- A deep inspection of an essay linked by David Brooks in his essay linked yesterday, much aligned with my current themes, with a key takeaway about the idea of “misinformation”;
- And links to two other pieces I’ll explore later.
Let’s look at this piece directly.
Dan Williams, 28 Jul 2024: Why do people believe true things?, subtitled “Ignorance and misperceptions are not puzzling. The challenge is to explain why some people see reality accurately.”
This is an extraordinary essay that addresses many of the themes I’ve explored on this blog. It’s impressive in particular because the writer is working from some different intellectual sphere than I have been working from, just comparing the citations he links to with the writers of the books I’ve read — while at the same time discussing the same issues, and reaching similar conclusions, albeit in different language.
The essay begins, as David Brooks’ excerpt quoted yesterday indicates, by inverting common questions. It’s not why there is poverty; poverty is the default in human existence. It’s why there is wealth. Williams goes on to call these questions “explanatory inversions.” Another is why people do or do not break the law, which leads him to discuss the puzzle of cooperation, which I attributed to evolving human morality that’s enabled cooperation among larger and larger groups. Here’s Williams’ take on this:
Once you understand the challenges of cooperation, it becomes clear that these failures are not puzzling. Instead, the truly puzzling fact is that humanity has—sometimes, in some places—achieved spectacular systems of large-scale cooperation that pressure, cajole, persuade, encourage, incentivise, and tempt a species of competitive apes to work together, dampening down immediate self-interest and overcoming collective action problems.
This fact is surprising from an evolutionary point of view: humans are famously unique in the degree to which we cooperate with those beyond our close genetic relatives. It is also surprising from any social-scientific perspective that treats individuals as somewhat rational, somewhat self-interested agents.
Unfortunately, many people do not understand this. In their analysis of the social world, they take cooperation for granted, treating it as the default mode of social interaction that arises automatically in response to its anticipated benefits.
Pinker and others deal with altruism and free-riders by identifying the various cultural methods that have evolved to deal with them: sanctions, shame, and so on. (Williams faults philosopher Susan Neiman for misunderstanding this. I have a book by Neiman and glanced through it on this issue, and put the book back on the shelf.)
Neiman’s analysis is mistaken but understandable. It reflects “commonsense”. However, commonsense is prescientific and, hence, frequently wrong. We do not leave physics to the intuitions of commonsense. We should not leave our understanding of society in its hands either.
A recurrent theme on this blog: beware “common sense.” (It’s the intuitive assumptions of beliefs about the world derived from humanity’s limited place in it.)
And now to the main point of this post: Social epistemology—very, very roughly, the study of phenomena such as knowledge, belief, and understanding in society—similarly needs an explanatory inversion.
Many people in social epistemology are concerned with the following question: Why do people believe false things?
I think I’ve gotten to this question by observing that the human mind has evolved for survival, not for perception of reality. There is no evolutionary reason why people should have evolved to perceive reality. (The most obvious example being why people think heavy objects fall faster than lighter objects.)
The writer extends this to a criticism of the whole idea of misinformation.
“The truth about distant or complex matters,” writes Walter Lippmann, “is not self-evident.” Given this, “The pictures inside people’s heads do not automatically correspond with the world outside.”
These points are obvious in some ways. But I think they are greatly underappreciated in how many people instinctively think about topics like “misinformation,” “ideology,” and “science denial.”
He gets deep into epistemology. Why do we believe anything??
Think of the economy, society-wide crime trends, vaccines, history, climate change, or any other possible focus of “public opinion.” Not only is the truth about such topics typically complex, ambiguous, and counter-intuitive, but almost everything you believe about them is based on information you acquired from others—from the claims, gossip, reports, books, remarks, opinion pieces, teaching, images, video clips, and so on that other people communicated to you.
Moreover, to organise all that socially acquired information, you relied on simplifying categories, schema, and explanatory models that reduce reality’s complexity to a tractable, low-resolution mental model.
And
For these reasons, the truth is not the default when people form beliefs about the world beyond their immediate material and social environment.
Of course, in some sense, this should be obvious. Just as poverty is humanity’s default state throughout history, so are ignorance and misperceptions. At least relative to a modern scientific worldview, almost everything people have ever believed about the world they are not in close perceptual contact with has been completely wrong.
And then he discusses norms and institutions — cf. Rauch, again — and how we take knowledge for granted, in our modern world.
For example, many of us are in a position to form accurate beliefs about vaccines, macroeconomic trends, the evolutionary history of our species, the misdeeds of powerful political elites, the micro-scale and large-scale structure of the cosmos, and much more.
From this position, phenomena such as flagrant lies, misinformation, ignorance, and misperceptions seem surprising. In an era of unprecedented epistemic wealth, it can seem odd that so many people endorse non-scientific—indeed, pre-scientific—beliefs about ghosts, astrology, paranormal activity, and supernatural forces and agents; that evidence-free conspiratorial narratives are so influential; that people embrace stick-figure, one-sided, biased ideological narratives; that political and economic elites lie in obvious ways to audiences who do not punish them for it; and so on.
And in some sense, these things are puzzling. Relative to the possibilities of knowledge and understanding in modern society, it is striking—and regrettable—that shocking forms of ignorance, misinformation, and misperceptions are so pervasive.
However, in a deeper sense, this situation is not surprising. The more puzzling feature of modern societies is that many people reliably form accurate beliefs about distant, complex issues. Unless we understand this, we will fail to appreciate how impressive—and fragile—this achievement is.
And this goes to my comments about how democracy, and science, might be passing fads in the history of our civilization, since we are a species driven by hierarchies and tribalism. (Also: the “many of us are in a position” comment is a reminder that “Everything you need to understand the reality of the world, as discovered over centuries, and especially in the past century and past few decades, is out there, available to you.” As I wrote about here.)
Another good point:
In connection with the themes of this essay, it is partly because the modern panic about these things is historically illiterate. There never was a “truth” era. The dominant world religions are vast repositories of fake news and rumours; conspiracy theories are as old as humanity; and false, cartoonish, and biased narratives and ideologies are the norm throughout human history.
Finally, the writer advises, give up the idea of naive realism. And second,
… lies, conspiracy theories, misinformation, bias, pseudo-science, superstition and so on are not alien perversions of the public sphere. They are the epistemic state of nature that society will revert to in the absence of fragile—and highly contingent—cultural and institutional achievements.
And these highly contingent achievements are the science and democracy I’ve spoken of, and Jonathan Rauch’s Constitution of Knowledge.
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Two more items I’ll link here, and perhaps explore more deeply later.
Robert Reich, 30 Dec 2024: How about if Canada annexes Blue America?
OnlySky, Dale McGowan, 30 Dec 2024: The never-ending appeal of the magic man, subtitled “Complex problems call for complex solutions. Oh well.”
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Today’s reading: another 70 pages of Bill Adair’s BEYOND THE BIG LIE.
