Why The Rationality Project?

Arguments fail for a reason.

It's not that people are stupid. It's not that they lack information. It's that the information never reaches them.

When a belief is fused to identity, the brain treats any challenge to that belief as a threat to the self. It is identity-belief fusion and the reason why facts bounce off, sources get dismissed, and conversations collapse into defensive posturing.

This isn't a flaw in human reasoning. It's human psychology doing exactly what it's designed to do: protect the self.

Logic doesn't fix this. More evidence doesn't fix this.

Arguing harder just triggers the defense harder. The more pressure you apply, the more they resist. You carry all the cognitive load. They carry none. And the conversation goes nowhere.

Questions change the structure.

A clear question doesn't trigger the same defense that an assertion does. It creates space instead of pressure. It shifts the burden back to the person making the claim. And it lets the silent audience...the people reading who aren't emotionally invested...see whether the reasoning holds up.

TRP isn't debate. It isn't Street Epistemology.

Street Epistemology is built for cooperative, one-on-one conversations with willing participants. TRP is optimized for public online spaces where participants are hostile and the real audience is reading silently.

In SE, you let dodges pass to maintain rapport. In TRP, you pin the dodge...because the audience needs to see it.

Same Socratic core. Different battlefield. Different rules.

The 139 Method.

One target. Three dynamics. Nine principles.