Judging someone as irrational is usually a good indication that you don't understand their world

From a book review of Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States by James C. Scott. The book review is Statist Just-So Stories by Jacob Levy.

In Seeing Like a State (1998) and The Art of Not Being Governed (2009), Scott shifted his attention to political institutions. States seek to make their populations "legible," he argued: countable, mappable, surveyable, and thus easily taxable and conscriptable. People seek to protect themselves from all that, sometimes by escaping into anarchic regions where the projection of state power is impractical.

In his emphasis on institutional surveillance, Scott overlapped with the French social theorist Michel Foucault. But in his insistence that states' efforts could never entirely succeed because too much social knowledge is local and tacit, he shared more with F.A. Hayek and Michael Oakeshott. And with his attention to the resistance of governed populations, he stood out from any of those. As he puts it in his newest book, "the first and most prudent assumption about historical actors is that, given their resources and what they know, they are acting reasonably to secure their immediate interests." While Foucault sometimes seems to see no human agency anywhere, Scott sees it everywhere.

I want to focus on that statement:

the first and most prudent assumption about historical actors is that, given their resources and what they know, they are acting reasonably to secure their immediate interests.

I agree but I would extend it just a bit further to something like:

the first and most prudent assumption about historical actors is that, given their resources, what they know, their understanding of and sensitivity to risk, and their time discounting, they are acting reasonably to secure their immediate interests.

We have a tendency to treat those with different values and priorities than ourselves as ignorant and possibly malicious instead of acknowledging that we all operate within constraints which heavily influence our decisions.

If you have a fat bank account, it allows you greater latitude to take greater risks. If you are living hand-to-mouth, your actions might seem self-defeating to the person with greater risk tolerance.

Likewise, someone in a high trust environment that is highly stable and predictable can make long term decisions inconceivable in an environment that is unstable and unpredictable. A person in one environment looking at someone in the other environment without taking into account the differences can condemn the other's decisions as foolish.

Making the judgment that someone is acting irrationaly or against their own self-interests usually indicates that the person judging does not understand the circumstance of the person being judged. Just because their actions do not accord with yours does not mean that their actions don't make sense to them given their resources, their knowledge, their risk sensitivity and their time discounting.