Kathryn Schulz has pounced on a gap in the market, and in popular perception, and constructed a thesis about the importance of error woven together with stories advertised as Malcolm Gladwell style by one review. Not quite, according to this reviewer, but a decent effort. Throughout, the author presents the offering as analysis rather than self-help, though she attempts valiantly to tease out unifying inferences from error studies, which is a vast field of academic literature, and she concentrates on how wrongness feels, how it arises, and what can (and should not) be done with it.
Being wrong feels bad. That’s why we associate it with evil—the reverse of righteousness if you like. And that’s also why institutions are set up with the ideal of eradicating error (such as the scientific method). But first we need to get to know what wrongness is. Unfortunately there is no unifying definition—not deviation from external reality, not internal upheaval in what we believe, not variance in whether rhubarb or apple pie is better. So Schulz’s goal is, instead a “practical, intimate acquaintance, such as springs from a long companionship” with wrongology. And a key possession for this is perpetual doubt, or skepticism, which requires the ongoing embrace of, and actually a quest for error lasting a lifetime.
We don’t know anything really. Well, Descartes probably managed to settle that we do know that we think; hence cogito, ergo sum. But beyond that pretty much everything is understanding by analogy, extrapolation and inductive reasoning. So why bother? Well putting aside the advantages of everyday functioning, a rather important reason is we cannot help it. Just as we are born with a sex-drive, springing from the evolution-honed will to reproduce, we also have a theory-drive (your reviewer found this idea delicious)—understanding the world is so crucial to survival that there is a natural instinct to generate a surplus of explanations and predictions. More than strictly necessary in most of our cases but hey—it feels good. It’s even automatic and involuntary (did you know that women theorise about seven times every minute?). It tends to careen into consciousness when something goes wrong, and belief formation is disconfirmed. Otherwise, we are apparently more adept at constructing models of the world than we are at realizing we are doing it—that’s naïve realism. And when we do, we no doubt think we are better than average.
This is OK. Inductive reasoning is a system that outcompetes others even though it requires the prospect of error. Believing something on limited information, and standing on the shoulders of others, is how we err, but how we advance. And almost all of the time it works. When it doesn’t, the experience ranges from despair (the collapse of cherished ideas) to pleasure (optical illusions). But also enlightenment is there for the taking. Believing things because others do has a ratchet effect—we form beliefs on the basis of communities, but then also form communities on the basis of beliefs. Frequent error and its embrace is the only check on the unhelpful polarization this otherwise implies. Denial rushes to the aid of the err-ee first (and this normally has evolutionary benefits too, which is why it is there), but occasionally acceptance can displace it (the transformation of one CP Ellis out of the KKK is a heartwarming example, the case of Penny Beerntsen who helped send an innocent man to prison for 18 years on a rape conviction is troubling but very elucidating)
Some useful illustrations of how wrong people can be—predictions, memory, interpretations—are nicely told. Early explores John Ross failed to find a navigable passage around North America because of an optical illusion that blocked Lancaster Sound with mirage mountains (this was later revealed). William Miller predicted the Rapture in 1843 and gave his followers a sizeable job of work adjusting their beliefs without having to abandon them (which many did). And closer to home, our cherished memories turn out to be mostly fictional in respect of their details (such as, we “know” we were at a baseball game when we lost our first tooth, except when fact-checking decades later shows up that it occurred out of season), as do most of our other ones—eyewitnesses get between 25% and 80% of their observations incorrect, yet eyewitness testimony regularly carries the day in judicial prosecution. There does not seem to be a relationship between “how wrong” and the propensity to accept though. Similarly there is none between the extent of self-examination to be right and the height of the stakes—or rather—those are illogically negatively correlated (think WMD in Iraq versus where your car keys are). Which doesn’t sound reassuring. Being wrong reminds us of our separation from everything else in the world. Defoe’s “Robinson Crusoe” is—per Descartes—the only real story there is, and the island in the story is aptly named Despair. The mind-body problem is more like a mind-everything problem, and that feels lonely and desperate. More if the consequences are graver, or if the discovery of mistakes places us a very long distance away.
What to do? According to Schulz it is learning to exit the (everybody’s) comfort zone of an inductive-happy mind and embrace the possibility of error—hackneyed advice, she admits but a truism that corniness can’t kill. Democratic power-sharing and justice by public reason are large scale examples of institutions built around the embrace of error. This does not prevent abundant desire to circumvent them of course, nor prevent them going astray—an example of that being highly democratic Switzerland withholding female suffrage until 1971 (and Schulz applies interesting cognitive analysis to this). Indeed via the author’s paradox of error, we need developed formalities for challenging our beliefs precisely because our hearts are bad at it. Schulz would like to have people embrace error as art—get lost on the island of Despair but re-name it Hope, or even Dreams, which we know are wrong—not reality—but generally welcome and enjoy. And not much more than that. This reviewer was maybe hoping for a broader positive set of conclusions than she got, that would enable her to tie up this book in a review more neatly. But that’s probably her inbuilt desire to know a correct theory. So she will let that hope dissipate.
Being wrong feels bad. That’s why we associate it with evil—the reverse of righteousness if you like. And that’s also why institutions are set up with the ideal of eradicating error (such as the scientific method). But first we need to get to know what wrongness is. Unfortunately there is no unifying definition—not deviation from external reality, not internal upheaval in what we believe, not variance in whether rhubarb or apple pie is better. So Schulz’s goal is, instead a “practical, intimate acquaintance, such as springs from a long companionship” with wrongology. And a key possession for this is perpetual doubt, or skepticism, which requires the ongoing embrace of, and actually a quest for error lasting a lifetime.
We don’t know anything really. Well, Descartes probably managed to settle that we do know that we think; hence cogito, ergo sum. But beyond that pretty much everything is understanding by analogy, extrapolation and inductive reasoning. So why bother? Well putting aside the advantages of everyday functioning, a rather important reason is we cannot help it. Just as we are born with a sex-drive, springing from the evolution-honed will to reproduce, we also have a theory-drive (your reviewer found this idea delicious)—understanding the world is so crucial to survival that there is a natural instinct to generate a surplus of explanations and predictions. More than strictly necessary in most of our cases but hey—it feels good. It’s even automatic and involuntary (did you know that women theorise about seven times every minute?). It tends to careen into consciousness when something goes wrong, and belief formation is disconfirmed. Otherwise, we are apparently more adept at constructing models of the world than we are at realizing we are doing it—that’s naïve realism. And when we do, we no doubt think we are better than average.
This is OK. Inductive reasoning is a system that outcompetes others even though it requires the prospect of error. Believing something on limited information, and standing on the shoulders of others, is how we err, but how we advance. And almost all of the time it works. When it doesn’t, the experience ranges from despair (the collapse of cherished ideas) to pleasure (optical illusions). But also enlightenment is there for the taking. Believing things because others do has a ratchet effect—we form beliefs on the basis of communities, but then also form communities on the basis of beliefs. Frequent error and its embrace is the only check on the unhelpful polarization this otherwise implies. Denial rushes to the aid of the err-ee first (and this normally has evolutionary benefits too, which is why it is there), but occasionally acceptance can displace it (the transformation of one CP Ellis out of the KKK is a heartwarming example, the case of Penny Beerntsen who helped send an innocent man to prison for 18 years on a rape conviction is troubling but very elucidating)
Some useful illustrations of how wrong people can be—predictions, memory, interpretations—are nicely told. Early explores John Ross failed to find a navigable passage around North America because of an optical illusion that blocked Lancaster Sound with mirage mountains (this was later revealed). William Miller predicted the Rapture in 1843 and gave his followers a sizeable job of work adjusting their beliefs without having to abandon them (which many did). And closer to home, our cherished memories turn out to be mostly fictional in respect of their details (such as, we “know” we were at a baseball game when we lost our first tooth, except when fact-checking decades later shows up that it occurred out of season), as do most of our other ones—eyewitnesses get between 25% and 80% of their observations incorrect, yet eyewitness testimony regularly carries the day in judicial prosecution. There does not seem to be a relationship between “how wrong” and the propensity to accept though. Similarly there is none between the extent of self-examination to be right and the height of the stakes—or rather—those are illogically negatively correlated (think WMD in Iraq versus where your car keys are). Which doesn’t sound reassuring. Being wrong reminds us of our separation from everything else in the world. Defoe’s “Robinson Crusoe” is—per Descartes—the only real story there is, and the island in the story is aptly named Despair. The mind-body problem is more like a mind-everything problem, and that feels lonely and desperate. More if the consequences are graver, or if the discovery of mistakes places us a very long distance away.
What to do? According to Schulz it is learning to exit the (everybody’s) comfort zone of an inductive-happy mind and embrace the possibility of error—hackneyed advice, she admits but a truism that corniness can’t kill. Democratic power-sharing and justice by public reason are large scale examples of institutions built around the embrace of error. This does not prevent abundant desire to circumvent them of course, nor prevent them going astray—an example of that being highly democratic Switzerland withholding female suffrage until 1971 (and Schulz applies interesting cognitive analysis to this). Indeed via the author’s paradox of error, we need developed formalities for challenging our beliefs precisely because our hearts are bad at it. Schulz would like to have people embrace error as art—get lost on the island of Despair but re-name it Hope, or even Dreams, which we know are wrong—not reality—but generally welcome and enjoy. And not much more than that. This reviewer was maybe hoping for a broader positive set of conclusions than she got, that would enable her to tie up this book in a review more neatly. But that’s probably her inbuilt desire to know a correct theory. So she will let that hope dissipate.
via JREF Forum http://ift.tt/1gZI1FN
Aucun commentaire:
Enregistrer un commentaire