Time to rattle the old cage

Philosophy
1

I re-listened to Pinker’s Big Think, titled, The Ultimate Guide to Rationality. Well, tall order. The first time through, it seemed all over the map, or spectrum, or “the place”. But I heard a theme to it this time, that rationality got us out of the messes we were in but it requires more than merely existing for it to sustain us into a future that is healthy, wealthy, and wise. There are paradoxes, like rationality itself can lead to irrational group thinking.

The talk is an hour and fifteen minutes and my notes on it are 1,300 words, so I’m not sure I’ve accomplished the goal of summarizing it, or making sense of it, or making it a practical guide.

2

Another look at this, which was adapted from a presentation given in 2022. Key points:

Dismissing humans as irrational is not enough.

We evolved to use reason as a way to show how our in-group is superior. There is a perverse rationality to endorsing a belief that gives us status in a group, but it’s irrational to believe that scales up to the whole world.

Our intuitions worked as survival mechanisms long before we discovered better ways to figure out what is true. We see our own stuff as being designed for a purpose and infer the universe has a purpose.

We can’t all be geniuses in every discipline, so we rely on expertise. Political tribalism conflicts with this.

Distal beliefs - deeply held convictions about abstract concepts. These lack direct experience.
Testable beliefs - verifiable through sensory experience and experimentation.

For example, I believe I know why it rains, and can provide data to back it up, but the ability to predict exactly where, when, and how much it rains is well known to be far less than exact. This is not quite as distal as “why bad things happen to good people”, but I have beliefs about that too. Examples of this can seem harmless until you realize that much of the world still holds on to mythological mindsets and either are unfamiliar with scientific methods or outright reject them. We have gained some control over the religious, but myths not of how a nation was formed or how some past hero shaped the world.

In the last year especially, the fringe actions of conspiracy theorists have made it into the halls of power. Conspiracy theories thrive on listing horrific actions of people they don’t like, but they fizzle out if actual investigation is done or police action is requested. Authoritarian rulers, who now include the FBI, use accusations as a tool for control.

This is a right-wing tactic, but the Left may have brought this on by dismissing people who are not able to enter the halls of academia due to a lack of resources, which also implicates academics for not helping them get there. When complex assertions with uncertain conclusions become moral expressions, and beliefs are not allowed to be questioned, mythological thinking disrupts science.

There is a “what can be done” section at the end. Maybe read that first if you want to feel a little better.