Why is it so hard to be rational?

> "You should wear masks because rigorous science tells us that it is effective."

you've really just glossed over the hard part, which is when and where masks work, which is in turn the difficult political problem to solve.

simplifying, covid spreads mouth-to-mouth with a brief stint in the air, not mouth-to-air-then-(much)-later-to-mouth, which is the mediopolitical narrative that's being pushed vehemently but irrationally, and upon which masking policies are erroneously based.

what's always ignored in these narratives is that the virus falls apart quickly all by itself outside the cozy confines of the body, not to mention floats away to oblivion quickly when outside.

if we're really concerned about masks working, we'd have to force people to wear them among friends and family in private spaces like homes, not outside and in grocery stores where they have basically no effect.

"masks work" is a grossly overreaching blanket political statement, not a summary of "the science". scientific evidence suggests masks reduce droplets (and aerosols, with better masks) being ejected into the air. there's less clear evidence that it reduces airborne viral particles being inhaled through the mask. but there's almost no evidence that the way we've deployed masks is doing much other than signalling our fears and concerns.

i'd be open to supporting mask policies that are based on actual evidence (e.g., wear them when socializing at home), but not the mediopolitically fearmongering policies we have.

But then you're not being perfectly rational. You're calculating the odds, which is what my second sentence says.

Being perfectly rational is impossible.

See: perfect rationality vs bounded rationality

For starters, who said it's better to be rational?

Not being rational - and instead being based on guts - has an evolutionary advantage (it cuts through the noise, which, in the past could be a life or death situation).

I came to say something similar, that rational decision making is really a poorly posed problem at some level.

Take money for example. You can create a theoretical decision-making dilemma involving certain sums of money, and work out what the most rational strategy is, but in reality, the differences between different sums of money is going to differ between people depending on different value systems and competing interests. So then you get into this scenario where 1 unit of money means something different to different people (the value you put on 1 € is going to be different from the value I put on it; the exchange rates are sort of an average over all these valuations), which might throw off the relevance of the theoretical scenario for reality, or change the optimal decision scenario.

The other issue beside the one you're relating to -- the subjectivity of the weights assigned to different outcomes, the achille's heel of utility theory -- is uncertainty not just about the values in the model, but whether the model is even correct at all. That is, you can create some idea that some course of action is more rational, but what happens when there's some nontrivial probability that the whole framework is incorrect? Your decision about A and B, then, shouldn't just be modeled in terms of whatever is in your model, but all the other things you're not accounting for. Maybe there are other decisions, C and D, which you're not even aware of, or someone else is, but you have to choose B to get to them.

Just yesterday I read this very well-reasoned, elegant, rational explanation by an epidemiologist about why boosters aren't needed. But about 3/4 of the way through I realized it was all based on an assumption that is very suspect, and which throws everything out the window. There are still other things their arguments were missing. So by the end of it I was convinced of the opposite conclusion.

Rationality as a framework is important, but it's limited and often misleading.

Intuition could be said to be the opposite of reason, but not rationality. There are whole parts of the rationalist diaspora that emphasize how important it is to be in touch with one's intuitions / feelings and to integrate them successfully into one's decision making process with an aim towards being more rational.