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June 2, 2014
November 9, 2018
A version of material
posted to the dailykos as [link]
"Towards a Smarter We":
SOCIAL_EPISTEMOLOGY
Back to "social epistemology", or as Dan Kahan
calls the subject, "cultural cognition":
Kahan has a series of experiments that show that people
do a better job of interpreting numeric results if it's
on a neutral subject, but when it concerns something
where they're already committed to an opinion their biases Or as Ezra Klein puts it:
take over. "Politics Makes Us Stupid"
People with better math skills aren't immune to this
effect-- in fact, Kahan says they seem worse-- and
people with liberal/left opinions don't show any real
immunity either.
(April 28, 2014)
Conservatives *love* Kahan...
You see? Both sides do it!
(So we don't have to stop.) (One suspects that
they're uncomfortably
aware they're well on
The liberal/left on the their way to being the
otherhand, feels party of crazy and
uncomfortable with Kahan's stupid.)
results.
In recent years, the Does the left have anything
left's self-image has at all equivalent to the
been that they are the of birthers and benghazi?
"reality-based
community", and the Prominent deranged beliefs
right is the province that are played-up to and
of lies and delusions. promoted by Congress?
Certainly Krugman feels that way, and he objected
that Kahan's results contradicted his "lived
experience", and asked the question where is the
left's equivalent of climate change denial?
A number of us objected that there really are
some cases that are close to level of climate
change denial, examples where the left prefers Interestingly, it's not
to argue against the consensus of expert so clear that the
opinion: GM food, nuclear power, and so on. anti-vaccination crowd
is a good example--
Krugman then went off and wrote a pro-solar Kahan has data showing
column for the NYT, which was fine, but has it's not a solely
it's weak points-- it's evidently true left-wing phenomena.
that solar power has had some encouraging
progress, but Krugman's apparent presumption
is that it's doing so well the nuclear power
debate is now moot, and that, shall we say,
has yet to be established.
But getting into the details of the nuclear debate
should probably wait for another day, and in any
case, upon reflection, I think there are other
examples of right-wing craziness that do a better
job of demonstrating the left-right asymmetry
Krugman pointed to: birthers and benghazi-ists
aren't just the right-wing fringe, they're pandered
to by members of Congress. I would suggest that
it's difficult to find left-wing insanity that's
both quite so obvious and yet still influential.
Kahan himself thought Krugman's reaction
was extremely funny, a clear example of
denial-in-action. Kahan argues it's a
matter of *how* you get the answer, not
whether the answer happens to be right.
This is interesting, but not entirely As Kahan continued to write about
satisfying: if the left has been calling this stuff he got increasingly
multiple different issues correctly, and ill-tempered, e.g. calling
if it kept it up for years, it would seem Krugman an illiberal asshole
peculiar to insist that this might just be for the crime of not agreeing
luck. precisely with Kahan.
Ezra Klein stepped in again, taking Krugman's
side in this against Kahan: and while I think
I'm largely in sympathy with the direction
Klein went, I think he was a little clumsy
about it. This is the way I'd put it:
Kahan's work (in this case) comes (April 8, 2014)
from individuals tested in isolation
from each other, but the collective But where individuals have
intelligence of groups of people is limitations, we try to set-up social
a different case entirely. structures that are stronger than the
individuals that make them up: it
For example, as most of us are aware could be true that individuals in both
at this point, scientific training factions have the same flaws, but if
does not turn human beings into one faction as a whole is better at
perfectly objective, unbiased correcting for individual flaws, then
reasoning machines, and yet the one might very well be better than the
scientific enterprise taken as a other.
whole does a good job on converging
on the truth over time. If we're stuck with tribalism,
then picking the right tribe
That's the existence proof that to identify with is critical.
social groups can be smarter than
individuals-- and it raises the
question of what sorts of social
institutions we might create that
can increase our collective
intelligence.
And it's at least possible that the left is already
near there, with checks on internal craziness that
function just a little better than those on the right.
And indeed, at the end of Ezra Klein's
piece, he goes off into a demographic
analysis, trying to make it plausible
that one "party" may reason differently Krugman, a few days later,
when taken as a whole. mentions that the right
doesn't just have crazies,
He presents evidence supporting the it has well-funded crazies...
claim that Democrats think differently
than Republicans... A different
knave/fool
Krugman's "lived experience" may ratio?
yet turn out to be consistent
with Kahan's laboratory data. But then, as I repeatedly
try to point out to lefties,
financial bias isn't the
only source of problems...
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