[extropy-chat] Re: POLITICS: 537 Economists Criticize Bush and Kerry

Christian Weisgerber naddy at mips.inka.de
Sun Oct 17 15:47:47 UTC 2004


Hal Finney <hal at finney.org> wrote:

> Consider that these people are among the greatest experts in the world on
> economic topics, [...] what hope have any of us in deciding what is the
> truth here?

This points to a major problem we keep touching on here: How can
we as laymen make decisions in the face of conflicting expert
opinion?  And even if there actually is a scientific consensus, how
can we recognize it?

This keeps popping up on this list in the context of global warming.
I understand nothing of climatology, how can I tell what views are
consensus ones and which are biased?

Let's get away from controversial examples and look at the general
problem.  Science reporting is plagued by this.  A journalist, who
himself doesn't understand the subject, sets out to write an article
on some topic.  Determined to present a fair picture he gives equal
room to the presentation of all conflicting opinions.  But since
he is not an expert, he can't tell what the actual scientific
consensus is, and he is bound to provide exaggerated coverage to
minority views and outright kooks.  A purported "conflict in the
scientific community" may be nothing of that sort.  If you sent a
science reporter out to write about the shape of the earth, he would
likely spend a disproportionate part of his article on flat earth
ideas--all in the spirit of fair and neutral reporting, but naively
giving the cranks a wildly exaggerated significance and an enormous
audience.  The usual suggestion to resolve a conflict is to come
to a compromise.  But if one side is fair and the other is wildly
biased, the compromise will be biased, too.

Since a detailed examination of conflicting scientific opinions
would require expert knowledge neither the reporter nor the reader
possess, the presentation of controversies devolves into a game of
"he said, she said", with credibility points being awared on
irrelevant aspects, such as academic credit or personal bearing,
rather than the strength of the theories themselves.

While I'm writing this I also have a browser window open with an
article reporting on the current state of cold fusion and nicely
illustrative of the problem.  The text is all bullshit.  It all
deals with meta issues and who is saying what.  "He hit me first."
"No, he did."  There is nothing there to help me figure out the
_truth_ of the matter.


(And now for something completely different:)

> And yet, I'll bet many politically oriented readers, especially those
> who have pledged their allegiance to an ideological system, believe
> that they actually know the truth of the matter.  They think that they,
> with their cursory and amateur levels of study, know these issues better
> than hundreds of hardworking, brilliant experts.  Or perhaps, prompted by
> ideological certainty, they will comfort themselves that those hundreds
> of experts on the other side are evil, wicked liars.

Group thinking, or tribalism, or whatever the correct term is, is
a fundamental part of the human condition.  People associate with
a particular group, frequently by accident, then they identify with
the group and fall into a pattern of "us versus them" thinking,
where everything considered good is projected on the in-group,
everything bad on the out-group.

It pervades all levels of human society.  It can be found in the
schoolyard, it appears in harmless contexts such as people fervently
advocating the computer operating system they use, it entirely
dominates the political process, and in the unpleasant extreme it
motivates genocide driven by nationalism or ideology.  Once you
realize this and start looking you can see it all around you.  You
can observe it on this very mailing list: "we Extropians", "we
Americans".

Given the ubiquity of the process I'm flabbergasted that it doesn't
appear to have any _conscious_ presence in the public mind.  Other
than psychologists talking about youth cliques and anthropologists
about remote aboriginal peoples, the subject is never broached in
our culture, as if we were immune to its effects or as if it were
a taboo.

Given its fundamental position in human psychology, group identity
should be of particular interest to transhumanism, both from a
practical perspective (how will it affect the road to a posthuman
future?  what will be its effects on posthumans?) and a theoretical
one (do we want it?  do we want to get rid of it?).  Instead
transhumanists are unconsciously caught up in it as much as everybody
else.

(Can anybody point me to some introductory psychological literature
that covers group mentality?  I imagine this being so basic that
it must have been exhaustively treated even a century ago.)

-- 
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber                          naddy at mips.inka.de



More information about the extropy-chat mailing list