I reject reality and substitute my own

Intended for constructive conversations. Exhibits of polarizing tribalism will be deleted.
jacob
Site Admin
Posts: 15907
Joined: Fri Jun 28, 2013 8:38 pm
Location: USA, Zone 5b, Koppen Dfa, Elev. 620ft, Walkscore 77
Contact:

I reject reality and substitute my own

Post by jacob »

http://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2016/0 ... ed-reality --- from the astrophysics department.

Who to blame? Post-modernism? The narrative model of the humanities? Politicians? The fact that people live in a bubble where the ignorance is bliss now comprises a rather fat tail of comfortable misery that's too rarely interrupted by catastrophic corrections when the ignorance-narrative no longer works?

The other issue is compartmentalization in which people selectively reject parts of reality while respecting other parts even if these two positions are mutually contradictory. Does specialization make such double think easier?

George the original one
Posts: 5404
Joined: Wed Jul 28, 2010 3:28 am
Location: Wettest corner of Orygun

Re: I reject your reality and substitute my own

Post by George the original one »

"And, in many ways, the forces seeking to cast doubt on climate science took a page from the playbook of creationism in their choice of tactics."

I think they took an entire volume from big tobacco and FUD. 20+ years of an industry going against the surgeon general only ended after the curtain was pulled back. It's harder to pull back the curtain on climate denial because the vested interests are more disparate with interlocking goals such that conspiratorial coordination is not required. Religion didn't play a role in discussing smoking habits, but it has a far larger role in climate denial; the US certainly allows freedom of religion, but still struggles with separation of church and state (and freedom from religion).

Dragline
Posts: 4436
Joined: Wed Aug 24, 2011 1:50 am

Re: I reject your reality and substitute my own

Post by Dragline »

I think the best explanation for this phenomenon is found in the Introduction of Nate Silver's "The Signal and the Noise" -- the internet is the printing press of our age and the immediate consequences have been and will continue to be more conflict, not more understanding. The mistake in apprehension that Adam Frank makes is assuming that all or at least most people are like him in their thought processes, when they are clearly not. It is the same mistake in apprehension made by the early proponents of the television, who thought it would be used to inform and educate.

"The original revolution in information technology came not with the microchip, but with the printing press. Johannes Gutenberg’s invention in 1440 made information available to the masses, and the explosion of ideas it produced had unintended consequences and unpredictable effects. It was a spark for the Industrial Revolution in 1775, a tipping point in which civilization suddenly went from having made almost no scientific or economic progress for most of its existence to the exponential rates of growth and change that are familiar to us today. It set in motion the events that would produce the European Enlightenment and the founding of the American Republic.

But the printing press would first produce something else: hundreds of years of holy war. As mankind came to believe it could predict its fate and choose its destiny, the bloodiest epoch in human history followed.

Books had existed prior to Gutenberg, but they were not widely written and they were not widely read. Instead, they were luxury items for the nobility, produced one copy at a time by scribes. . . This made the accumulation of knowledge extremely difficult. It required heroic effort to prevent the volume of recorded knowledge from actually decreasing, since the books might decay faster than they could be reproduced. . . . The pursuit of knowledge seemed inherently futile, if not altogether vain. If today we feel a sense of impermanence because things are changing so rapidly, impermanence was a far more literal concern for the generations before us. . .

The printing press changed that, and did so permanently and profoundly. Almost overnight, the cost of producing a book decreased by about three hundred times, so a book that might have cost $ 20,000 in today’s dollars instead cost $ 70. Printing presses spread very rapidly throughout Europe; from Gutenberg’s Germany to Rome, Seville, Paris, and Basel by 1470, and then to almost all other major European cities within another ten years. The number of books being produced grew exponentially, increasing by about thirty times in the first century after the printing press was invented. The store of human knowledge had begun to accumulate, and rapidly.

As was the case during the early days of the World Wide Web, however, the quality of the information was highly varied. While the printing press paid almost immediate dividends in the production of higher quality maps, the bestseller list soon came to be dominated by heretical religious texts and pseudoscientific ones. Errors could now be mass-produced, like in the so-called Wicked Bible, which committed the most unfortunate typo in history to the page: thou shalt commit adultery. Meanwhile, exposure to so many new ideas was producing mass confusion. The amount of information was increasing much more rapidly than our understanding of what to do with it, or our ability to differentiate the useful information from the mistruths. Paradoxically, the result of having so much more shared knowledge was increasing isolation along national and religious lines. The instinctual shortcut that we take when we have “too much information” is to engage with it selectively, picking out the parts we like and ignoring the remainder, making allies with those who have made the same choices and enemies of the rest.

The most enthusiastic early customers of the printing press were those who used it to evangelize. Martin Luther’s Ninety-five Theses were not that radical; similar sentiments had been debated many times over. What was revolutionary, as Elizabeth Eisenstein writes, is that Luther’s theses “did not stay tacked to the church door.” Instead, they were reproduced at least three hundred thousand times by Gutenberg’s printing press— a runaway hit even by modern standards.

The schism that Luther’s Protestant Reformation produced soon plunged Europe into war. From 1524 to 1648, there was the German Peasants’ War, the Schmalkaldic War, the Eighty Years’ War, the Thirty Years’ War, the French Wars of Religion, the Irish Confederate Wars, the Scottish Civil War, and the English Civil War— many of them raging simultaneously. This is not to neglect the Spanish Inquisition, which began in 1480, or the War of the Holy League from 1508 to 1516, although those had less to do with the spread of Protestantism. The Thirty Years’ War alone killed one-third of Germany’s population, and the seventeenth century was possibly the bloodiest ever, with the early twentieth staking the main rival claim."

Spartan_Warrior
Posts: 1659
Joined: Fri Dec 02, 2011 1:24 am

Re: I reject your reality and substitute my own

Post by Spartan_Warrior »

Shared reality is good--until you question who is manufacturing that shared reality, and why.

I disagree with Nate Silver (no surprise to me at this point*) regarding the internet's role. Yes, it gives fringe voices more ability to be heard and propagate "false realities"; but the alternative before the internet was the total control of information by gatekeepers in the monolith of Big Media, who are owned by exactly the kinds of big corporate interests behind things like climate science denial. I certainly don't trust politically connected and wealthy news corporations to report an objective "shared reality" any more than the average Twitter user--in fact, probably less so. I'd say removing the mainstream media's monopoly on "reality" is more beneficial than harmful.

In other words, oe Blow's anti-science blog does a lot less harm than Fox News--especially when Tom, Dick, and Harry are running pro-science blogs.
To me, the slide into the gray zone where all facts about the world are up for grabs is the logical consequence of organized science denial.
IMO, it's more of a chicken-and-egg scenario, really. That "all facts about the world are up for grabs" is not only a consequence, but also a cause of science denial. There is a perception (and I don't fully disagree with it) that "science" can be bought, rigged, and/or spun just like politics, the media, and everything else.

*Silver has been consistently off in his predictions of the Democratic primary, some might say to an extent that would imply bias. I won't say that much, but I will say that this election cycle, more than anything before, has reinforced to me how important it is to check sources, check the source's sources, and pay at least as much attention to the motivations of those telling you something as to what they're actually saying. Or at least know to whom/what they make their political contributions.

User avatar
Ego
Posts: 6359
Joined: Wed Nov 23, 2011 12:42 am

Re: I reject your reality and substitute my own

Post by Ego »

We get good at what we practice.

We are now almost entirely a "public" made up of people who shift seamlessly between reality-reality and virtual-reality. Add to that the fact that the virtual-reality of yesteryear (early radio, television & movie) was usually grounded in something pretty close to the reality of the day. When it wasn't, as in the early star wars films, we reveled in the fact that it was an unusual escape from reality.

Today people spend more time in fantasy worlds than in the real one so it is no surprise that, for instance, so many assumed "The Martian" was based on a true story. It has gotten so bad that the NFL had to create virtual player-like things as a bridge to lure people back from the edges of fantasy to watch a real live football game.

Image

The more often we seamlessly shift between reality and fantasy the better we get at making the shift, and the worse we become at distinguishing between the two.

IlliniDave
Posts: 3845
Joined: Wed Apr 02, 2014 7:46 pm

Re: I reject your reality and substitute my own

Post by IlliniDave »

I think the biggest issue a fair viewing of climate issues has is that it's been appropriated by the crowd who promote a bigger government to fix it (and everything else). If you want a big segment of the population to flee from your position in droves, tell them that more taxes and more government control is needed to support it.

jacob
Site Admin
Posts: 15907
Joined: Fri Jun 28, 2013 8:38 pm
Location: USA, Zone 5b, Koppen Dfa, Elev. 620ft, Walkscore 77
Contact:

Re: I reject your reality and substitute my own

Post by jacob »

http://www.vox.com/2014/4/6/5556462/bra ... -us-stupid

TL;DR - Ideology can actively override any hard skills any one may have. In the article, a statistics problem was first phrased in terms of whether a lotion was the likely cause skin rash. People who were good at math solved it correctly. People who weren't got it wrong. Then the exact same stat problem was phrased in terms of whether guns where the likely cause of violence. The correct number of answers from the strong-math group of the previous question dropped by 45%. Kahan, in the article, calls this psychological fallacy identity protective cognition.

The fallacy has some interesting side-effects.

1) As soon as a subject becomes politicized, disagreement increases rapidly over party lines. It's well-known that the strongest predictor of whether people accept climate change is not determined by education but according to how they vote. It's curious that there's no strong public disagreement with regards to plate tectonics or quantum physics. The article mentions the stark difference between the heavily controversial HPV vaccine (a sexually transmitted diseases) and the non-controversional Hep-B vaccine (also a transmits sexually).

2) People who are better at solving "neutral problems" are also better at finding ways to defend their ideological position. They are able to construct arguments that sound reasonable to themselves and people who are less informed than themselves while being obvious nonsense to those who know more. There's a cartoon of this which summarizes most of the field of sociology that explains this. The corresponding Dreyfus level is two, advanced beginner.

3) The identity-protective-cognition colludes with people's desire to be nice and maintain social relations. Indeed, whenever I identify an "advanced beginner"(*) who is beyond pedagogical reach because he's still under the spell identity protective cognition, I shut up because I don't need the aggravation. However, what's great for the individual (me) can be really bad for the group. The article mentions climate change as an example (but you could insert measles virus or whatever instead). Ice floes or measles don't give a hoot as to whether us humans are trying to be nice to each other's ideologies. They just melt and infect regardless.

(*) Unfortunately, due to the Dunning-Kruger version of Poe's law, this often takes a while to figure out.

I think Sagan had a list in his candle in the dark book about how to tell whether something was true. IIRC, two of the rules were something like this
1) If 95% of experts agree, it's probably true.
2) If experts disagree, it's probably irrelevant.

This has wide implications because more expert-knowledge is actually quite irrelevant to the individual (even if it is important to the group). For example, me denying the veracity of gravity has direct and immediate implications if I jump out of the window on the 20th floor. However, I can accept of deny climate change to my hearts content w/o it having any direct or immediate impact on me whatsoever. This holds for many of these ideological-science issues. If I deny the efficacy of measles or HPV vaccinations, it's not like I'm going to get infected tomorrow. Human evolution has almost zero relevance for my personal life even if all biology derives directly from it. My point is that these arguments are almost exclusively in a sphere of complexity where ignorance has no immediate impact.

You can see exactly the same effect when it comes to FIRE complainypants. Those who aren't ideologically invested are able to judge things like ERE on its merits. For those who are already saving a lot, ERE is an easy sell. Conversely, those who have adopted a consumerist or a Marxian ideology are more likely to use their brainpower to rationalize why not being a consumer sucks or why everybody has a duty to work according to their ability.

jacob
Site Admin
Posts: 15907
Joined: Fri Jun 28, 2013 8:38 pm
Location: USA, Zone 5b, Koppen Dfa, Elev. 620ft, Walkscore 77
Contact:

Re: I reject your reality and substitute my own

Post by jacob »

I found some graphs ... but, uhm, ideological trigger warning: They are from an article in MotherJones :-P

http://www.motherjones.com/environment/ ... illiteracy

However, it has some interesting observations. The graphs are Q-Q plots where x-axis, "ordinary climate science intelligence", is the score for the population as a whole, and the y-axis is the probability of a correct response.

Here are the questions and the results:

1) What gas do most scientists believe causes temperatures in the atmosphere to rise. Is it hydrogen, helium, carbon dioxide, radon? (This is obvious)
Here red and blue answers almost identically in the Q-Q, IOW, there's no ideological identity protection.

2) Climate scientists believe that human caused global warming will result in flooding of many coastal region? T/F (This is true)
Here blue gets more correct the more they know whereas red get increasingly incorrect. IOW, red is getting the facts wrong.

3) Climate scientists believe that if the North Pole icecap melted as a result of human caused global warming global sea levels would rise? T/F (This is false unless you're total nitpicker who regularly use the word thermohaline. Put an ice cube in a glass of water and observe. Nitpickers, put an ice cube in a glass of salt water :-P ).
Here red gets more correct the more they know, whereas blue gets correct at a slower rate. IOW, blue is reluctant to admit that the North Pole melting doesn't pose a threat.

4) Climate scientists believe that human caused global warming will increase the risk of skin cancer in human beings? T/F (This is false. There's no connection.)
Again, red gets more correct the more they know, whereas blue gets correct at a slower rate. IOW, blue is reluctant to admit that global warming doesn't cause skin cancer.

User avatar
GandK
Posts: 2059
Joined: Mon Sep 19, 2011 1:00 pm

Re: I reject your reality and substitute my own

Post by GandK »

jacob wrote:Who to blame? ... The narrative model of the humanities?
I find this the most likely culprit of those you listed, and I believe this is driven by the increasing focus on the subjective (I) vs the objective (E) with regard to both the sciences and society. I think the underlying goal is inclusion, but the unfortunate side effects of the current situation are lack of any form of consensus in perspective, vocabulary, touchstones, etc. Which makes meaningful dialogue about problems and solutions damn near impossible.

The cultural change in the definitions of "fact" and "opinion," for example... such that they are - rather than markers of existential reality or lack thereof - tools of conversational and ideological manipulation now.

IlliniDave
Posts: 3845
Joined: Wed Apr 02, 2014 7:46 pm

Re: I reject your reality and substitute my own

Post by IlliniDave »

jacob, the interesting thing about those questions is that they all pertain not to what people think they know about future climate and its effects, but rather what people's knowledge of current scientists' beliefs are. I wonder if the responses/trends would have been different (especially in degree) if "Climate scientists believe" had been omitted from each of the four assertions/questions.

Solvent
Posts: 233
Joined: Wed Mar 04, 2015 3:04 pm
Location: กรุงเทพมหานคร
Contact:

Re: I reject your reality and substitute my own

Post by Solvent »

I always find it interesting to note, in discussions that touch on policy issues, that when there is an argument that a political party finds itself strongly on one side of, the issue starts to get labelled as 'political' and henceforth, some people suggest there can be no attempt to find an objectively good answer. This is because, it must be presumed, such an attempt is considered to be political argument based on opinion rather than a scientific search for truth.

This is gross misdirection. Just because one team's politician says one thing, and one team's politician says another, does not in turn mean that neither of them could be wrong (that's just, like, your opinion, man).*

Whether or not the Higgs Boson exists seems to be recognized by most as a question for scientific enquiry, where answers can be found based on investigation and experimentation. Whether or not there is anthropogenic climate change, though, is just a politicized debate and there can be no correct answer (or rather, nearly everyone knows the answer, but the answers are not consistent with each other, that is, there is no shared reality). This is not because of anything inherent in anthropogenic climate change. It's because at some point various political parties decided to affix themselves strongly to one side of the "debate", and people followed with their cognitive deficiencies.

You can sub climate change out for other hot-button issues, of course, as should be obvious.

I was tempted to suggest that this is primarily a USA thing, but luckily I thought twice about it and realised that it's really not. But I do think it's more common there to see people saying that an issue is 'political' and as a result imply that there's no good answers, only differing opinions. I seem to recall there was a good example in Australia last year where this kind of language was used, something more to do with economics, but it escapes me for the moment.

*https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWdd6_ZxX8c

Tyler9000
Posts: 1758
Joined: Fri Jun 01, 2012 11:45 pm

Re: I reject your reality and substitute my own

Post by Tyler9000 »

Meh.

I expected an article about climate science and the psychology of convincing people, and instead found one that talked about creationism, religion, birtherism, Trump, immigration, moon landing conspiracy theorists, and all the problems with the Republican party. While giving short deference to "fringes on the left and right", every example deliberately and glaringly points one direction. It strikes me that the author does not actually desire a shared reality, but a homogeneous one.

The blind spot to his own tribalism is precisely what makes it impossible for authors like this to argue convincingly to people of different viewpoints. You can't move others until you're first willing to move yourself.

I understand that many will argue that the science is absolute and should transcend politics. It didn't for the author. Why should one expect readers to behave differently?

jacob
Site Admin
Posts: 15907
Joined: Fri Jun 28, 2013 8:38 pm
Location: USA, Zone 5b, Koppen Dfa, Elev. 620ft, Walkscore 77
Contact:

Re: I reject your reality and substitute my own

Post by jacob »

@GandK - The other interesting thing is how emperical facts are have been reduced to the status of rhetorical device. They are freely rejected
if they don't fit with the argument (i.e. "That's just your opinion") but I've also noticed that often they are selectively added to make a rhetorical point. Climate science denial has been pretty thick with the latter type, e.g. "But how do you explain this piece of contradictory data---doesn't this destroy your whole theory(meaning argument)?" or the more advanced version of the same thing in which people put together crackpot alternatives(*) based on an incomplete mastery of all the facts. The other pernicious issue is of course the public confusion between "fact" and "theory". That's some very powerful Orwellian stuff right there. I wonder how that one got started.

I think the former (rejecting) is a combination of PoMo and the bubble-world we live in where decisions are far removed from any immediate and direct consequences.

I think the latter (selectively adding) can be blamed on the internet. It's very easy to "google an opinion" or find some random facts to back it up these days. Twenty years ago one would have to read an entire book.

(*) Which look eminently convincing at Dreyfus levels 1 and 2, less convincing at level 3, and fall apart at levels 4 and 5.

@IlliniDave - I bet you could get very different answers just by rephrasing the questions slightly, e.g.

Climate scientists believe that human caused global warming will result in flooding of many coastal region? T/F
Climate scientists don't believe that human caused global warming will result in flooding of coastal regions? T/F
Climate scientists no longer believe that human caused global warming will result in flooding of many coastal region? T/F

Logically the rephrasings should not change the results but I bet they would. It's well-known that survey answers depend a lot on how the question is asked. Even more interestingly ... one can prime the answer in a certain direction by asking the person another question first.

The idea with this study was to reveal ideological bias seeing if a) it was there and b) how it dependent on "intelligence". Not to gauge how strong it was in the respective groups. Hence the trick-questions and the non-questions. People who stop and think should have been increasingly correct the more they knew. People who are ideologically blocked would be using their knowledge to come up with an increasingly wrong answer.

@Tyler9000 -
Tyler9000 wrote:While giving short deference to "fringes on the left and right", every example deliberately and glaringly points one direction.
I've noticed this too. Do you know of any examples of crazy-talk from the other direction?

Tyler9000
Posts: 1758
Joined: Fri Jun 01, 2012 11:45 pm

Re: I reject your reality and substitute my own

Post by Tyler9000 »

jacob wrote: Do you know of any examples of crazy-talk from the other direction?
Well, there's always the persistent scaremongering on fracking, GMOs, and nuclear power that minimizes or misrepresents the scientific foundations of each in pursuit of purely ideological goals. One could argue that the current political de-emphasizing of chromosomes when discussing gender is an anti-science position. The misrepresentation of adult stem cell research vs. embryonic stem cell research is almost solely due to political grandstanding on abortion rights. And there are also politically-neutral issues as well, such as the insane anti-vaccines movement (that the author briefly references at the top before going full political) and much of what passes for organic food "science".

There are lots of examples of tribal thinking passing as scientific fact on both sides of the political aisle. IMHO, articles like this that piously only look at one half of the problem do more harm than good. It weakens the arguments of one side by destroying any intellectual integrity it possibly has going for it, and the obvious bias provokes the other side to dig in.

IlliniDave
Posts: 3845
Joined: Wed Apr 02, 2014 7:46 pm

Re: I reject your reality and substitute my own

Post by IlliniDave »

jacob, yeah you're right, there's an art to designing surveys that will coax out the answer you want to get. So clearly small changes can have major contributions. I was just thinking more on the lines just forgetting about the scientists and asking people what they believe. I could see a person who maybe herself does not think humans are the primary contributor still agree that climate scientists think coastal flooding is a likely result of human activity. Just like I can agree with the statement (i.e., select "true") "Certain cultures believe a woman should never go out in public without male relatives escorting her", while I would not agree with the statement, "A woman should never go out in public without male relatives escorting her."

Kriegsspiel
Posts: 952
Joined: Fri Aug 03, 2012 9:05 pm

Re: I reject your reality and substitute my own

Post by Kriegsspiel »

jacob wrote:I found some graphs ... but, uhm, ideological trigger warning: They are from an article in MotherJones :-P

http://www.motherjones.com/environment/ ... illiteracy
Ever since I saw that Triumph Dog at New Hampshire video, I giggle every time I see "trigger warning" :lol:.


Carry on with your intelligent discussion.

tonyedgecombe
Posts: 450
Joined: Thu Aug 30, 2012 2:11 pm
Location: Oxford, UK Walkscore: 3

Re: I reject your reality and substitute my own

Post by tonyedgecombe »

Interestingly even accepting the science doesn't often lead to changes in behaviour, there are a lot of people who are convinced about the effect we are having on the climate but continue to lead a lifestyle that contributes to problem.

vexed87
Posts: 1521
Joined: Fri Feb 20, 2015 8:02 am
Location: Yorkshire, UK

Re: I reject your reality and substitute my own

Post by vexed87 »

Denialists ignore anthropogenic global warming, not because they truly believe it is impossible, nor because they don't understand the science or the consequences of doing nothing, but because they can't cope with changes required to reach the 'solution'. I.e. give up fossil fuels and resign ourselves to a destiny of being energy and materially poor by today's standards.

Swap in any problem, peak oil, national debt, state pension ponzi schemes, Keynesian monetary policy, terrorism, you name it, the denialist worth his salt (the ones you see debating on TV) understands the worst case scenario of doing nothing yet they would rather put there fingers in their ears and sing "la la la" and do nothing in the short term because the changes required to fix the 'problems' are perceived to be too painful.. accepting the truth is painful.

WRT to specialisation enabling doublethink, definitely, I only have enough time to seek the truth because I make the time, and it interests me. Every one who I have met who rejects the truth or as I like to call it prefer 'ignorance is bliss' because they "haven't got time to read about the end of the world". They haven't got the time because they work all day (a result of specialisation) wouldn't find the material like William Catton's Overshoot easy to read, or relaxing for that matter. Increasingly I find the ones who are not denialists, are the truth seeking or self directed learners. Why else would this stuff enter people's consciousness?

What really interests me is the Truth seekers who see the glass as being half full, or Catton's "cargoists". What makes them tick?

jacob
Site Admin
Posts: 15907
Joined: Fri Jun 28, 2013 8:38 pm
Location: USA, Zone 5b, Koppen Dfa, Elev. 620ft, Walkscore 77
Contact:

Re: I reject your reality and substitute my own

Post by jacob »

IlliniDave wrote:Just like I can agree with the statement (i.e., select "true") "Certain cultures believe a woman should never go out in public without male relatives escorting her", while I would not agree with the statement, "A woman should never go out in public without male relatives escorting her."
But that was the point of this study. Your first statement is a factual statement(*). Your second statement is an opinion. If you tested positive for identity protective cognition, your disagreement with the opinion would spill over into the fact department proportional to how informed you were about other cultures. That is, if you were very well-informed, you might find plenty of examples as to why those certain cultures don't really believe it either.

To add an example to Tyler9000's list for lefties, consider a question along the lines that "Certain religions are inherently violent". Now, I don't know the factual answer to this, but I bet if did a similar survey, you'd find a red/blue split on that question the better informed people became.

(*) Presumably, he put in "climate scientists ..." just as we could put in "anthropologists ... " in this example/

IlliniDave
Posts: 3845
Joined: Wed Apr 02, 2014 7:46 pm

Re: I reject your reality and substitute my own

Post by IlliniDave »

jacob, okay, I must have made too much of the thread title and what was meant by "reality" and aligned it with "factual" in my mind. You seem to be saying that the climate science conclusions are not factual, which I don't think is what you mean, so I must still be misunderstanding something. Not important though.

Locked