Kathryn Schulz Discusses the Possibility of Being Wrong at TED

It's difficult to imagine that I, at this very moment, am wrong about anything. Yet we all know, in retrospect that we were often wrong about many things. But it never felt like it at the moment. At TED, Kathryn Schulz discusses the dangers and opportunities of looking more closely at these moments.

Most of us do everything we can to avoid thinking about being wrong, or at least to avoid thinking about the possibility that we ourselves are wrong. We get it in the abstract. We all know everybody in this room makes mistakes. The human species, in general, is fallible -- okay fine.

But when it comes down to me, right now, to all the beliefs I hold, here in the present tense, suddenly all of this abstract appreciation of fallibility goes out the window -- and I can't actually think of anything I'm wrong about.

And the thing is, the present tense is where we live. We go to meetings in the present tense; we go on family vacations in the present tense; we go to the polls and vote in the present tense. So effectively, we all kind of wind up traveling through life, trapped in this little bubble of feeling very right about everything.

I think this is a problem. I think it's a problem for each of us as individuals, in our personal and professional lives, and I think it's a problem for all of us collectively as a culture. So what I want to do today is, first of all, talk about why we get stuck inside this feeling of being right. And second, why it's such a problem. And finally, I want to convince you that it is possible to step outside of that feeling and that if you can do so, it is the single greatest moral, intellectual and creative leap you can make.

So this is one reason, a structural reason, why we get stuck inside this feeling of rightness. I call this error blindness. Most of the time, we don't have any kind of internal cue to let us know that we're wrong about something, until it's too late . . .

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Axiomatic Civic Responsibility

I’m looking at the “protesters” in Michigan and ruminating on the nature of civil disobedience versus civic aphasia. By that latter term I mean a condition wherein a blank space exists within the psyché where one would expect an appropriate recognition of responsible behavior ought to live.  A condition which seems to allow certain people to feel empowered to simply ignore—or fail to recognize—the point at which a reflexive rejection of authority should yield to a recognition of community responsibility.  That moment when the impulse to challenge, dismiss, or simply ignore what one is being told enlarges to the point of defiance and what ordinarily would be a responsible acceptance of correct behavior in the face of a public duty. It could be about anything from recycling to voting regularly to paying taxes to obeying directives meant to protect entire populations.

Fairly basic exercises in logic should suffice to define the difference between legitimate civil disobedience and civic aphasia. Questions like: “Who does this serve?” And if the answer is anything other than the community at large, discussion should occur to determine the next step.  The protesters in Michigan probably asked, if they asked at all, a related question that falls short of useful answer:  “How does this serve me?”  Depending on how much information they have in the first place, the answer to that question will be of limited utility, especially in cases of public health.

Another way to look at the difference is this:  is the action taken to defend privilege or to extend it? And to whom?

One factor involved in the current expression of misplaced disobedience has to do with weighing consequences. The governor of the state issues a lockdown in order to stem the rate of infection, person to person. It will last a limited time. When the emergency is over (and it will be over), what rights have been lost except a presumed right to be free of any restraint on personal whim?

There is no right to be free of inconvenience.  At best, we have a right to try to avoid it, diminish it, work around it.  Certainly be angry at it.  But there is no law, no agency, no institution that can enforce a freedom from inconvenience.  For one, it could never be made universal.  For another, “inconvenience” is a rather vague definition which is dependent on context.

And then there is the fact that some inconveniences simply have to be accepted and managed.

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Irresolvable Negotiable Differences of our Culture Wars

Marriage/relationship researcher John Gottman has provided us with a stunning statistic:

"69% of relationship conflict is about perpetual problems. All couples have them — these problems are grounded in the fundamental differences that any two people face. They are either fundamental differences in your personalities that repeatedly create conflict, or fundamental differences in your lifestyle needs.In our research, we concluded that instead of solving their perpetual problems, what seems to be important is whether or not a couple can establish a dialogue about them."

Gottman's research reminds me of the our nation's cultural divide; apparently, we can no longer talk with those we perceive to be different. I don't think we differ from each other nearly as much as the mass media suggests. That said, it seems to me that Gottman's suggested strategies for keeping individual relationships happy and functional are relevant to what we need to do on a national level.

We have forgotten how to talk respectfully to one another, avoiding Gottman's "four horsemen," criticism, contempt, stonewalling, and defensiveness. We have forgotten that being in any functional relationship takes hard work and compromise. I believe that this difficult work has become logarithmically more difficult for two basic reasons: A) tribal ideologies running rampant and B) corporate money gushing through the political system. These two things distort the issues, cause us to create crude cartoons of one another, and permeate the national conversation with fear and loathing of each other.

Barking at each other never brings us any progress. We've seen that for years already. It will take lot of work, soul searching, and looking in the mirror to become more functional on a national level. It will take an act of faith that we can get along if only we worked harder to be civil. This is perhaps too much to ask in an age of widespread magic thinking and diminished attention spans.

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Rethinking the War on Drugs in the Age of Opioid Addicted Europeans

I don't see racism everywhere I look. In my view, most issues are far too complex for "race" to serve as a dominant explanatory factor.

That said, it's rather stunning to see the recent tsunami of news articles (like this one recent news piece from NPR) taking the position that as people of European descent become an ever bigger percentage of drug addicts, throwing their asses in jail is no longer trendy as a first-choice paradigm for addressing the problem. Almost overnight, in this age of opioid addiction, compassionate treatment has become "common sense."

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The Illusory Truth Effect

Why do we believe things that aren't true? Sometimes, it's a matter of the Illusory Truth Effect: Repeated Exposure to (even false) information becomes easy to process in our brains and that easy processing makes it seem true.

Shane Parish discusses this in his latest post, "The Illusory Truth Effect: Why We Believe Fake News, Conspiracy Theories and Propaganda." Here's an excerpt:

This is how the illusory truth effect works: we all have a tendency to believe something is true after being exposed to it multiple times. The more times we’ve heard something, the truer it seems. The effect is so powerful that repetition can persuade us to believe information we know is false in the first place. . . . [W]e’re often far outside our circle of competence, reading about topics we don’t have the expertise in to assess accuracy in any meaningful way. This drip-drip of information pollution is not harmless. Like air pollution, it builds up over time and the more we’re exposed to it, the more likely we are to end up picking up false beliefs which are then hard to shift. For instance, a lot of people believe that crime, especially the violent kind, is on an upward trend year by year—in a 2016 study by Pew Research, 57% of Americans believed crime had worsened since 2008. This despite violent crime having actually fallen by nearly a fifth during that time. This false belief may stem from the fact that violent crime receives a disproportional amount of media coverage, giving it wide and repeated exposure. When people are asked to rate the apparent truthfulness of news stories, they score ones they have read multiple times more truthful than those they haven’t.

It seems like the repeated exposure creates a slippery path that runs that information quickly and easily through the brain. William James used this type of metaphor of a "path" in his discussion of memory (this is from "Talks to Teachers, Chapter 12, Memory):

Reflection will show you that there are peculiarities in your memory which would be quite whimsical and unaccountable if we were forced to regard them as the product of a purely spiritual faculty. Were memory such a faculty, granted to us solely for its practical use, we ought to remember easiest whatever we most needed to remember; and frequency of repetition, recency, and the like, would play no part in the matter. That we should best remember frequent things and recent things, and forget things that are ancient or were experienced only once, could only be regarded as an incomprehensible anomaly on such a view. But if we remember because of our associations, and if these are (as the physiological psychologists believe) due to our organized brain-paths, we easily see how the law of recency and repetition should prevail. Paths frequently and recently ploughed are those that lie most open, those which may be expected most easily to lead to results. The laws of our memory, as we find them, therefore are incidents of our associational constitution; and, when we are emancipated from the flesh, it is conceivable that they may no longer continue to obtain.

In his incredible opus, The Principles of Psychology, Williams James elaborates this metaphor, writing about the path along with a marble that rolls down the path. Each time the marble rolls down, it smoothens the path a bit more, making it a more and more fast and direct path.

The psychological law of association of objects thought of through their previous contiguity in thought or experience would thus be an effect, within the mind, of the physical fact that nerve-currents propagate themselves easiest through those tracts of conduction which have been already most in use. Descartes and Locke hit upon this explanation, which modern science has not yet succeeded in improving. "Custom," says Locke, "settles habits of thinking in the understanding, as well as of determining in the will, and of motions in the body; all which seem to be but trains of motion in the animal spirits[Pg 564] [by this Locke meant identically what we understand by neural processes] which, once set agoing, continue in the same steps they have been used to, which by often treading are worn into a smooth path, and the motion in it becomes easy and, as it were, natural."[476]

This is a good metaphor for the process of memory, whether or not the memory is about something real in the world or whether the thing remembered is fake news."

I like this phrase Shane Parrish uses in his quote: "information pollution." I'm going add that to my vocabulary.

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