[ExI] Fwd: [twister] Meta Conspiracy

Bryan Bishop kanzure at gmail.com
Wed Dec 2 03:50:43 UTC 2009


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Brandyn <brandyn at mail.sifter.org>
Date: Tue, Dec 1, 2009 at 9:13 PM
Subject: [twister] Meta Conspiracy
To: Twister <twister at mail.sifter.org>


       So, I have noticed that with high reliability certain people
take predictable sides on most issues, even new and seemingly unrelated
issues where the side is predictable by the nature of the argument as
opposed to any particular bias of fact or topic.

       For instance, certain people are prone to prefer what I might call
mystical interpretations even when the topic isn't mysticism (so it is
some bias of the way they think, not just a learned belief in mysticism),
some naturally latch on to conspiracy theories, some to mainstream science,
and so on.  As I mentioned before, all tend to defend their faction by
digging a little further behind any disenting evidence until they find
the next bit which discredits it, and then they stop, satisfied that they
have swept aside what they knew was a bogus challenge before they even
bothered to put the effort in to prove it.  None of this is remarkable --
pretty well defines human thinking most of the time.  What's interesting
to me is to try to tease out the real underlying differences that establish
the sides in the first place, particularly where they are not by topic but
by manner...

       E.g., there is definitely a faction here who see themselves as
scientific,
rational, no-nonsense, obvious truth, keep it simple, don't be silly, and
everybody knows (or, at least, everybody with a Phd knows).  And then there
is an often opposing faction who see themselves as scientific, rational,
consider everything, the truth isn't always what it appears to be on the
surface, and science makes progress one death at a time.

       If I could take a first stab at qualifying the difference between
the two, the first seems universally more optimistic about human nature,
in terms of objectivity, motive, and sometimes ability, and especially
in power of the group mean or concensus to win over individual defects
in these things.  The latter sees man as a rationalizing animal, self-
deluding, sometimes malicious, regularly deceptive whether by unwitting
bias or conscious intent, and with group-think tending to exagerate rather
than mediate these defects.

       So, I wonder where these biases come from, and whether one or the
other tends to be more predictive of reality.

       I am pretty well in the latter camp, and I can trace it back to my
childhood of being an outsider, always "the new kid" and so had to do
a lot of cold-reading of the social scene, and got to see a lot of
variations thereof; close friends and family members variously involved
in three letter agencies, government weapons programs, the police force,
the maffia, various politicized scientific domains, and so on.  Throughout
my adult life, I encounter regular reenforcement of these "biases" through
encounters with people involved in these things today, and so I always
expect that the "opposition" must be coming over to my side by the year
since surely they must hear the same stories...

       But of course that isn't true, and they are seeing the other side of
the same biased coin, thinking surely I am going to clue in eventually...

       And sometimes I get a glimpse of how this happens, and the story is
usually pretty close to this:  One side thinks there are scorpions everywhere,
and one should always wear shoes.  The other side says there are none, and
has never seen a scorpion their entire life.  The difference, it turns out,
is simply that one, expecting to find scorpions, lifts up rocks, and often
finds them, and the other, certain there are none, never looks and never sees.
But that's a biased analogy--favorable to the second faction--so I am still
curious to distill it down to something more essential and central.

       Thoughts?

       -Brandyn

--
---------- brandyn at sifter.org ------- http://www.sifter.org/~brandyn ----------

      The fatal tendency of mankind to leave off thinking about a thing
      which is no longer doubtful is the cause of half their errors.
                                                     -- John Stuart Mill


----------------------------------------------------------------------------
General options: http://sifter.org/al/
Unsubscribe from this thread, sub-thread, poster, or forum:
http://sifter.org/al/?msg=emsg.5607&_from=bm.574&group=group.2
----------------------------------------------------------------------------



-- 
- Bryan
http://heybryan.org/
1 512 203 0507



More information about the extropy-chat mailing list