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Abhinav Bansal

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Is bounded Rationality good?

Does creativity comes with a cost of mental anguish and pain? And do bounded-ly rational people score better on the dimension of happiness?

Topics: happines rationality
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  • Barney Woods

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    Aug 27 2012: The more superficially we are able to skip along the surface of life, the less sadness and anguish we feel. Rationality doesn't go deep. It has no need to, because everything the rational person requires is there within easy and obvious reach, or has already been contemplated by someone else. There is less need for the rational person to dig deeper inside themselves, or to look to the future to find hitherto unknown things that stimulate them.

    The rational person gets his/her stimulation from the outside in, while the creative person gets stimulated from the inside out.

    I think anguish and pain goes with the territory of being creative because it is by definition, introspective. The introspective spiral can so easily go downwards if creativity isn't happening (artist's block), or self-esteem has taken a knock.

    The problem is that we are all born to be certain thinking types - rational or creative (sometimes both) and our degree of relative happiness seems to be linked to one or other of those.

    We just have to accept that we are either going to be irrational/creative/artistic, or rational/logical/scientific. I think we also have to accept that one will never properly understand the other.

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