, but always fascinates me.

Dan, I addressed this in my earlier post. The crucial component of the definition is that a rational decision is a conscious decision, or a considered decision if you prefer.

I like "conscious" over "considered" personally. It's possible to make a decision with a reason very quickly, without fully considering that decision.

BTW, my shrink would love to meet you. FYI.

Creepy.

You know why he would want to, right? (Family connections etc.)

Anyway, /derail.