I suspect there’s a decent harvest of low-hanging fruit available through rationalism, at least initially. From wherever you happen to stand right now, rational thinking probably offers a quick boost, an obvious step up from the status quo. But eventually you reach a threshold beyond which rationalism begins to fail, eclipsed by some other mode of engagement, something messier, less rigidly calculable. Because the truth is, we’re simply not intelligent enough (none of us) to be genuinely, exhaustively rational. We can’t integrate across every branching consequence of each decision; the world presents itself in an unmanageable tangle of dimensions, feedback loops spiraling out into chaos. At some point, we need the noise, the sheer butterfly-wing unpredictability of a more romantic countenance. And not just because it might yield better outcomes, but precisely because it spares us from knowing about the infinitely better outcomes we could have had but missed. A perfectly rational mind, aware, always and vividly, of the myriad alternate worlds in which things turned out better, would be driven utterly mad.