My realisation that people are not even remotely rational beings came rather late. I think I was at that confusing time towards the end of childhood when the mocking adolescent in you begins to realise that people are generally somewhat frailer and more complicated that you thought. You begin to treat your parents more kindly, and the certainties that seemed blindingly obvious in your first foray into reason become less so. I suspect, though, that I got to that realisation before Richard Dawkins did.
I haven't read Dawkins' triumphalist demolition of irrational religion, but I suppose I will. I won't enjoy it because I know that I'll feel bullied. I rather like religious people and I have a grumbling suspicion that Dawkins revels a bit too much in his pitiless nihilism. I'm also wary of people that everybody tells you are “brilliant.” To me “brilliant” people are usually grumpy and misunderstood—and definitely not good looking. Now Perelman, who recently proved the Poincare Conjecture and turned down a Fields medal, is brilliant. He's a scruffy, mad looking hippy who has gone into hiding rather than be seen as a “genius.” Now that's my kind of “brilliant.”
I also seem to have become more sceptical about “obvious” rational argument. It was HL Menken who said that for every problem, however complex, there is a solution that is incisive, simple, elegant, and wrong. Twelve years ago, I remember being awestruck by the results of the 4S study. Now I just find myself bored and distrustful as yet another expert flashes up yet another PowerPoint graph about some expensive drug that has become essential to life. Who measures the downside to medicalisation?
I think that over the years I've come to think that most important things are not only not measurable, but often have only a loose correspondence to the words we use to describe them. I suspect that there are large aspects that are not capable of being evidenced, or that are too subtle for simple analysis, and yet are important—maybe even the essence of the matter. Anyway, I'll go and take my Polypill now. After all, as Bohr said about his good luck horseshoe—they say that it works even if you don't believe in it.