Rationally speaking is a presentation of New York City skeptics dedicated to promoting critical thinking, skeptical inquiry, and science education.

For more information, please visit us at NYCCEceptics.org.

Welcome to rationally speaking, the podcast where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense.

I am your host, Massimo Phil Yuchin, and with me, as always, is my co-host, Julia Galev.

Julia, what are we going to talk about today?

Well, Massimo, today is another very special episode.

Oh, yay!

Yay! This is our 20th episode of Rationally Speaking.

And our new pattern is that every fifth episode, we'll be taking a Q&A from our readers and listeners and doing a one-hour

special episode where we answer whatever's on your rational minds. So we've collected a lot of questions

from the rationally speaking blog.

I'll start out with a question from a commenter named, hmm, that's HMM, that's really his name.

Anyway, he asked if groups such as the skeptics over-emphasized science and rationality.

Basically, he asked, should they be less like Spock

and more like McCoy? So, yeah, honestly, if I can start, I think that this whole idea of

overdoing or over-emphasizing rationality is kind of a straw man, or to use a term that I recently came across, a straw vulcan,

which that's from TV tropes. I love that so much. So it's this idea that being too rational is bad for us,

either in general or in specific types of situations or contexts. And I would argue that this mostly stems from a misunderstanding of

what rationality is. So I would define the rational thing to do in a situation as whatever

is most likely to get you the best results for whatever definition of best you want to use.

And so if someone's going to tell me that, well, sometimes doing the rational thing

is actually not a good idea, well, then I'd say, no, you're doing it wrong.

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