Chapter Review: The Environment

Energy efficiency increases

The Environment is chapter 10 of Steven Pinker’s 2018 book, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress. Pinker argues that although there are major barriers to dealing with global warming, there are also sound reasons for conditional optimism that it is still possible to significantly soften its impacts. His arguments point out that to a large extent, the environmental problem is significantly solvable. Implementing solutions will require social and political will, some reasonably expectable technological progress, and reliance on existing technologies. He comments, that “The key idea is that environmental problems, like other problems, are solvable, given the right knowledge. Despite a half-century of panic, humanity is not on an irreversible path to ecological suicide. The fear of resource shortages is misconceived.”

Pinker and others envision a new approach to environmentalism, called by various names such as Ecomodernism or Ecopragmatism. The first idea is that the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics will necessarily lead to some pollution. We cannot escape entropy, and from that point of view, humans have never lived in harmony with the environment. We deforested and made species go extinct as we hunted them for food. A second insight of Ecopragmatism is that industrialization has been good for humanity and costs of pollution must be weighed against benefits such as escape from extreme poverty and public education. A third concept is that the human well-being vs environment tradeoff has been and continues to be significantly affected by technology. As technology develops, benefits such as calories, home heating, electricity, and gas mileage all continue to generate less pollution, including less CO2 emission into the atmosphere.

Pinker points to historical data showing that when a country develops, it prioritizes growth over the environment. Over time, that changes as affluence supports concern for both modernity and the environment: “when they can afford both electricity and clean air, they'll spring for the clean air.” Societies with sufficient affluence tend to be ones that pressure governments and businesses into protecting the environment. Countries such as China and India are now both concerned about their own environmental problems, due to pressure from their people and from the downsides that pollution is inflicting on their economies and their people.

Pinker refers to ecopessimists as advocating unworkable solutions such as giving up on modern things and going back to a simpler life. People simply will not do that and advocating it psychologically damages the idea that something can be done to deal with climate change.

Deforestation decreases

The resource scarcity fallacy: Since the 1970s, dire predictions of resource scarcity and ensing social collapse have all proven false. Pinker comments: “Indeed, most metals and minerals are cheaper today than they were in 1960. . . . . Humanity does not suck resources from the Earth like a straw in a milkshake . . . . . Instead, as the most easily extracted supply of a resource becomes scarcer, its price rises, encouraging people to conserve it, get it at the less accessible deposits, for find cheaper and more plentiful substitutes. . . . . In reality, societies have always abandoned a resource for a better one long before the old one was exhausted.”

Pinker asserts that existing data on oil spills shows another common fallacy, namely that environmental protection is not compatible with economic growth: “. . . . seaborne oil transport has become vastly safer. . . . . even as less oil was spilled, more oil was shipped.”

Oil spill data

Other fallacies are prevalent, e.g., organic farming, “which needs more land to produce a kilogram of food, is neither green nor sustainable.” Pinker acknowledges and then rebuts a tendency of environmentalists to respond to such arguments “with a combination of anger and illogic. . . . . But for many reasons, it’s time to retire the morality play in which modern humans are a vile race of despoilers and plunderers who will hasten the apocalypse unless they undo the Industrial Revolution.”

Climate change skepticism: Deniers and skeptics of global warming are in full retreat, at least among experts, but not among vested interests and political ideologues.

“Anthropogenic climate change is the most vigorously challenged scientific hypothesis in history. By now, all the major challenges . . . . . have been refuted, and even many skeptics have been convinced. A recent survey found that exactly four out of 69,406 authors of peer-reviewed articles in the scientific literature rejected the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming, and that ‘the peer-reviewed literature contains no convincing evidence against the hypothesis.’ Nonetheless, a movement within the American political right, heavily underwritten by fossil fuel interests, has prosecuted a fanatical and mendacious campaign to deny that greenhouse gases are warming the planet. In doing so they have advanced the conspiracy theory that the scientific community is fatally infected with political correctness and ideologically committed to a government takeover of the economy. . . . . I can state that this is nonsense: physical scientists have no such agenda, and the evidence speaks for itself.” (emphasis added)

To be clear, denying warming and accusing the scientists of bad intentions or conspiracy is a fanatical and mendacious campaign of pure lies and nonsense by people who know better and self-delusion by people who don't.

Dematerialization: Progress in technology is causing dematerialization of all kinds of formerly material consumer goods. The digital revolution replaces material things with bits. For example, smart cell phones replace land lines, answering machines, phone books, cameras, street maps and other formerly physical things. Social media leads many young people to show and describe their experiences and preferences, e.g., music, travel and brand of beer, instead of showing pictures of cars and clothes. Dematerialization is changing criteria of social status. These trends reduce adverse impacts on the environment.

Psychological barriers: A number of psychological barriers must be acknowledged and dealt with. Research strongly suggests that people are more likely to accept the reality of global warming if the problem is presented properly: “people are likelier to accept the fact of global warming when they are told that the problem is solvable by innovations in policy and technology than when they are given dire warnings about how awful it will be.”

Other barriers include (1) a cognitive bias that leads people to ignore thinking in terms of the proper scale of the problem, and (2) a misplaced sense of morality that really is not particularly moral. Most people are poor at seeing global warming in terms of the scale of what needs to be done. The scale we are dealing with is tens of billions of tons of CO2 per year. When people propose sacrifices might feel morally good to propose, and maybe even live up to, but are trivial in terms of dealing with the problem, e.g., don't fly on airplanes or buy jewelry or pottery because those things are energy intensive. Aviation accounts for 1.5% of CO2 emissions, while jewelry and pottery are much smaller.

The moral problem runs deep. People advocating for environmental protection tend to dehumanize political opposition, “politicians are pigs”, which fosters a punitively aggressive mindset, “make the polluters pay.” Pinker makes the moral issue quite clear: “by conflating profligacy with evil and asceticism with virtue, the moral sense can sanctify pointless displays of sacrifice. . . . . But however virtuous these displays may feel, they are a distraction from the gargantuan challenge facing us. The problem is that carbon emissions are a classic public goods game, also known as a Tragedy of the Commons.”

Pinker notes that to deal with the Tragedy of the Commons, essentially all economists advocate a carbon tax or some analogous scheme. In economic terms, letting pollution go for free externalizes the cost. Imposing a cost incentivises less reliance on carbon energy sources. Unfortunately, a carbon tax is vehemently opposed by conservative political ideologues and the fossil fuel industry. The tax is the basis for nutty, unfounded allegations of deep state conspiracy theories and quack attacks on the expert science community. In a sense, this is another moral issue. Global warming deniers generally see efforts to impose a carbon tax as immoral. People on the other side tend to see not acting, e.g., by imposing a carbon tax, as immoral.

Nuclear power: Pinker argues that another necessary tool has to be an increase in the use of nuclear power. No other existing technology can come close to providing the amount of power needed to deal with the billions of tons of CO2 we generate each year. He notes that reactor design in the US has not been standardized, which drives cost up: “The French have two kinds of reactors and hundreds of kinds of cheese, whereas in the US the figures are reversed.” The US needs to standardize reactor design, or adopt an existing design, and it needs to do so urgently.

The prospect of nuclear power raises unwarranted psychological barriers such as fear of radiation poisoning, images of easily imagined catastrophe, distrust of technology and misplaced fears articulated the many progressive supporters of the traditional Green movement in the 1970s. Pinker argues fears of nuclear power are unwarranted:

“It's often said that with climate change, those who know the most are the most frightened, but with nuclear power those who know the least are the most frightened. . . . . engineers have learned from accidents and near-misses and have progressively squeezed more safety out of nuclear reactors, reducing the risks of accidents and contamination far below those of fossil fuels.”

All in all, the psychological and political barriers to dealing with global warming are high. But given the incredibly high stakes, not trying amounts to playing Russian Roulette (or Climate Casino, as one expert calls the do-nothing attitude) with modern civilization and billions of lives, and maybe, on a very bad day, the existence if the human species itself. Trying to deal with the problem carries some risk, but not trying carries far more risk.

B&B orig: 1/31/19

Chapter Review: The Totalitarian Movement

Hannah Arendt, 1906-1975

The Totalitarian Movement is chapter 11 in Hannah Arendt’s 1951 book, The Origins of Totalitarianism. This chapter focuses on two topics, totalitarian propaganda and totalitarian organization.

1. TOTALITARIAN PROPAGANDA: Arendt argues that propaganda is a tool totalitarian ideology uses to deal with the outside world, not just within the movement itself:

The essential point is that the necessities for propaganda are always dictated by the outside world and that the movements themselves do not actually propagate but indoctrinate. Conversely, indoctrination, inevitably coupled with terror, increases the strength of the movements or the totalitarian government’s isolation and security from outside interference. Propaganda is indeed part and parcel of “psychological warfare”; but terror is more. . . . . Where the rule of terror is brought to perfection, as in concentration camps, propaganda disappears entirely; it was even expressly prohibited in Nazi Germany. Propaganda, in other words, is one, and possibly the most important, instrument of totalitarianism for dealing with the nontotalitarian world; terror, on the other hand, is the very essence of its form of government.

The scientific basis of propaganda: The Nazis learned from how American businesses applied propaganda to market to the public. Those methods were incorporated into totalitarianism propaganda methods. Totalitarian propaganda emphasized the “scientific” basis of its claims in the same way that business marketing propaganda did in the US. That was the way to reach and persuade the masses. Arendt argues:

“Science in the instances of both business publicity and totalitarian propaganda is obviously only a surrogate for power. . . . Totalitarian propaganda raised scientificality to and its technique of making scientific statements in the form of predictions to a height of efficiency of method and absurdity of content because, demagogically speaking, there is hardly a better way to avoid discussion than by releasing an argument from the control of the present and by saying that only the future can reveal its merits.”

The latter assertion is quite insightful. Positing claims in terms of future performance does tend to deflect from flaws in arguments the propagandist does not want people to even think about, much less discuss. That tactic is highly effective, and both politicians and marketers still use it to this day. In the case of politicians, their track record is dismal, just barely better than random guessing and much worse than validated computer algorithms.

The infallible leader: Arendt argues that totalitarian leaders cannot admit any error because they are the center of everything. The difference between a totalitarian leader and everyone else is that the leader has much more power and an unfettered willingness to use it to make his mistakes go away, even if the consequences are mass murder and mass destruction:

The chief qualification of a mass leader has become unending infallibility; he can never admit an error. . . . . Mass leaders in power have one concern which overrules all utilitarian considerations: to make their predictions come true. The Nazis did not hesitate to use, at the end of the war, the concentrated force of their still intact organization to bring about as complete a destruction of Germany as possible, in order to make their prediction that the German people would be ruined in case of defeat.

She argues that the irrational infallible leader illusion rested on (1) appeal to always correct forces of history and nature that will always manifest themselves, even in the face of short-term defeat and ruin, and (2) the leader was literally a powerful social institution where he was the only person who knew what he was doing. Sociology reveals that social institutions are powerful shapers of perceptions of reality, morals and even thinking: “society not only controls our movements, but shapes our identity, our thought, and our emotions.” Social institutions are therefore, to a significant extent, “structures of our own consciousness.”

Leader infallibility arises once the totalitarian is in power and cannot be challenged any longer:

The method, like other totalitarian propaganda methods, is foolproof only after the movements have seized power. Then all debate about the truth or falsity of a totalitarian dictator’s prediction is as weird as arguing with a potential murderer about whether his future victim is dead or alive . . . . . Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such. . . . . What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system [social institution] of which they are presumably part.

Which contemporary politicians do ‘extreme contempt for facts’ remind us of?[1]

2. TOTALITARIAN ORGANIZATION: Arendt argues that the forms of a totalitarian organization were “completely new”, which is an extremely rare thing in politics where almost nothing is new. The origins of new forms of political organization are unclear, but Hitler was an early proponent and maybe he was the source or one of the sources of the social and political power that this new organizational concept could deliver to the leader.

The most strikingly new organizational device of the movements in their prepower stage is the creation of front organizations, the distinction drawn between party members and sympathizers. . . . . We do not know who first decided to organize fellow travelers into front organizations, who first saw in vaguely sympathizing masses . . . . . a decisive force in itself. . . . . Hitler was the first to say each movement should divide the masses which have been won through propaganda into two categories, sympathizers and members. . . . . Hitler, consequently, was the first to devise a conscious policy of constantly enlarging the ranks of sympathizers while at the same time keeping the number of party members strictly limited. . . . . The ingeniousness of this device during the movements’ struggle for power is that the front organizations not only isolate the members but offer them a semblance of outside normalcy which wards off the true impact of true reality more effectively than mere indoctrination. . . . . The world at large, on the other side, usually gets its first glimpse of a totalitarian movement through its front organizations. The sympathizers, who are to all appearances still innocuous fellow citizens in a nontotalitarian society, can hardly be called fanatics; through them the movements make their fantastic lies more generally acceptable, can spread their propaganda in milder, more respectable forms until the whole atmosphere is poisoned with totalitarian elements which are hardly recognizable as such but appear to be normal political reactions or opinions.

Not only were sympathizers organized into groups or societies to look like parts of regular societies, such as teachers for Hitler, lawyers for Hitler, policemen for Hitler, coal miners for Hitler, and if it existed, sociologists for Hitler (a group that would have later been exterminated because sociology is by its nature completely inimical to totalitarianism because its function is to see through social lies), these groups served to continually isolate party members from reality. In other words, the fellow travelers in front organizations worked on two fronts to serve two different goals. One was to make the pre-power movements look normal to the outside world. The other was to insulate party members from the real world, freeing them to form increasingly radical and murderous groups of party members based in part on their increasing levels of detachment from reality and all moral concerns.

Arendt commented: “They [party members] are so well protected against the reality of the nontotalitarian world that they constantly underestimate the tremendous risks of totalitarian politics.”

Digression – A personal speculation: At this point, one can see what Senator Joseph McCarthy was so fearful of in the 1950s. He had a point. His tactics were illegal, immoral and ineffective, but at least there was a solid reason for fear and an instinctive response in self-defense. In view of Arendt’s version of history, it would seem that one could argue what Russia and China are doing today in their relentless attacks on democracy and personal freedoms is vaguely akin to what Hitler and Stalin did in their time. Societies and communications technology would seem to make the route to power that worked for Hitler and Stalin probably not possible today.

So instead, enemies of democracy and freedom turn to the most effective modern propaganda techniques possible, social media and propaganda or fake ‘news’ sources. Building front organizations may not be so effective today due to, e.g., the ease of fact checking. That said, one must look very, very carefully at groups who support President Trump. Although Trump does not have the intellect or work ethic to be a totalitarian, but he very much would like to be an authoritarian dictator. The parallels between Trump’s tactics and immorality and those of Hitler and Stalin are not trivial.

Rotting the status quo from within – duplication of social institutions: In the critical, short period of time when social institutions and norms finally fall to the totalitarian, front groups served as pre-existing institutions to replace the existing groups and institutions. Professional organizations were quickly replaced by the front groups. Front groups of lawyers, doctors, and most everyone else were ready to step in and act as if nothing had changed, when in fact everything had changed.

The important factor for the movements is that, even before they seize power, they give the impression that all elements of society are embodied in their ranks. (The ultimate goal of Nazi propaganda was to organize the whole German people as sympathizers.) . . . . . This technique of duplication, certainly useless for the direct overthrow of government, proved extremely fruitful in the work of undermining actively existing institutions and in the “decomposition of the status quo”, which totalitarian organizations invariably prefer to an open show of force. . . . . The practical value of the fake organizations came to light when the Nazis seized power and were ready at once to destroy the existing teachers’ organizations, with another teachers’ organization, the existing lawyers’ clubs with a Nazi-sponsored lawyers’ club, etc. They could change overnight the whole structure of German society – and not just political life – precisely because they had prepared its exact counterpart within its own ranks.

Footnote: 1. President Trump, Russia’s Putin, China’s Xi, and others.

B&B orig: 2/3/19

Chapter Review: Democracy

“. . . . the typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field. He argues and analyzes in a way which he would readily recognize as infantile within the sphere of his real interests. . . . cherished ideas and judgments we bring to politics are stereotypes and simplifications with little room for adjustment as the facts change. . . . . the real environment is altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance. We are not equipped to deal with so much subtlety, so much variety, so many permutations and combinations. Although we have to act in that environment, we have to reconstruct it on a simpler model before we can manage it.” Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels, Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government, 2016

This discussion reviews chapter 14 of Steven Pinker's 2018 book, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress. Pinker is a professor of psychology at Harvard. Getting right to it, Pinker argues:

Since the first governments first appeared about 5,000 years ago, humanity has tried to steer a course between the violence of anarchy and the violence of tyranny. In the absence of a government or powerful neighbors, tribal peoples tend to fall into cycles of raiding and feuding, with death rates exceeding those of modern societies, even including their most violent eras.

Pinker cites the necrometician (corpse counter) Matthew White as arguing: “Chaos is deadlier than tyranny. More of these multicides result from the breakdown of authority rather than the exercise of authority.”

White claims the corpse count is millions for anarchy compared to hundreds of thousands for murdering tyrants. That seems to ignore the tens of millions that the totalitarians Stalin and Hitler amassed. As Hannah Arendt argues, mass murdering dictators are not the same thing as mega-murdering totalitarians. Presumably, White accounted for that corpse count.

Continuing, Pinker then argues:

One can think of democracy as a form of government that threads the needle, exerting just enough force to prevent people from preying on each other without preying on the people itself. A good democratic government allows people to pursue their lives in safety, protected from the violence of anarchy, and in freedom, protected from the violence of tyranny. But it's not the only reason: democracies have higher rates of economic growth, fewer wars and genocides, healthier and better-educated citizens, and virtually no famines.

Citing various politicians and others, Pinker pointed out that prospects for democracy have appeared bleak in recent decades. One recent wave of pessimism was in the 1970's, which was immediately followed by a new wave of countries moving to democracy, including Greece, Spain, Portugal, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Taiwan, South Korea, and Indonesia.

Critics of democracy argued that democratization is “a conceit of Westerners projecting their tastes onto the rest of the world, whereas authoritarianism seemed to suit most of humanity just fine.” Pinker responds: “Could recent history really imply that people are happy to be brutalized by their governments? Most obviously, in a non-democratic country, how could you tell? The pent-up demand for democracy might be enormous, but no one dares express it lest they be jailed or shot.”

Pinker has a good point there. And, he makes two more good points based on cognitive biology:

The other is the headline fallacy: crackdowns make the headlines more often than liberalizations. Availability bias could make us forget about all the countries that became democratic bit by bit. As always, the only way to know which way the world is going is to quantify. (emphasis added)

Just to flog this live horse once more, rely on facts, do not reject, deny or distort them, whether you like it or not. That requires moral courage. Political, economic, religious and philosophical ideologues generally do not have enough of it to deal with reality for what it is.

Continuing further,

Why has the tide of democratization repeatedly exceeded expectations? . . . . . The awe is reinforced by a civics class idealization of democracy in which an informed populace deliberates about the common good and carefully selects leaders who carry out their preference. By that standard, the number of democracies is zero in the past, zero in the present and almost certainly zero in the future. Political scientists are repeatedly astonished by the shallowness and incoherence of people's beliefs, and by the tenuous connections of their preferences to their votes and to the behavior of their representatives. Most voters are ignorant not of just current policy options but of basic facts . . . . . Their opinions flip depending on how a question is worded . . . . . When they do formulate a preference, they commonly vote for a candidate with the opposite one. . . . . Nor does voting even provide much of a feedback signal about a government's performance. Voters punish incumbents for recent events over which they have dubious control, such as macroeconomic swings and terrorist strikes, or no control at all, such as droughts, floods, even shark attacks [and bad outcomes of local football games].

Pinker points out that 20th century philosopher Karl Popper astutely observed that democracy is not so much an answer to the question of who should rule, but more a solution of how to “dismiss bad leadership without bloodshed.”

Pinker argues that the freedom to complain is central to democracy: “The freedom to complain rests on an assurance that the government won't punish or silence the complainer. The front line in democratization, then, is constraining the government from abusing its monopoly on force to brutalize its uppity citizens.”

Uppity citizens indeed.

Pinker argues that it is easy to be deceived about a lack of progress for democracy:

But progress has a way of covering its tracks. As our moral standards rise over the years, we have become alert to harms that would have gone unnoticed in the past. . . . . the information paradox: as human rights watchdogs admirably look harder for abuse, look in more places for abuse, and classify more acts as abuse, they find more of it . . . . but if we don't compensate for their keener powers of detection, we can be misled into thinking there is more abuse to detect.

Enlightenment Now published in February of 2018. Pinker was aware of Trump, and the rise of authoritarian movements in Europe and elsewhere. The anti-democracy momentum associated with those forces has not abated and instead appears to still be gaining strength. One can begin to see in aggregated poll data that the hit Trump took to his popularity from the recent government shutdown is just beginning to fade.

Is Pinker too optimistic, naïve or otherwise off base in his vision of the future of democracy and the rule of law, as implied by its inherent constraints against silencing its complaining uppity citizens? President Trump has made it clear that he wants to silence a free press that he sees as the enemy of the people.

B&B orig: 2/6/19

Chapter Review: Reason

“So convenient at thing it is to be a rational creature, since it enables us to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to.” Benjamin Franklin, polymath, diplomat, humorist, Founding Father, 1706-1790

“Those who are governed by reason desire nothing for themselves which they do not also desire for the rest of mankind.” Baruch Spinoza, Dutch philosopher, 1632-1677

This discussion reviews Reason, which is chapter 21 of Steven Pinker's 2018 book, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress. Pinker is a professor of psychology at Harvard. In this chapter, he defends the use of reason as a necessary component if, among other things, one thinks it is possible that politics maybe can be more rational than it is now.

Pinker paints a picture of reason, defined roughly as evidence- and logic-based thinking, as (i) having been critical to the development of modern civilization, and (ii) in need of defense despite its obvious role in improving nearly all aspects of life for centuries. He goes on to address one area of life where reason has been significantly derailed in a “flaming exception” to progress, tribal politics, and how the problem might be ameliorated. He argues that it is possible to significantly defuse the irrationality of tribal politics in part by greater reliance on modern teaching methods in debiasing and critical thinking, and in part how modern media and social institutions can deal with politics in a less political and thus more rational way.

Digression - correcting an error: Pinker contradicts an assertion made here on several occasions, specifically that some human minds can predict events 18-30 months in the future. That is wrong. Some people can predict events up to about 5 years into the future before their predictions fade into statistical insignificance. Accuracy seems to be highest for predictions up to one year out, and then they fade in accuracy.[1]

Attacking anti-rationalism: Pinker goes directly after people who argue that rationalism is “a pretext to exert power” that “all statements are trapped in a web of self-reference and collapse into paradox”, or that “it is futile to even try to make the world a more rational place.” He logically points out that “all these positions have a fatal flaw: they refute themselves. The deny that there can be a reason for those very positions.” His logic is simple: all of those arguments depend on a rational reason to believe any of their arguments, and as soon as “their defenders open their mouths to begin their defense, they have lost the argument, because in that very act they are tacitly committed to persuasion – to adducing reasons for which they are about to argue, which, they insist, ought to be accepted by their listeners according to standards of rationality that both accept.”

On this point, Pinker cites philosopher Thomas Nagel as arguing that “subjectivity and relativism regarding logic and reality are incoherent, because ‘one can’t criticize something with nothing’.” Pinker goes on to point out that even unhinged conspiracy theorists and spewers of alternative facts defend their indefensible beliefs and falsehoods with “Why should I believe you?” or “Prove it.” They never respond to reasonable questions or disbelief with “That’s right, there’s no reason to believe me.” or “Yes, I’m lying right now.” Everyone relies on reason, not as a matter of faith in reason, but as a matter of its unavoidable use.

We’re not always rational: Pinker next turns to an apparent reason to distrust reason, namely cognitive psychology, which is subject matter that informs and drives much of B&B’s ideology and advocacy. Among others, he cites Daniel Khaneman’s 2011 book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, with its now famous description of System 1, our fast, powerful and tireless unconsciousness, and System 2, our slow, weak and easily fatigued consciousness. Throughout his book, Pinker raises such concerns about various biases such as the availability heuristic, stereotyping, non-Bayesian thinking, and motivated reasoning, that sometimes lead to (1) false perceptions of reality, facts and truth, and/or (2) flawed reasoning that is applied to our perceptions, true or false:

But as important as these discoveries are, it is a mistake to see them as refuting some Enlightenment tenet that humans are rational actors, or as licensing the fatalistic conclusion that we might as well give up on reasoned persuasion and fight demagoguery with demagoguery. To begin with, no Enlightenment thinker ever claimed that humans were consistently rational. . . . . . What they argued was that we ought to be rational, by learning to repress the fallacies and dogmas that so readily seduce us, and that we can be rational, collectively if not individually, by implementing institutions and adhering to norms that constrain our faculties, including free speech, logical analysis, and empirical testing.

Here, Pinker seems to come close to giving up on the individual, and at least sees a possibility of greater rationality in collectivism and social institutions dedicated to rationality and norms that foster it. The norms he mentions are crucial. The rebuttal from the alternative fact and bogus logic populist and conservative crowd is obvious. It goes something like this: ‘I’ve got my free speech rights, you can’t touch them, and besides, I’m the truth teller and you are the evil liar and corrupter of all that is good, civilized and American.’ Pinker may very well be right that rationality will probably require social institutions and collective actions that render this irrational social- and self-identity no longer worth defending. That is a task for social institutions to play a major role in.

Pinker points to an aspect of evolutionary biology we have to accept and deal with, namely the deep human craving for reasons and explanations of the world. But there’s a catch:

Since the world is the way it is regardless of what people believe about it, there is a strong selection pressure for an ability to develop explanations that are true. Reasoning thus has deep evolutionary roots. . . . . But reality is a mighty selection pressure, so a species that lives by ideas must have evolved with an ability to prefer correct ones. The challenge for us today is to design an informational environment in which that ability that prevails over the ones that leads us into folly.

He makes good points here. All the available research points to a powerful innate need to explain things, even when there isn’t enough information to do that. Unfortunately, we often form beliefs without enough evidence, and we do it all the time. If this explanation is basically true, it clearly reveals the origin of many false beliefs and the flawed logic that generates them. This phenomenon is rampant in politics.

Symbols of cultural allegiance – social identity is a tough nut to crack: Pinker turns to researcher Dan Kahan (Yale, legal scholar), who generated evidence that people often hold false beliefs do so as a signal of cultural allegiance and who they are. The fact that their beliefs are false is often not important enough to abandon them, even when they know the belief is false. This is a matter of a person showing social identity and, in this case liberal, conservative or libertarian tribal affiliation:

A given belief, depending on how it is framed and who endorses it, can become a touchstone . . . . . sacred value, or oath of allegiance to one of these tribes. As Kahan and his collaborators explain: “The principle reason people disagree about climate change science is not that it has been communicated to them in forms they cannot understand. Rather, it is that positions on climate change convey values – communal concerns versus individual self-reliance; prudent self-abnegation versus the heroic pursuit of reward; humility versus ingenuity; harmony with nature versus mastery over it – all that divide them along cultural lines.”

Pinker points out that in one sense, belief in obviously false ideas and truths is rational in a person’s social context. People intuitively know that their opinions, e.g., on climate change, are not going to affect anything, but if they change from climate science denial to acceptance (or vice versa) they do know that can make an enormous difference in their social standing with the tribe. The mind-flipper on a sacred value can be seen as odd at best and at worst, a traitor to the tribe and ostracized. Pinker observes that “Given these payoffs, endorsing a belief that hasn’t passed muster with science and fact-checking isn’t so irrational after all – at least by the criterion of the immediate effects on the believer.”

It’s hard to argue with that logic. Kahan sees this mess as people playing a role in a giant “Tragedy of the Belief Commons: what’s rational for every individual to believe (based on [self-]esteem) can be irrational for the society as a whole to act upon (based on reality).” Researchers call this self-defense phenomenon “expressive rationality” or “identity-protective cognition.” From this observer’s point of view, this explains a great deal about why it is so very hard, usually impossible, to change minds with facts that run counter to self-identity, self-esteem, and political beliefs, morals and values. For climate change deniers, it is a matter of those human factors, not science, and not science-based logic. Instead, it is a matter of self-preserving logic, with or without bad science to back it up. Of course, that ignores people and businesses in climate science denial mode for the money, and self-aggrandizers and blowhards in it for themselves in way or another.

One quick note for completeness. Having education, much expertise and employing conscious reason does not guarantee rationality. It can lead to more ingenious rationalizations instead of a search for truth. That bias is called motivated reasoning. Hence the quote by Ben Franklin above.

Predicting the future: Pinker discusses at length research that is the empirical basis this observer’s favorite source of hope for mankind, Philip Tetlock (U. Pennsylvania, Annenberg Professor, https://www.sas.upenn.edu/tetlock/bio , book review 1 - https://disqus.com/home/discussion/channel-biopoliticsandbionews/book_review_superforecasting/ , book review 2 - https://disqus.com/home/discussion/channel-biopoliticsandbionews/book_review_expert_political_judgment_30/ ). Tetlock’s research is revolutionary. It revealed that people can learn to become more rational if they want to. Among other things, his finding of superforecasters who have an outstanding intuitive ability to predict future events (1) opened new fronts in warfare among nations, (2) intensified competition among businesses, and, at least for this observer, (3) revealed a major part of a pathway to partially rationalize politics. Pinker sets his discussion up and then leverages it like this:

Though examining data from history and social science is a better way of evaluating our ideas than arguing from the imagination, the acid test of empirical rationality is prediction. Science proceeds by testing the predictions of hypotheses . . . . Unfortunately the epistemological standards of common sense – we should credit the people and ideas that make correct predictions, and discount the ones that don’t – are rarely applied to the intelligentsia and the commentariat [the blithering class?]. Always wrong prognosticators [blowhards?] like Paul Ehrlich continue to be canvassed by the press, . . . . . The consequences can be dire: many military and political debacles arose from misplaced confidence in the predictions of experts . . . . . A track record of prediction also ought to inform our appraisal of intellectual systems, including political ideologies. . . . . A rational society should seek the answers by consulting the world rather than assuming the omniscience of a bloc of opinionators who have coalesced around a creed.

Pinker notes that we continue to hear from blowhards with dismal prediction track records because (1) no one is keeping score, and (2) blowhards are expert at couching their predictions in vagueness and hard to pin down generalities. And, on the rare occasions that a blowhard is shown to have been wrong and called out for it, they superb at rationalizing their failure into insignificance, e.g., “I was almost right”, “I was wrong but for the right reasons”, “I would have been right but for that unexpected incident”, “I will be proven right next year”, “That wasn’t what I predicted, you got it wrong”, and etc. Tetlock’s first book, Expert Political Judgment: How good it is? How can we know? dives deep into the amazing ability of experts to deflect their dismal track records into nothingness. Pinker is absolutely right to pound on the dismal failures that experts have been, and mostly still are. The people and nations who have learned from Tetlock and take his research seriously are building competitive advantages over those who ignore him.

Trump is incompetent at picking personnel, unless you like incompetence: It may be of some interest to readers that made it this far, thanks for that, Tetlock’s books cite two well-known people as examples of stunning, above and beyond the normal standard of expert failure: (a) Larry Kudlow, now President Trump’s Director of the National Economic Council, and (b) Michael Flynn, former high-ranking US intelligence officer and, briefly, Trump’s National Security Advisor. Before they came to power under Trump, Tetlock ripped Kudlow and Flynn to pieces as prime examples of America’s unfettered modern blowhardoisie. Trump certainly knows how to ‘pick the best people’, if by that he means the most incompetent – they are among the best at being the worst, especially Kudlow.

The superforecaster mindset: One final consideration deserves to be mentioned. Exactly who or what are these superforecaster people compared to non-superforecasters? Pinker describes it like this, and quoting Tetlock:

The forecasters who did the worst were the ones with Big Ideas – left-wing or right-wing, optimistic or pessimistic – which they held with an inspiring (but misguided) confidence: “As ideologically diverse as they were, they were united by the fact that their thinking was so ideological. They sought to squeeze complex problems into their preferred cause-effect templates and treated what did not fit as irrelevant distractions. . . . . As a result, they were unusually confident and likelier to declare things ‘impossible’ or ‘certain’. Committed to their conclusions, they were reluctant to change their minds even when their predictions clearly failed. They would tell us, ‘Just wait.’” Indeed, the very traits that put these experts in the public eye made them the worst at prediction. . . . . Tetlock’s superforecasters were: “pragmatic experts who drew on many analytical tools, with the choice hinging on the particular problem they faced. . . . . When thinking, they often shifted mental gears, sprinkling their speech with transition markers such as ‘however’, ‘but’, ‘although’, and ‘on the other hand’. They talked about probabilities, not certainties. And while no one like to say ‘I was wrong’, these experts more readily admitted it and changed their minds.” . . . . . they are humble about particular beliefs, treating them as ‘hypotheses to be tested, not treasures to be guarded. . . . . .They display what the psychologist Johnathan Baron calls “active open-mindedness”. . . . . Even more important that their temperament is their manner of reasoning. Superforecasters are Bayesian, tacitly using the rule . . . . . on how to update one’s degree of credence [confidence] in a proposition in light of new evidence. . . . . Two other traits distinguish superforecasters from pundits and chimpanzees. The superforecasters believe in the wisdom of crowds, laying their hypotheses on the table for others to criticize or amend and pooling their estimates with those of others. And they have strong opinions on chance and contingency in human history as opposed to necessity and fate. . . . . with the most accurate superforecasters expressing the most vehement rejection of fate and acceptance of chance.

This review will be followed by another discussion that focuses mostly on how Pinker sees a way forward toward more rational politics.

Footnote:
1. A personal misconception dispelled and a point about ideology: Pinker contradicts a belief that this reviewer held and expressed several times here at B&B. Specifically, I believed that researcher Philip Tetlock’s data on the human ability to predict future events faded into statistical insignificance at about 18-30 months in the future. Pinker flatly contradicts that. He asserts that the best minds can see future events with statistical significance before they fade at about 5 years in the future:

Once again, there was plenty of dart throwing [referring to the essentially random guessing that characterizes the spew from nearly all experts, talking heads, politicians, partisans, special interests, pundits, and ideological blowhards], but in both tournaments [rigidly controlled tests of people’s ability to predict the future] the couple [Tetlock and his colleague] could pick out “superforecasters” who performed not just better than chimps and pundits, but better than professional intelligence officers with access to classified information, better than prediction markets, and not too far from the theoretical maximum. How can we explain this apparent clairvoyance? (For a year that is – accuracy declines with distance into the future, and it declines to the level of chance around five years out.)(emphasis added)

B&B orig: 2/8/19

Some Thoughts on Political Reasoning and the Rationality and Morality of Politics

Stuff just keeps falling on the trail

Political reasoning (Germaine's definition, v. 1.0): Unconscious and conscious thinking about political issues and policies in view of cognitive and social psychological factors, including perceptions of relevant reality, truths and facts, personal ideology, personal morals, ethics or values, self-identity, social identity, and social institutions and norms the individual identifies with; it can be mostly rational by being reasonably based on significantly or mostly true objective reality, truths and facts and thinking or logic that reasonably flows from objective reality, truths and facts; it can be mostly irrational by being based on significantly or mostly false perceptions of truths and facts and/or significantly or mostly flawed thinking or logic, wherein what is reasonable or not is assessed from the point of view of service to the public interest (as I tried to 'objectively' define the concept)

In his 2018 book, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress, psychologist Steven Pinker discusses some context and suggests some tactics that might help rationalize politics to some extent relative to what it is now. This discussion is based on chapter 21, Reason.

He argues that although humans operate with cognitive and emotional biases that sometimes leads to error, that does not mean that (i) humans are completely irrational, or (ii) there is no point in trying to be more rational in our thinking and discourse. He argues that both ideas are false. Bias and error happens but not all the time because if that were the case, it would be impossible for anyone to say we are subject to bias and error. He argues: “The human brain is capable of reason, given the right circumstances; the problem is to identify those circumstances and put them more firmly in place.”

Fact checking: Pinker asserts that despite a common perception of America being in a ‘post-truth era’, that is false because societies have always been subject to lies, deceit, unsupported conspiracy theories, mass delusions and so forth. He points to the rise of fact checking in response to the rise of Trump as evidence of social progress. Poll data indicates that about 80% of the public is open to the idea of journalists questioning politicians, pundits and special interests about fact accuracy in live interviews. Fact-checking is increasingly popular with the public and complaints are increasing in cases where when fact checking is not made available.

In that regard, Dissident Politics is at or near the leading edge in advocating public refusal to listen to sources with an undeniable track record of chronic lying without real-time or near real-time fact checking. The cognitive power of unchallenged lies is too much to allow it to go unchallenged for any significant period of time. It makes sense to prefer a linguistic tactic called the truth sandwich to blunt the at least some of cognitive power of lies and deceit.

Moral irrationality: Pinker points to steady social progress citing the court case, Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967), a Supreme Court civil rights decision that struck down all state laws banning interracial marriage. He asserts that “moral irrationality” can be outgrown. By casting interracial marriage in terms of being morally irrational, he incorporates conceptions of what is morality rational and what isn't in his conception of social progress. That is an important point because it correctly sees politics as a matter of not just ice-cold facts and logic, but also hot moral values.

The affective (emotional-moral?) tipping point: Pinker argues about rationality and mindset change:

Wherever we get upset about the looniness of public discourse today, we should remind ourselves that people weren't so rational in the past, either.

Persuasion by facts and logic, the m

ost direct strategy, is not always futile. . . . . Feeling their identity threatened, belief holders double down and muster more ammunition to fend off the challenge. But since another part of the human mind keeps a person in touch with reality, as the counterevidence piles up the dissonance can mount until it becomes too much to bear and the opinion topples over, a phenomenon called the affective tipping point.

Pinker goes on to point out that once something becomes ‘public knowledge’ disbelievers begin to hit their personal affective tipping point and change their minds. That is in accord with evidence that Americans who disbelieve human-caused climate change are slowly changing their minds, one at a time. But that sort of mindset change also depends on each person's subjective cost-benefit assessment of the social damage they will incur for changing their minds. As one can see, assigning rationality and irrationality to political thinking is very complicated and fraught with ambiguity. That complexity and ambiguity is the very fertile soil that tyrants, liars, kleptocrats, oligarchs, deceivers, mass murderers and other brands of bad leaders take root and grow in. Therein lies the main source of unnecessary human misery, poverty, misery, racism, bigotry, hate and bloodshed that litters human history. That is an inescapable aspect of what it is to be biologically, psychologically and sociologically human.

Debiasing thinking and fostering critical thinking: Pinker observes that the “wheels of reason turn slowly” and it makes sense to apply torque to two sources of influence, public education and the professional media. He observes that although some or many people have been arguing for better teaching of critical thinking for decades, that job is tough:

People understand concepts only when they are to think them through, to discuss them with others, and to use them to solve problems. A second impediment to effective teaching is that pupils don't spontaneously transfer from one concrete example to others in the same abstract category. . . . . With these lessons about lessons under their belts, psychologists have recently devised debiasing programs that fortify logical and critical thinking curricula. They encourage students to spot, name and correct fallacies across a broad range of contexts. . . . . Tetlock has compiled the practices of successful forecasters into a set of guidelines for good judgment . . . . These and other programs are provably effective: students newfound wisdom outlasts the training session and transfers to new subjects.

This is extremely encouraging because it says that at least some people can learn to be more rational if they want to, and mental traits that facilitate rational, critical thinking have been identified and thus directly addressed in the teaching. There is no data that says that only some people can become more politically rational. If Peter Berger in his brilliant little 1963 book, Invitation to Sociology, is right, there is nothing this observer can see that prevents the building of powerful social institutions that hold objective facts, less biased political reasoning and critical thinking as the highest moral or ethical values.

Some such institutions may exist now, probably mostly scattered, fragmented academic groups, but they are not yet powerful influences on mainstream American politics and society. That needs to change. Those institutions need to be built ASAP.

Along those lines, there is reason for encouragement. Pinker argues:

Many psychologists have called on their field to “give debiasing away” as one of its greatest potential contributions to human welfare. . . . . As one writer noted, scientists often treat the public the way Englishmen treat foreigners: they speak more slowly and more loudly. Making the world more rational, then, is not just of training people to be better reasoners and setting them loose. . . . . Experiments have shown that the right rules can avert the Tragedy of the Belief Commons [what’s rational for every individual to believe can be irrational for the society as a whole to act upon] and force people to dissociate their reasoning from their identities. . . . . Scientists themselves have hit on a new strategy called adversarial collaboration, in which mortal enemies work together to get to the bottom of an issue, setting up empirical tests that they agree beforehand will settle it (citing Psychological Science, 12, 269-275, 2001).

From this observer’s point of view, Pinker is right that if psychologists can teach debiasing, it would be one of its greatest potential contributions to human welfare. Things are not as bleak as the news would have it. Humans still have a chance to outgrow their self-destructive tendencies, even if the toll along the way is in the hundreds of millions or billions of lives.

So, is that assessment too optimistic? Or, are humans doomed to an ultimate fate of enslavement, misery and maybe even self-annihilation with complete species extinction?

B&B orig: 2/15/19

Chapter Review: Humanism

In Humanism, chapter 23 in Steven Pinker’s 2018 book Humanism Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress, Pinker lays out his arguments that the ideal of humanism is superior to other ideologies or belief systems that lay claim to being best for humanity, and its morality and long-term well-being. Broadly speaking, humanism is a movement that enlightens the meaning of life and morals based on non-supernatural grounds.

Humanism holds, among other things, that ethical and moral values derive from human needs, empirical evidence and rational analysis leads to knowledge of the world. Progressive cultures “working to benefit society maximizes individual happiness.” Collectively, all of that refers to what can be called human flourishing. Based on the historical and scientific evidence he relies on, Pinker firmly rejects the notion that humans must look to any God for deep meaning, morality, happiness, fulfillment or social progress. Instead, humanism is based on principles such as impartiality, e.g., ‘your interests are as good as mine’, to provide a secular basis for morality. In that conception moral sources, everyone has an equal right to major concerns such as life, safety, health, free expression and social and emotional attachments, all of which contribute to human flourishing. Major humanistic concerns include blocking major social influence by “rational sociopaths” and to justify human needs we morally ought to respect.

Balancing conflicting morals and desires: This aspect of Pinker’s vision of humanism is fully in accord with the balancing of moral, freedoms and other conflicts the B&B anti-bias ideology advocates:

Unlike ascetic and puritanical regimes, humanistic ethics does not second-guess the intrinsic worth of people seeking comfort, pleasure and fulfillment . . . . . At the same time, evolution guarantees that these desires will work at cross-purposes with each other and with those of other people. Much of what we call wisdom consists in balancing the conflicting desires within ourselves, and much of what we call morality and politics consists in balancing the conflicting desires among people.

(emphasis added)
That is a bit of 3rd party validation for the balancing act that the anti-bias ideology is significantly based on.

The utilitarianism objection refuted: Humanism has been criticized as blind utilitarianism, which could lead to bad outcomes such as euthanizing some unlucky people to harvest their organs for the good of a greater number of others who need new organs. Pinker argues that human flourishing is not a humanistic utilitarian morality of just seeking the greatest happiness for the greatest number, as the happy organ harvesters would have it. Instead, humanistic morals are evaluated by the consequences of our actions. One can say that lying is bad and immoral, as B&Bs anti-bias ideology posits, but there are times when the consequence of a lie justifies itself. For example, it is defensible or good to lie to a person seeking to do a bad thing, e.g., murder someone, to prevent the worse thing, i.e., the murder. In this regard, humanistic ethics and morality are pragmatic and rationally flexible according to circumstances. In a sense, that reflects a rational anti-ideology ideology.

That said, Pinker admits that humanism has a strong utilitarian streak in it, but that is not a lethal flaw. He argues that well-known utilitarians such as Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill came to the conclusion that slavery, cruel criminal punishments and even animal cruelty were all bad and outside acceptable bounds of utilitarianism. Apparently, evolution has conferred on most members of the human species a common belief that some things are just not right and they draw lines: “That’s why in practice, humanism and human rights go hand in hand. . . . . since people can always spin doctor their selfish acts as benefiting others, one of the best ways to promote overall happiness is to draw bright lines that no one may cross.”

Pinker also points out that historical evidence shows that when cultures, or people of different cultures, come in contact and they need to get along, the human tendency is to converge on humanistic values, e.g., I won’t kill you if you won’t kill me. He cites the origin of American constitutional church-state separation: “The only way to unite the colonies [with incompatible religions and practices] under a single constitution was to guarantee religious expression and practice as a natural right.

Competing moral frameworks refuted: Pinker asserts that when people are being rational, culturally diverse and need to get along, they converge on humanism. Theistic morality holds that God’s morals are right and supernatural rewards and punishments await depending on how one behaves. For believers in an immortal soul, that can loosen attachments to humanistic morals. The reward for punishing heretics and infidels can lead to immortal rewards, while slackers are forever punished.

Another anti-humanist mindset, romantic heroism, is equally daffy and just as dangerous, if not more so. Romantic heroism arose from 19th century romantic heroism, and continues today as authoritarian populism (Donald Trump), neo-fascism (Trump again), neo-reaction and the alt-right (definitely Trump). This mindset holds that morality lies in “purity, authenticity and greatness of an individual or a nation.”

Some who don’t fully profess to adhere to theistic morality or romantic heroism nonetheless see their value by providing a theistic, heroic or tribal psychological basis to argue that humanistic humanism cannot sustain a nation or society for the long run. Pinker’s criticism of that thinking is blunt and historically correct: “It’s a short step from the psychological claim to a historical one [but]. . . . . the moral, psychological and historical arguments are wrong.”

Other points: Pinker discusses several rationales in opposition to humanism. For example, he discusses and rebuts attacks based on the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness. He argues that God of the Gaps arguments to account for what we do not yet understand about consciousness is logically flawed. Our current state of incomplete understanding in no way opens a rational door for any God or immaterial soul: “Nothing that we know about consciousness is inconsistent with the understanding that it depends entirely on neural activity. . . . . the phenomena of consciousness look exactly as you would expect if the laws of nature applied without regard to human welfare. If we want to enhance that welfare, we have to do it ourselves.”

No immaterial soul or anything else immaterial. Dualists will definitely take exception to that brazen assertion.

Pinker discusses and criticizes Nietzsche at length, arguing that he was and still is a mortal enemy of humanism. He considers Nietzsche to be a major force behind modern resurgent authoritarianism, nationalism, populism and fascism: “Nietzsche argues that it is good to be a callous, egotistic, megalomaniacal sociopath. [quoting Nietzsche ] ‘I do not point to the evil and pain of existence with the finger of reproach, but rather entertain the hope that life may one day become more evil and more full of suffering than it ever has been. . . . . Man shall be trained for war and woman for the recreation of the warrior. All else is folly. . . . . Thou goest to woman? Don’t forget thy whip.’”

That sounds very anti-humanist. Pinker asserts that Nietzsche is riddled with logic flaws and has no moral authority to speak for anyone other than himself. Despite that, Pinker observes: “Nietzsche is among the most influential thinkers of the 20th century and continuing into the 21st. Most obviously Nietzsche helped inspire the romantic militarism that led to the first World War and the fascism that led to the Second.”

Regarding theistic morality and secular morality, Pinker comments:

The Euthyphro argument puts the lie to the common clam that atheism consigns us to a moral relativism in which everyone can do his own thing. The claim gets it backwards. A humanistic morality rests on the universal bedrock of reason and human interests . . . . For this reason, many contemporary philosophers . . . . . are moral realists (the opposite of relativists), arguing that moral statements may be objectively true or false. It’s religion that is inherently relativistic. . . . . Not only does this make theistic morality relativistic, it can make it immoral.

To support this, Pinker points out that, for example, the Old Testament includes admonitions permitting immoral behavior including mass rape, genocide, death for homosexuality, death for talking back to one’s parents and death for working on the Sabbath. He describes modern believers’ response like this: “Today, of course, enlightened believers cherry-pick the humane injunctions while allegorizing, spin doctoring, or ignoring the vicious ones, and that’s just the point: they read the Bible through the lens of Enlightenment humanism.” In his view, religion is morally relativistic compared to the moral realism that flows from humanism. His reasoning seems rather sound.

B&B orig: 2/23/19