[PREV - CROOKED_REASON]    [TOP]

ID_OF_REASON

                                             March 30, 2018

Henry Farrel over at crookedtimber has been following
some of the great intellectual debates of our time,
as filtered through the lens of Twitter...

The latest was "Sam Harris and the ideology of reason",
which was about global village atheist Sam Harris          [link]
picking fights with Ezra Klein and some of the crew at
vox (and also as I understand it, Glenn Greenwald, and
much of the rest of the planet, with the exception of
Charles Murray, the honor of whose bell curvery is the
cause Harris was trying to defend).

Henry Farrel treats this all as an example of:

    "One of the minor plagues of our time is
    a specific flavor of Enlightenment Man
    Rationalism-- see Harris, Dawkins, Pinker--
    in which the Enlightenment Man (gender
    specificity intended) casts himself as
    the bold- honest truth-seeker, who is
    willing to follow reason wherever it
    takes him, even if (and perhaps
    especially if) this upsets the vulgar
    prejudices of the right-thinking herd."

    "This doesn’t mean that reason is useless--
    if harnessed through appropriate social
    means, it can be extremely valuable in          ARENA_COMBAT
    figuring out the truth. The fact that we
    are much better at poking holes in other
    people’s rationales than in our own means
    that groups that harness this capacity
    can reach better judgments than individuals."

    "But it does highlight the possibility of
    an unfortunate circuit that can occur
    where an individual has prejudices, uses
    reason to elaborate good rationales for
    those prejudices, and then convinces
    himself through his own reasoning
    capacity that he was right all along."

    "One possible (but by no means necessary)
    implication is that individuals with an
    unusually high faith in the power of
    individual reason to demolish prejudice
    may, precisely by virtue of that belief,
    be especially vulnerable to a feedback
    loop in which their reasoning reinforces
    their own prejudices rather than                   But similarly, if you're
    undermining them. When you have convinced          convinced of your own
    yourself that you have science on your             virtue.  Any counter
    side, and that your opponents do not, you          arguments must be
    are going to be more likely to ignore              lies and distortions.
    their criticisms, even if they are good ones."
                                                       When you know the bad
    "But there is less (that I’ve seen                 guys hire shills-- and
    anyway) about the specific ways in which           they do-- and they just
    its more specific notion of individual             make up "scientific
    reason can armor-plate bad ideas against           data" when it suits
    criticism. Finally and obviously, the              them-- and sometimes
    kind of criticism I’m making here can be           they do-- there's very
    turned back itself against critics,                little left that can
    myself included. But that’s sort of the            puncture your defenses.
    point."



--------
[NEXT - ARENA_COMBAT]