Off topic - a pet peeve of mine is seeing humans termed as “irrational”. Please forgive my rant, as it is not personally targeted at you.
We only seem “irrational” when we are talking about a narrow view of “rationality”, i.e., as defined by the cold hard logic of machines. We do not question why we have this definition of rationality. Our “irrationality” simply seems so because we have not bothered to understand the larger complexity of our evolutionary programming. It’s the same as not bothering to understand how a car works, and then claiming that the car works on magic. If one understands how it works, then it is no longer magic. In the case of humans, we may never fully understand how we work, but we can work towards a compassionate understanding of the same.
Absolutely on point. I would argue that irrationality isn't even possible. If person A thinks or behaves "irrationally" according to person B, there is simply a difference in perception between the two. A large percentage of those perceptions are created inside one's own mind which may or may not be aligned with the rest of the universe.
It sounds like your main objection is with conflation of "irrational" with "wrong". It's helpful to describe an extreme fear of heights as "irrational" but from an evolutionary point of view it might in fact be correct because it keeps those genes that give the rest of the population a healthy fear of heights in the gene pool. I think these are different concepts and a person can be both irrational and correct in their behaviour.
We only seem “irrational” when we are talking about a narrow view of “rationality”, i.e., as defined by the cold hard logic of machines. We do not question why we have this definition of rationality. Our “irrationality” simply seems so because we have not bothered to understand the larger complexity of our evolutionary programming. It’s the same as not bothering to understand how a car works, and then claiming that the car works on magic. If one understands how it works, then it is no longer magic. In the case of humans, we may never fully understand how we work, but we can work towards a compassionate understanding of the same.
/rant