User:Marknau

This user has been on Wikipedia for 22 years, 3 months and 17 days.

This user strives to maintain a policy of neutrality on controversial issues.

Content contributed by this user is released into the public domain.

Personal Info

I live in Austin, TX with my wife and 2 daughters. For money, I design games. For fun, I design and play strategy games, read, sing karaoke, watch arty movies, and pretend to be different people.

I am an expert in nothing. I'm sort of a "poor-man's polymath."

My fields of not-quite-as-non-expert-as-others are mathematics, politics, economics, and history.

The Problem of Irrationality

One of the things I love about Wikipedia is the fact that NPOV is baked in as a foundational principle, and that lots of policies are erected to try to help people mutually reach neutral, objective, rational consensus. I think we need more awareness of our own irrationalities, and more structures and processes to help us overcome that human weakness in cases where it is important to be as objective, neutral, and rational as possible. Some of the rules of evidence that many judicial systems have is a good example of this.

I recommend this article as a good examination of one aspect of the human irrationality problem, as it pertains to matters political:
http://home.sprynet.com/~owl1/irrationality.htm