Perhaps The Opposite Is Also True

Why Do People Believe True Things? by Dan Williams at Conspicuous Cognition.

I have read things like this several times, perhaps even many times, especially over the last few years. Yet it is so counterintuitive that I revert to my "Why do we have a problem here and how can we fix it" default on topic after topic. Like the Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect, in which we recognise an article in a field we know about as fatuous and inaccurate, but turn the page and instinctively trust the next article about Palestine or Trump, there is something virtually automatic about it.  We have to intentionally try in order to ask ourselves "Have I got this backwards? Have I reversed the arrow of causation? Am I too trusting of the wrong people?" Over a decade ago I had a lengthy series May We Believe Our Thoughts? (It's rather a heavy slog, not least because I didn't have an editor.) 

Think of the economy, society-wide crime trends, vaccines, history, climate change, or any other possible focus of “public opinion.” Not only is the truth about such topics typically complex, ambiguous, and counter-intuitive but almost everything you believe about them is based on information you acquired from others—from the claims, gossip, reports, books, remarks, opinion pieces, teaching, images, video clips, and so on that other people communicated to you.

Moreover, to organise all that socially acquired information, you relied on simplifying categories, schema, and explanatory models that reduce reality's complexity to a tractable, low-resolution mental model.

It is a wonderful article in many ways, especially at the beginning. The puzzle is not why there is poverty, but why there is wealth; not why there is ignorance, but why there is knowledge; not why is there crime but why is there gooc civic behavior.  Yet it misses the most important point.  He lauds rationalism and the Enlightenment, scientific worldview, and the precious few in modern society who are free from superstition because of their education, their training.

Even extraordinarily complex institutions designed, refined, and shaped over centuries with the explicit goal of generating knowledge—institutions that constitute humanity’s best and most successful attempt at generating knowledge—still often fall short.

Those institutions do not "fall short." That is far too mild a phrase. If they are better than the default of ignorance, it is only marginally and intermittently.  They aren't close. I have a group that meets for lunch monthly, and one of the smarter members bemoaned just a few days ago that people believe misinformation because they aren't taught critical thinking.  I objected, and later sent a short rant by email to the wider group, including the three not in attendance. It is not intelligence or education, there is some other quality, perhaps humility, perhaps a grumpy skeptical-of-the-skeptics attitude. I wrote privately to two of the six later "P, you saw my little rant about not only questioning other people, but oneself. T can testify that I have hit this button at least twice before, once quite hard, over the last few years.  No one has taken me up on that, ever. The smartest people in the world - and I mean that sincerely.  The other three may all be smarter than the three of us. But the humility to be wrong seems to be an entirely different thing." 

My exercise over the next few days will be to look for clues: educated vs. less; male vs. female; old vs young; liberal, conservative, libertarian, communitarian; religious vs non; profession type - whatever occurs to me.  I have some initial suspicions which I will try to erase, or better still, consider the opposite.

Remember the rabbinic caution "Perhaps the opposite is also true." You can comment here, certainly, but if something seems too hot for public consumption, communicate with me at my backup email that I seldom check (but will now) asstvillageidiot    gmail.