However, as I have noted before, in the real world there is never a balance between belief and reality. As with the Rowe conjecture regarding the efficient market hypothesis, there is a stochastic process which moves belief in the EMH and the reality of the EMH taking place. Economists all too often assume some cause and effect, and they all to often fail to note that responses are based on what people "believe" yet the market may be acting on some exogenous reality, or any possible combination thereof. And that is the problem.
WHEN THE INTELLECTUAL history of our time is written, it will be a sorry chronicle of knocks on reason. You would think we have too much of it. These days the work of delegitimation is done largely in the holy name of intuition. Psychologists and economists (and their journalistic secretaries) keep discovering that people are not usually rational, and they cannot contain their excitement. We often do not know the reasons for our beliefs and we often do not deliberate logically before our actions: careers and reputations are made out of this breaking news. But then the mean is elevated into the norm. That is the scandal. Since we rely so little on reason, we ought to emancipate ourselves from the summons to reason, and be content with the management and the manipulation of our intuitive nature (as if that, too, will not require the services of reason). The most recent instance of the intuitionist complacency is the “argumentative theory of reason,” propounded by Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber, according to which reasoning is not a “means to improve knowledge and make better decisions,” but a callow technique for winning arguments, which is an evolutionary gain.
People sometimes act reasonably and sometimes do not. That is the problem. As I had indicated earlier, when a jury seeks to reach a conclusion based solely on the "facts", and there is just a circumstantial case, then reason is essential. That is why they call it a "reasonable doubt". The Founders clearly understood that since they were offspring of the Enlightenment. Reason existed. Most advances if not all in science are reasoned. Yes there are the inevitable surprises but then reason kicks in again.
The problem is also that with many today what one person "feels" has equal footing on what another "feels", and reason be damned. We have replaced feeling for reason, and worse for the facts.
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