That Gurwinder substack site The Prism that Eric put me onto for my previous post has some good articles. It is another one that might make its way to my sidebar, though I am not hasty about such things. (Treebeard's voice is supposedly CS Lewis;s in Tolkien's mind, BTW.) His article Why Smart People Hold Stupid Beliefs is excellent. He links to research showing that the best-informed people on any side of an intellectual debate are more likely to be ideological and biased, not less. We speak to others as if answering their logical flaws is the key to changing their minds. Apparently it is secondary - or worse.
An absurd ideological belief is a form of tribal signalling.It signifies that one considers ideology more important than truth, reason, sanity. To one's allies, this is an oath of unwavering loyalty. To enemies, it is a threat display.
This is similar to the idea of foxhole friends that I have written about a half dozen times over the years. Politicians and cause leaders look for these sorts of people in order to enlist them. Anyone can support you when you are right, but you want followers who will stick with you even when you are talking nonsense.
Gurwinder's addition, which I had not considered but makes sense, is that last line about the threat display to enemies. It is that as well. It is equivalent to those useless but decorative peacock tails that signal to the peahens "I've got energy to burn, baby! Sign up on this while you can." If you signal that you are willing to fight for this side even though you are capable of knowing it's irrational, you are saying that you and your pals are going to be a tough out, like Bigwig burying himself to his neck in the floor of the tunnel in the defense of Watership Down.
We all hope it is not us. One of the great rabbis, I believe it was Rashi, used to pray every morning "Let me not use my powers of persuasion in the defense of a lie."
From the essay
...while unintelligent people are more easily misled by other people, intelligent people are more easily misled by themselves.
Exactly
Oh well. God is a concept many smart people believe because they were taught there is such a thing.
ReplyDeleteAny serious reflection will reveal this is just something humans made up, to keep other humans in line. I read the back of the Book Of Common Prayer, as chapel 3 times on Sunday was very boring, and became 'not a Christian' as the stuff there was egregious.
Later on I read scriptures and teaching from the Buddha, who was very forward with the idea that if something does not make sense to you, its not what you should believe. Exactly why I left the Christian religion. Now I have followed the Buddha for over 50 years, and it all makes sense.
Perhaps one aspect of the situation is that much university intelligence is spent on abstractions, and not so much on concrete instances. Abstractions remove the unimportant stuff--but which parts are unimportant? If you abstract away pesky details like human self-interest, systems like marxism seem obvious.
ReplyDeleteBack in the early 70's I read of a trading game experiment in which the first round had specific rules, but the rules for the second round were changed in one aspect by the winner of the first round, and again in one aspect by the winner of the second, etc. Memory is fuzzy here, but I think there was a cash prize--so the winners of the first round, who had cornered all the blue tokens, made a rule that blue tokens counted double from here on out.
The details that support my thesis are significant, but the rest can be abstracted away.