Political Philosophy and Ethics discussion
Both Pol. and Ethical Philosophy
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Reason, Informal Logic, Evidence, and Critical Thinking
Thank ye Alan. I've broadened my original points while you were replying. I like this mental exercise even if no one else in this thread responds. Making a list like this is useful, I just wonder if all the legwork has already been done? Perhaps by Popper or someone. But I tell you. Sometimes I feel like we're still in a medieval landscape. There was one evening last month where I went on a pub crawl and every single place where I rubbed-elbows with strangers, I heard yet a different conspiracy-theory trotted out for my approval each time.
It often feels to me as if the populace of this, the capital of western civilization, is still in a 10th-century fog!
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It's always been this way, and it probably always will be.
Another good one I often find myself reminding others: 'locality' (for lack of a better term). Local conditions.Something that happens only in one isolated vicinity does not mean you can extend (whatever you observed) to say 'it happens everywhere'.
Or, if you saw something once, claiming that 'it always happens'.. Prove that it always happens, show how it is axiomatic!
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Something that happens only in one isolated vicinity does not mean you can extend (..."
I meant it as a universal, not local, proposition. All I can cite are my experience (over more than 70 years) and reading. Of course, I was being somewhat ironic and flippant, but still . . . .
It may be an elitist thing to say, but I try to focus on what the leading thinkers and actors are saying, as distinguished from the hoi polloi. The latter (as evidenced by your barmates) are usually impervious to reason, logic, and evidence.
'Rum characters', for sure. But I can't avoid them, poor-habits-of-mind even creep into my workplace. I encounter citizens from many different walks-of-life. Conflicts-of-opinion conceivably erupt anywhere I might venture during the varied course of my day. I like to be prepared for debate (if it breaks out) especially if it's heated debate.Also, I'm prone to be outraged whenever I meet up with (as you say, above) this ..well, 'resistance' to rational thought. Being outraged by it, (to me) means I can't not try to improve the situation when I so find it.
Eh well. :^)
Something I managed to glean out of Kant: certain kinds of argument should not completely rely on themselves to explain themselves. But I suppose this might simply mean that they shouldn't be circular or tautological. 'Polarized' arguments, 'reductionist' arguments..no good either...
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I plan to get back to Kant (whose convoluted arguments and style have heretofore often eluded me) sometime within the next year. This is in the context of my current focus on issues of free will and ethics (both of which he addressed). Do you recall the exact work in which he made the points you mention in your comment?
Everyone grapples with Kant, I reckon. I fumbled through his original text years ago and came away wanting, maybe only retaining 1/3 of what I read. So this morsel I just mentioned came from one of his commentators; it was contained in a text from circa 1970s which was written expressly to clarify his ideas for easier absorption.
Trying to fathom Kant's convoluted meanings from his own prose...well, you could spend a lifetime struggling with that task. Instead, I benefited greatly from commentary-texts.
Of course, I realize (from your past remarks) that this may not be ideal for your research purposes. Nevertheless, the title I enjoyed was this:
'Kant's Theory of Knowledge: An Introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason by Justus Hartnack
and also this (from OUP):
'Kant: A Very Short Introduction' by Roger Scruton
At least, these supplements gave me a 'roadmap' for the 'terrain' I was trying to navigate via Immanuel Kant. It showed me where to search for what I wanted to hear from him. Good luck!
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So this morsel I just mentioned came from one ..."
Along this line, I made the following remark in the first post of the Immanuel Kant topic:
"I have tried to read Kant but have found him exceedingly difficult to understand. As a distinguished philosophy professor observed in what, to me, is a quintessential understatement, 'Unfortunately, [Kant] was not a good writer, and his works are very difficult to read.' Jill Vance Buroker, Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason": An Introduction (Cambridge: University Press, 1996), Kindle ed., chap. 1, Kindle loc. 32-33."
I put Hartnack's book on my "to read" list some time ago, and, upon your recommendation, have now ordered the paperback. I have also just ordered Scruton's book. Thanks for these tips. Kant may be an exception to the rule that one should first read the original source text before reading the commentaries. I have found reading him to be quite frustrating, and perhaps these books (Buroker, Hartnack, and Scruton) will help.
Sounds like a fair way to get the job done. Aye, it's not only that the man is preponderously dense in his writing style, you also have to bear in mind German translation issues...all of that, on top of the fantastic difficulty of the concepts he is describing. And last (but not least) his magnum opus is 796 pps long! Anyway, I very much look forward to hearing your appraisal of this giant. When I finally found a surveyor like Hartnack, I obtained the intellectual thrill I had been searching for all along. Kant is indeed awe-inspiring, even when filtered through a secondary mediator.
For anyone who enjoys finding 'hidden structure' in life;...or, applying 'organization' and 'hierarchy' to our jumbled human mindset, Kant is towering.
A new reference for this thread: A physicist friend of mine (who owns a toy store) heartily recommended a 2017 book to me; The Enigma of Reason by a researcher at the Cognitive Science Institute in Lyon (Hugo Mercier) and a researcher at similar institutes in Budapest and Paris (Dan Sperber).From the 12-page introduction:
"Reason as standardly understood is doubly enigmatic. It is not an ordinary mental mechanism but a cognitive superpower that evolution - it used to be the gods - has bestowed on us humans. As if this were not enigmatic enough, the superpower turns out to be flawed. It keeps leading people astray. Reason, a flawed superpower? Really? . . .
"We are less interested in debunking shaky ideas than in developing a new scientific understanding of reason, one that solves the double enigma. Resaon, we will show, far from being a strange cognitive add-on, a superpower gifted to humans by some improbable evolutionary quirk, fits quite naturally among other human cognitive capacities and, despite apparent evidence to the contrary, is well adapted to its true function. . . .
"We have intuitions about what other people think and about abstract ideas. These institutions about representations play a major role in our ability to understand one another, to communicate, and to share opinions and values. Reason, we will argue, is a mechanism for intuitive inferences about one kind of representations, namely, reasons. . . .
"Reason, we will argue, has two main functions: that of producing reasons for justifying oneself, and that of producing arguments to convince others. Those two functions rely on the same kinds of reasons and are closely related. . . .
"Few will be surprised to hear that reason is typically biased and lazy when it is applied to moral and political issues (my exclamation point!) More surprising may be evidence that shows how, even in moral and political realms, argumentation may work quite efficiently, allowing participants to form more accurate moral judgments and citizens to form more enlightened opinions. Such findings, however, are what one should expect in an interactionist perspective. . . .
"It is by force of argument that we hope to persuade you that the interactionist approach is right or, at least, on the right track. This, of course, makes the book itself an illustration of the perspective it defends."
By "interactionist" I think they mean that reason is not "out there" in Platonic hyperspace, but an evolved intuitive skill which helps humans to function in a social (and political) context. Sounds like a defense of sophism? Sounds like it is what Der PumpkinFuhrer does? Hmm . . .
These two seem to be sceptics in the tradition of Sextus Empiricus. Which means I am likely to read on! "Sceptics keep searching."
Cheers,
Randal
Feliks's latest sub-topic reminds me of I book I had my eye on, but can't recommend first hand. it just looked kind of interesting:Believing Bullshit: How Not to Get Sucked into an Intellectual Black Hole
As far as Kant and the post-Kantians, I can recommend at first hand (but from twenty years ago, at least):
Lectures on Modern Idealism by Josiah Royce.
Then, of course, the newly issued Kant seminars by Leo Strauss indicate that for someone who hardly ever mentions Kant in his own work, clearly knew him backwards and forwards from his own undergraduate or graduate days:
https://leostrausscenter.uchicago.edu...
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[book:Believing Bullshit: How Not to Get Sucked into an Intellec..."
Thanks, Chris, for reminding me of Leo Strauss's Spring 1958 and Spring 1967 courses on Kant. I had downloaded the transcripts last December after you mentioned them in the Leo Strauss and the Straussians topic. I will now note them in the topic on Kant. When I revisit Kant, I will study these transcripts as well as Kant's writings and the secondary sources previously mentioned.
I was at the University of Chicago when Strauss gave the Spring 1967 course on Kant and the Winter 1967 course on Nietzsche. But these were graduate courses and, as an undergraduate, I was not aware that he was offering them. Had I known, I would have audited (attended but not registered for) them, which was a common practice at the University of Chicago at that time. These may have been the last two courses that Strauss taught at Chicago, since he was at Claremont the following school year. Although he taught a course on Aristotle's Politics in the autumn of 1967, no audio recording or transcript of that course has survived, and my guess is that this course was at Claremont.
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Thanks, Randal, for this reference. I've just now ordered it.
Alan wrote: "Although he taught a course on Aristotle's Politics in the autumn of 1967, no audio recording or transcript of that course has survived, and my guess is that this course was at Claremont. .."I have an unofficial e-book of that transcript, and it was, in fact, at U of C.
I don't know the details of Strauss's move from U of C to Claremont.
Update- I plunked down the $11.99 for the rudely titled book.
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I don't know the details of Strauss's move from U of C to Claremont."
Strauss was forced to leave Chicago due to the mandatory retirement policies in effect at that time. He went to Claremont, but he didn't spend much time there before he become scholar-in-residence at St. John's College in Annapolis, MD. He died in 1973, while at St. John's.
Is the "unofficial e-book" of the transcript of the autumn 1967 course available to the public? How do you get these things (perhaps you don't want to say in a public forum like this)?
Alan wrote: "Is the "unofficial e-book" of the transcript of the autumn 1967 course available to the public? How do you get these things (perhaps you don't want to say in a public forum like this)? ..."These were available for free download from the Internet Archive at one point. I have moved them around as Kindle after Kindle went defunct or lost. The transcriptions were really bad, some of them. The official ones are much better.
At one point, I also had the early New School lecture on German Nihilism which someone 'read esoterically' to 'prove' Strauss was a National Socialist.
I don't know if this was a 'reductio ad absurdum,' or in 'deadly earnest,' (as IF!) but the lecture was not all that nefarious or obscure.
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I don't know if this was a 'reductio ad absurdum,' or in 'deadly earnest,' (as IF!) but the lecture was not all that nefarious or obscure. "
I think I have that lecture in one of my books of Strauss writings. The notion that Strauss was a Nazi is ridiculous. He was, after all, Jewish, and he later praised Churchill for standing up to Hitler. Nevertheless, I am not enamored of Strauss's youthful writings. Like all (or most) of us, he improved with age. He probably would not have approved of his early writings having ever being published. Yet there is a cottage industry of people obsessed with them.
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That's why I think it's meant to be tantamount to the claim, say, that Maimonides was an atheist.At any rate, here is a discussion of the matter:
https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/the-german-s...
The first paragraph:
According to William H.F. Altman, the German-Jewish historian of political philosophy Leo Strauss was “the secret theoretician of National Socialism” and almost a Nazi. Readers familiar with the “Strauss Wars” fought between Strauss’s critics and defenders during the past decade may not be shocked: since 9/11 Strauss has been accused of being liberalism’s worst foe and of being the secret (and thirty years posthumous) architect behind George W. Bush’s foreign policy in Iraq and Afghanistan, so why not a secret Nazi philosopher as well? However, readers of Altman’s The German Stranger: Leo Strauss and National Socialism will find far more than the simple charge that Strauss, who left Germany to pursue studies in France and England just before Hitler’s rise to power, might have joined the Nazi Party if his Jewish heritage hadn’t made that impossible. In the process of pressing his case Altman surveys Strauss’s debts to German philosophers both Jewish (Moses Mendelssohn, Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig) and non- (Immanuel Kant, G.W.F. Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger), provides an iconoclastic portrayal of Strauss -- usually portrayed as a defender of Platonism -- as an anti-Platonist, and casts Strauss as the titular “German stranger” who attempted to seduce American youths to an illiberal philosophy after his 1938 arrival on American shores.
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At any rate, here is a discussion of the matter:
https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/the-german-s......"
See my post 2 in the Leo Strauss and the Straussians topic.
I don't agree with everything Strauss wrote or said. But arguments that he was a Nazi sympathizer or the architect of a war that occurred three decades after his death are patently absurd.
He admitted to an early fascination with Nietzsche, but the mature Strauss considered Nietzsche highly problematic. As I have been saying for some fifty years now, Nietzsche was absolutely right half the time and absolutely wrong the other half. And the part in which he was absolutely right has nothing to do with his teachings regarding the Übermensch.
As for Maimonides, that is an entirely different matter. I did an independent study course in 1968 with Professor Ralph Lerner on Maimonides's The Guide for the Perplexed. Lerner (a Straussian) was and is a foremost expert on Maimonides, and I came to Maimonides from a Lutheran upbringing. What I learned is that Maimonides is much too complex a thinker for an undergraduate to master. And I feel no differently about it today; he is still a mystery to me. I am agnostic regarding whether Maimonides was an atheist. One thing, however, is quite clear: Maimonides's teaching about the Torah was far from orthodox. His allegorical interpretation of many passages of Jewish scripture impressed me at the time and still impresses me.
My impression of the German Nihilism article is that Strauss was making an abstract of discussions between himself and Jacob Klein, with Klein being the anonymous spokesman for a nihilist, Nietzschean position that only a crisis can bring about a rebirth, etc.Which, it just occurs to me, is what happened at least regarding Strauss "studies." It seems like Altman's Strauss was a secret Nazi thesis was just the last gasp of the Shadia Drury "sinister opponent of our values" school, which had just about run its course.
In answer to Alan question in #159: "Do you recall the exact work in which he made the points you mention in your comment?" Alan, for your purposes the Kant text to read is the Critique of Practical Reason, not the Critique of Pure Reason.
A short text (less than 100 pages) you also might find useful is Gilles Deleuze's Kant's Critical Philosophy. Deleuze works out the interrelations among the three critiques: pure reason, practical reason, and judgment.
With Deleuze's help you can probably skip the Critique of Pure Reason altogether. That's the real bear.
Bob
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Thanks, Bob. I've just now ordered it. Some day I still hope to read and comprehend the entirety of the Critique of Pure Reason (I've read parts of it), but that may, or may not, be an attainable goal. Perhaps that work will be more approachable after I have studied the Critique of Practical Reason and the secondary references that have been cited.
Alan
Great stuff.I've been reading Jose Ortega Y Gasset's 'The Revolt of the Masses' over the past two weeks and while I was amazed to find it not living up at all to its reputation, it does offer a sprinkling of wonderful quotes and factoids. One which caught my eye is Gasset remarking on European population. He reports that for centuries, all of Europe held at most, 180m people. When modernity arrived, the industrial revolution, etc--population skyrocketed to 460m people. In historical terms this is abrupt and overnight change, and Gasset is awed by it and what it means.
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Feliks has called our attention in post 7 here to a recently published book on this exact subject: The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters by Thomas M. Nichols. I have put this book on my "to read" list.
Its getting to be a pretty terrifying world out there, isn't it?I myself don't think I love anything more than books, academia, learning. Intellectual integrity. Its what has given me my whole career and livelihood. It's an entire way of life; something to constantly aspire towards. Nothing pleases my gaze more than a shelf full of literature.
But what did I see today as I spent a typical workday in downtown New York? From 8am when I walked out my door until 6pm when I made my way home, I doubt if I saw a single human being going about their day without their smart-gadget in their palm. Men, women, school children, and even toddlers all gazing into plastic screens. Sorry, but I have to report on this!
Mozilla, Inc forced to remove phrase 'master' and 'slave' (computer language terminology) from its big tech projectshttps://tinyurl.com/y6upt97p
Anyone wish to opine on this?https://tinyurl.com/y7fmobxk
Washington Post article on frenzied 'speech policing' on California campuses
Just catching up having been away for a while.The argument that Alan mentions from the Republic about might and right is also reproduced in real life in the Athenian argument against Melos, one of its allies/subject states in Thucydides 'The Pelopenesian War' - "the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must". Both Socrates and Plato were alive and active citizens at the time of the siege, sack and slaughter at Melos so it is not to hard to imagine Plato had this in his mind at the time of writing that section of The Republic.
Plato having Socrates rebut the argument is telling given both Plato and Socrates were deeply conflicted about the war even though Socrates fought in at least three battles for Athens.
With regard Feliks' query about emotion in the judicial system and Alan's response.
From my point of view most judicial sirens in Democracies are a balancing act between reason and emotion. Alan is correct in that the rules of law lean heavily on reason as I believe they should for without reasoned argument and rules of evidence we would be back to burning witches because someone believed their bad luck was because a spell had been cast.
That said for the victim and the family of victims the penalty handed down must be seen to address the harm done. Every court case that makes the news finishes with a report from those harmed along the lines of "we are happy / unhappy that the he / she did / didn't get what was coming to them."
So reason and emotion are both always in play but they are in play for different reasons and in different places and that is as it should be.
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'Chesterton's Fence'(!) I'd not known about this one before, had you?https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikiped...
Wonderful little principle articulated by England's redoubtable GK Chesterton (a man among men if ever there was one).
now this is just astoundingHeard of the "Replication Crisis" in (the sciences) but specifically in psychology?
Vast quantities of established findings are failing the basic test of 'scientific replicability'.
(This harkens back to Thomas S. Kuhn's conclusions about the 'community' of science).
Now it doesn't mean that a physicist can't make a reasonable prediction about an apple falling from a tree branch. But physics is not a social science, nor is it a medical field. What do those practitioners do when they're making potentially deadly diagnoses without backing?
Anyway, all of academia is in an uproar over it. See article in The Atlantic Monthly:
https://tinyurl.com/ydbl37tf
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Heard of the "Replication Crisis" in (the sciences) but specifically in psychology?
Vast quantities of established findings are failing the basic test of 'scientific re..."
Query: Is the "replication crisis" the inevitable result of attempting to apply the experimental scientific methodology of the "hard sciences" (physics and chemistry, for example) to the study of human things? Perhaps Leo Strauss, RIP, is having the last laugh.
Apart from replication, I have other questions regarding the application of experimental methodology to the "social sciences," e.g., the question of the validity of the analogical reasoning of many such studies. See my review of Michael Shermer's The Moral Arc here.
Of course, replicability should remain an essential ingredient of physics and chemistry research. If replicability is failing in these hard sciences, somebody is fudging the facts.
Randal quoted: "Reason, we will argue, has two main functions: that of producing reasons for justifying oneself, and that of producing arguments to convince others. Those two functions rely on the same kinds of reasons and are closely related. . ."That actually sounds like the contemporary language philosophy of "Pragmatic Inferentialism". Inferentialism has had a resurgence in recent years under people like Bob Brandom.
To step back a bit. Most theories of how the mind understands the world, and theories of language - which are frequently proxies for theories of how the mind understands the world have been representationalist for most of the 20th century.
Thinly stated representationalist theories argue that the mind understands the world through mental representations. Thoughts are representations of things. Thoughts refer to things. This theory goes back at least as far as Aristotle (De Anima).
In contrast Inferentialist theories identifies the meaning of an expression with its inferential relations with other expressions.
Representationalism is a far more solipsistic theory than inferentialism because in representationalism a single individual only needs to be able to form some sort of image or other representation of the external world to themselves. Inferentialism, by insisting on the relationship between expressions, must introduce the notion that ideas are formed as normative constructs within a linguistic community.
From this insistence on the normative nature of inferentialist you can trace it's obvious forbears in Hegel and Kant. Representationalism is closer to Plato and his cave.
Inferentialism would therefore insist that language is a process of inferring meaning by a dialogue between your use of terms and my understanding of the normative use of those terms and my response to you is a further act of meaning negotiation and reasoning. The definitions of 'reasoning' above with the implications that reason must have an interlocutor and that it is a process of justifying myself (showing that I conform with norms) makes it standard referentialism in my understanding. A view I am very sympathetic to given I am at an utter loss to understand how any form or representationalism can work in practice i.e. if we represent the world to ourselves internally who sees that representation? Some internal being who then represents it to a further internal being? Homunculism and infinite regress.
I also have that book Randal, though I haven't read it yet.
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Gerard, as I stated in a post in another topic a few weeks ago, Randal has voluntarily withdrawn from this Goodreads group and accordingly will not be posting any further comments in it.
Alan wrote: "Query: Is the "replication crisis" the inevitable result of attempting to apply the experimental scientific methodology of the "hard sciences" (physics and chemistry, for example) to the study of human things?...."OK. As a Bachelor Psych Science student, third year let me weigh in here.
The replication crisis is not the result of applying hard science analytic tools to social sciences. I'm not going to get deeply into the philosophical justifications of the applicability of using certain science models in the social sciences, interesting though that topic is. Suffice to say social sciences have adapted tools from the hard sciences to the social sciences but they are used in different ways and the language used to express outcomes is entirely different, as they should be.
Social sciences use statistical models to calculate probabilities of behaviour spread over a normative curve and the outcomes expressed are not laws as they would be understood in physics. There are still 'facts' though. A physics fact is that every unsupported rock dropped from a building must fall till it is arrested by some new object or force. A social 'fact' is that human beings are predisposed to see patterns in nature, Pareidolia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia ) But where 'all rocks must', all humans have a disposition to pareidolia that is distributed across the normative curve. This means that 'all and must' are replaced by 'most and should' and instead of a velocity equation we get a probability equation that would read something like "under such and such conditions 30% of humans will experience ~15 examples of pareidolia per day to a probability of 95% plus or minus 5%.
But have no fear. That is a fact. We even know the brain structure that does it (the fusiform gyrus) and we can trigger it with electrodes stuck into that brain region. It's just that you can't say "all and must" because some people have brain damage to that region and can't see any. Others are very strongly disposed to see pareidolia and others are less disposed again because of biological reasons as strongly correlated to facts as is the chances of your eyes being blue if you have one parent with blue eyes and one parent with brown - 50% (a fact!).
Now we have that cleared up let me first state that a bit like a distribution curve the replication crisis isn't across psychology uniformly. It could be characterised as being largely non existent where psychology comes closest to biology and more likely in the field of study where we study how one person's emotions and behaviours influence another person's emotions and behaviours. That field is called social psychology and because the dispositions and influences are multiplied and are so hard to track it has very special issues.
But that is not the only reason. The reason is also interestingly enough something that finds it explanation in social psychology itself.
The current explanation that has most traction is that academics are under such pressure to publish that they have indulged in a process called 'P hacking'. P is a probability value high enough to say with a confidence factor of 95% certainty that something real is happening - a fact. Now, in a field like social psychology (unlike biology) you get a lot of money and time spent on research that returns P values that are very borderline (you either have brown eyes or blue but if you influenced someone by your behaviour to change theirs, well that's hard to measure). So sometimes researchers look at the data and they can see something is happening but they can't really say that it answers there original question. Thus p hacking is born; in the attempt not to lose the research money and under intense pressure from the university to justify their positions they run a bunch of fancy stats models to try to pull out what that 'thing' they can see in the data something that can be expressed as a fact. That thing is almost always there, the researchers aren't being dishonest, it's just that asking the question in desperation after gathering the data leads to wonky conclusions about what that thing, that P, actually is. The proper way is to ask the question (theory) then gather the data to test the theory. Not gather data then find the theory to fit the data.
So that's the replicability crisis. It's mostly in a few distinct areas of psychology and it is at least partly a creation of social pressures created by social institutions. The irony is not lost on psychologists that the very area that is suffering the 'crisis' - social psychology - is the very area that studies the type of behaviour - social influence - that brought about the crisis in the first place.
Alan wrote: "Randal has voluntarily withdrawn from this Goodreads group"Ah, pity.
Never mind apart from the last comment the post still stands as a comment about the role of inference and representation as models of reason and reasoning.
Gerard, big thanks for that clarification on P values. I myself have been wondering the past few days, what the heck that meant!
p.s. Gerard, similar story below. Apparently long-awaited deregulation for research in areas of social science, humanities, and law is finally arrivingI'm not up on the nuances of this; perhaps you can weigh in?
https://www.chronicle.com/article/Lon...
Again, my thanks for your breakdown of the replication crisis. That was super.
How harrowing is this?http://timharford.com/2017/03/the-pro...
You will learn a new word from this article:
('agnatology' - the science of producing ignorance)
Mod
The replication crisis is not the result of applying hard science analytic tools to social sciences."
Thank you Gerard, for your comment, which takes me into areas I didn't even know existed.
I was actually referring to the kinds of experimental studies that are cited in Michael Shermer's and Sam Harris's books. Perhaps this is called "experimental psychology"? An experiment is constructed to determine how a small number of actual people react under certain narrow conditions. The results are then extrapolated into more general conclusions on the basis of analogical reasoning. This is what I am questioning. I'm not sufficiently knowledgeable about the kinds of studies you discuss to be able to comment on them.
Feliks wrote: "How harrowing is this?http://timharford.com/2017/03/the-pro...
You will learn a new word from this article:
('agnatology' - the science of producing ignorance)"
“The Problem with Facts,” a new word “agnatology,” of an old problem. The problem is as old as the field of science. A better titled would have been “The Problem with Ideology and Ethics.”
In my own experience, I came across this problem twice in my career, once at Bell Laboratories and once at IBM. I was lucky, the combine research, and convincing my colleagues only took around twenty years. Research is an expensive endeavor. Yes I was lucky. Take the works of Charles Darwin for example, the dispute over his work still rings today dominated by ideology. The same with Albert Einstein, empirical verification of some of his claims came after his death. And so on.
In Tim Harford’s article I see more problems with ideology and ethics than with scientific facts. There is no problem with the facts, the problem is with the art of persuasion and/or the application of statistics as a function of ideology and ethics. What scares me about Tim’s article, Facebook is becoming our fact checker. Also, Google is on the same path. Should we question the ideology and ethics of those fact checker masterminds?
Relative to Tim’s article, in the fall season of my life I took on a new endeavor, using science to settle the dispute between Thomas Jefferson and Woodrow Wilson. Jefferson claims we are born with “unalienable Rights,” where Wilson claims those rights are “nonsense.” For those who are interested or "curious" in this endeavor, please join the conversation in the Constructal Theory folder.
two good articles on subconscious biases when intaking numeric datapriming & contamination
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BaCWF...
anchoring & adjustment
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bMkCE...
These are psychology articles; (Gerard you may want to pipe up)
I deal with "man in the street" type people frequently where I reside and where I work. Lately, I hear individuals styling themselves the equal of scientists, statesmen, or jurists --taking on extraordinary intellectual airs--when they are little more than internet-informed. That superficial level of informed-ness is the dominant one pervading their lives. It's increasingly disturbing.What I encounter now is people using the www to justify all sorts of hysterical stereotypes, old-wive's-tales, and charlatanry. 'Grown adults' have been surfing the net for years now, and its gone to their head. Everyone works in 'IT'--the field of disinformation and subjective 'virtual' environments.
Gazing at the internet during the workday, tinkering with internet technology itself for your job; gazing at the internet for leisure; playing in a virtual world long into the night--relying on it for just about everything--can potentially erode one's judgment and acumen. The internet for relationships, the internet for conversations, the internet to support every bit of conscious and unconscious decision-making...can lead to a hare-brained myopia. One's whole worldview can be structured by it. Since everyone around you follows suit, it is insidious in a way that nothing ever was before. The net is "always on"--and it is always reinforcing biases. Even TV news programs now report on the world of social media as if it is a world of real-life.
Back to biases: whenever a new topic arises in conversation, people turn a touchscreen to quickly 'confine it' for them, deliver a snap assessment, provide a means of dismissing it. People who have never participated in formal discourse, conducted research, or flown solo in an environment of critical thinking, can now demean and disparage any countervailing surveys, statistics, authors, studies, news, or reports. Instead of evidence, you can find someone online to validate, corroborate, and re-echo your view instead. Anything which contradicts one's prejudice, can be deflected. Any 'authority' or 'expert' can now be belittled, their background questioned, their lifestyle sniffed at. You can impugn any information and scoff at any metric or measure, because information is now 'all the same weight'.
No one feels themselves to be 'dumb' anymore. Or inexperienced. Or un-savvy. Everyone is 'in the know' and 'up-to-date'. Yet no one has been anywhere, no one has done anything with their lives, no one has had 'their hand off their mouse'. No one is doing anything except sitting in chairs blinking their eyes at flickering screens. Year after year. Reminding someone of this is 'disrespecting them'. Doubting someone's capacity will make them exclaim, 'they've been working in technology for twenty years'.
You can't convince anyone anymore, that taking 8-10 years of your life to slowly absorb a body of knowledge via a succession of college degrees non-digitally, to achieve true depth and mastery of subject matter, is valid.
(Today's students take the internet with them whatever they do and wherever they go --it tells them where to go, what direction to move their feet, what text to select and store--without ever touching an actual book; weighing it, evaluating what it says vs what it means; without ever solving difficult problems completely on their own.)
The www lets people skip over any 'mental work'. Lets people leapfrog over anything dull, tedious, laborious, or painstaking. Instant information is in. If you remind a digiterati that e-books are not actual books, if you remind them that computers are inaccurate, they stare at you in consternation. Instead, they 'point you to a video', they send you a web-link, they fwd you a txt, they email you a picture.
You've heard me reiterate all this before. Why I'm refreshing my concern about it is this: I'm suspecting that the internet lifestyle-- is now obscuring people's mental problems. It can make any form of monomania, megalomania, or pathological paranoia seem justifiable, it can make any form of crackpot group-think seem legitimate, it can make any form of political or social xenophobia seem warranted instead of suspicious. It used to be that "disturbed individuals" were noticeable because they hibernated and hid from the rest of us--but if everyone is now in a personal shell pushing others away--what then?
Everyone lately seems to forget that lunatic-fringe mentalities were identifiable long before the internet arrived. Back in the day, if you were found with bomb-building plans in your basement, you were taken in for questioning.
If you were ever discovered with graphically violent pornography or Neo-Nazi literature in your closet, your family would be scandalized, would try to keep this habit hidden, would suggest you seek counseling. Anyone who previously walked around 'addicted' --to any kind of media, even if just television--this used to send up flags and ring alarm bells to everyone around them.
My question is: where has that oversight gone? Where is that circumspection, that perspicacity? If everyone is now addicted to media --how then do we detect when people are actually dangerous to themselves or others?
Since no one is meeting face-to-face anymore, since "everything is a text" and everything is merely "one narrative reinforcing another narrative"; since "all opinions are valid", since everything is merely "your opinion vs my opinion", since 'history is only written by victors'--we seem to be forgetting that schizophrenia and other abnormal psychologies are real behaviors which can be diagnosed by professionals. 'Detachment from reality' can be a harmful mental state; something worth recognizing-- not just a 'political catcall' indicating that someone doesn't follow the same TV shows, celebrity websites, or info-feeds as you do.
Why has everyone forgotten that there is a medical reality underlying one's thoughts and speech which virtual internet reality can not cover up?
I encourage anyone who just read what I've written to explore this topic on their own. Here's just one article of dozens one can choose from:
https://tinyurl.com/yb8xz5ub
Mod
Well said, though I think the internet also has some advantages, as I have previously stated.
I wonder whether people will change in this regard as time goes on. If not, we are probably doomed to be governed indefinitely by crackpots and idiots. (Any resemblance to persons now running a government of a major world power is purely coincidental.)
Mod
Exactly right, Felix! Too bad more Americans don't travel abroad; there is nothing as humbling and enlightening at the same time as finding yourself in a place where they don't speak your language, or if they do, you discover that you're wildly uninformed about their culture. (Personal experience with people from New Zealand here, which somehow I confused with New Guinea).
Our neighbor, a staunch Republican, returned from a trip to Croatia and Venice remarking about how severely their region is being affected by global warming. Nothing like seeing it first-hand to change your mind!
In addition, and I do not mean this in a snide way, literally half the population has an IQ below 100: just enough to misuse Google. I am not optimistic about the planet's future.
Thanks! I agree with Alan there are some 'positives' --academia benefits in several ways from tech. But I also think its vital to have matriculated to adulthood (and to academia) prior to mass-digitization of the environment. One should be able to sharply distinguish between the two modes of thinking, communicating, and discoursing--old vs new. There should always be a 'control group'. Everyone "politicizes" information and engagement lately; everyone claims they are the only ones who are impartial and unemotional and objective. Raising criticism is taken as partisan or personal attack. You are asked, "what camp you are in?" We're forgetting that 'belief in one's own infallibility' has long been a trait of the medically-diagnosed, irrational mind. If a psychiatrist is examining you, its time to stop demanding to know who he voted for.
I don't wish to repeat myself so I'll taper off here...
Mod
I have long thought that these kinds of issues are essentially ethical matters. Being an ethical human being means, first and foremost, being rational in one's thinking and in one's evaluation of evidence. This is especially true in a democracy, where the assumption attending the universal electoral franchise is that voters will be minimally reasonable and knowledgeable. To channel Lincoln, we are now "testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure." The last two chapters of my forthcoming book Reason and Human Ethics are tentatively entitled "Citizen Ethics" and "Political Ethics," respectively. I will address these and related issues at length in these chapters. (Note: I have hesitated to reveal this information in public, but "these are the times that try men's [people's] souls," and it seems to be necessary and appropriate to do so.)
This projected book will not be ready for publication until probably well after 2020. Accordingly, in the meantime, the world will have to fend for itself. I say that tongue-in-cheek. Given the track record of my book sales, and the likely unpopularity of a somewhat scholarly book on ethics, I don't expect to reach many people. But I will have done my duty, which is all I can do.
Political Philosophy and Ethics
Books mentioned in this topic
The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms: Volume 4: The Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms (other topics)Mythical Thought (other topics)
The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms 3: The Phenomenology of Knowledge (other topics)
Ernst Cassirer: The Last Philosopher of Culture (other topics)
The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Volume 1: Language (other topics)
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Authors mentioned in this topic
Arthur Koestler (other topics)Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (other topics)
Edward R. Tufte (other topics)
Richard Saul Wurman (other topics)
For example, 'consistency' might be one characteristic. Its the first trait I us..."
I don't think there is a "concise list of obvious hallmarks which mark a str[o]ng argument vs a weak one," but your list is good. The only item I would question is "Must be able to contain all previous theories and account for them." If a previous thinker committed all kinds of logical fallacies, for example, I don't think one is obligated to account for the obviously inadequate theory. In such case, one would spend all one's time refuting other thinkers. Although this is now standard practice in academia, it quickly becomes a boring and unproductive exercise that often interests no one but specialists in the field (if them). It might suffice to focus on the leading theory or theories that currently constitute "conventional wisdom." However, your examples of this are in the field of natural science, whereas I am thinking more generally.