The Friday Roundup - 3/29/2024 Edition

Why Smart People Believe Stupid Things; How We Know What We Know: The Art of Seeing with the Eye of the Heart; On the Luckiness of Death

Every Friday, I share some of the most interesting articles, videos, and books I’m looking at with our paid subscribers. It’s an eclectic mix fueled by my unique personal variant of ADHD and pattern recognition, so you won’t find compilations like these anywhere else.

Because of public interest in this post after publication, I’ve unlocked it for non-subscribers.

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Happy Friday everyone, and welcome back to another edition of The Skojec File’s Friday Roundup!

To those of you who celebrate, I wish you a fruitful and happy Easter Triduum.

I’d also like to thank Kyle Harris and Gary Huber, who both bought me coffee this past week. If you enjoy The Skojec File and would like to buy me a coffee to say thanks (and get mentioned in the next Friday Roundup) you can do so too, right here:

Now, let’s get to the links!

Why Smart People Believe Stupid Things - Gurwinder/The Prism

“The prevailing view,” writes a guy called ‘Gurwinder’ at a Substack called ‘The Prism,’ “is that people adopt false beliefs because they’re too stupid or ignorant to grasp the truth. But just as often, the opposite is true: many delusions prey not on dim minds but on bright ones. And this has serious implications for education, society, and you personally.”

He continues:

In 2013 the Yale law professor Dan Kahan conducted experiments testing the effect of intelligence on ideological bias. In one study he scored people on intelligence using the “cognitive reflection test,” a task to measure a person’s reasoning ability. He found that liberals and conservatives scored roughly equally on average, but the highest scoring individuals in both groups were the most likely to display political bias when assessing the truth of various political statements.

In a further study (replicated here), Kahan and a team of researchers found that test subjects who scored highest in numeracy were better able to objectively evaluate statistical data when told it related to a skin rash treatment, but when the same data was presented as relating to a polarizing subject—gun control—those who scored highest on numeracy actually exhibited the greatest bias.

I don’t know who Gurwinder is, nor do I remember where I stumbled across this essay, written over a year ago, but the topic is fascinating to me.

I have often wondered: how can clearly intelligent people be so stupid on topic X?

It would appear that there is a real answer.

Scott Adams, the cartoonist behind Dilbert and political commentator, was professionally trained as a hypnotist before he got into his current career. He has consequently offered some very interesting insights into the art of persuasion, including the books Loserthink: How Untrained Brains Are Ruining America and Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don't Matter. He made an interesting observation a few days ago that I suspect is connected to the phenomenon Gurwinder is describing:

But Gurwinder offers an insight that might better explain it: unintelligent people are easily fooled by others; intelligent people are great at fooling themselves.

More from Gurwinder:

[H]uman intelligence evolved less as a tool for pursuing objective truth than as a tool for pursuing personal well-being, tribal belonging, social status, and sex, and this often required the adoption of what I call “Fashionably Irrational Beliefs” (FIBs), which the brain has come to excel at.

Since we’re a social species, it is intelligent for us to convince ourselves of irrational beliefs if holding those beliefs increases our status and well-being. Dan Kahan calls this behavior “identity-protective cognition” (IPC).

By engaging in IPC, people bind their intelligence to the service of evolutionary impulses, leveraging their logic and learning not to correct delusions but to justify them. Or as the novelist Saul Bellow put it, “a great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.”

What this means is that, while unintelligent people are more easily misled by other people, intelligent people are more easily misled by themselves. They’re better at convincing themselves of things they want to believe rather than things that are actually true. This is why intelligent people tend to have stronger ideological biases; being better at reasoning makes them better at rationalizing.

This tendency is troublesome in individuals, but in groups it can prove disastrous, affecting the very structure and trajectory of society.

This gets at another one of my hobby horses: the growing and dangerous phenomenon of extreme tribalism at a time where most of us have nothing like an authentic tribe, or the need to outsource our reasoning to one.

Tribal thinking is everywhere. We see it in politics, we see it on polarizing issues like the border and gun control and transgenderism and COVID. I’ve had some big run ins with the power of tribal thinking in my own work, most notably when my assessment of current events and the state of the trad Catholic movement began to clash with that of the audience I built, which was deeply committed to the entirety of the trad Catholic ethos — including a growing conspiracy theorism around the pandemic that matched up nicely with that group’s general propensity towards catastrophizing and identifying as being targeted for oppression by powerful forces, many of them unseen. These experiences led me to become first aware, then deeply suspicious, of how much we allow our thought to be influenced by the groups we self-identify as part of.

Gurwinder says that elite academic institutions are more invested in creating acolytes who can argue well than they are in fostering a commitment to arguing truthfully. In turn, these “master-debaters” (his term, not mine, I’m chuckling too) quickly attain status and influence.

He discusses how adherents of the “Woke” phenomenon

typically reject claims of objectivity as a weapon created by straight white men to enforce the dominant, “cisheteronormative, patriarchal, white supremacist” worldview. As such, they believe that the purpose of scholarship is not to determine truth but to promote social justice. To this end, they will often use their intelligence to persuade people of arguments that are logically unsound but which are perceived to contribute to a more diverse and equitable world.

[…]

Despite being irrational, wokeism is nevertheless an intelligent worldview. It’s intelligent but not rational because its goal is not objective truth, or even social justice, but social signaling, and in pursuing this goal it’s a powerful strategy.

Gurwinder says that in the 19th century, the same kind of irrational argumentation was used to justify slavery and anti-black racism:

An example would be the American physician Samuel Cartwright. A strong believer in slavery, he used his learning to avoid the clear and simple realization that slaves who tried to escape didn’t want to be slaves, and instead diagnosed them as suffering from a mental disorder he called drapetomania, which could be remedied by “whipping the devil” out of them. Like the fictitious disorder that white people are diagnosed with today—white fragility—drapetomania is an explanation so idiotic only an intellectual could think of it.

An explanation so idiotic only an intellectual could think of it.

What a brilliant turn of phrase.

Gurwinder says the tendency to self-delude among the intelligent is a surprisingly tricky thing to resist:

The standard rationalist path is to try to avoid delusion by learning about cognitive biases and logical fallacies, but this can be counterproductive. Research suggests that teaching people about misinformation often just causes them to dismiss facts they don’t like as misinformation, while teaching them logic often results in them applying that logic selectively to justify whatever they want to believe.

Such outcomes make sense; if knowledge and reasoning are the tools by which intelligent people fool themselves, then giving them more knowledge and reasoning only makes them better at fooling themselves.

He says that education isn’t futile, but character matters more. We must not place our intelligence at “the service of irrational goals.”

“There is only one thing,” he writes, “that can motivate us to put our intelligence into the service of objective truth, and that is curiosity.”

Basically, curiosity is the desire to fill gaps in knowledge. As such, curiosity occurs not when you know nothing about something but when you know a bit about it. So learn a little about as much as you can, and this will create “itches” that will spur you to learn even more.

Curiosity is essential to directing your intellect toward objective truth, but it’s not all you need. You must also have humility. This is because the source of our strongest biases is our ego; we often base our self-worth on being intelligent and being right, and this makes us not want to admit when we get things wrong, or to change our mind. And so, in order to protect our chosen identity, we stay wrong.

This is why I don’t like ideologies that claim to have all the answers. The Catholic milieu was notorious for this. Every debate between Catholics could essentially be ended by invoking the phrase, “But the Church teaches…” This appeal to not just any authority, but divinely-backed, infallible authority, was a tremendously powerful intellectual shortcut. One of the first things I noticed when I stopped being a Catholic writer was that I could no longer just launder the Church’s authority through my work, leaving it unstated but implied that if the reader had a problem with my conclusions, they had to take it up with Rome. I was just the messenger.

When forming my own positions, I have to actually think them through, evaluate their merits and soundness, and determine whether I am confident enough in them to put them in print. The buck stops with me now. When I was writing Catholic content, the buck didn’t even slow down with me. And what that created in me was a complete and total lack of epistemic humility — which is, frankly, the defining characteristic of Catholic Apologists the world over. They seek to ensure they have answers that are black and white, clear as crystal. They attempt to shut arguments down by offering definitive takes that appeal to unassailable authority or the systems of thought it has developed that are believed to be ironclad. (This is why so many Thomists are so insufferable. They think Thomas is the last word on pretty much everything.)

Gurwinder offers a better path:

If you define your self-worth by your ability to reason—if you cling to the identity of a master-debater—then admitting to being wrong will hurt you, and you’ll do all you can to avoid it, which will stop you learning. So instead of defining yourself by your ability to reason, define yourself by your willingness to learn. Then admitting you’re wrong, instead of feeling like an attack, will become an opportunity for growth.

This, my friends, is the way to enlightenment.

Read the whole thing here:

Why Smart People Believe Stupid Things

How We Know What We Know: The Art of Seeing with the Eye of the Heart - Maria Popova/The Marginalian

This essay is related to the epistemological discussion above, although where Gurwinder focuses on our ideological or personal commitment to believe certain things at the cost of self-delusion, Popova, citing E.F. Schumacher’s A Guide for the Perplexed, focuses on the idea of “adequatio” or “adequateness”:

What enables man to know anything at all about the world around him? … Nothing can be known without there being an appropriate “instrument” in the makeup of the knower. This is the Great Truth of “adaequatio” (adequateness), which defines knowledge as adaequatio rei et intellectus — the understanding of the knower must be adequate to the thing to be known.

He explains further:

As regards the bodily senses, all healthy people possess a very similar endowment, but no one could possibly overlook the fact that there are significant differences in the power and reach of people’s minds… Beethoven’s musical abilities, even in deafness, were incomparably greater than mine, and the difference did not lie in the sense of hearing; it lay in the mind. Some people are incapable of grasping and appreciating a given piece of music, not because they are deaf but because of a lack of adaequatio in the mind. The music is grasped by intellectual powers which some people possess to such a degree that they can grasp, and retain in their memory, an entire symphony on one hearing or one reading of the score; while others are so weakly endowed that they cannot get it at all, no matter how often and how attentively they listen to it. For the former, the symphony is as real as it was for the composer; for the latter, there is no symphony: there is nothing but a succession of more or less agreeable but altogether meaningless noises. The former’s mind is adequate to the symphony; the latter’s mind is inadequate, and thus incapable of recognizing the existence of the symphony.

Like Gurwinder, Schumacher insists on humility as a key here:

For every one of us only those facts and phenomena “exist” for which we posses adaequatio, and as we are not entitled to assume that we are necessarily adequate to everything, at all times, and in whatever condition we may find ourselves, so we are not entitled to insist that something inaccessible to us has no existence at all and is nothing but a phantom of other people’s imaginations.

Popova also quotes the late Science Fiction luminary Phillip K. Dick, who defined reality as “that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”

Where Gurwinder and Schumacher converge is in the effect of the ideological baggage we bring to the table:

The observer depends not only on the adequateness of his own higher qualities, perhaps “developed” through learning or training; he depends also on the adequateness of his “faith” or, to put it more conventionally, of his fundamental presuppositions and basic assumptions. In this respect he tends to be very much a child of his time and of the civilization in which he has spent his formative years; for the human mind, generally speaking, does not just think: it thinks with ideas, most of which it simply adopts and takes over from its surrounding society.

[…]

There is nothing more difficult than to become critically aware of the presuppositions of one’s thought. Everything can be seen directly except the eye through which we see. Every thought can be scrutinized directly except the thought by which we scrutinize. A special effort, an effort of self-awareness, is needed: that almost impossible feat of thought recoiling upon itself — almost impossible but not quite. In fact, that is the power that makes man human and also capable of transcending his humanity.

We all think, we all know things, and we all tend not to do a great deal of questioning our existing beliefs and assumptions. There is so much we take for granted without realizing we’re even doing it.

One of the key elements of epistemic humility is receptivity. Something Rick Rubin said in his excellent book (which I will continue to mention frequently) The Creative Act: A Way of Being, really struck me, and I’ve been trying to change my behavior to match:

Communication moves in two directions, even when one person speaks and another listens silently.

When the listener is totally present, the speaker often communicates differently. Most people aren’t used to being fully heard, and it can be jarring for them.

Sometimes we block the flow of information being offered and compromise true listening. Our critical mind may kick in, taking note of what we agree with and what we don’t, or what we like and dislike. We may look for reasons to distrust the speaker or make them wrong.

Formulating an opinion is not listening. Neither is preparing a response, or defending our position or attacking another’s. To listen impatiently is to hear nothing at all.

Listening is suspending disbelief.

We are openly receiving. Paying attention with no preconceived ideas. The only goal is to fully and clearly understand what is being transmitted, remaining totally present with what’s being expressed—and allowing it to be what it is.

Anything less is not only a disservice to the speaker, but also to yourself. While creating and defending a story in your own head, you miss information that might alter or evolve your current thoughts.

If we can go beyond our reflexive response, we may find there is something more beneath that resonates with us or helps our understanding. The new information might reinforce an idea, slightly alter it, or completely reverse it.

Listening without prejudice is how we grow and learn as people. More often than not, there are no right answers, just different perspectives. The more perspectives we can learn to see, the greater our understanding becomes. Our filter can begin to more accurately approach what truly is, rather than a narrow sliver interpreted through our bias.

Rubin borrows from the tradition of Zen Buddhism, which offers conceptual heuristics such as “the beginner’s mind.” Zen Buddhism also gives us the proverb about the need to “empty our cup” if we wish to learn:

Once upon a time, there was a wise Zen master. People traveled from far away to seek his help. In return, he would teach them and show them the way to enlightenment.

On this particular day, a scholar came to visit the master for advice. “I have come to ask you to teach me about Zen,” the scholar said.

Soon, it became obvious that the scholar was full of his own opinions and knowledge. He interrupted the master repeatedly with his own stories and failed to listen to what the master had to say. The master calmly suggested that they should have tea.

So the master poured his guest a cup. The cup was filled, yet he kept pouring until the cup overflowed onto the table, onto the floor, and finally onto the scholar’s robes. The scholar cried “Stop! The cup is full already. Can’t you see?”

“Exactly,” the Zen master replied with a smile. “You are like this cup — so full of ideas that nothing more will fit in. Come back to me with an empty cup.”

You can read the rest of Popova’s piece right here.

On the Luckiness of Death — Maria Popova/The Marginalian

Two in a row from Popova, but she’s good, what can I say? The funny thing is, the full title of her post is Richard Dawkins on the Luckiness of Death, but a) I didn’t want to lead with Dawkins because he’s insufferable even to atheists and agnostics and I wanted you to keep reading and b) because the really beautiful insight here is not the quote Popova provides from Dawkins, but her own observation on death that precedes it:

We are born into the certitude of our eventual death. Every once in a while, something — perhaps an encounter with a robin’s egg, perhaps a poem — staggers us with the awful, awe-filled wonder of aliveness, the sheer luck of it against the overwhelming cosmic odds of nonexistence. But alloyed with the awe is always the half-conscious grief that one day the light of consciousness will be extinguished. It is a heavy gift to hold, this doomed delirium of aliveness. It is also a buoyant gladness, if we are limber enough to stretch into the cosmic perspective that does not come naturally to us small, Earth-bound bipeds corticed with tender self-importance.

Consider this.

For each of us, one thing is true: Had any one variable been ever so subtly different — had your parents mated on a different day or at a different altitude, had the early universe cooled a fraction of a second faster after the Big Bang, you would not exist as the particular constellation of atoms configuring the particular consciousness that makes you you. Because chance plays such dice with the universe, and because the die dictates that the vast majority of energy and matter never had the luck of cohering into this doomed delirium of aliveness, it is, in some profound and practical sense, a staggering privilege to die — one that betokens the privilege of having lived. To lament death, then, is to lament our luck, for any negation of the possibility of death is a negation of the improbable miracle of life, a wish for there to be nothing to do the dying — nothing to have partaken of the beautiful, bittersweet temporality of aliveness.

As someone who feels as though he’s only just truly started being alive after emerging from four decades of indoctrinated thinking, with agency and self-determination and all the rest of what makes us self-aware beings with free will, I am, frankly, terrified of death.

I recognize that the time that is already behind me is likely greater than what lies before me. I am aware that half my children are already mostly grown. I have only begun to glean small glimmers of wisdom that feel as though they would facilitate my desire to live a better, more fulfilling life, and I would desperately like more time to do exactly that. (As long as I’m engaging in wistful fantasy, I wouldn’t mind starting at 18 again, too.)

But that’s why it’s important to be grateful for what we’ve got. We are, in fact, very fortunate to be alive, and if death is the final page in the book of life, its ending should be bittersweet; the closing of a remarkable journey.

In any case, it’s a short reflection, but you can see the rest here.

That’s it for this edition, gentle reader. Have a great weekend. I’ll catch you next week.

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