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The Perils of Pop Philosophy
ThousandStars tips a new piece by Julian Sanchez, the guy who, in case you missed it, brought us a succinct definition of the one-way hash argument (of the type often employed in the US culture wars). This one is about the dangers of a certain kind of oversimplifying, as practiced routinely by journalists and bloggers. "This brings us around to some of my longstanding ambivalence about blogging and journalism more generally. On the one hand, while it's probably not enormously important whether most people have a handle on the mind-body problem, a democracy can't make ethics and political philosophy the exclusive province of cloistered academics. On the other hand, I look at the online public sphere and too often tend to find myself thinking: 'Discourse at this level can't possibly accomplish anything beyond giving people some simulation of justification for what they wanted to believe in the first place.' This is, needless to say, not a problem limited to philosophy."
What?
When Planned Parenthood was founded, many people were disgusted at the thought of an agency dedicated to abortion. Worse, though, was the fact that PP was founded in order to control the population of undesirables, and Sanger, the founder of PP, was especially eager to label non-whites as undesirable.
Now, here's the dilemma. If we take the position that speech itself is relatively useless since anyone can do it, and that only actions are important since only those willing to act will effect true change, then how do we reconcile the good which PP has brought while taking into consideration the completely immoral basis upon which it was founded?
Sanchez is wrong in his supposition that speech itself is wrong. Speech leads to debate, and debate can bring out the truth. The ancient Greek sophists knew this, and thus we have the practice of oratory.
Let's have an international philosophers strike to protest. Let's bring this planet to it's knees!
Discourse at this level can't possibly accomplish anything beyond giving us some simulation of justification for what we wanted to believe in the first place.
Locking up knowledge so that only specialists get access is a stupid, destructive, elitist practice that is self defeating (who do you think funds most work???) and detracts from the life we're all capable of leading. Those who Suggest that popular accounts can't be good are just making a poor excuse for their own inability to communicate. Over-simplification isn't the whole problem. Poor communication is.
Since the summary clearly states that culture should not be locked up, you completely missed the point. Which is: can an expert (in any field, not just philosofy) divulge and disseminate his/her knowledge without the general public assume they are omniscient experts too?
Note however that the question arises also in scientific/technological matters. For example most Slashdotters assume to be authorities on any of those. Look at all the bad programming/computer administration advice you can get from the comments. (Sending my karma to hell for implying that slashdotters are less than omniscient on computer subjects)
In the end, the article is right and probably more general than that. We non-experts know nothing about climate change and we cannot understand the merit of the debate. A seemingly winning argument for us could be a huge logical fallacy if we knew a little more than that. The only remedy is to put trust in those we call experts, which is difficult because everybody pretends to be one. Bonus points for a working solution.
oversimplifying is bad?
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge." Darwin
"Discourse at this level can't possibly accomplish anything beyond giving people some simulation of justification for what they wanted to believe in the first place."
The problem I've found, even since my first debate class in 10th grade, is that the vast majority of people have no interest in what the 'right' answer is. They only care that their perspective is correct, and if an inconvenient counterpoint is presented, they discount, rail against, or outright ignore it.
In addition to this, the people presenting the counterpoints often do it in such a condescending manner, any slim hope there was of the other person considering an alternate viewpoint is evaporated in a blast of indignation.
The most productive problem solving I've ever done, and still do, is when I'm surrounded by smart people who don't believe their personal ego should factor into any decision made. We sit down at a table, drink lots of coffee, joke around, and at the end of the day, have solved most of our problems in elegant, efficient ways. We even laugh at our own dumb ideas when we've overlooked something that should have been obvious. I've also been in groups where you are crucified for uttering something that isn't completely accurate. This environment simply leads to a large amount of CYA, because once a person commits to the decision, he then MUST follow through, even if later he realizes it wasn't the best choice, because the environment he's working in is completely unforgiving. Basically if he admits there was a better option, it costs him his job. It's best to not have that type of fear, because no matter how hard you are on people, they will still make mistakes, even the brilliant ones.
The same holds true for personal philosophies; solving the problems that being alive presents. When you are listening to other people, you should actually listen to them. Try to see things their way. Don't bash them, even if you disagree. It doesn't hurt. It can often help. And when you're presenting a counterpoint, be genteel about it. Tact goes a very long way.
The Dude said it best, "You're not wrong, Walter. You're just an ASSHOLE!"
"Study your math, kids. Key to the universe." -The Archangel Gabriel
But hot damn it made him feel great when he used all those sophysticated words!
I doubt it. To write with that level of ease and complexity, one needs to occupy the required head-space in earnest. Probably doesn't even notice he's doing it except on those rare occasions when he pulls back from the keyboard to pause for a breather and watch himself. And people, even the smart ones, rarely manage to do that more than a handful of times in any given life.
That, and the fact, (in my opinion anyway), he also happens to be right.
Not that it matters. For some reason everybody who thinks and writes seems to be perpetually concerned about what humanity ought to do about the state of humanity. The longer I live, the more I realize that the quest for societal justice is a fool's errand. Nobody can change anything no matter how hard they try, and the most amazing thing is that nobody realizes this astonishing truth. Change requires awareness, and machines are not aware. Almost all humans are machines. Even as I write this, I can hear the gears clicking in my skull, still on auto-pilot. And I've been working on this stuff.
-FL
It's even more messy than that. In many areas (climate change is one, but pretty much any area where people are trying to influence politicians) I know I'm not an expert and don't understand the real issues but I can also see that one or both sides of the debate are depending on invalid or misleading use of statistics. So it's even harder to work out who the experts are, because in their efforts to disseminate their knowledge some step out of their area of expertise and come across as incompetent.
We are Blog. Intelligence is irrelevant. Resistance is futile. We will add your philosophical and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service ours.
Here's something interesting:
Following a link from the first article we get:
The Dunning-Kruger Effect: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning-Kruger_effect
which in turn leads us to:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crank_(person)#The_psychology_of_cranks
which pretty much explains the logic behind at least 10% of the posts here in Slashdot.
Yes it is just you. Slashdot is 'News For Nerds'. Not 'News for IT Professionals', or 'News for Computer Science Graduates'. The article's subject has relevance to Slashdot readers, because many of us are well versed in a particular field, and hate it when the media or pundits use a simple argument to convince lay-people of something which is flat out wrong.
Thanks for mashing your fists on the keyboard. It was a valuable contribution that makes us all intellectually richer.
The expression of ideas in the media IS a big problem. Noam Chomsky (some random guy, don't worry about it) has made similar points on the pitfalls of brevity in the media. I have read articles in New Scientist by a scientist discussing how to debate with creationists, in a limited time frame, when they ask short pithy questions which require long answers to refute. It is a widely recognised problem which, to date, hasn't found a satisfactory solution.
The fact is, some things are too complicated to form an informed opinion on without graduate level study. It is OK to have elites. As someone with no medical training, I am very grateful that there are elite surgeons around to perform any procedures on me I might need in the future, rather than some bloke with 'common sense' who saw an episode of Casualty and reckons he can have a go at it.
Being able to spell 'sophisticated' is not a sign of being an intellectual elitist.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
> It can be done, or it can be done poorly.
But the point is that for many ideas, the majority of people are not in a position to evaluate whether the exposition is done well or poorly...
Even a topic as superficially obvious as evolution benefits from a basic mathematical intuition and a nodding acquaintance with mathematical complexity. Most popular descriptions I've seen of the evolutionary process characterise it as 'random chance', whereas it's a more complex mechanism comprising the following elements:
So, option (a) random chance or option (b) the more complex system with its attendant subleties?
Option (a) genuinely *does* give irreducible complexity, whereas in option (b), the numbers work and you can use the mechanism to practical effect in genetic algorithms...
Which option sells best when a confident, charismatic person sells it to a typical member of the public? It's the easiest thing in the world to ignore the subtleties inherent to a complex topic. We're set up to do it - if we were not, we'd spend all our time gazing at the intricate designs in the rug and tracing them back to their religious, mathematical, philosophical and social roots. We'd starve or be eaten.
Is it arrogant and elitist to understand something which the majority of people have difficulty with? In the above instance, no-one is hiding the knowledge, and yet there's no shortage of people who doubt evolution. Finally, it's an argument from personal experience, but I'm from a working-class family. The rest of my family would glaze over and say something rude if I tried to talk about this kind of thing. They don't want to know. Ironically, they *do* believe in evolution, but the keyword here is *believe*. Place them in a different context, around glib people with a different agenda, and they'll believe that the Great Marmoset scooped up its poop and moulded it into a patty-cake, and thus we have the world. Forgive me if my arrogant elitist frustration leaks out all over the floor.
> Intelligence comes into it but only to a point . . .
Out of interest, what is that point?
Are you saying that the vast majority of the human race will have a good intuitive understanding of physics if only the argument is put well enough in sufficiently clear english?
or specialize in every field. Studying math and specializing in it is a safe bet to gain most general knowledge that is still applicable to wide array of scientific fields, and that would allow you to follow quite a bit of science.
These days majority of science is based on mathematical models, including physics, chemistry (esp. the physical chemistry part of it), biochemistry, computer science, certainly climate and weather prediction, astronomy, engineering of almost any kind, but esp. electrical and mechanical, and lately more esoteric things like psychology and theories of the mind, and less esoteric things like sociology and crowd behaviors.
True, mathematician is no expert on any of these fields, but is armed with enough mathematical knowledge that coupled with a bit of curiosity and motivation to read and research is enough to give them insight into any of these fields, and sometimes better insight than people who traditionally are bad at formulating theories like biologists, or psychiatrists for example.
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
" . . .if you can't communicate complex ideas to interested parties outside your field then you don't properly understand your field."
I think it depends what field you're in, and the background of who you're trying to communicate with. An engineer talking to another engineer or scientist in a different field is one thing, an engineer talking to a dental hygienist is something else entirely.
Try explaining transient noise analysis, the hot electron effect or negative bias temperature instability in integrated circuits to a non-technical audience. Even if you start out with an "interested party", they'll turn into an expressionless zombie before you've finished.
It's not always a simple matter of communication skills. Some ideas require a foundation of knowledge, without which, the idea is nearly impossible to conceptualize.
It's not just misleading use of statistics -- those are easier to identify since they do deal in factual numbers. It's the underlying political agendas that get people to mislead through omission, commission, or outright lying. In the end it's not about whose argument is more correct, and not even who has the "more authoritative authority." It's about whose argument swayed the people in power. We can all sit here at our keyboards whining about how stupid Jack Thompson is, or how evil Comcast is for opposing net neutrality, but in the end it's not about convincing us -- it's about convincing Congress (or Parliament or whatever they have where you live.)
And even though we'd like to think differently about their abilities, Congress is not very different than Joe Sixpack. Sure, they'll stack their offices with competent and smart advisors (we hope) but with the hundreds of bills they have to review, and the fact that a well-reasoned, well-researched letter only puts a checkmark in the "for" column that's equally counted against Cletus' "The TV dun tell me it's bad" means that the philosophical and scientific arguments are ultimately worthless.
The scientific campaigns can be spun in whichever direction they're needed, regardless of their methods, their science, or their outcome. The real lesson is "Do not waste your time and money on science, but spend it only on the advertising campaigns that promote whichever viewpoint puts more money in your pocket." Pay an actor to wear a lab coat when he delivers your message. Have him wear a hard hat and carry a clipboard. Pose him in front of a very large machine, or a pristine meadow. That's where your dollars have their biggest effect.
John
Without divinity, I don't see how any of those things are theological (or rather, absent divinity, I don't see what theology brings to them).
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Most people over the age of about 12 (well 16 in some places) understand that you won't get all the detail from a popular article.
Never been to a Mensa meeting, eh? Not to knock a group I belong to, and where I met my wife, but the Expert-on-Everything is common. Really, it's just GIGO at work coupled with a state of mind. Reading widely does not make one literate if the content read is Time, Newsweek, Reader's Digest and Discover. However, the sad thing is that said Mensan can be excused in American culture because reading Time, Newsweek, Reader's Digest and Discover actually is relatively elite. A soc professor I had got off topic many years ago and asked our class what we thought were the most popular American reading materials. Some people were coming up with outrageous answers like the New Yorker. I thought I was being sociologically clever with the supermarket shelf Reader's Digest. I was on the right track but he said it was the National Inquirer. That makes me conclude that a large part of the sociology of the pop expert is that the standard for popular reading is so abysmal in America that a person can feel justified as a lay expert merely by reading faithfully from among a selection of the mediocre.
Pay an actor to wear a lab coat when he delivers your message. Have him wear a hard hat and carry a clipboard. Pose him in front of a very large machine, or a pristine meadow. That's where your dollars have their biggest effect.
Reminds me of a funny story. We got a new shiny 1.3Million dollar mass spec machine. The national news paper comes in to do a story. The ask if we can take a photo with "that machine in the background, because it looks more credible as a expensive scientific instrument...".
It was the printer.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
Certainly people can be persuaded. It happens all the time.
I used to be a death penalty supporter. Now, I'm not. Of course, I can't put my finger on any one thing that changed my mind, but the arguments were certainly there.
I also used to be significantly more inclined to see offensive war as a legitimate tool of policy, now I don't. Believe it or not, the Iraq war had nothing to do with that, as I honestly expected that a Mideast war was inevitable anyway. I just wish we had been a lot more justified and a lot better at managing the aftermath.
So, yes, people can change their mind. It just doesn't happen suddenly, so you might get the idea that no one is listening. They certainly are.
And how do we differentiate between elites and retards? Remember that for years we were told that all the brightest mathematicians and physicists were now working on financial derivatives because only "rocket scientists" could understand them.