Getting drunk on people

Extended quote from http://agentyduck.blogspot.com/2017/06/tasting-godhood.html

"In early college, when I drank wine for the first time outside of Mass, my experience was very different. I was mainly concerned with whether I could tolerate the taste long enough to get drunk.

My brain is programmed to efficiently assess whether food is safe to eat, and whether it is calorically rich. Chefs, winemakers, and other culinary artists are doing their own thing, which is almost orthogonal to the goals (so to speak) of biological evolution. So, if I want to know what a carefully crafted food actually tastes like, then I have to do something weird with my mind. I have to be an epicure, which I would not do by default, because it’s not part of a human mind’s factory settings.

This is, of course, a metaphor for rationality in general. But I’m going to apply it a bit more precisely than that.

When I struggle to empathize with someone (which is pretty much every time I try, in my case), the main obstacle is the very same thing that originally prevented me from tasting wine.

By default, I’m only perceiving a few blunt fragments of info about how they relate to my goals and values. Are they smart? Do they signal like my in-group? Are they easy to talk to? Do they enjoy the same things as me? Can I tolerate this wine long enough to get drunk?

And I’m filtering the info so quickly that I’m not even aware it’s happening, unless I’m looking right at the process. The thing that makes it to consciousness and feels like “my perception of the person” actually contains more of my song than theirs. I’ve discarded most of their personhood."

Rocky Point Water Temperature and the Failure of a Defintion of Rationality

What is rationality? As good a definition as any I've heard is: someone who doesn't give away money.

A preference set [A>B, B>C, and C>A] is not logical because you would pay money to trade C for A, B for C, and then A for B until you've spent all your money to end up no better than you began. Unfortunately, one of the first results of game theory is that exactly such a preference set can be expressed by groups of (at least three) voters, each of whom has an individually rational preference set. For example, in a recent election, voters preferred Gore to Bush, Bush to McCain, and McCain to Gore.

If the human mind is composed of parts that interact or "vote" to make decisions, with no Kantian Captain making a final logical check, individual actions would be just as irrational. And thanks to Nicole, I am now convinced that rationality is overrated -- it doesn't explain human actions. The reasons we give for our actions ARE important (we can't look just at actions for meaning) even if they're not logical. If our reasons are nonsensical, that itself is no reason (or at most, a reason on par with any other possibly countervailing "reason") to discount our words.

Furthermore, logic can be used to force certain responses, for example, giving 100 dollars away: True or false: you will either give me 100 dollars or you will answer false? If you say false, you are an irrational liar, no better than the man who trades A for B, then B for C, and (because he prefers C to A), C for A. But if you say true, you didn't say false, so you have to give me 100 dollars. To which Sanjay issued his infamous "f*ck you!!!!!!!!!!!!!".

How could it be rational to give away money?