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Shameless self-promotion
Here's what my latest anti-memetics screed turned into. And the rare (for me at least) positive citations of Pinker and Lakoff!
REally intersting. I need to read it a second time, more carefully, but it's something that we all see - but don't really address.
I read an article, oh way the hell back in undergrad, so 80's that suggested that the vast majority of our decisions and even our "logic" were things we all but intuited first, then verified or rationalized later. and that most of us are especially good at this in non lab settings, like deciding that we like a candidate, a tv show, or a particular restaurant. Or figuring out we know what is wrong with the car, and what isn't wrong with it, before we even hear from an expert.
And yet, even having those processes studied, most people will say they were rational, not emotive when it came to how they made their choices.
That's the thing, really. It's trivial to prove or disprove, or demonstrate, or provide evidence for something. Getting people to actually believe it is the trouble. But if we didn't rationalise after the fact, we'd probably be very short lived.
Without that, though, we'd basically be Buridan's asses. Also, I don't know that it's trivial to prove or disprove something. It really depends on what that thing is.
Trivial as in "what do you expect the evidence to be for this assertion". It's not particularly difficult to formulate expected evidence from a belief, if you have your thinking cap on. In principle, it's then not particularly difficult to find what that evidence is and see if it's there. That's not a comment on the practical difficulty, as anyone working to discover something in science will undoubtedly tell you. But the method underlying it is easy.
But, since we have this horrible tendency to rationalise post facto, not least because it solves a few problems for us, we don't think in this simple cycle of generating anticipations of evidence from beliefs. We just think, ascribe "truth" to it, and then just get bogged down in asserting the truthiness of it. So it's far more difficult to convince someone that they're wrong than it is to prove that they're wrong.
@ADK: Okay, in that sense it is very true. @Godot: You should check out Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me), which looks at cognitive biases as applied to everyday life and political events rather than scientific thinking.
Hey, I actually have that book!
Mistakes Were Made and Philip Zimbardo's Lucifer Effect are my two favorite "people are horrible" nonfiction books :-)
Tavris and Aronson's work in general is really interesting. Mistakes Were Made references lots of other great stuff -- Festinger is classic of course. My undergrad research drew heavily on confabulation research and Elizabeth Loftus.
Latest SciAm has an article on Lakoff-style embodied cognition, but unfortunately it's paywalled. It's very reminiscent of Valins' classic "Playboy" study, though.
Damn, i read "Lakota styled"...
Several studies with people who natively speak languages that have gendered nouns do show a tendency to describe "female" things with softer, sterotypically "female" descriptions. Even when the "things" are the same. For example, voiture vs. vehicule -- same damn thing, using "voiture" will get female sounding descriptions, and "vehicule" male descriptions. without really noticing. Even when the only reason the noun carries one gender or another is linguistic. clearly, language does modify what we think and how we think about it... even if it's not a controlling factor.
I've seen similar results in studies of native folk taxonomies. Obviously, Newspeak-style control is not possible but language definitely does "nudge" thinking in certain directions.
and then you toss into the mix a language like "asl" that is almost a-gramatical in the sense most of us understand grammar, and is in no small way, "idea" driven, rather than "precision" driving. You create your stories as moving, interacting images rather than words. That must effect how you think. (of course, some of you already think in images).
Yeah, I don't need ASL to think in "moving, interacting images rather than words." :P
Yeah, but think about how great it would be to communicate your ideas in such a fluid form.
oh, wait, you and ADk are the masters of "precision" and "words must be precisly used with perfect form and understanding from the entire audience" grins...
"Master of Precision" sounds like the sort of thing an anal retentive magician puts on their business card.
Well, of course. It's part of the Magician's Code.
You should read these two when they get onto tracks about how everyone needs tight conformity in a word, or no useful discourse will happen. ;-)
I think they've been reading too much LessWrong.
shudders. I'm not "rational" enough to fight it out, but god that site makes me go nutty.
Oh, do tell. I do love hearing rationalvangelists rag on each other.
You should head over to Tetronian's talk page -- I have been ripping on LW over there.
mabye it's cause i'm old and cantankerous, but it just feels like this stuff you all argue about there, is just a bunch of boys having a circle jerk. It's very self indulgent (to me), and relies on people thinking about things in a very narrow sense of "rationality" or of logic or reason or just ideas.
The very frame that anyone thinks he or she could define a word in such a way that it is precise is (to me) laughable. No matter how much you think you are enclosing language, no one will see what you see, or think how you think, and they will not understand what you mean on this precise of a level.
but it is always fun to watch you all argue. ;-)
I agree with you about it being self-indulgent.
Part of my personal philosophy is "never trust anyone who's completely enamored with their personal philosophy."
But academia is all about self-indulgent circle jerks. Can god microwave a burrito so hot that even he can't eat it? Inquiring minds want to know.
I never understood that. I would read things like Simularcum and say "well, yeah, so what?" (kinda my reaction to Lakoff. I want to find answers. I want to explore history, and learn about other cultures, and read things that people who are not from my world have said, thought, or done.
But I don't get spending hours debating the effects of teh difference between "this is an illusion" "we only think this is an illusion" and "we can *only act/react* as if this is an illusion". Ok... what do those add to our lives?
shrugs... I'm a paralegal now. :-)
Well, it makes a huge difference in philosophy and science in general. Are our definitions even useful? Many of the most insidious pseudosciences rely on poor definitions for their existence. What is "intelligence"? Is there a "general intelligence" ("g")? Do IQ tests measure this g? This abstract, high-falutin' debate definitely had an effect (a very negative one) on ethnic minorities in Western nations. Much time and intellectual energy is wasted on Wittgensteinian pseudo-debates, such as "nature vs. nurture" (see, e.g., Evelyn Fox-Keller's semantic takedown of this). Asking the right question is often more important than finding the "right" answer. That was the whole point of the "42" joke in Hitchhiker's Guide -- a nonsensical question gets a nonsensical answer.
Speaking of definitional wankery, rationality, and IQ, watch what I posted in the SB. So much social science lives and dies by construct validity.
I love IQ issues. I'm firmly on the idea that they are there to make rich educated white people feel better about themselves. ;-)
So like most things in life, you say there is a "thing" you want to measure. (INtelligence, verbal skills, emotional health, etc), and having defined this "thing", you create a "scale" that "measures" it, and then a test to see where each person is on that scale. The problem is likely circular, as your tests are designed in such a way that you see them measuring your X, when in reality they could be measuring Y, effect by Y, or X could simply not even exist except in your mind?
I need an hour and a half to watch this.
The last 1/3 or so is Q&A. Re: Rich educated white people, see also Gould's takedown of The Bell Curve. This should also explain why Mensa is a hotbed of crank ideas like parapsychology.
The thing about that sort of measurement is invariably it's going to be valid at the population level, not for individuals.
Yeah, that's why I say it should be used like BMI. But IQ is big business. There's the same problem with "personality" tests.
Oh bollocks to personality tests. I'm not even convinced most of those can give you statistically useful info, never mind individually useful info.
But don't you see that as a Libra Type 5, you are best suited for career paths in engineering, finance, and poodle-washing?
But my blood type says I'm...
Ok, what the heck is up with that? I've seen my hubby's translation Resume, and honest to god, it includes a photo and his blood type. huh?
The blood type diet is the manifestation in the US and Europe. It seems that if you don't attach a personality test to it, you attach a diet to it.
Blood type isn't ancient or mysterious, so we can't blame mystical ancient knowledge for it; something else has to have generated the woo around it. The simple act of creating categories seems to be what unites them, from blood type, to star signs, to "I have Type XX personality".
I've taken myers-brigs, and i'm convinced intelligent people just over think these things. Neither my husband and I can ever answer them, cause we are always asking things like "well, it's not really A or B, but someone in betwee, and further, teh question is loaded, because it requires an awareness of our thought process that only comes after teh fact" or some such. Also, I answer the way I want to answer in any given mood.
I am not "introverted", i have introverted moments. I am not a thinking vs. felling, I approach things trying my best to use both - but some situations are more feelings and some are more thinking.
Have you all taken an officall (vs. some site on the internet) IQ test? I never have. Maybe too scared to know. hehehe
I think someone wrote on my talk page once that MBTI is the thinking man's astrology. I-E is the only scale with any sort of validity. But I've always found this profile kind of spookily accurate. Never took an IQ test, though.
I get bored with IQ tests. But I see what you mean with "thinking man's astrology", but in the end it's just trying to put neat little rings around complicated clusters and saying "ABRACADABRA!! This is now a Real Thing!!" Hence why you're stuck unable to answer "yes" or "no" to all these questions because you're kinda both. I always feel wrong answering "I feel introverted and uncomfortable around strangers" AND "I feel like being the centre of the party" to these things, because they're blatantly contradictory, but it's true.
The Mill quote in Gould's review is timely: "The tendency has always been strong to believe that whatever received a name must be an entity or being, having an independent existence of its own, and if no real entity answering to the name could be found, men did not for that reason suppose that none existed, but imagined that it was something particularly abstruse and mysterious."
I like precision for my own selfish purposes -- people should use words that match up with my mental imagery, dammit!
i cannot yet grok asl, becasue i think in english. i don't know how to paint language. you should learn it...
I once saw an 80 comment Facebook argument over respecting religion. It came to shouting, name calling, anger all round... it generally got out of hand and people were running to stupid analogies to save their point and things just didn't move.
How did I fix it? By pointing out that they were arguing over the definition of "respect" and at no point ever discussed what they expected or were thinking of by "respect". I may be at a live face-to-face version of this tonight rather than on the internet. If it ends up the same way I'll be highly disappointed.
So it's not just intellectual excerise to think like that, it really does happen.
Well, poop. I have a print subscription to Scientific American, and I thought I'd lend you my login so you could view it. Turns out the print and digital subscriptions are considered "separate products," for reasons that I'm sure sounded very good to their finance department.
LOL,it's ok. I have a library card, still. I can log into the University and get pretty much anything I want.
You know, when I was in high school, I really liked George Lakoff's ideas, and now you're making me feel really bad :-(
One of teh first of a long history of icky books i had to read was : women fire and dangrous things. big and pink. that prof hanuts me still
I thought you liked Lakoff. I've only read Metaphors We Live By, though, and his most recent stuff is quite obvious shilling for the DNC. He is essentially trying to become a lefty Frank Luntz and spouting pseudoscience while he's at it.
The book I read was Moral politics: What Conservatives Know that Liberals Don't. I really liked his ideas, though even at 15, I noticed how here and there he'd use wording that distinct liberal bias. (I know, duh, but I felt that if you were going to write a book intending to change how people think, you should try a bit harder to not use loaded language.)
Hum, nope, never really been a fan. I got his ideas, i understood where he was coming from, but I never felt (or maybe never understood) what was so surprising about it. Again, maybe I just didn't get it. But it felt very common sense to me.