Exploring what it means to be rational and human, what EXPERIENCE has to do with that...
The vital question
...and whether human (ir)rationality is sustainable. "The really vital question for us all is, What is this world going to be? What is life eventually to make of itself? The centre of gravity of philosophy must therefore alter its place. The earth of things, long thrown into shadow by the glories of the upper ether, must resume its rights." William James, Pragmatism III
Please post at least two comments (of at least two paragraphs) prior to class each week, preferably by Wednesday, indicating your reflections on any aspect of the reading and subject matter. Week 1's reading assignment is William James's Varieties of Religious Experience, preface and Lectures 1 & 2. Feel free to comment on anything in the book, not only the reading assignment. Respond to my discussion questions (or to your classmates' or your own), by scrolling down and clicking on "comments" below. Or skip the discussion prompts entirely if you don't think you need them to frame your comments.
Meanwhile, to get us started...
I always begin a new semester by asking students to post an Introduction, responding to these questions:
Who are you?
Why are you here?
Interpret those questions any way you'd like.
Discussion Questions. After posting your introduction, post at least two comments pertaining to Varieties (VRE).
Have you had experiences you would characterize as religious? What made them so? What was/is their significance to you?
Do you agree with WJ's remark in the preface that acquaintance with particulars makes us wiser than the possession of abstract formulas? How does that apply to religious experience and religious doctrines?
Do you think "the inner experiences of great-souled persons" are worth pondering and have a value, even when extreme, "eccentric," or "pathological"? Do you agree that "a religious life...does tend to make [a] person exceptional and eccentric"? 15 (page references to the Library of America's edition of William James-Writings, 1902-1910... if you don't have this edition and are reading the etext, use the search function and keywords to find these passages)
WJ says he's not talking about "your ordinary religious believer, who follows the conventional observances of his country" and whose religion thus "has been made for him by others" rather than issuing from "original experience"... Why do you think most people's religion is not "original" in that sense? Should it be? Should anyone ever take anyone else's word for what's theologically (OR philosophically) correct? Put another way: should everyone think for themselves, if not by themselves, in arriving at their religious (or irreligious) beliefs and practices?
WJ says the Quaker religion is founded on "veracity rooted in spiritual inwardness" (15) but declares its founder George Fox "pathological" (17). What do you make of this?
What do you think WJ is saying about the status of Alfred's, Fanny's, and William's beliefs, and about "medical materialism"? 18-20
Do you agree with WJ about "immediate delight" and "good consequential fruits for life"? 22
Should religious opinions be tested in the same way that scientific opinions are, "by logic and experiment"? 24 Wouldn't that have the effect of discrediting many religious traditions?
In light of the preceding question, what do you think of the late Stephen Jay Gould's ideas about religion and science being "non-overlapping"? (Stay tuned for further consideration of this question next week, when we turn to Carl Sagan's own Gifford Lectures and The Varieties of Scientific Experience...)
What do you think of WJ's definition of religion as "the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual(s)..."? 36
Do you like the "Emersonian religion"? 36-9
Must religion in some sense be "serious" and "solemn"? 41-2 (Guess that would rule out the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, aka Pastafarianism, or L. Ron Hubbard's Scientology... But maybe not the Church of Baseball?)
Is WJ fair to Marcus Aurelius, and to stoicism generally? 46-7
Is it true that only religion delivers "happiness in the absolute and everlasting"? 50 But what if nothing is absolute and everlasting, in the religious sense?
If "we are in the end absolutely dependent on the universe," is it possible for a secular perspective to treat that dependency in spiritual terms? What, for instance, do you think of Bertrand Russell's "A Free Man's Worship"? And again, we'll revisit the question when we turn to Sagan's The Varieties of Scientific Experience.
Questions/comments on other parts of WJ's Varieties, or any of the excerpted texts below?
Scroll to the bottom of this post, click on "comments," and share your thoughts.
See you on Sep 1, 6 pm in WPS 310. I'll do my best to arrive on time, my Environmental Ethics class in the James Union Building concludes at 5:45.
Happy reading and thinking! (Varieties, and some other writings by and about James, are below.)
Gary Marcus — Rebooting AI: Building Artificial Intelligence We Can Trust
Despite the hype surrounding AI, creating an intelligence that rivals or exceeds human levels is far more complicated than we have been led to believe. The achievements in the field thus far have occurred in closed systems with fixed sets of rules, and these approaches are too narrow to achieve genuine intelligence. The real world, in contrast, is wildly complex and open-ended. How can we bridge this gap? What will the consequences be when we do?
Shermer and Marcus discuss: why AI chatbot LaMDA is not sentient • "mind", "thinking", and "consciousness", and how do molecules and matter give rise to such nonmaterial processes • the hard problem of consciousness • the self and other minds • How would we know if an AI system was sentient? • Can AI systems be conscious? • free will, determinism, compatibilism, and panpsychism • language • Can we have an inner life without language? • How rational or irrational an animal are we?
Gary Marcus is a scientist, best-selling author, and entrepreneur. He is Founder and CEO of Robust.AI, and was Founder and CEO of Geometric Intelligence, a machine learning company acquired by Uber in 2016. He is the author of five books, including The Algebraic Mind, Kluge, The Birth of the Mind, and the New York Times best seller Guitar Zero, as well as editor of The Future of the Brain and The Norton Psychology Reader. He has published extensively in fields ranging from human and animal behavior to neuroscience, genetics, linguistics, evolutionary psychology and artificial intelligence, often in leading journals such as Science and Nature, and is perhaps the youngest Professor Emeritus at NYU. His newest book, co-authored with Ernest Davis, Rebooting AI: Building Machines We Can Trust aims to shake up the field of artificial intelligence.
Thanks, Rationality class of summer '22. I've enjoyed our brief time together.
Older Spock learned to love humanity, and to honor his own (half-) humanity. You might say he developed a "sentiment of rationality" to complement his logical acuity. Maybe (like Picard) he even read some William James. I'd like to think so. But as an old bumper sticker admonishes:
*
Do feel free to continue commenting on this site, which will host my Spring MALA course Experience.
As WJ said, there's a new dawn breaking on philosophy. And as HDT said, the sun is but a morning star.
Live long and prosper!
jpo
==
*Interesting example of this, in this morning's Times: AI researchers who think machines can think like humans.
"The problem is that the people closest to the technology — the people explaining it to the public — live with one foot in the future. They sometimes see what they believe will happen as much as they see what is happening now."
“There are lots of dudes in our industry who struggle to tell the difference between science fiction and real life...”
Within social contract theory there are several different
factions of thought regarding several different components of the theory.Among them are Contractualists and Contractarians,
these two groups observe different reasonings and motivations for us to have
entered into this social contract we find ourselves in.Both groups have different ideas of what
constitutes justification for the social contract.
The contractarians believe that self interest is the
motivating factor for individuals to enter into the social contract, which
offers a way to maximize our own personal gain by accepting the traditions and
norms of a moral society. Morality is not
offered by an outside source, it is not determined by a Deity for us to accept
and use as a basis for justification of being moral, but rather the benefit to
oneself for being moral and being within a moral society is the justification
without need of a higher power.Contractarians
start from the original position, this is done in an effort to promote fairness
as the original position has no hierarchy or class superiority, and in considering
justification from the original position we can identify what we find to be the
most beneficial to the collective. “Contractarians
hold that the success of the contract in securing cooperative interaction
itself requires that the starting point and procedures be fair and impartial.”(Cudd
& Eftekhari, 2021) The contract itself is the
agreement between the collective, which is presumed to be rational and that rationality
is used to agree upon norms of morality, the original position allows for the
collective to disregard the prior notions of moral norms. From that point forward the moral norms of
the society are established by the agreement, without using any outside motivation
for those norms. The individuals within
the original position are understood by contractarians to be rational, or at
least to have the capacity for reason and rationality.(Cudd & Eftekhari, 2021)
Whereas the contractarian views the social contract and its
justification through the lens of a collective, the contractualist views morality
and its justifications from the lens of the individual: “Under contractualism,
I seek to pursue my interests in a way that I can justify to others who have
their own interests to pursue.”(Ashford & Mulgan, 2018).The contractualist focuses on norms and rules that are valid within
their own right that would not be rejected by most reasonable individuals, as
opposed to the contractarians who opine that the rules are determined by what
can be agreed to.A main difference here
is that the contractualist believes that we have a purpose and reason to be
moral for the sake of morality, whereas the contractarian believes this
agreement of morality is motivated by self-interest.
“To this war of every man against every man, this also in
consequent; that nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justice
and injustice have there no place. Where there is no common power, there is no
law, where no law, no injustice. Force, and fraud, are in war the cardinal
virtues.”
― Thomas Hobbes
"The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which
obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will
but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm
another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions… (and) when his own
preservation comes not in competition, ought he, as much as he can, to preserve
the rest of mankind, and may not, unless it be to do justice on an offender,
take away, or impair the life, or what tends to the preservation of the life,
the liberty, health, limb, or goods of another."-John Locke
"It would be melancholy, were we forced to admit that this
distinctive and almost unlimited faculty is the source of all human
misfortunes; that it is this which, in time, draws man out of his original
state, in which he would have spent his days insensibly in peace and innocence;
that it is this faculty, which, successively producing in different ages his
discoveries and his errors, his vices and his virtues, makes him at length a
tyrant both over himself and over nature." Rousseau
Maybe the most fascinating component of social contract
theory is the hypothetical state of nature or original position. The pre-social contract era. A time before man had entered into society
and any obligations that holds. Locke, Hobbes,
and Rousseau each had different versions of the original position. I read these during my undergrad in political
science courses and have given a fair bit of thought to the state of the
natural man, and I disagree with the portrayal of each of these
philosophers.
Hobbes’ state of nature is one of conflict and fear, wherein
every man is serving his own interest and defending his own life on a constant basis. Every man is equal in the sense that he can
be killed in his sleep like anyone else and the reasoning behind entering into
the agreement of society is to preserve one’s own self-interest(Friend). At minimum in considering the state of nature,
particularly a hypothetical one, it must be viewed through the eyes of a
collective, man cannot exist in an individual capacity. There must be at least a parent and child. Rousseau’s version, while much more pleasant,
commits the same error. The individual
in his state of nature seldom sees another person(Friend). We could not grow in this fashion, and again
it neglects the parents or at least the mother who would be necessary for the natural
man to exist.
Locke gets a little closer with his conjugal society, a
group of a mother, father, and child. This group is then represented by the father
in making the social contract with the other representatives of the other
families(Friend). That still is too small, perhaps
this is sufficient for a species to exist, and survive but it is insufficient
to allow a species to thrive in the way the ours has. The hypothetical original position begins at
small communities, when a group becomes just big enough to require stratification. We are naturally inclined to embrace stratification,
from our conception there is a separation of duties between the mother and the father,
and an agreement to carry out the different assigned tasks for one
another. Both the original agreement and
stratification exist, but once they exist across nuclear families a community
has reached a size that norms must be established and accepted by the
collective group. This is the social
contract and the point of the original position.
Although these are hypothetical situations if the state of
nature is intended to be the starting point from which we as a society form our
morals it must consider a realistic hypothetical. And it must acknowledge the value and legitimacy
of each member of the society, for the social contract to fulfill its potential
it must be done with equality in mind among the members. As close as Locke gets to this, sending the
man as a decided representative is clearly indicative of superiority. If it is supposed to be a fair and just
social contract then everyone must agree upon it, not just the representatives
of each party.
The social contract exists in our everyday lives, we don’t
think about it often, but every day we follow guidelines set forth and agreed upon
far before we ever had any say about the matter. We did not agree to be here, yet we are subject
to the laws and institutions that were set forth by this agreement. Understanding the social contract is the best way for us to come to terms with being bound by it.
Works Cited
Ashford, E., & Mulgan, T. (2018, April 20). Contractualism. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved August 5, 2022, from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/contractualism/
Cudd, A., & Eftekhari, S. (2021, September 30). Contractarianism. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved August 5, 2022, from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/contractarianism/
D’Agostino, F., Gaus, G., & Thrasher, J. (2021, September 27). Contemporary approaches to the Social Contract. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved August 5, 2022, from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/contractarianism-contemporary/
Friend, C. (n.d.). Social Contract Theory. Internet encyclopedia of philosophy. Retrieved August 5, 2022, from https://iep.utm.edu/soc-cont/
Goodreads. (n.d.). Thomas Hobbes quotes (author of leviathan) (page 2 of 6). Goodreads. Retrieved August 5, 2022, from https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/10122.Thomas_Hobbes?page=2
John Locke on the rights to life, Liberty, and property of ourselves and others (1689). Online Library of Liberty. (n.d.). Retrieved August 5, 2022, from https://oll.libertyfund.org/quote/john-locke-on-the-rights-to-life-liberty-and-property-of-ourselves-and-others-1689
Rousseau, J.-J. (n.d.). Discourse on the origin of inequality quotes and analysis. GradeSaver. Retrieved August 5, 2022, from https://www.gradesaver.com/discourse-on-the-origin-of-inequality/study-guide/quotes
Steven Pinker states that, “causality is the cement of the universe”. The way things are correlated matters in our everyday lives. It is important to understand the difference between correlation and causation so that we can be rational humans in a constantly changing society.
Causation is what causes the relationship between two different variables and correlation is the dependence between two variables. If you want to prove that there is a causation in place, you must first show that there is a correlation. In order to see if this correlation holds we turn to a scatterplot, or scientific evidence to back up casual claims.
Individuals can be quick to say that an event certainly causes the other. This occurs quite frequently in the fitness industry. It seems that in the fitness world everyone seems to be focused on the issue of weight loss. How can we lose it, and how can we lose it fast?! With pills, shakes, powders, and supplements being put on the market, there are issues with correlation and causation taking place right in front of us.
Here are some outlandish claims people have made for weight loss in the fitness industry:
Sensa "Weight Loss" Powder
Here is an add created by the company Sensa. Sensa's product was a powder additive that you would sprinkle on top of your food just like you would salt or pepper. This powder claimed to alter your sense of smell tricking individuals into feeling full. Since it would make you feel full, the company promoted that it would make you lose weight fast.
Above is a news segment posted from May 2009 to promote Sensa’s powdered product.
As you might have guessed, this product did not last, and their business was not successful. Articles and videos were coming out about how Sensa was a scam. There was no concrete research that backed up Sensa's weight loss claims. The company got in trouble for its false weight loss advertisements and was forced to pay over $25 million dollars in settlements. The company is no longer selling this product, but different sellers on eBay still try to sell Sensa powders for those who still think there is correlation with Sensa and weight loss.
The Sensa powder is an example of correlation and causation in the fitness industry. Although, some individuals were losing weight while on Sensa, this does not mean that one caused the other. Just because losing weight and Sensa are correlated does not mean that Sensa works. There could have been other factors that played into those individuals weight loss. Such as eating better and working out. Since there was no credible research that Sensa caused weight loss, it was wrong to say that these two were correlated in the first place.
Sale Slash Diet Pills
Another product in the fitness industry that dealt with correlation and causation was Sale Slash LLC diet pills. Sale Slash diet pills was a pill that you would take every morning to help individuals lose weight fast. The pill would suppress your appetite and prevented your body from storing fat from the food that you ate. Sale Slash had many celebrities endorse the product. Oprah Winfrey used her platform to discuss how amazing the pills were. The company also used fake news sites and ads to promote the pills effectiveness. As you could guess, this became extremely problematic with the more individuals buying this product. As a result of the company making unproven claims about the “weight loss pills”, Sale Slash LLC paid over $8 million in settlements.
Above is a news segment about Sale Slash LLC diet pills. Dr. Pat Salber talks about how deceitful the company was.
The Sale Slash LLC diet pills is yet another example of how correlation was implied even when the pills did not cause weight loss. There was no evidence that this product worked yet they claimed that their pills led to shedding fat fast. There was no evidence of causation.
There are tons of misleading causes to weight loss in the fitness industry. As it may seem overwhelming and confusing on what product to trust, there are proven correlated events that can cause weight loss. For example, eating right and exercising. It seems obvious that eating right and exercising would help you lose weight, but many people will try just about any fast weight fix and not what is guaranteed to work first.
Here are some studies that prove a correlation and causation with exercise and weight loss:
Study 1: The Role of Exercise and Physical Activity in Weight Loss and Maintenance
Scatter plot- x axis: total days tracked, y axis: total weight loss
These studies help show that when exercise and weight loss are correlated, exercising will cause weight loss. It is important for us as individuals to be aware of what we see online and make sure we do not believe every weight loss ad we see. We need to make sure that we review the research and make sure that these causal claims are backed up by evidence.
Even when it comes to the real world, it is important to not believe everything you see online. We live in a world where misinformation is swarming all around is. Just because someone says that two things are correlated it does not mean that they caused the other. It is important that we act as rational humans and think about things that are correlated before stating causation.
Thursday, August 4, 2022
If Everything Is Great, Why Is Everyone
So Unhappy?
-Dan Eschenfelder
Happiness is subjective.People have different ideas as to what it
even is or what is required to be happy.
Aristotle believed, to live a happy life required conditions, including
physical and mental well-being.He
believed that man cannot know if he led a happy life until the end of his
life.He believed happiness isn’t
something to be granted in a few hours, it’s the entire value of your life as
you lived it, not just moments of pleasure.
Today, even though most 1st-world countries are
living quite prosperously, happiness seems to be low.Obviously, a pandemic doesn’t help the
situation, but most would probably agree that people were unhappy even before
COVID struck…but why?Some blame
politicians, the media, or even educators for spreading lies, myths, and loaded
language and they’re probably right.In
this blog post it is not my intention to provide examples or unhappiness, nor to
search for answers, rather I intend to simply provide information from
philosophers and psychologists who have explored the topic of happiness—folks like
Aristotle, William James and some more recent information provided by the
author of our class text, Steven Pinker with excerpts from his most recent
book: Enlightenment Now,
who explains
with great detail just how prosperous we really are.The reader can decide after a brief
definition of happiness from these philosophers and recent data provided by
Pinker, if we should be happier than we are.
Bishop Butler’s paradox– the attempt to be happy
is one of the chief sources of unhappiness, (“William
James,” n.d.).
Philosopher
William James believed that “happiness is created as a result of our active
participants in the game of life, (“William
James,” n.d.).”Instead of focusing on
how much we suffer in life, we should correct our attitudes and act as if life
has meaning.“Believe that life is worth
living, and your very belief will help create the fact, (“William James,” n.d.).”One might deduce from the following quotes
that James was an optimist and most likely led a happy life himself and wished
others the same.
The world in itself is a neutral flux of “booming blooming
confusion,” hence it is entirely up to us whether to view it as positive,
negative, or as absent of all meaning, (“William James,” n.d.).
Happiness is not produced merely by thinking or by resigning
oneself to life’s circumstances, but rather by taking bold risks and acting on
possibilities that come from the “heart’s center,” the Real Self within, (“William
James,” n.d.).
Aristotle—the Godfather of
happiness to many—too followed the same logic in his pursuit of happiness.In TheNicomachean Ethics, Aristotle wrote:
The function of man is to live a
certain kind of life, and this activity implies a rational principle, and the
function of a good man is the good and noble performance of these, and if any
action is well performed it is performed in accord with the appropriate
excellence: if this is the case, then happiness turns out to be an activity of
the soul in accordance with virtue, (1098a13).
Since the days of Aristotle, many
philosophers have attempted to understand and gage happiness, most believing
that happiness can be defined in two aspects:
1). A state of mind
2). A life that goes well for the person leading it.
The state of mind is quite
literally a psychological matter learned from the amount of pleasure or
depression one experiences.Some refer
to it as the “psychological sense” or mental state.In the second case, life that goes well is a
state of value, or what philosophers call, “prudential value.” Happiness refers to a life of well-being
or flourishing, a life that goes well for you.St. Louis University Professor, Dan Haybron writes this of Aristotle:
Aristotelians
identify well-being with virtuous activity, yet Aristotle plainly takes this to
be a highly pleasant condition, indeed the most pleasant kind of life there is.
You cannot flourish, on Aristotelian terms, without being happy, and
unhappiness is clearly incompatible with well-being. Even the Stoics, who notoriously regard all
but a virtuous inner state as at best indifferent, would still assign happiness
a kind of importance: at the very least, to be unhappy would be unvirtuous; and
virtue itself arguably entails a kind of happiness, namely a pleasant state of
tranquility, (Haybron, n.d.).
So, if Aristotle believed one
cannot flourish without being happy then why are so many people hesitant to
believe they should be happy?Harvard
University Psychology Professor, Steven Pinker gave a speech at the 2019 YES convention.In his speech he presents data proving just
how much 1st world countries are “flourishing.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mf7e7WQiE-w
Here is a list of memorable quotes taken from his speech: (*TC = Time Code)
TC: 2:55 “Objective well-being has increased massively over the last
250 years beginning with the most precious thing of all…life, life expectancy
at birth in most human societies throughout most of history is about 30 years
today it is more than 70 years. Life
expectancy is longest in wealthy parts of the world like Europe and the
Americas but it has been soaring in [other areas].”
TC: 3:40 “Child mortality for the most of human history about one third
of children did not live to see their 50th birthday such Sweden 250
years ago that was brought down by a factor of a hundred and other parts of the
world such as Canada, South Korea, Chile and Ethiopia.”
TC: 3:55 “Mothers used to be vulnerable to death in childbirth as
well about 1% of Swedish mothers about 250 yeas ago that was brought down by a
factor of 300, likewise in other parts of the world, United States, Malaysia,
Ethiopia.”
TC: 4:10 "Sustenance…famine was one of the Four Horsemen and through
most of human history societies were not able to grow enough calories to feed
their population that is no longer the case in most parts of the world. Undernourishment, which afflicted about one
third of people in the developing world 50 years ago has fallen to less than
15% and famines which used to strike any part of the world and wreak enormous
devastation and misery now take place only in remote and war-torn parts of the
world where the problem is not an inability to grow enough food but to get it
to the people who need it.”
TC: 4:50 Prosperity…for most of human history, economic growth pretty
much did not exist…for about 1,600 years [was stagnant] then with Industrial
Revolution it has increased by a factor of about 200[%]…it has decimated the
rate of extreme poverty which 200 years ago pertained to about 90% of the
world’s population, today it applies to 9 percent.
TC: 5:38 150 years ago wealthy countries redistributed about 1.5% of
their GDP to children, the sick, the poor and the elderly. Today every developed country devotes between
20 and 30 percent of its GDP to social transfers.
TC: 5:54 Peace, the natural relations between empires and states for
most of human history was war and peace was merely a brief interview between
wars…if we zoom in on the period since the end of the Second World War, we see
there’s been an uneven but unmistakable decline in the rate of deaths from all
wars from about 20 per 100,000 per year to less than one per 100,000 per year.”
TC: 7:59 There has been a massive decline in the rate of the most
violent wealthy democracy, the United States since 1990 and the world has a
whole has seen it’s rate of homicide go down by about 30% in the last 20
years. Not just homicide but violence
against women has been in decline—these are data from the United States—both
domestic violence against wives and girlfriends and rates of rape and sexual
assault have plummeted over the last 40 years.
TC: 8:26 Knowledge, the natural state of humankind is ignorance and
illiteracy in the early modern period, about 15% of Europeans could read and
write, that is increased to universal literacy by the early 20th
century and the rest of the world is rapidly catching up. About 80% of the world can read and write
now, 90% of people under the age of 25.”
TC: 10:00 All of these gains are unappreciated. We pocket our good fortune, we return to
innate baseline and we are no happier than we were before…we live in an amazing
word and it’s wasted on the crappiest generation of spoiled idiots.”
TC: 11:11 With all these advances in objective well-being, has there
been a flat lining of subjective well-being of happiness?
TC: 11:45 The scientific study of happiness is that happiness is
correlated with freedom and as I’ve mentioned, freedom has increased, and
happiness is correlated with prosperity and prosperity has increased.
TC: 16:11 Objective well-being must be distinguished from
subjective well-being or happiness.People can be better off and not appreciate their good fortune.Objectively, well-being has increased
massively almost everywhere.Subjectively, less clear.On
average yes.Not everywhere but still
more than most people think.”
Prosperity
and democracy—as Pinker points out—have never been stronger.This is the most peaceful time in our
history, yet perception is that we are less happy.We need to look a bit closer at our
blessings.In our Aristotilian pursuit
of good health, meanable wealth, and obtainable knowledge, don’t forget to
appreciate how fortunate we truly are.
Gary Wedgewood
Presentation for:
Rationality, MALA 6050, Summer 2022
Presented August 2, 2022
The most popular evening news program, in fact the number
one television program in total viewers excluding sports, is World News Tonight
with David Muir. It has been the top
show for 190 of the past 191 weeks in average total viewers. If you have
watched this news program you will immediately notice that the reporting is
concise, to the point, and fact based. Correspondents are sent to the scenes of
news events all over the world and report what they see from the scene in a few
brief sentences. The program always concludes with a heartwarming “good news”
report about some extraordinary person or group doing something unusually kind
and generous. Could it be that our
polarized society is full of people hungry for such reporting? Consider what
has dominated the news recently, especially the entertainment/news-like media. Supreme
Court decisions have caused an uproar.
Some have described the overthrowing of Roe as “prejudice masquerading
as reason.” The January 6th Congressional investigation has
challenged “The Big Lie” that the 2020 election was stolen and has exposed the
underbelly of a deliberate attempt to overthrow American Democracy.
From:There’s something more dangerous than the
‘Big Lie’ | The HillLink
“…facts
don’t change minds. Fact-checking can sometimes backfire,
ironically making people hold on more fervently to the corrected lie. But it’s
also the case that people may understand or accept the facts but simply not
care, as they are motivated by something else.”“Thus, all the logic and evidence — even from trusted
messengers…doesn’t shake the ‘Big Lie,’ because the lie isn’t really the
point…”“The dangerous inflection point we are at, however, is that loyalty
to team has become not only more important than facts, but more important than
democracy — and has justified harassment and violence.”“Many have written about the deep polarization
and partisan tribalism that has turned our opponents into mortal
enemies andmade contestations of power a zero-sum game.” (…a
situation in which one person or group can win something only by causing
another person or group to lose it.)
What
is personally disturbing to me is that I can recall mourning leaders like John
F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and even Walt Disney.
Today, many people seem drawn to misleaders and strong uniting creative leaders
are few and far between.
From “Rationality” Chapter 10:Pinker writes of “…a larger rejection of
the norms of reason and science…” p. 284 and “canards that the historian of
science Michael Shermer calls “weird beliefs.” and asks “How can we explain
this pandemic of poppycock?” p. 286On
p. 287 he bemoans instances of“overinterpreting coincidences, failing to calibrate evidence against
priors, overgeneralizing from anecdotes, and leaping from correlation to
causation… all of them represent failures of critical thinking.”“The mustering of rhetorical resources to
drive an argument toward a favored conclusion is called motivated reasoning…(the
‘reasoner”) would rather be right than get it right.” p. 290“In biased evaluation, we deploy our
ingenuity to upvote the arguments that support our position and pick nits in
the ones that refute it.” p. 291
This is the essence of “gaslighting” which causes the victim to question the
validity of their own thoughts, perception of reality, or memories.“…(In another case) people reason their way
into or out of a conclusion even when it offers them no personal advantage.
It’s enough that the conclusion enhances the correctness or nobility of their
political, religious, ethnic, or cultural tribe. It’s called, obviously enough,
the myside bias, and it commandeers every kind of reasoning, even
logic.” p. 294On a hopeful note
Pinker writes:“When people evaluate
an idea in small groups with the right chemistry, which is that they don’t
agree on everything but have a common interest in finding the truth, they catch
on to each other’s fallacies and blind spots, and usually the truth wins.”Bertrand Russell famously said, “It is
undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatsoever for
supposing it is true.”For Pinker this
is “a rejection of motivated reasoning; a commitment to placing all beliefs
within the reality zone” p. 310“We can
see why humans steer their reasoning toward conclusions that work to the
advantage of themselves or their sects, and why they distinguish a reality in
which ideas are true or false from a mythology in which ideas are entertaining
or inspirational…” p. 309“Reality is
that which, when you apply motivated or myside or mythological reasoning to it,
does not go away…for all the vulnerabilities of human reason, our picture of
the future need not be a bot tweeting fake news forever. The arc of knowledge
is a long one, and it bends toward rationality. ” p. 309John Maynard Keynes, “When the facts change,
I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” p. 310“…universities have a responsibility to secure the credibility of
science and scholarship by committing themselves to viewpoint diversity, free
inquiry, critical thinking, and active open-mindedness.” p. 314Rationality is a public good…Each of us has a
motive to prefer our truth, but together we’re better off with the truth.” p.
315
“…in groups of cooperative but intellectually diverse reasoners, the truth
usually wins.” p. 317“…impartiality
(is) the core of rationality: a reconciliation of our biased and incomplete
notions into an understanding of reality that transcends any one of us.
Rationality, then, is not just a cognitive virtue but a moral one.” p. 317-318
Discussion Questions:
1. What recent public assertions or decisions have struck you as the result of
motivated reasoning?
2. During sporting events, do you find yourself practicing myside reasoning?
3. Have you found yourself turning to mythological reasoning
regarding your health, climate change, or some conspiracy theory?
4. What percent of the thinking going on in America today would you identify as
being rational?
Wednesday, August 3, 2022
Rationality in Terms of Critical Thinking.
This course has made me think about rationality in new ways, and is changing how I think about news, politics, medicine, and really most areas of life. As Pinker says in his podcast, he’s got me “thinking about thinking”. We started the semester considering critical thinking in the San community that use high level logic skills to track and hunt animals. They don’t trust first impressions, but rather what they see. They’ve survived hundreds of years without exterminating threatened species. This level of critical thinking is becoming harder to find in countries like the United States, that is considered educated, where people have a hard time distinguishing truth from fiction, and in some cases would prefer fiction.
The Foundation for Critical Thinking published “A Brief History of the Idea of Critical Thinking” that traces how critical thinking has developed through time. The beginnings of the teachings can be traced back to Socrates who brought to light the need reflectively question common beliefs. He encouraged the questioning of authorities, not take everything they say as reliable or rational, but rather question and examine their reasoning. Plato and Aristotle followed Socrates and encouraged people to train their minds to see though the surface to see deeper realities and think systematically. These ideas have been recognized and expanded through hundreds of years.
Critical thinking requires a certain level of skepticism to evaluate the premises as well as the conclusions. We want to believe ideas, and sometimes we create beliefs to make sense of something we see or don’t understand. We also have inherent biases that affect what we do and do not believe. We have to be willing to investigate claims, who says them, what their motivation may be, and what do the people that support the claim say as well as what do those who do not support the idea say. Getting to the core of whether or not a claim is true takes this kind of investigation and thinking. When something conflicts with one of your worldviews, it is often easier to reject the evidence than to readjust your thinking. But if we can confront our biases, and learn to see and understand truths, we can grow in our ability to know and understand new ideas. Bill Nye, Derren Brown, and others talk about this in the You Tube video: Skepticism: Why critical thinking makes you smarter.
Pinker states that “a valid argument correctly applies rule of inference to the premises”, but a sound argument “applies the rules correctly to true premises and thus yields a true conclusion.” So much depends on the truth of the premise of an argument. This has been something that has stuck with me through this course. So many times we are willing to believe something that has a false premise, for a variety of reasons, like as I said previously, we want to believe it, it confirms a bias, or it is easier to believe than to begin to think differently. Many of the things I have believed growing up and carried into adulthood, I’ve had to question and revisit, especially in the last five years. Critically rethinking long held beliefs and ideas has been hard work, uncomfortable, it is often stressful, and has changed many of my relationships, but I feel that I am better off for it. I see how I was willing to believe false premises in order to hold onto the beliefs that I wanted to be true. This course has given me a greater understanding of the ways in which I am beginning to grow in critical thinking and ultimately, rationality.
"Alex Jones concedes Sandy Hook attack was ’100% real’" Will wonders never cease. Next up: Alex Jones concedes Earth is round, we landed on the moon, and 9/11 was orchestrated by Al Qaeda, not George W. Bush.https://t.co/CaMyR9ZIE1
LISTEN. Rationality meets once more this evening. It's Closing Day again. In addition to my standard exit lines (keep asking questions, nothing has concluded) I'll encourage us all (not least myself) to continue reflecting on the full meaning of rationality. Rational people try to achieve their ends economically and efficiently, they constantly interrogate themselves about the wisdom and humanity of their chosen ends, they never close the door on other possibilities, they intend and expect to feel at home in the world and to coexist with other rational agents whose various personal projects and faiths (hopes, dreams, delights) make the world a richer and more celebrative plurality.
I've started a little reading list, to support that encouragement... (continues)
==
...Philosophy must pass from words, that reproduce but ancient elements, to life itself, that gives the integrally new. The “inexplicable,” the “mystery,” as what the intellect, with its claim to reason out reality, thinks that it is in duty bound to resolve, and the resolution of which [Benjamin Paul] Blood’s revelation would eliminate from the sphere of our duties, remains; but it remains as something to be met and dealt with by faculties more akin to our activities and heroisms and willingnesses, than to our logical powers. This is the anesthetic insight, according to our author. Let my last word, then, speaking in the name of intellectual philosophy, be his word.–“There is no conclusion. What has concluded, that we might conclude in regard to it? There are no fortunes to be told, and there is no advice to be given.–Farewell!” --A Pluralistic Mystic by William James
== We've thought and talked a lot. The universe of a professor is indeed crowded with words.
My parting words: set some goals, keep asking questions, draw no premature conclusions, and get some walking in.
Especially keep asking questions, keep moving forward, and drop me a line sometime. Meet me at the Boulevard.
Finish Pinker (book & podcasts)... Final report BLOG POSTS due Aug 5, post an early draft (click on "New Post") if you'd like potentially-constructive feedback from the class. (NOTE TO CLASS: Please offer constructive feedback on your classmates' posts.) Your final report can continue the theme of your presentation, or you can select a different topic. Be sure to include embedded links, images, etc. in your final posts. Let me know if you have questions about how to do any of that.
COMMENT?: “A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. Authoritarian institutions and marketers have always known this fact.”― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow
COMMENT?: “Odd as it may seem, I am my remembering self, and the experiencing self, who does my living, is like a stranger to me.” Kahneman
COMMENT?: “The easiest way to increase happiness is to control your use of time. Can you find more time to do the things you enjoy doing?” Kahneman
Have you ever served on a jury, or attended/observed a criminal trial? How rational a proceeding was it? How could it have been more rational?
How do you manage your daily exposure to news? Do you think you have a reasonably-undistorted understanding of events generally? How could your news diet be improved?
"The media is a click-seeking machine dressed up as a truth-seeking machine," says Elon Musk. Is he right about that?
What if "we were to replace intellectual combat with genuine discussion and treat beliefs as hypotheses to be tested rather than treasures to be defended?" Would we have to be Vulcans or Stoics to do that?
Do you have any first-hand experience of recovered/false memories?
Why are Rorschach tests so popular? 251
Are sophomore slumps and winner's curses a fiction? 255-6
Can you think of a better illustration of Excludability than the rabbi towel story? 265
Do you cry twice as often as your father did? 273
Are you surprised by any of the figures on 285?
Do "most members of our species have the capacity to discover and accept the canons of rationality"? 288
What do you think of the literary scholar's explanation of why he abhors deductive thinking? 289
How do you avoid the Myside Bias? Or do you? 293
Do you belong to any "class-crossing civil-society organizations" where partisan polarization is minimized? 297
Are you proudly WEIRD? 301
What can be done to challenge "the pseudoscientific fringe"? 305
Do you consider yourself a member of the "Rationality Community"? (312 & podcast)
Was Al Gore a "lamentable" face of climate activism? 312
Has Pinker overstated "universities' suffocating left-wing monoculture"? 313
If intensive error correction works on Wikipedia, why shouldn't it work on social media? 316
Do you believe in progress? 325
Were you aware that extreme poverty and battlefield deaths had declined so greatly? 326-7
Do you share Bentham's and Singer's commitment to animal rights based not on their capacity for reason but rather their suffering? 334-5
Do you think Pinker's analysis in this book of rationality, with the explicit "goal of human flourishing" and transcendence of "parochial experience," supports and complements James's "sentiment of rationality" and its goal of enabling us to enjoy the "sufficiency of the present moment"? 340
Nudges and noise The way we think makes us vulnerable to bad decision making, but in his guide to thinking better, Steven Pinker explores how we can exploit our cognitive biases to make better choices.
Professor Pinker is joined by:
Daniel Kahneman, Professor Emeritus at Princeton University, Nobel Prize in Economics winner and author of “Thinking Fast and Slow” and “Noise A Flaw in Human Judgement” Robyn Scott, writer, entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of Apolitical, a peer to peer learning platform for public servants designed to make government smarter and more effective.
Sentence first, verdict afterwards Decision making in the courtroom: In his guide to thinking better, Professor Steven Pinker explores the life and death choices made by judges and juries.
To help him sift signals from noise, he’s joined by:
Judge Nancy Gertner: former United States district judge and now professor of law at Harvard University
Elizabeth Loftus; professor at the University of California and one of the most influential psychologists of the 20th century
Headlines and trendlines The media fills our minds with vivid images of rare events from plane crashes to terrorist attacks. In his guide to thinking better, Professor Steven Pinker explores how we can stop the news from distorting our understanding of the world.
He’s joined by:
James Harding a former editor of The Times and director of BBC News, and now the co-founder of Tortoise Media.
Anna Rosling Rutland, co-founder and vice president of the Gap Minder Foundation and co-author with Hans and Ola Rosling of “Factfulness; Ten Reasons Why We're Wrong About the World and Why Things Are Better Than You Think”
Being right Why getting it right might mean admitting you're wrong.
What if we were to replace intellectual combat with genuine discussion and treat beliefs as hypotheses to be tested rather than treasures to be defended?
In his guide to thinking better, Professor Steven Pinker is joined by:
Julia Galef of the Center for Applied Rationality and author of ‘The Scout Mindset’
Daniel Willingham, professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and the author of ‘Cognition and Raising Kids who Read’
==
Recommended reading for your continuing reflections on rationality:
Over the past 50 years in America, our partisan identities have merged with our racial, religious, geographic, ideological, and cultural identities. Those merged identities have attained a weight that is breaking much in our politics and tearing at the bonds that hold this country together.
Klein shows how and why American politics polarized around identity in the 20th century, and what that polarization did to the way we see the world and each other. And he traces the feedback loops between our polarized political identities and our polarized political institutions that are driving our political system towards crisis. g'r
“...toxic systems compromise good individuals with ease. They do so not by demanding we betray our values but by enlisting our values such that we betray each other. What is rational and even moral for us to do individually becomes destructive when done collectively. How American politics became a toxic system, why we participate in it, and what it means for our future is the subject of this book.”
“I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...
The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance”
“I worry that, especially as the Millennium edges nearer, pseudoscience and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive. Where have we heard it before? Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us - then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls.
The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir.”
“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.” == I cited that last quote in reply to Garrison Keillor, who wrote "I don’t have an opinion on [Trump's] legal situation but I am hopeful that Republicans will give up on the lie of the stolen election. It’s a hole they’ve dug for their candidates and it doesn’t work to their benefit, as lies never do. The vast majority of Republicans know that it’s a lie. It’s dangerous to support a narcissist in politics."
Unfortunately the vast majority of Republicans won't say it in public. In fact about 70% of them say they believe the Big Lie. Carl Sagan's sad observation of a quarter century ago rings true: “One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.” == In light of Pinker's statement about well-designed video games helping students think more critically/logically, maybe we should add this to the Reading List (it was on the cover of the latest NYT Book Review)...
