Yesterday I gave a general overview of this book, and made a few specific comments. Today I’m going to read through my notes again, and highlight some more specific comments, and maybe quotes. Like this summary, at the end.
The Constitution of Knowledge is the most successful social design in human history, but also the most counter-intuitive. In exchange for knowledge, freedom, and peace, it asks us to mistrust our senses and our tribes, question our sacred beliefs, and relinquish the comforts of certitude. It insists that we embrace our fallibility, subject ourselves to criticism, tolerate the reprehensible, and outsource reality to a global network of strangers.
Some summary of the early chapters:
- Ch2 ends: So how did we get to the world today? With a reality-based community that exists, that has triumphed? Because we are capable of outwitting our biases and thinking well. This is the other half of the story. People tend towards quackery and conspiracy theories when they have no stake in the game. Thinking well also depends on the social environment: the institutions. So how do we do this? It’s happened, around the world. Something that was founded by visionaries and born of struggle.
- Ch3: Booting Reality: The Rise of Networked Knowledge, Outsourcing reality to a social network is humankind’s greatest innovation. Discussion of Hobbes and Rousseau (as discussed in Rutger Bregman’s HUMANKIND, also recently read), and the three great liberal social systems that arose in the 17th and 18th centuries. John Locke, the source of modern liberalism. Montaigne, about the limitations of human knowledge [[ this was referenced in the essay I just placed ]]. Locke’s 1689 essay: Knowledge comes from experience, facts, and data. Claims must be checkable, rather than adjudicated. Empiricism. A welcoming of intellectual diversity. Pluralism. Thus everyone has the right to assert their own beliefs and contest those of others. “No exceptions for priests, princes, or partisans.” Later Hume, Popper. (Recall Strevens’ take on Popper and Kuhn.) Science floats and falsifies hypotheses all the time, something no other system can do. Kill the idea, not the person.
- Then about Charles Sanders Pierce (pronounced ‘purse’); James Hutton, geologist, who rejected Bible stories and insisted on evidence, showing that the world was in fact extremely ancient; how even science can be subject to creed wars, e.g. between the Vulcanists and the Neptunians. How slow medicine was to become a science. Through professional societies, who set standards. Like the Royal Society. Later research universities, teachers became researchers, universities added presses (i.e. to publish books). The general answer: no authority in individuals or tribes, but a set of values and rules that everyone more or less embraces. If there are biases among individual scientists, then the community corrects them. Overcoming the creed wars.
- Ch4: The Constitution of Knowledge: The operating system of the reality-based community. Here the author aligns his concept with that of the US Constitution, and venerates James Madison, who understood the need to compromise, and the idea of checks and balances. Author discusses objective reality, and the two core rules (cited previous post) for establishing it. “No personal authority” does not deny expertise. You can’t shut down a conservation for being offended. [[ This alludes to the cancel culture on the left. ]]
- Still in chapter 4, Rauch identifies who is in this “reality-based community.” First, the world of professional scholarship, science, and research. Many in academia, some in think tanks etc. Second, ‘mainstream’ (i.e. reality-based) journalism. Details. In both cases, they do not take kindly to being told in advance what their conclusions or stories must be. Third, Government agencies who gather intelligence, do research, develop regulations. Also agencies who gather statistics and conduct research; list of examples p101. And reality-based regulators. Fourth, the world of law and jurisprudence.
Key point: This is where, from pages 100 to 102, the author lists examples. Of government agencies, academic institutions, think tanks, and others, of which most people are vaguely aware, long lists of them, which he wants us to understand are the foundation of American civilization, without which our nation of some 330 *million* people could not function. It occurs to me — this is not Rauch’s observation, because the book was written several years ago — that these are precisely the “deep state” that the simple-minded right thinks are enemies of freedom and wants to eliminate. They have no idea what they’re talking about, or how it would wreck society if they were successful. (Rather, they would complain about the government not taking care of them.)
This is why I want to scan and post a long sample passage, but here I am again in the early evening, and it’s getting too dark, so let me try again tomorrow.
The remaining chapters cover these subjects:
- Ch5, Disinformation Technology: The Challenge of Digital Media: Making the online world truth-friendly is difficult but doable
- Ch6, Troll Epistemology: “Flood the Zone with Shit”: disinformation is an old enemy with new weapons and powerful friends (this is from the right)
- Ch7, Canceling: Despotism of the Few: Coercive conformity is corrupting the reality-based community (this is from the left)
- Ch8, Unmute Yourself: Pushing Back: Defending the Constitution of Knowledge requires confidence and counter-mobilization
I’ll quote from the final pages.
As I wrote in chapter 1, the Constitution of Knowledge is the most successful social design in human history, but also the most counter-intuitive. In exchange for knowledge, freedom, and peace, it asks us to mistrust our senses and our tribes, question our sacred beliefs, and relinquish the comforts of certitude. It insists that we embrace our fallibility, subject ourselves to criticism, tolerate the reprehensible, and outsource reality to a global network of strangers.
With examples of attacks against it.
Yet the reality-based community has withstood much worse. It beat back the inquisitors who imprisoned Galileo, the dictators whose gulags spanned continents, and the racists and homophobes who sought to silence voices of freedom. “Tomorrow morning,” said Socrates, “let us meet here again.” The conversation he and his young protégé began 2,500 years ago continues, now spanning the world instead of just Athens, despite countless efforts to squelch it.
