Asymmetrical Information

That book has been on the ever-expanding pile in My library of "to be read" books. [sigh] Maybe in the summer when it's 105 outside.

Science and logical thinking are an unnatural act. Evolutionary pressure favored those who identified (sometimes incorrectly) a leopard based on scanty evidence and fled over those who wanted to be sure.

If everyone took the author's words to heart, 95% of the blogosphere would vanish. Except the parts I agree with, of course.

Liberals object because conservatives regularly call them "liberal".

Conservatives object because liberals regularly call them hate-filled, mean-spirited, racist, sexist, homophobic assholes who want to spoil the environment, exploit workers, trample the poor, starve children and kill old people.

Obviously, both sides are equally to blame.

But I thought Pinker was talking about libertarians in that passage?

(Joke.)

I'm a Pinker fan, but I thought he continually pushed his argument too far in Blank Slate and made the book into a real mish mash. To a large extent, he's arguing against a straw man, and I found myself tiring of his polemics less than halfway through.

On the other hand, "How the Mind Works" is a terrific book....

Stan: what about cowards? tree-huggers? faggots? sissies? useful idiots? idiotarians? ninnies? traitors? sinners? hippies?

I've been accused of being a damn dirty hippie who doesn't wash and is always dirty and smell. I've been accused of wanting to molest little children because I am gay or friends with them, which is really the same in the end. I've been told that I'd let rapists run wild on our streets and invite the chinese red menace with open arms because I'm a big doo-doo head. Also: I am not a man, since I've ordered vegetarian. Yeah.

Don't let your own limited experiences stop you from making a point though. Liberals are mean and they pick on you, go cry to my mummy. Meh!

Each side must acknowledge that the other is arguing out of principle, too, and that they both share certain values and disagree only over which to emphasize in cases where they conflict. Finding such common gound is my goal in the discussions to follow.

Hey, yeah! That's it! Perhaps a chat with Saddam or Osama will straighten things out!

Theories such as Pinker's are useful only in a world in which cultural and individual development have progressed to the point at which violence is considered a lesser alternative than peaceful resolution of problems. They assume that every individual or culture is willing to resolve issues through negotiation. The observable fact that this is untrue makes no difference when they are formulating their ideas.

All academics should be forced to spend 5 years living in a tribe in Afghanistan. They would learn that most people do want to settle things amicably but that the small few who do not are the ones that actually define the discussion. They would understand that their artificial intellectual and university culture is provided for them by hard men and women who are willing to fight and die to defeat those who would prefer to see our society wiped from the face of the earth. The would then acknowledge those hard men and women and the value of their contribution by simply including them in their theoretical constructs.

Inquis:
No. They wouldn't.
They are not only wrong, but they are so personally invested in their views that it is literally impossible to change it. They are their views and their views are them.
Besides. Soldiers are icky.

When scientific facts come in they rarely conform exactly to our expectations; if they did, we would not have to do science in the first place. So when facts tip over a sacred cow, people are tempted to suppress the facts and to clamp down on debate because the facts threaten everything they hold sacred.

Worth noting, with respect to some earlier discussions we've had here, that the scientists are also human and capable of falling into this trap if the results don't conform to expectations. That's not to say that there will be supression of information or limitation of debate, but (as events like the reactions to Bjorn Lomborg show) the open-minded layperson should at least keep the possibility on the back burner.

Besides. Soldiers are icky.

LOL.

You are right of course. The part of the excerpted post that I ignored in my little presentation is the part that Pinker actually got right. Sociologists have shown that moral positions are largely immovable and that facts are gathered to support the pre-supposed assumptions regardless of any kind of observable or rational truth. This seems to be an evolutionarily successful behavior. People who flipped their opinions or realities at the drop of a hat didn't hang around long enough to mate very often.

Despite all of that, however, progress is sometimes made and persuasive arguments or confrontation of difficult realities does actually cause some people to change their position and increase their ability to function. We call this "learning" and despite the seemingly immense body of evidence to the contrary it does actually happen once in a while. For example -- I was once a cowardly, tree-hugging, faggotty, sissified, usefully idiotic, idiotarian, ninnified, traitorous, sinner. (I was never a hippy, sorry) until I became a hate-filled, mean-spirited, racist, sexist, homophobic asshole who wants to spoil the environment, exploit workers, trample the poor, starve children and kill old people.

I haven't (yet) read Pinker's text, but perhaps relevenant to the matter at hand is the use of logic as a mechanism for argument. First, let me add the disclaimer that I am a great fan of logic. I'm an aspiring PhD Computer Engineer and logic is the language of the trade. However, logic is of course predicated on axiomatic systems and in the ongoing moral debate between people, often times it seems to me, that little progress is made on either side because of the underlying values/axioms that each party has.

Since we live in a material world (no, I'm *not* a material girl), it should be possible to use science to test the objective reality of many of these axioms (especially those relating to material prosperity). However, in many (if not all) cases the cost of these experiments would be astronomical if they were to be conclusive.

So, until then, the jury is still out while we wait for another untold generations of people to gather data and further the experiment. Except for those that are extremely patient (willing to wait these untold generations), it looks like much of our arguments will still be based heavily on belief.

(In case your wondering, for me, my belief is in humanity and voluntary civil interaction. Yeah...I'm a libertarian.)

My 2 cents. (Convert to your local currency as necessary and adjust for inflation when appropriate.)

Well, you see, this all perfectly validates my unique take on how things should be run . . .

Arnold Kling realized this on his Corante blog, got fed up, and took an extended vacation ;-). As I read the exerpt, I recalled a recent conversation with my Dad about steroids in baseball. He argued that steroids were bad and illegal and that Barry Bonds should be indicted. I had a bit of a moral disagreement with him, and couldn't figure out whether the conclusion about Bonds came from left or right field. I conceded the legal argument. I peppered him with questions and factoids to try to figure out what philosophy guided his moral conclusions. For example, he thought steroids were a shortcut. So I brought up how Mak McGwire used andro so he could recover faster and workout MORE. How is that a shortcut? I asked what he would think of someone who took a couple aspirin before a hard workout to reduce pain while working out, thus getting more out of the workout. Or someone who would consume vast amounts of simple sugars during lengthy aerobic activity like a marathon. Aside from legality, aren't these kinds of activities effectively the same?

Well, all I did was piss him off. So my feeling is that when discussions get heated on one side or another or both, it's not really the subject matter or the facts or principle or any of that. It's all psychology.

-Brad

Hahahaha. The irony of Pinker making this point is unfortunately lost in the excerpt, since the entire rest of "The Blank Slate" is chock full of him questioning the motives of sociologists, educational theorists, and indeed anyone who doesn't agree with his extremist Chomskyan views on innateness. Check out "Mead, Margaret" in the index if you don't believe me.

JS Mill, by the way, took the diametric opposite view; that important questions are best settled between committed partisans of the opposing viewpoints. And I rather think he was right.

Huh, conservatives, liberals?
I thought he was just dissing behaviorism.

(When my brother started learning psychology and heard about extreme behaviorism, he found it hard to believe anyone ever actually held such silly opinions. So I can't blame Pinker.)

Chevalier,

You have pointed out something that I should have addressed. Let's restrict this to comments made be nationally prominent elected representatives in leadership positions (therefore presumed to be more reasonable and less inflammatory) AND endorsed by a majority of the members of the commenter's party. This way we eliminate the fringes and focus on mainstream liberals and mainstream conservatives (or Democrats and Republicans).

Democrats get angry when Republicans call them liberals.

Republicans get angry when Democrats call them mean-spirited, hate-filled, racist, sexist, homophobic, or fascist. They don't like it when they are accused by Democratic LEADERS of wanting to starve children and kill old people. They object to the Democratic LEADERSHIP saying that they send soldiers to die in order to make their friends rich. They are offended by being called evil or incapable of genuine religion. Or wanting to rape the environment, exploit workers and abandon the poor.

Thank you for helping me make the point more precisely. That is, ALL Democrats from the leadership on down accuse Republicans of all manner of despicable evil. Republican leaders only accuse Democrats of being liberals.

Stan wrote:
"Let's restrict this to comments made be nationally prominent elected representatives in leadership positions (therefore presumed to be more reasonable and less inflammatory) AND endorsed by a majority of the members of the commenter's party."

"...Liberals are in my estimation just not bright people. They don't think deeply; they don't comprehend; they don't understand. ... They have a narrow educational base, as opposed to the hard scientists," [House Leader] Dick Armey said.

The problem I had with the Blank Slate was that there was about 40 pages of fairly interesting hard science in it, and 500-odd pages of straw-man fu and armwaving generalizations. I grew anxious for something crunchier, and annoyed at various lacunae in Pinker's text (like, err, the Flynn effect).

Other annoyances were his wagging his finger at those who got upset at Murray & Herrnstein's "Bell Curve", but then invoking Tom Sowell as an authority for that there isn't a genetic racial difference in IQ actually, really. Sowell's an economist, not a cognitive or genetic researcher, FFS. But presumably Sowell had a sufficiently conservative pedigree that, say, Gould, Alan Ryan, or the other critics of Murray & Herrnstein don't have.

My feeling was that Pinker was taking the very recent discoveries possible through MRI imaging and genetic analysis, and extrapolating wildly from them.

Just to check, I asked an MBA classmate, who's also a researcher & lecturer of 10+ years in cognitive science, what he thought of Pinker. He thought he was an annoying oversimplifier as well. It's nice when one's amateur opinion confurs with that of experts.

Stan,

Give it up. Chevalier's right.

You and I missed the 20 or so years in which anyone who had an idea that was out of the box was labeled with a nasty name. Conservatives ruled society and everyone who was different was dissed. The tide has simply turned and Conservatives are now being falsely accused in the same way they dished it out during the earlier part of this century.

Stan, you followed up a hasty generalization with a biased sample (inasmuch as I submit that your justification of its premises is made without any actual proof and the value judgement used in lieu thereof is not self-evident). Neither fallacy demonstrates that all (or even a majority) of "liberals" resent the label and/or refer to conservatives with insulting rhetoric, or that all (or even a majority) of "conservatives" merely refer to "liberals" by such a name, refraining from adding on rhetorical abuses.

On either side of a polarizing debate, we will find a spectrum of people something like this (which, speculatively, would probably fall under a bell curve in terms of populations):

* Extreme partisans who recognize little of either balanced evidence or reason, seeing the debate almost exclusively as the rightness of their own position vs. the wrongness of the other side, and recasting and interpreting all facts in light thereof;

* Moderate partisans who still hold to an inherent wrongness in the other side but make somewhat better use of logic and reason;

* Centrist partisans who believe the other side's wrongness is evidencially positional, not inherent, and can be convinced by the other side's evidence if it becomes strong enough;

* Unconvinced fence-riders who lean to one side but may readily shift to the other based on the basis of even a modestly convincing bit of evidence, reason, or rhetoric.

When extreme partisans are present in one's own camp, they are less likely to be heard inasmuch as they generally speak at least partially to one's own positions and prejudices, even if one disagrees with their approach; and they are generally not large in number. So they are easily dismissed as not being representative of the camp. But on the other hand, from whom is a centrist or moderate partisan on the other side going to hear the loudest and most virulent criticism? Most likely, the extreme partisans; they have the greatest ideological interest in succeeding.

So, I posit there is a danger in trying to make assertions like those stated earlier: that the net effect of the above, for centrists and moderates on either side, is to make one's own side appear to be dominated by a broad range of reasonable people, while the other side is characterized by its loudest and most abusive members.

And it may be that at any point in time, one side is likely to have a greater quantity of extreme partisans -- or at least a quantity engaging in a more aggressive open-mouth policy. Indeed, idologues on the losing side of an argument would be a recipe for exactly that scenario. But even that doesn't mean that one or the other side keeps, or has kept, its flowers white on the matter.

Is Bill Clinton an extreme partisan? Because he said that Republicans are racist and a large number of other Dems have joined him in that slander over the years. I'm waiting for an example of a Republican president labeling all Democrats with something as vicious as "racist".

Democratic members of the House and Senate in leadership positions made the "starve children, kill old people" charge. Find me GOP Congressional leaders saying anything as ugly.

A large number of Dem leaders have accused Bush of waging war (sending soldiers to die) to enrich his oil friends. This is as vicious as it gets. I await an example of GOP leadership making a slur against Democrats which is close.

I could go on and on. These are people who are presidential contenders and Congressional leaders. Are they extremists?

Is Bill Clinton an extreme partisan? Because he said that Republicans are racist and a large number of other Dems have joined him in that slander over the years. I'm waiting for an example of a Republican president labeling all Democrats with something as vicious as "racist".

Democratic members of the House and Senate in leadership positions made the "starve children, kill old people" charge. Find me GOP Congressional leaders saying anything as ugly.

A large number of Dem leaders have accused Bush of waging war (sending soldiers to die) to enrich his oil friends. This is as vicious as it gets. I await an example of GOP leadership making a slur against Democrats which is close.

I could go on and on. These are people who are presidential contenders and Congressional leaders. Are they extremists?

Stan, telling the truth about Republicans hardly qualifies as slander or as vicious.

I said this --

And it may be that at any point in time, one side is likely to have a greater quantity of extreme partisans -- or at least a quantity engaging in a more aggressive open-mouth policy. Indeed, idologues on the losing side of an argument would be a recipe for exactly that scenario.

-- and like clockwork, Orbitron steps up to provide an active example! Thanks for the assist.

Bill Clinton didn't say that Republicans are Racist. He said that Racists are Republicans, which is something entirely different.

It's also a generalization, it would be more correct to say that Racists are more welcome in the Republican party and thus more of them choose be Republican than choose to be Democrat.

You may find this offsensive. But it's true. It's also something that is subject to change. A generation ago, the Democrats made it clear that racists weren't welcome in their house, but there's nothing stopping the republicans from doing the same.

Ball's in your court.

And two generations ago, the racists were all Democrats. The one thing I can say to the credit of the Democratic party in the 1960's and 70's is that they forced Strom Thurmond and his ilk out.

OTOH, which party is now:
Calling for preferential treatment for certain races?
Implying that blacks must have lower abilities, because they need so much more help?
Implying that blacks are so over-sensitive that they can't stand to hear a white person speaking words that sound somewhat like "offensive" words. ("Niggardly", e.g.) Never mind that black rappers can record albums consisting mostly of that and other offensive words...

Clinton and many, many Democrats have said that Republicans are racist. Perhaps you remember the comment by one Congressional leader that the KKK doesn't wear sheets anymore; they wear suits and talk of tax cuts?

Trent Lott lost his position over a minor comment that was perceived to be racist. David Duke was forcefully told that he was not welcome.

Vicious anti-Semites are welcome in the Democratic party. Racist hatemongers such as Al Sharpton are honored and respected. KKK members such as Byrd are not even rebuked when they make racist comments.

The evidence is overwhelming that the party that coddles racial and ethnic hatred is the Democratic party. It is the party that fans the flames of racial division and demands that government discriminate on the basis of race and ethnicity.

The claim that the GOP is about racism is the kind of vicious lie that Democrats spread in their desperate efforts to regain power. The facts clearly demonstrate how false it is. If you listen to Dems, you would have to conclude that all those whites in places like the Dakotas and Wyoming are racists. Minnesota is becoming increasingly Republican. I guess they must be responding to the racist "code words" imbedded in GOP messages.

Coming back to this post after a couple of days I think "I give up."

I don't want to fight or argue with my ideological enemies any more. I just wish we could all live in separate countries.

If that's despair, then that is what I've come to.

"Social psychologists have found that with divisive moral issues, especially those on which liberals and conservatives disagree, all combatants are intuitively certain that they are correct and that their opponents have ugly ulterior motives." -S. Pinker

I was interested in the comments following the Pinker excerpt because I read _The Blank Slate_ this summer and have found it and other Pinker writings to be helpful in my effort to understand what appears to be a swing of the pendelum -- toward increased polarization -- in the last decade or so. I'm inclined to believe that most comments served to confirm his posit, as quoted above. It's human nature to attach morality to our opinions. By doing so, we conveniently diminish our responsibility, and our sense of insecurity.

Inquisit misses the point with his post about chatting with Sadam or Osama. Indeed, if you *read* Pinker, you hardly get the impression that he is a pacifist or utopian. The excerpt is simply a reference to our human tendency toward self-deception, in connection with *ideological* debate. The "_part_ that Pinker actually got right" is, I believe, his whole point.

Kevin Drum and Tom make helpful observations about Pinker's straw man attack, and tendency toward generalization and oversimplification. But as a self-described bleeding heart liberal who is often uncomfortable with with some of the illogical assumptions on which many liberal positions are based, I see value in his readable arguments. While digesting TBS, I found myself pleasantly comfortable with crossing lines of political correctness and reforming some of my opinions and biases.

Admittedly, says Inquisit, "'[L]earning' does actually happen once in a while."

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