- The Lost Wanderers — Anthropology and Algorithms — Medium
Neurath condemns the third wanderer for his “pseudo-rationalist” pretensions: in the interest of appearing rational, he has forced a conclusion out of insufficient evidence “on the basis of inadequate premises of whose deficiencies he is unaware.” Even worse, because he thinks he has decided rationally, he is supremely confident in his decision, even though it is no more justified than any other. The hero of the story for Neurath is wanderer number four, who recognizes the limits of her rationality and supplements it with an auxiliary motive—an arbitrary aid to making decisions among options that, rationally speaking, are all equivalent.