The Other Sides

Let’s imagine the conflict known as the Civil War. It had been brewing since before the Constitution was ratified. The issues were marrow deep in American society, so much so that any attempt to address the issue of slavery was, in effect, a deal breaker for the new nation. The South made it abundantly clear that any action on the part of the North to write into the new guiding document the idea that black slaves were somehow deserving of the liberty being claimed for their white owners—and thereby signaling the end of slavery among the Thirteen Colonies—would be met with absolute refusal to play. Had the reformers, exemplified by the likes of Benjamin Franklin, tried to assert any kind of racial equality at the time, the United States would have been stillborn. Instead, they put a time limit into the document—20 years—which forbade the topic from even being discussed in Congress until that later year, at which time, presumably, the issue would come to the floor for some kind of resolution. History shows that every such attempt was met with denunciations by southern members of Congress and often with threats of secession—which by then were illegal. Make no mistake, as some revisionists might have you believe, secession was not an option and everyone who voted to ratify the Constitution knew it. Contrary to popular mythology, the original 13 states locked themselves together permanently. [More . . . ]

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The roots of human difference and conflict

My prejudice has long been that most human conflicts can be traced to base-level differences, minor seeming micro-differences, until they clash at macro levels.   I tried to describe this by reference to an incident in the movie "Apollo 13." Here's another way of expressing this same idea:

We proceed from the working hypothesis that inferential and judgmental errors arise primarily from nonmotivational—perceptual and cognitive—sources. Such errors, we contend, are almost inevitable products of human information-processing strategies. In ordinary social experience, people often look for the wrong data, often see the wrong data, often retain the wrong data, often weight the data improperly, often fail to ask the correct questions of the data, and often make the wrong inferences on the basis of their understanding of the data. With so many errors on the cognitive side, it is often redundant and unparsimonious to look also for motivational errors. We argue that many phenomena generally regarded as motivational (for example, self-serving perceptions and attributions, ethnocentric beliefs, and many types of human conflict), can be understood better as products of relatively passionless information-processing errors than of deep-seated motivational forces.

R. Nisbett and L. Ross Human Inference: Strategies and Shortcomings of Social Judgment, p. 12 (1980). The solution to most social conflict, then, is not fighting wars or even yelling at each other.  It is striving to be smart--working hard to identify those low-level differences.    That is one of the main reasons why I find Jonathan Haidt's ideas so valuable.   Rather than demonize (which we should avoid at all costs), we should work hard to determine why we disagree.  Where is it that our world-views diverge?

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Status on Illinois law prohibiting citizens from recording police

Illinois Republicans voted down a bill that would have allowed people to record public police activities in Illinois. What are they afraid of? The good news:

Even without the legislation, however, the law’s days might be numbered. Two judges, one in Cook County and the other in Crawford County, have declared it unconstitutional in recent months.

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How to tell the difference between Science and Pseudoscience: A presentation by Massimo Pigluicci

Today I attended a lecture by Massimo Pigliucci at Washington University in St. Louis. The title of the talk was "A Fresh Look at the Demarcation Problem and Why it Matters." Pigliucci’s aim was to help us distinguish between real science and pseudoscience. He offered some a few examples up front to set the stage. It is fairly well accepted these days that Freudian psychoanalysis is pseudoscience whereas Einstein's theory of relativity is a prototypical example of legitimate science. Most science falls in between these endpoints. One example of a suspect science is string theory, which Pigliucci characterized as a favorite modern day "whipping boy." Karl Popper had the same objective back in the 1930s, offering his falsifiability approach: a theory should be considered scientific if, and only if, it is falsifiable. Not only did Popper believe that he had provided a method for determining what is truly scientific; he also believed that he had solved David Hume's “problem of induction.” Induction is the process of generalizing from a smaller set to a larger as-yet-unobserved set; the induction problem, according to Hume, was that we cannot rationally justify induction, because this conclusion depends upon the assumption that nature will continue to be uniform. Pigliucci argued that Popper's falsification approach is not sufficient for it distinguishing between pseudoscience and science, because it is “vulnerable to the Duhem-Quine theses.” The problem, according to Pigliucci, is that one can often save a falsifiable hypothesis by tweaking it (as nineteenth century astronomers did when they worked to save Newtonian physics in light of the perturbations of Mercury by positing that there was an as-yet-unseen planet closer to the sun, a planet they named "Vulcan." It would also seem that there is another problem with falsifiability; some nascent fields don't yet have a thick collection of observations with which to work. Imagine that Aristotle announced the theory of general relativity, far before Einstein. It might have been impossible for him to offer a way to falsify his theory back then, but not because there was any problem with the theory itself; it would thus be declared to be not-science. Pigliucci addresses this situation (see below). Throughout his lecture, Pigliucci referred to Larry Laudan's approach to the demarcation problem. Laudan has argued that the demarcation problem is "uninteresting and intractable," urging that we should completely stop using terms like "pseudoscience" and "unscientific." Laudan argues that philosophers have failed to point out necessary and sufficient criteria for distinguishing between pseudoscience and science. He therefore considers the demarcation project doomed. Pigliucci disagrees, pointing out that it is not necessary to find necessary and sufficient criteria for distinguishing between science and pseudoscience. Pigluicci draws upon Wittgenstein's work on family resemblances. Wittgenstein had challenged people to define the word "game" in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. It seems like an easy task, but it is not. Pigliucci refers to this exercise as "humbling." Just because we can't set out the necessary and sufficient conditions doesn't mean we don't know what a "game" is. With regard to many concepts, including "species," and, yes, "science," no boundaries have been drawn, yet we have workable ideas for what these concepts are. Wittgenstein’s observations have been recognized and expanded by modern linguists, including George Lakoff, who has labeled such concepts as “radial categories,” indicating that prototypes serve as the most typical instances of such categories. [More . . . ]

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