emotionalism is strongly linked to irrationality. once someone is irrational I'm not following how that can be reduced to a "difference in priorities". I'm an open source maintainer of some very popular projects. more in the early days, I was certainly irrational on a few occasions where someone called out things that I did wrong and I refused to see it. It wasn't like I had de-prioritized "making sure the code is not completely broken". my own fear that I was going to have to rethink a whole huge set of assumptions (which of course I had to do anyway) prevented me from working with people.
But rationality (in the human sense) is completely governed by emotion. Curiosity about an unsolved problem? that's emotional regulation of the brain. Satisfaction that a problem is solved? also emotion. Beauty in a better solution? emotion.
This has significance, it's not just a restatement of "the problem" using different terminology. It's significant because the brain, like every other part of the body, evolved parsimoniously, and it does not have spare capacity lying around, so anything that "distracts" the emotional parts of the brain will diminish rational capacity. "Hangry" is not just a pun/quip about being hungry, it's empirically measurable, it affects outcomes.
Debating rational topics with your rational friends, whether at work, at school, or after hours over a beer, it's fun (emotion), can be frustrating (emotion) but does it ever not get heated (more emotion)?
The brain is an emotional organ. All the other organs are rational, they do what they do in entirely predictable and logical ways.
this does not negate the fact that a breakdown in rationality is also caused by emotion. the human brain is emotional throughout. however the part of it that has "rational debates" is not an intrinsic behavior. that part is based on cognitive skill which will perform to a greater or lesser extent based on current brain state. if the amygdala is active in a state of fear or anger, "rational debate" skill will be compromised, since that is not a useful skill in the traditional evolutionary situation that calls for fear or anger.
now this time I will employ simple restatement to help convey the point I'm making--and for you to be rational is for you to first simply understand what I'm saying; arguing back is not entirely rational, it's actually an additional emotional step:
think of rationality of the brain like a signed vs unsigned char in most implementations of C, basically a byte: you could think of a byte as 0-255 or as -127 to +126. The brain is an emotional organ. Rationality is the best possible outcome, but it's not the default state; the brain doesn't function from 0 to 255 rationality, it functions from -127 to +128.
I say it this way because you talk about rationality "breaking down" as if it's some sort of default. I don't think of it that way. Rationality is something we hope to build up to and are lucky to achieve, but our default state is animal passion.
I'm not trying to convince you to change what you think, just using some restatements to open your thinking to the way psychiatry views the brain.
> I say it this way because you talk about rationality "breaking down" as if it's some sort of default.
I'm sorry, can you please explain how you come to this conclusion based on what I wrote:
"however the part of it that has "rational debates" is not an intrinsic behavior. that part is based on cognitive skill which will perform to a greater or lesser extent based on current brain state."
I'm not really arguing with you, as your first point seemed to be some kind of "but what about...!" that didn't really negate what I was trying to say. However if you think I was saying something completely different, that would make more sense for whatever it is you're attempting to "argue".
> I was certainly irrational on a few occasions where someone called out things that I did wrong and I refused to see it.
I don't think that's a problem with the emotion itself, so much as which specific events trigger that emotion and how you chose to process them and react.
Having fear does not make you lash out at users. We all have fear, often about similar things. It's having fear associating with a person calling you out, and then failing to process that fear in a healthy way that caused you problems.
Very rational people still have lots and lots of emotions. They are not robots. They can just handle their emotions in a mature, mindful way.
I employ mindfulness on a daily / hourly basis in my own life and especially when dealing with the large number of requests I deal with every day.
In those times that I have not been able to respond politely or rationally, my lack of mindfulness as well as my own emotional reactiveness to certain stimuli (e.g. triggers) was at the core of it.
that is, if a request is not triggering strong emotion in me, I don't need to employ patience and mindfulness in order to have a reasonable and rational response. If a lot of requests are in fact triggering, this is what I would term "emotionalism", and I have to work much harder to have rational responses. Hence emotionalism is linked to irrationality especially for someone with fewer emotional maintenance skills.
emotion is not a "problem" any more than the urge to go to the bathroom is, however, both require proper training to be dealt with.
