July 2010 Archives

People act on what is important to them… as they see it.  What’s important to you?  Can you list the top five most important things you believe in?  Go ahead, do it!                On this list be very general as in ‘Making an income’ and ‘Marital Bliss’ (they may seem the same, they’re not, just very closely related, however) or ‘Having Quality Family Time’ or ‘Concerns with global climate change’ or ‘The Progressive Movement within Politics’.                MY IMPORTANCE LIST:  1-Ensuring a source of income. 2-Marital Bliss. 3-Having Quality Family Time. 4-Continuing my education toward a degree. 5-Concerns with Global Climate Change.  Dang nabit! I can’t include the progressive movement within politics, however it is important to me… or is it?                 Now list the top ten things you do.  These should be the specifics.  Leave out preparing your food, sleeping, and your toiletry habits.  List the impact stuff on your life… the stuff that takes time and energy.                 MY DO LIST: 1-Getting through two classes for summer school.  2-Keeping current with unemployment and dislocated worker program.  3-Planning a short vacation for the time between summer and fall semesters. 4-Enjoying the company of my wife, when we can (bicycle rides and walks) 5-Watching a DVD (down time with netflicks), we don’t watch TV (except PBS every so often).  6-Spending time with our adult children and our grandkids.  7-Get-togethers with close friends, BBQ’s and rendezvous’ at the pub 8-Taking my chronically ill mother to regular doctor visits. 9-Doing household stuff: budget & bills and upkeep of our older home (yard work & house repair).  10-Try to keep current with news (online and radio).               I guess what I am trying to show is that I am doing the stuff of life that is closest to my existence.  While I care about climate change and politics I do nothing about it.  Oh yeah, I vote.  However, I don’t get involved in grass roots politics (this is where the beginning of change starts).                 I believe, for the most part, I am an average American.  Do I act on what I believe?  What I act on, the stuff I spend most of my time with, is centered within the proximity of my closest self-interests.  The far reaching interests don’t even come into my top ten list.   I just don’t have time for them!  Would any more education change this?

After reading Tom's 7-14 post, I was stunned by the study that stated by watching different news sources your actually knowledge will vary.  Most interesting, the more you watch particular sources, the more your actual knowledge degrades.  Specifically, the more you watch FOX, the dumber you get.  Wow, I previoulsy expected different news sources to have a slant to their reporting.  But, I also thought that if you were dilligent enough, you could decipher the facts from the frill.  This has given me more to think about in choosing where we would want to get our information. 

All this political chat… I have understood that 20-25% of people are dyed in the wool conservative and another 20-25% is dyed in the wool liberal.  You ain’t gunna change em.  That leaves 50 -60% who fall somewhere in the middle… and yes you are right that has been the battleground for political power.           I believe the question comes down to does this group of ‘moderates’ act on what they know?  Are they swayed by mass appeal?  Are they duped by deceptive media games?  Do they act on habit?        Sad thing about it is too much information gives paralysis due to info overload and too little… well there have been plenty of people acting from the deficit mode for some time now.           Are we asking ourselves what can be done about this?  Is it simply education?   

I was just curious what other people thought about the questions we had to answer on our last assignment about Kuhn's view of science. If science doesn't gradually bring us closer to an objective view of reality, or to Truth with a capital T, then what is its point? Why should kids want to become scientists when they grow up? Why should the government fund research? All these serious questions come up if we accept Kuhn's unique view of science.

Very interesting thoughts Todd, I probably would have guessed that it wouldn't even be possible to govern or do anything at all with a governing style like Lincoln's! But perhaps I just think that way because I've been brought up in this heavily "partisian" world, where it often appears that reconciliation between liberals and conservatives is impossible. It probably is true that it would be better to keep people who differ from you in your cabinet, even if only to get more points of view on issues. And maybe you're correct that partisianship is even worse than relativism and could be compared to a disease. You could probably make a good case for it. It divides people, usually into 2 or 3 warring camps, that routinely demonize each other at the other's expense. This in turn creates an "us versus them" mentality (false dichotomy?) in which the only way to "win" or to do good is to defeat the other party. This in turn takes the main focus of politics off of demanding social issues that need our attention to petty squabbling between parties.

Actually Jerry, I think it's a pretty large group of people in the US who consider themselves "moderates" or people who don't just vote according to party lines on all elections. It seems like there are decent sized groups of people we can very generally call "liberals" or "conservatives" too, but in most elections it seems that these smaller groups spend most of their time courting the larger "moderate" group.

In all are readings and discussions I am left with a few thoughts.

People believe different things and are unlikely to change those views even when presented with conflicting data. In the political realm, there seems to be about equal amounts of people who consistently are liberal or conservative with a smaller group changing its vote every election. How else would we continually flip between a republican and democratic president. So who is really running this country? My thought is that it is that small group. But who are they? Are we to assume they are Rational? Do they carefully monitor various news sources to gather enough data to make a sound rational decision? Or are there decisions based on other reasons?

At age 47 I am still relatively new to the area of political behavior. Did not give it much attention for many years. So my voting decisions were most likely not based on rational ideas, but more based on how the economy was (or how I thought it was). I wonder what affect, in any, does the battle between liberal and conservative media really have on voter behavior.

If the Democrats lose in the upcoming midterm elections, does that mean we want Republican control again? How can we change our minds so quickly? Or is this just some pattern that has been going on for many years.

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/11/conflicting-signs-for-midterm-elections/

President Lincoln had a ridiculous assortment of personal tragedies in his life and many thought he had significant psychological demons: depression, introversion, etc.  It is a wonder he could govern.  But, one thing he mastered that no politician even attempts (to the same degree) today is that he incorporated his rivals in his government.  And not just in ceremonial positions - in his inner circle, his cabinet.  There is a great book, Team of Rivals by Doris Goodwin, that details how Lincoln assembled people whose world views conflicted heavily with his and with his other appointments.  (The tome is nearly 800 pp plus another 200 pp of footnotes and index, so not a quick read!)  It was his deliberate and calculated abandonment of partisan comforts that allowed him to see, understand and thoughtfully weigh options in a time of significant turmoil.  He rejected the comforts of agreement and agreeable people in favor of better solutions.  I believe partisanship is one of the great mental and ethical diseases of our time.  Is it even worse than relativism? 

The study that Prof A posted (July 14) is startling, but I guess not all that surprising.  My experience is, for the most part, the people who listen to any message are the people already in the choir.  I am blessed with both conservative and liberal friends.  It is easy to talk with either about topics or reports that support their ensconced beliefs.  If I present either group with evidence that the "other side" is making a good point, they attack the evidence without really considering it.  I will note that on things that I would consider "facts" (like the 3 Iraq war misperceptions in Prof A's July 14 posting), my conservative friends dispute "facts" more than my liberal ones.  But they both "spin" the report with equal vigor.  I don't like this about either group.

Hi All, sorry to be MIA.  I was away taking a course in Virginia, where they had the temerity to make us work late into the evening every day.  I have been reading the blog, but found no time to post.

 

On the question of "citizens epistemology", I admit my own internal conflicts.  I believe it is important to have well-justified beliefs and some level of commitment to them.  At the same time, I believe it is crucial to possess an open, inquisitive mind.  Every belief is subject to review when evidence comes along to give reason for that review.  The difficulty is to "see"  the evidence in a sufficiently unfiltered way so I notice it is actually challenging my world view and I need to reconcile something.  All along, I think we can develop principles of thinking, of behavior, of ethics, and so on that we might keep throughout.  Although, even these might require constant adjustment and sharpening.  Reconciling is work and perhaps my subconscious chooses the path of least resistance.  I know sometimes it is easier to just agree rather than take issue with someone.

As anyone would have guessed, it appears that propaganda has reared its ugly head yet again. The decision of Andrew Breitbart, a conservative website blogger, to post a video clip of a speech given by Shirley Sherrod, a Dept. of Agriculture employee who is African-American, to the Local Georgia Chapter of the NAACP depicting her as a racist who did not give her all to a white farmer facing foreclosure. The video clip, which inevitably aired on several media outlets, was misleading, incomplete, and fabricated. Unfortunately, the video clip was deliberately taken out of context creating a mass media fact twisting hailstorm. I'm appalled (along with countless other Americans) that the video was not watched in its entirety before being tossed out to the media vultures. Moreover, Sherrod was asked to resign her position with the Dept., publicly humiliated and was condemned by the N.A.A.C.P. for a politically correct speech held in front of one of their local chapters. Now that the frenzy is in full swing, the original video in its entirety has been aired and apologies to Sherrod are flooding in by the truckload. When will these media outlets research the facts of a story before spreading misleading information? What will it take for the public majority to stand up against and denounce political media opportunists?

Here's a post I wrote a few years ago that may or may not be helpful in answering Ann's most recent question:

Kuhn thought that the main value of his work was that it showed the importance of paradigms (and of revolutionary changes in paradigms) in science. He considered it fairly unremarkable that paradigms shaped peoples' perceptions in other areas of human thought and action (like art and politics). But, as he points out in the last few pages of the Postscript, other people have been excited by the idea that paradigms play an important role in our lives. (There is a good example of this way of thinking about paradigms at http://www.ee.scu.edu/eefac/healy/kuhn.html

I think it's worth considering this idea in connection with 'citizens' epistemology'. As a beginning, here are two simple points: First, people are influenced by their training, education, and experience (peer groups, role models, culture, etc, etc.) and, as a result, they come to see the world in particular ways. (These can be fairly specific -- people's ideas about marriage or war, for example -- or they can be more global -- the sorts of outlook we characterize as liberal or conservative, for example.) Second, these 'outlooks' or 'paradigms' or 'conceptual frameworks' (or whatever you want to call them) structure people's perceptions of the social world, so that people who confront (in some sense) the same information come to very different conclusions. (Of course, if we take Kuhn seriously, we will want to put that second point differently: since paradigms shape perception, it isn't really the same information.)

Some examples:

First, from the realm of 'expert' knowledge, an article, on the op-ed page of the 3/27/2004 New York Times, suggests that the Bush administration didn't see 9/11 coming because its key players were adherents of an outdated (or was it always wrong?) paradigm. According to that paradigm, terrorists can only do serious damage when they are sponsored by states, so Al Qaeda could not be seen as a serious threat, except insofar as it might be supported by a 'rogue state' like Iraq. Like one of Kuhn's anomalous cards, the threat from Al Qaeda didn't fit their expectations and couldn't be seen for what it was. If you want to read the whole article it's here. (The term 'paradigm' is used explicitly three times in the article. I've put those sentences in bold type.)

As I taught a classroom version of this class during spring semester of 2004, we discussed 'citizen's epistemology' in connection with some of the events that were unfolding then: the hearings held by the 9/11 commission (especially the dramatic testimony of Richard Clarke and Condoleeza Rice) and the developments in Iraq. I was struck then, as I am still, by the extent to which people perceived these events in ways that supported their preconceptions. Critics of the Bush administration found Clarke (who had been a leading counter-terrorism official under both Clinton and Bush) to be a very credible person who made cogent criticisms of the administration's policies and competence. Administration supporters saw him as a disgruntled former employee trying to get back at his old boss and sell his book. Bush's critics saw Rice's testimony as evasive, heavily scripted, and as "raising as many questions as it answered" (to use a stock phrase), whereas supporters of the President saw the same testimony as a masterful rebuttal of the administration's critics. When the administration finally released the August 6, 2001, Presidential Daily Briefing, the critics saw it's references to possible airplane hijackings and to terrorist cells in the US as pretty clear evidence that the Bush administration was "asleep at the wheel" prior to 9/11, whereas Bush supporters saw it as a summary of vague and outdated intelligence that required no actions beyond those already underway. Finally the developments in Iraq (most notably: an increase in anti-US violence and in US casualties, the takeover of several towns by Shiite militias loyal to Moqtada Sadr, unexpected resistance to the efforts of US marines to enter Falluja and apprehend the people who desecrated the bodies of four Americans on March 31, the inability and/or unwillingness of Iraqi police and military personnel to assist the US forces, and signs of growing cooperation between Sunni and Shiite factions) -- these developments were seen by some as a major setback for the US, and often as a sign that US efforts to create a decent regime in Iraq were now so far off-track as to be virtually doomed. Bush supporters, again, had a drastically different view: most of Iraq is at peace, most Iraqi's support the American efforts, the insurgents are a small group of 'thugs' or 'terrorists' who will soon be defeated, and the big picture still looks good. Differences of this kind led one observer, Juan Cole, who is a Professor of Middle Eastern History at the University of Michigan, to talk about "two-party epistemology."

[Update, 2010:  We might add to these examples the divergent opinions people have about the current situation in Iraq.  Conservatives/Republicans tend to think that the troop build up undertaken by President Bush in 2007 (the so-called 'surge') "worked"  and that the US will soon be able to pull out of Iraq and leave a fairly stable and friendly regime behind.  People on the left (like me) see a dysfunctional Iraqi political system still torn by irreconcilable differences that will probably erupt into a bloody crisis as soon as the US troops are gone and think that the most likely outcome of the whole episode (invasion and aftermath) is an expansion of Iranian influence in the region, not anything like a 'win' for the US. (Here's a nice overview by Thomas Ricks.)  Some conservatives agree with the critics on this issue, by the way, for example: Diana West.]

It is tempting to say about these political differences what Kuhn says about scientists who have different paradigms: that people with different political paradigms (or is it just different political allegiances?) are "living in different worlds." If you stay, as most of us do most of the time, in just one of those worlds, then your world seems like the only real world (any sensible person would see it your way), and the partisans on the other side seem almost crazy. Is there any hope of rational discussion between the inhabitants of these different worlds? Can we even imagine what it would be like to be on the other side of the divide? Is there any hope of figuring out which view is closer to the truth? (Or should we follow Kuhn in giving up on the idea that we can get "closer to the truth"?)

I think the simplest way to think about this connection is "what if Kuhn's notion of paradigms within scientific communities (which he claims make them live in a completely different world) were true about other things as well?"

In response to Jonathon and Ross, I actually seem to agree with Kuhn, for the most part. In regards to his paradigmatic shifts and how the world becomes entirely different and how you are no longer able to view the world in the same light as you once had, I found it helpful to relate it to human relationships. For example, if you met a new person and this person was kind and caring and always helpful when you needed a hand. Later, however, say you found out that this guy was only friends with you because he wanted to date your sister. Then, at least for me, all his actions must be viewed with this new information, which will then distort your perception of the actions on his part. His previous helpful behaviors now seem to hold an ulterior motive and you can no longer view him as just simply a kind and nice guy. Not to say that he isn't, but rather, he's not just being kind and nice to you for the sake of being kind and nice to you. I'm not sure if this does justice to what Kuhn seemed to be implying to me, and I am more than open to any criticism you guys may have and how I have gone about interpreting Kuhn's paradigmatic shifts.

Ann is asking some good questions. (Here and here.)  I've been reading assignment 4 papers today, so I know that some of you understand Kuhn well enough to take a stab at answering them.  How about it? 

Meanwhile, here is Dan Drezner (of Foreign Policy magazine and Tufts University) on how to tell which research papers are worth heeding:

In response to Jonathan, I agree with you that Kuhn's special concept of a paradigm seems to be a very slippery one at least; and a possibly self-contradictory one at its worst. My problem with this concept seems to be very similar to yours. He says that when a paradigm shift happens, the scientists are all of a sudden living in a different world, at least in some sense. But this is where I think he wiffle-waffles and loses alot of people. In WHAT sense does he mean they live in a different world? Physically? Intellectually? He never really says or bothers to clarify this, which I think is one main reason many people fail to belive him.

As I read chapter 8 of Weird Things, I was struck by the connection made between the conceptual schemes and Kuhn. I spent a lot of time digesting Kuhn for the last assignment and the connection did not even remotely cross my mind when I read about conceptual schemes. Even after reading how Schick and Vaughn make the connection, I do not get it.  If anyone out there has a better understanding of this and pities me enough to try to explain, I would really appreciate it!

Very interesting to go through the battle between Kuhn and the authors of "How to think About Weird Things". I really did enjoy reading Kuhn and, for the most part, he made sense to me. However, reading Fay and Schick and Vaughn seemed to put my perspective in a new view. It became increasingly apparent to me that Kuhn's theory contradicts and undermines itself drastically. If the paradigm we were in determined everything that we did in fact observe, then it would be impossible to see anything else,which would make it impossible to even shift into a new paradigm. I think Kuhn's theory is too subjective here and does not succeed. Any comments?

... or so someone says in a comment on this post on Matthew Yglesias' blog  (another of my regular reads). 

The context for this remark is a discussion of the role of journalists in our current 'hyper-partisan' media environment.  The question being discussed is whether it is a worthwhile use of journalistic resources to try to rebut lies and misinformation put out by politicians, pundits and advocacy groups or whether it is better to just report what the various parties are saying and hope that your readers/watchers/listeners can figure out what's true.  Here's the full comment:

I guess I understand why someone might not want to spend all their time and energy swatting down lies, half-lies, and personal vested interests masquerading as principled convictions.

But that noble and important task is needed today more than ever because there is a crisis of epistemology in this country. It’s necessary to rely on the reporting of others to ever learn much of anything about any subject. Nobody has the time or energy to fact check everything they hear. But with the emergence of conservative columnists, Fox News, industry spokespeople and Astroturf organizers all dedicated to the mission of deliberately misleading their audiences, it’s becoming harder and harder to know what to believe.

The last three sentences of this comment provide a pithy statement of the problem of 'citizen's epistemology' as I see it.  We have to rely on other people for most of our information, but many of those people are not trustworthy.  And if you don't share the commenter's opinion that most of the distortion is coming from the conservative side of the political spectrum, then the problem gets harder.  (It gets harder because then you have to take seriously the possibility that Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh might be right when they tell you to ignore the 'liberal mainstream media', which would otherwise seem to be a mostly reliable source of reasonably fair-minded reporting, and ignore the 'liberal college professors', who would otherwise seem to be a mostly reliable source of expert, science-based knowledge.)

Is Fox News "deliberately misleading" its audience?  It's hard (as I keep saying) to discern people's motives.  But here's something to think about:

In the summer of 2004 the cartoon strip "Doonesbury" spent a week hammering Rupert Murdoch's Fox News Network. My favorite strip is this one:

The study in question, I think, comes from The Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) at the University of Maryland.  The particular study I have in mind is "Misperceptions, The Media and The Iraq War". The study is summarized here. The full report is here. (PDF)

The focus of the study was to look at the number of Americans who had one or more of three "misperceptions". The misperceptions were identified as such by the people who conducted the study on the grounds that they were "demonstrably false, or were at odds with the dominant view in the intelligence community." These misperceptions were that:

- Evidence has been found of significant cooperation between Iraq and al-Qaeda
- Weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq
- World public opinion favored the US going to war with Iraq

(You can read the study to find out how the authors came to the conclusion that these three beliefs were false.)  The study found that most Americans had at least one of these misperceptions (In fact, nearly 1/4 of the population believed that the Iraqis had actually used chemical or biological weapons against American soldiers during the war.) It also found, unsurprisingly, that people who had these beliefs were more likely think that the war had been justified and more likely to say that they intended to vote for President Bush in the next election. It also found that there was a strong correlation between people's primary source of news and the presence of one or more misperceptions, as follows:

 

	FOX	CBS	ABC	NBC	CNN	Print Sources	NPR/ PBS
None of the 3	20%	30%	39%	45%	45%	53%	77%
1 or more misperceptions	80%	71%	61%	55%	55%	47%	23%

 

The most interesting finding, from my point of view is the following: "While it would seem that misperceptions are derived from a failure to pay attention to the news, overall, those who pay greater attention to the news are no less likely to have misperceptions. Among those who primarily watch Fox, those who pay more attention are more likely to have misperceptions. Only those who mostly get their news from print media, and to some extent those who primarily watch CNN, have fewer misperceptions as they pay more attention."

Let me underline that point: If you get your news from television, watching more and paying more attention does not improve your knowledge. If you watch Fox it actually degrades your knowledge (by making you more likely to believe false things.

I agree with you Nick, I think our society definitely emphasizes having lots of technology and fancy gadgets over being informed and knowledgable about what science can tell us about the universe, which probably does contribute to the "all about me" attitude many Americans have. While this attitude certainly does drive growth and innovation in technological fields such as video games, phones, and the like, it probably doesn't drive too many people to become scientists or researchers in fields other than these either.

Taking a stab at Paul's questions:

I wouldn't say that principles of inquiry depend on actions.  I would say that actions often depend on beliefs -- in the sense that what we do depends on how we understand the circumstances in which we are acting, the values at stake, etc., etc.  Which is to say that beliefs typically have consequences for behavior.  (Does it even make sense to think that there could be a belief that made no difference whatsoever to how a person would act?  Maybe not.  But I don't think we need to answer that question.  It's enough to notice that beliefs generally do make a difference.)  Since our beliefs typically guide our actions, we can ask (as Clifford did) whether we are believing responsibly.  As the title of his essay implies, there can be an ethics of belief as well as an ethics of action.  When people jump to conclusions (base their beliefs on flimsy evidence or fallacious reasoning) or indulge in wishful thinking we can (and do) say that they have no right to believe as they do.  It sometimes follows that they have no right to do what their beliefs lead them to do -- but that's a separate question.
 
It seems to me that the main lesson we should learn from the material we have studied about cognitive biases is that it is a lot harder to be a responsible believer (to earn one's right to believe through honest inquiry) than you might think it is.  It is not enough, for example, to look for evidence for your beliefs.  You also need to take seriously the possibility that you are under the influence of confirmation bias and are noticing the the evidence that supports your belief while ignoring (or failing to seek out) the evidence that contradicts it.  And similarly you need to become aware of the other cognitive biases and take steps to avoid them. 

If we were some kind of ideally rational machines instead of human beings, then these efforts would be unnecessary.  But we are human beings, and we need principles of inquiry that work for us, not for robots or Vulcans. 

Cognitive biases afflict human inquiry in all areas, I think -- in science and in business as well as in politics  and the paranormal.  Scientists are no more immune to these tendencies than the rest of us.  This is part of what Kuhn is telling us.  The anomalous card experiment he discusses in Chapter VI is an early contribution to the study of cognitive bias.    The subjects in that experiment saw what they expected to see, and Kuhn insists that scientists do this too.  But in science there are practices that permit anomalies to be perceived (eventually) and new ways of thinking to emerge and become dominant.  Even if individual scientists stubbornly cling to their paradigms and even if whole scientific communities can suffer from a kind of 'group think', the effort to make scientific ideas precise and testable, the presence of rival groups with different ideas, and the replacement of older scientists by younger ones permits progress to be made.  But if Kuhn's account is anywhere near right, then even our best practices of inquiry are far from algorithmic -- they are not the sort of practices that permit questions to be answered by mechanical computations.  They involve interpretation and therefore the possibilty of multiple interpretations.  Good principles of inquiry have to be good for coping with these difficulties.  I think this means that they have to include a social dimension.  I am unlikely to figure things out all by myself. (Descartes' solitary meditations are not a good model for rigorous inquiry.) My ideas need to be tested against others' experiences and interpretations.  I need not only principles to guide my solitary reflections but also principles to guide me in my interactions with other inquirers.  (One of the things I like about Brian Fay's book is that he works out an approach of this kind.)  But this is tricky.  We need to acknowledge the existence of multiple interpretations without losing our ability to distinguish between better and worse interpretations.  Or perhaps I should say: I hope we can find a way to distinguish between better and worse interpretations.   Fallibilism, yes; relativism, no.

In response to the 'my kind of guy' heuristic Tom describes in his recent blog let me express sadness.  I do not think that this idea is new to us, perhaps newly thought about, but pervasive in our daily lives.  The imput that creates deciding factors in our decisions is highly suspect.  Voting is a decision that we may want to mark off more than likability for extending a candiate our support- but think about all the more common activities that we use this criteria in guiding our decisions.  More often our vote is represented by the dollar than the ballot box.  We spend our money most easily and often when we feel comfortable with the person attached to the transaction.  We make concessions in quality and cost at times for the personal comfort factor.  This is my thought on how this idea extends in to other areas of our lives. 

What is more important in our world today?  Does the answer to this question in one way (say technology for example) have a detrimental effect on the other (science)? 

I think technology is viewed by a large majority of people as the driving force of the "advanced world" of 2010.  The age of corporate industries has produced new lines of products every few months for people to desire to make the old ones obsolete (e.g. computers, cell phones), and our media (so much of which is dominated by advertisements) create the sensation for chasing these items with more and more fervor as technology presents them new modes and outlets to inundate us with (e.g. Twitter, Facebook/YouTube advertisements). 

Also, I see a link between this “rivalry” between technology and science and the differentiation between anecdotal evidence and scientific evidence we previously read.  I think technology creates a here-and-now, “me-first” impression on people to sway them to think that technology innovation rather than scientific investigation is the more pressing need.  Similarly, those who find anecdotal evidence more appealing than scientific evidence ignore the subjective and unreliable limitations of our personal experience to focus on an individual aspect of understanding rather than the more universal, “big picture” mentality offered by objective, scientific evidence.   

 

I have been pondering the threads on education and most informed/most biased for a couple of days now                 So, in an individual’s continued learning and the quest to knowing more, that is learning more facts, having more breadth, and the means to use it, would gives us a better chance to be critical thinkers (by way of having more to draw from to question and understand any argument), could it also be seen as also providing more tools to firmly argue your own set beliefs?  Certainly how someone uses their knowledge is an important aspect of this discussion.  Does this come down to the question of personal motives?  Or is it a question of personal disposition?  That is some people have a disposition toward openness while others draw close their circle, possibly because of fear.  What motivates us to act on anything we ‘know’ or wish to believe?  As Tom pointed out it is very difficult to know the motives of other people.   Does our own self interest weigh its heavy hand to influence from what facts, breadth, and means we will employ to state and act out for our own best interest?  I believe that once we start to talk about how people act on their beliefs (based on knowledge, faith, or otherwise) we are getting into the realm of ethics and morality.  Tom, is this true, is morality the actions we take based on what we believe?                      Now if that is true, what is the relationship of bias to morality?  Tom, this is where I am starting to find confusion.   I get the idea of ‘bias’ having an influence on how we perceive things, from the way this blog thread has proceeded I get the impression that we are talking personal/political agendas and doesn’t this start to move toward ethics and morality… that we are acting on our beliefs?  I thought, in this class, what we were studying is the principles of inquiry: ways we know.  I didn’t realize that we were studying the psychology of why and how people act with what they ‘know’.                 In the readings for asg #5, Fay lays out a very reasonable argument as to why there are so many ways to see the same event.  That is, the facts (low-level theoretical entities) are dependent on conceptual schemes that organize our factual descriptions… perspectivism.   I believe, that this is saying that while we all have a similar framework to see reality, our descriptions of reality are dependent on perspective and reality is never directly seen as it is.   So now I get why there are a multitude of ways that people see reality and thereby construct their own reality.           This blog thread has also led me to ask: does everyone have to think alike?   The quick response, of course is: no, of course not, but I find that all of our discussions in life are about convincing others to see reality the way each one of us do individually.  Actually, I have come to find it quite interesting (and frustrating) that people think so differently.   The very fact that people do think so differently is a benefit to all of us, it does give us a chance to see something from another viewpoint.                    Tom, how closely do the principles of inquiry (what we are studying) depend on actions and moral consequences?  Could you elaborate on this question?  Thanks!   

After reading Kuhn chapters 2 & 3, I have questions and I am hoping someone can shed some light. In chapter 3, he says there are 3 problems for factual scientific investigation having to do with determining which facts matter, matching facts with theory, and the articulation of the theory. He says these are problems for both the experimental and theoretical aspects of science. When he says these are 'problems' for normal science, is he saying these are challenges of normal science? I am not exactly clear what he means when he says that these 3 problems 'exhaust the literature of science' either. Is it just that there is much to be found within the literature of science dealing with these problems? On a more basic note, can anyone talk about the definition and uses of paradigm?

One aspect of political belief could be related to physiology, at least according to this article http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=112246 on the National Science Foundataion website.

Andrew Sullivan's blog (one of several I try to skim daily) steers me to a couple of items of interest:

1. Here Sullivan ponders the firing of various media personnel, most recently Octavia Nasr, CNN's Middle East editor -- fired for an impolitic Tweet (http://www.businessinsider.com/the-real-issue-2010-7).  Is he right to see a pattern of enforcement of ideological conformity?

2. Here he notes some recent discussion of the difficulties of deciding which experts and which studies we should pay attention to when we try to figure out what's going on in the world. He refers to these posts:

Ezra Klein of The Washington Post says, "Fairly few political commentators know enough to decide which research papers are methodologically convincing and which aren’t. So we often end up touting the papers that sound right, and the papers that sound right are, unsurprisingly, the ones that accord most closely with our view of the world."

In "Confirmation Bias in Policy Debate" Will Wilkinson of the libertarian Cato Institute agrees that it is difficult:  "This is one of the reasons I tend not to blog as much I’d like about a lot of debates in economic policy. I just don’t know who to trust, and I don’t trust myself enough to not just tout work that confirms my biases."

And this leads me to cast my eye over Wilkinson's blog and find:

3.  "Ignorance and Ideology" , a rumination on the ignorance of the masses and the dogmatism of the relatively well-informed, which might make one think that democracies are doomed to bad policies and disastrous decisions.  Here is a quote relevant to our previous discussion: 

[Phillip] Converse’s most disturbing and under-remarked finding is that the relatively well informed compensate in dogmatism for their greater knowledgeability. …

The selective (constrained) ideological perception and retention displayed by the well informed would seem to confront us with a Hobson’s choice. We can either be ruled by a mass of ignoramuses or – to the extent that the ignorant public takes its cues from relatively knowledgeable elites, or is simply ignorant of the policies that elites enact – we can be ruled by a coterie of the doctrinaire.

Following the link to the source for this quote I find:

4.  "Popper, Weber, and Hayek: The Epistemology and Politics of Ignorance ” (PDF), by Jeffrey Friedman. This is a long scholarly paper, and I have not had time to read it all yet.  But it looks to have a lot of illumination to offer on our subject of 'citizen's epistemology'. 

Noting that political scientists have long known that most people are shockingly ignorant of basic political facts, Freidman says:

one of the “research traditions” in political science—the tradition of public-opinion research—has accumulated an ocean of findings about political ignorance that are potentially lethal to the pro-democracy normative consensus in political science, in economics, and in our culture at large. As John Ferejohn (1990, 3) has put it, “nothing strikes the student of public opinion and democracy more forcefully than the paucity of information most people possess about politics.” Indeed, public-opinion researchers sometimes seem to compete with each other to come up with the best adjective to describe the breadth and depth of public ignorance: is it “jaw-dropping” (Luskin 2002, 4)? Or merely “astonishing” (Converse 1975, 79)? In one instance, two out of three Americans failed to recognize the Bill of Rights when it was read to them (Sniderman, Brody, and Tetlock 1991, 15). At any given time, about one in four don’t know who the vice president of the United States is (Luskin 2002, 6). Two in five were found to believe that Israel is an Arab nation (ibid.). Meanwhile, “the most commonly known fact about George [H. W.] Bush’s opinions while he was president was that he hated broccoli. During the 1992 presidential campaign ... 86 percent of the public knew that the Bushes’ dog was named Millie, yet only 15 percent knew that both presidential candidates supported the death penalty” (Delli Carpini and Keeter 1996, 101).

Whether the topic is the absence of weapons of WMD in Iraq; who is on the Supreme Court; which side Russia led during the Cold War (Page and Shapiro 1992, 10-11); or the meaning of such elementary concepts in political discourse as liberalism and conservatism (Converse 1964), the public’s political ignorance is so immense that one cannot help wondering how effective democratic politics can be at achieving good ends, and at avoiding the inadvertent achievement of bad ones.

Friedman describes a couple of theories that are supposed to reconcile us to these facts.  One is the theory that voters' ignorance is "rational ignorance."  People recognize (correctly) that it is very unlikely that their vote will be the deciding vote in an election, and they decide (rationally) that time and energy invested in becoming well-informed voters is time and energy that is wasted.  They rationally decide to tune out and leave politics to others.  They may tune in again if things get bad in a way that drastically impacts their own lives, but otherwise, they'll stay tuned out.  Friedman argues that this is not a satisfactory theory:  lots of these badly informed people do vote, do care about politics and elections, and do have strong opinions about political affairs. But their opinions have been formed in the absence of even the most basic knowledge of the facts.

Another comforting theory says that voters may be ignorant of basic political facts, but they are able to make reasonably good decisions about who to vote for by deploying 'heuristics' -- mental shortcuts that steer them towards one candidate or another.  One such heuristic is what Converse called "the nature-of-the-times" heuristic.  If I look around and things seem to be going well, I vote for the incumbents.  If things seem to be going badly, I vote to throw the bums out.  The problem with this rule, is that the current office-holders may have little responsibility for the whatever is producing 'good times' or 'bad times'.  Right now, for example, most observers expect the Democrats to lose a large number of seats in Congress next fall, because many voters will look around, see high unemployment and slow economic growth, and vote against the mainly Democratic incumbents.  But it is at least possible (some would say probable) that these economic conditions are mainly the fault of the policies of the previous administration and have been made worse by the refusal of Congressional Republicans to go along with the Democrats' efforts to address the problems. (For example, it is clear that, if the Democrats had not been prevented by Republican filibusters in the Senate from bringing their preferred bills to a vote, the government would have done much more to stimulate the economy last year, and would be doing more now -- extending unemployment benefits, sending aid to state governments so they don't have to lay off government employees, funding more work on infrastructure projects, etc.  If the Democrats' Keynesian economic theories are correct, as most economists believe, then this would do a lot to bring down unemployment and stimulate economic growth.)  This may or may not be true, but the 'heuristic' theory tells us that voters aren't trying to find out whether it is true.  They are 'reasoning' in  more simple way.  Their heuristic doesn't even consider the possibility that current problems may be left over from previous administrations or may be caused by forces beyond the control of the government.  As Friedman points out, this is actually an instance of a logical fallacy, traditionally called 'post hoc, ergo propter hoc' and called 'false cause' in our textbook.  There is no reason to think that voters who are using this kind of mental shortcut will get what they want from their political choices.

Another heuristic is what we might call the 'my kind of guy' heuristic. (I just made up that name, but Freidman describes the pattern).  Voters absorb media stories and images that persuade them that particular politicians either are or aren't 'their kind of guys (or gals)'.  Friedman relays a story told by Richard Popkin in his book The Reasoning Voter:  When Gerald Ford was running against Jimmy Carter in 1976, he stopped at a restaurant in Southern California and tried to eat a tamale without removing the corn husk wrapper.  This evidently persuaded many Hispanic voters that he was not their kind of guy.   More recently, George W. Bush scored points with the same community by displaying some familiarity with their culture and language.  And it became a cliche that one of the reasons for Bush's victories over Gore and Kerry was that they seemed 'stiff' and 'elitist,' and he seemed like 'somebody you would like to have a beer with.'  But this sort of mental shortcut seems to me to be a very near neighbor of the 'plain folks' propaganda technique, not a helpful way to identify the politicians most likely to represent your interest or your values.

There's more good stuff in Freidman's article, but that's enough for now -- I need to mow the lawn!

Joshua has made some very astute proposals for why college-educated people might be further ensconced in their own "parties" beliefs.  They probably do self-select as to what and who they read and they also self-select the groups they hang out with - which might also harden their positions on political topics.  I have known there is a positive correlation between higher education and atheism.  This discussion makes me want to examine that further and see if it hold true for more highly educated Republicans as well as Democrats.

It would be nice to think that education makes us more circumspect.  Perhaps it has that initial impact, but then we use new skills to increase our confidence in what we believe - and this might drive us further from positions that we do not like.

I think the study cited by professor Atchison is very interesting, because it is quite contrary to what alot of people probably think, and at least what i thought anyway. the most "politically informed" people (such as all those "politcal experts" on the news) are also the most likely to cling to their party lines despite evidence against it (such as the best-informed Republicans saying the budget deficit got worse during Clinton's first term when it went down by 90%, or the best-informed Democrats saying similar things about Reagan).

what interests me too is why this is the case. you'd expect the most politically informed people around to admit that yes, the other party actually did a decent job of reducing the deficit this term or of passing such and such a bill (even though they will always say their party could've done even better). Does it all come down to self-interest? do they know the opposite party in power did a decent job, but just dont want to admit it because it will make them look bad?

To answer Tom's question regarding education and rationalization, yes it is true that education increases one's ability to rationalize and defend one's prejudices but more importantly, education provides a necessary framework for intellectual thought by enhancing one's knowledge of the world and political affairs. I am not at liberty to state beyond a reasonable doubt that you must be educated to understand these affairs, but it would be difficult to critically asssess the claims of some Political figures without it.  But, I am sure we can all agree that the acquisition of a higher education,  does not guarantee the acquisition of intellectual integrity ( I understand the term Tom used was intellectual discipline however for the purpose of this entry I use this term loosely) nor does it guarantee that the educated will be able to discern truth from propaganda. As a seeker of truth and knowledge, it is truly amazing to listen to some of the Public Officials I have helped become elected into office as it would seem at certain times, when the economical mood is satisfactory, Integrity seems to flow like the Nile and at other times, integrity and intellect have been replaced with old ideologies and partisan biased slandering. One thing I know for sure, it is essential to maintain an open, yet critical mind when deciphering truth from propaganda when it pertains to those we have/have not elected to represent our intellectual views.  

Yes I do believe that getting an education can assist you in being able to rationalize and defend prjudice against your points. I am taking an intro class for Law and we were told that for the 3 years of education for the JD we would use socratic classroom instructions.

There are so many different aspect and points that we are taught while in school. Different forms of learning, talking and even forms of munipulation.

So with that said I defend the "elite, other people, politicians". What if they are only doing as they were taught. They react as they are taught we must always keep in mind that they go home at night and it is just a job to them just as we hold our positions. I believe they can carry intellect just as a "normal person"and in a since intellect is a natural operation of our brains it just requires a sense of decipline to make it respond with a high performance. So maybe they just dont ahve the decipline function up and running.

Eevry level of our learning reflects on some different aspect of our lives.

Hi Jerry Although I did not find the comment distrubing I think you make a great point.

 I dont believe the United States public school system was ever created to formaly educate one into any elite position of the government or society. Being a former private and public school attendee I can say that the learning curriculums were totally different. Once I transfered to a public school I was well advanced when compared to another student in the same grade. This was an advantage for me.

I think that the public schools were actually created to give the industrial workers a better understanding and training in field work. I think that we are educated way earlier than the age of twelve on purely what we are told is true with the trust of our knowledge in the hands of our teachers and textbooks. I think that this continues until we are nearly finish or finished with high school. Some philosophers say that we are educated once we learn to think for ourselves.

I fear I sparked this recent discussion of the relative epistemic virtues of educated elites v. common people by asking, at the end of my last post, "But is there any reason to think that us regular folks have a lot of intellectual discipline and integrity?  Enough to avoid the effects of confirmation bias and the rest? Does anyone?"

But the contrast I was talking about was not 'common folks' vs. the educated.  It was "high-level politicians" vs. everybody else.  The article I was discussing, by Jonathan Chait, had alleged that integrity and intellectual discipline were in short supply among high level politicians, and that this accounted for their ability to change their policy views to benefit their political ambitions without noticing that that's what they were doing.  Now, it seemed to me that there was a danger that we would see this claim as something that applied only to politicians (who are, after all, widely held to be slippery people without much integrity) and not seriously consider that the rest of us (i.e., non-politicians) may also be prone to adjusting our beliefs to suit our political allegiances.  So that was the question I wanted to raise.  It had nothing to do with commoners vs. elites, smart vs. dumb, or educated intellectuals vs. ignorant masses, or anything of the kind. 

In fact there is some reason to think that education can make things worse.  (Sorry!)  In a fascinating paper called "It Feels Like We're Thinking: the Rationalizing Voter and Electoral Democracy,"(PDF)  by Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels of Princeton University, some data is presented about how people's perceptions of the state of the economy are influenced by their political allegiances.  Roughly, people tend to see economic growth and the budget deficit as worse than they really are when their political opponents are in charge of the government, and as better than they really are when their side is in charge.   For example, a survey from 1996 found that more than half of Republicans thought that the budget deficit had gotten worse during President Clinton's first term, when, in fact, it had declined by more than 90%.  Republicans were twice as likely as Democrats to say that the economy had gotten worse. (By most measures it had improved.)    (In other papers, Bartels reports similar results in relation to Democrats perceptions of the economy during Reagan's second term.)

OK.  Nothing too surprising so far.  But Bartels and Achen also looked at the effect of different levels of political information on these partisan biases.  As you might expect, the accuracy of people's perceptions of the budget deficit and the economy tended to increase as their overall level of political information went up. (Level of political information was measured in a fairly standard way by asking respondents to identify various prominent political figures, say which party was in control of Congress, and the like).  But there was a drop off in the ability to see the improvement in the economy among the best-informed Republicans. And for both Republicans and Democrats, partisan identification seemed to have it's most pronounced effect on the best informed respondents.  Bartels and Achen also cite some research by Danielle Shani, which finds a similar effect.  Shani writes, "political knowledge does not correct for partisan bias in perception of ‘objective’conditions, nor does it mitigate the bias. Instead, and unfortunately, it enhances the bias; party identification colors the perceptions of the most politically informed citizens far more than the relatively less informed citizens”

(Shani's paper, "Knowing Your Colors: Can Knowledge Correct for Partisan Bias in Political Perceptions?" is available here.)

Of course, political information is not the same thing as education, but I'd bet there's a strong correlation.  And here's a report of another study that looked specifically at college education as a variable.  A Pew Center poll about global warming found (not too surprisingly) that Democrats are more likely to believe that global warming is happening and is caused by human activity than Republicans are.  But the differences are much greater among the college educated. Among those who have not graduated from college 52% of Democrats and 31% of Republicans have that view.  But among college graduates the percentage for Democrats goes up to 75, while the percentage for Republicans goes down to 19.   Whatever your own views about global warming, I think you have to wonder, why would the more educated people be farther apart on this issue than the less educated people?    It is, after all, a scientific and not a political or ideological issue. Whatever science really is telling us about this, you would hope that more educated people would be better able to comprehend and evaluate that science.   Could it be that more education simply increases your ability to rationalize and defend your prejudices?

Hi Ross.  Frankly, I think all people are "common folk" - no matter what education they have.  Education can improve knowledge, skills, and critical thinking abilities - that is why businesses reward degrees; it is not just the fancy piece of paper.  I hope to nudge my own reading, writing, thinking and hard skills (eg math), a little further down the road by taking classes.  But!!!!  I have learned countless important lessons from people who have never set foot in college.  One of the most articulate and literate people I know has never been to college.  Though, as a single mom, she paid for both her daughters' educations because she sees the value and advantage that a degree brings them.  I know that some people who never go to college begin the game far ahead of me, can dance circles around me intellectually, and that I will never catch them.  (I also know some people with PhDs that sometimes amaze me - not in a good way.  lol.)  Still, I am only the captain of my ship, and I see my job as navigating that tug as best I can.

 

On a humorous note, I can't resist appending this:  Dan Cole hosts a show on KFAN called the "Common Man Progrum (sic)."  At the beginning of the show, he plays a classic clip from Paul Harvey about the common man.  Dan does this to mock himself.  It's pretty funny.  (Also worth noting, that Cole is actually "uncommon" when it comes to sports radio hosts.)   Any way, the text of Paul Harvey's clip, embedded in a short, but interesting, blog piece on our schools can be found here:  (the actual audio clip is much better, but you'd probably have to listen to KFAN to hear that)   http://doneasasociety.blogspot.com/2005/01/americas-biggest-educational-challenge.html 

This blog piece is a short rant about the tension and disconnection between our schools and competition, work, reality and what it means to be common.

Hi Paul.  You make some excellent points.  I am not sure we disagree.  I was not intending to change the discussion, but perhaps I was talking about a different side of the same tree - or maybe I was just muddling my words - it would not be the first time.  When I say intellectual integrity, I mean commitment to the part of the code which says something like "I should not ignore evidence that is presented to me."  I am bound to let my intellect (poor as it is) examine whatever I encounter and not just dismiss it because I don't "like" it.  Of course, as you have pointed out, integrity does imply a pre-existing code or set of principles (another "definition").  I agree.  I was trying to say the commitment should be to principles rather than specific political positions.  I think we agree on this also.  I did not mean for my phrase "intellectual integrity" to signify intellectualism at all.  By intellect, I simply mean someone's mind.  Sometimes that mind is fuzzy; which I instantiate not infrequently.

this is an interesting discussion about the ability of "regular/common" people's ability to detect bad reasoning. but I think we need to ask ourselves what exactly do we mean by a "common" person? from the way this discussion has been going, it seems like we mean someone that is not that "educated" or someone without much knowledge of logic and logical fallicies. but I think this might be creating a somewhat false dichotomy of the "intellectuals/educated/people with college degrees" vs. "common/regular/people without college degrees"

This has been an interesting discourse on integrity and intellectual discipline.  However, Todd, you have shifted the discussion by changing the word order of our discussion.  I hate to get critical here, but it does significantly alter the discussion.  Our original discussion was on ‘integrity and intellectual discipline’ not ‘intellectual integrity’ as your response has stated.  The discussion on the issue of integrity was about how, as Tom had pointed out in his posting, that the Republicans have flip flopped their economics position from the last administration (when they held power) to the new administration (now that the Democrats hold power).  And while I will continue to be critical, I mean nothing personal by it, but, by changing the word order you have misrepresented what was originally stated (sort of the ‘Straw Man’ argument we learned in lesson 3).            The definition of integrity is about ‘adherence to a code’.  If your code is to be open and accepting of new ways to see the world around you (as we hope the brightest minds in our society would be willing) this is in my mind is also the way I would want the world to be (no matter how jaded my glasses are, I hope for this kind of mindset).  But, integrity does imply some preexisting code, often a code of ethics, and when we make association to and identify with a group or a circle, we accept their code.  We are found to have integrity when we adhere to their code and through this our acceptance by and with that group become stronger.  Those that rebel get ostracized or have something happen to them that is far worse.   If you join the military your code is military honor and there is a strict protocol and order to that way of life, when ordered to do… you obey or suffer the consequences.            Intellectual integrity, on the other hand, is adherence to the code of intellectualism which does strive for the discovery of truth within knowledge.  This, however, is not what we are discussing.  Intellectual discipline, here in our discussion, is meant to say and question whether  we (even us common folk) have the skills of critical thinking that can see through the loosey-goosey arguments that lack consistency.

Hi Jerry.  Yes, it is more than a little scary how much teachers and schools can impact young minds.  I happen to believe that much (most?) important basic psychological formations and mechanisms are done, done!, by age 2.  Still, there is a lot of knowledge to be added to the machine - knowledge which will come from our environment.  I went to 10 different schools before I graduated High School (Army brat).  They were all different.  Some great teachers and some not so great.  They all impacted me in ways I am aware of and ways which I am not aware of, but which still impact my actions.  I do believe that many students believe what they are told and do not challenge.  I had a chat with a student in another class yesterday and said she needs to challenge the author of her text if she does not agree with something.  But, that her challenge should not just be a rant.  It should be a well-argued response.  Who knows?  She might be the next "authority."  : )  Thanks!  Todd

Hi Paul!  You raise some great questions about how we "qualify" people to perform civic duties.  I did not mean to imply that agreement on moral, ethical, religious, or other grounds was any part of my fantasy IDI score.  My point was only that our or our circle's beliefs could and would be scrutinized by any and everyone and that we would be open to what others (in our circle or the world at large) might have to say.  For me, integrity is not "reliability to the cause, adherence to a code" - I would call that loyalty.  For me, intellectual integrity is the willingness to give up anything when I have been presented with sufficient reason (according to my own scales and measurement).  In short, integrity is my willingness to admit I was wrong about something if I am presented with evidence if that.  Unfortunately, or fortunately, It happens a lot!!!  lol.  Great questions!  Todd

Hi Kara!  Yes!!  I agree that there are multiple forms of intelligence.  Howard Gardner describes seven dimensions:  Spatial, Linguistic, Logical-mathematical, Kinesthetic, Musical, Interpersonal, Intrapersonal, and Naturalist (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_multiple_intelligences ).  Also, Perkins speaks of neural, experiential, and reflective intelligence (http://otec.uoregon.edu/intelligence.htm ).   Both these pages are quick reads.  So, IDI scores should include a social/historical/current events component in addition to critical thinking and things like that.  Thanks!  Todd

"But science students accept theories on the authority of teacher and text, not because of evidence"  from The Structure of Scientific Revolutions page 80.

 

Anyone else find this statement by Kuhn disturbing? Although somewhat controversial, Jean Piaget thought that it took until around age 12 for kids to be able to have then ability to generate abstract propositions, multiple hypotheses and their possible outcomes is evident. Based on this, teachers could tell kids under the age of 12 whatever they want and most would believe.