Fri, 11 Nov 2005
With the recent Kansas Board of Education decision and the results in the Dover, Pennsylvania Board of Education elections, the Intelligent Design debate seems to be all the rage. It’s not really that interesting a debate, mostly being a rerun of the standard evolution versus creationism stuff with some new catchphrases. Even as a religious debate it’s not really terribly interesting from what I can see; the idea that God created the universe, then allowed it to evolve to where it is today seems entirely satisfactory, and doesn’t even undercut the Bible as much as considerations like “why does God let evil exist?”
But to my mind, the real fun in religious debates is in accepting all the premises, and seeing where that really leads.
So let’s forget the fossil record, genetic science, knowledge about breeding animals, and whatever else that might be relevant, and think instead about Platonic ideals of God. If God is all that’s good, all that’s wise, all that’s loving and caring, and Man is made in His image, what does that mean for the question of whether we evolved from bacteria and apes or appeared fully formed, ejected from Eden? If you or I were perfectly loving, perfectly wise, knew everything and could do whatever we wanted, and what we wanted was to make beings in our own likeness, what would we do?
Sat, 18 Dec 2004
…and you can’t beat that.
Or, at least, I think that was some primary school slogan we had at some point. But Google knows nothing about it, so maybe I imagined it all. Surely, there isn’t still more in the universe than’s dreamt of in Google’s eight billion web pages… I think it might’ve had something to do with aboriginals; it rhymes after all.
Anyway, I occasionally get confused at the way both lefties and right-wingers claim exclusive ownership of particular concepts. Well, not so much that, but when both manage to do it over the same concept, and actually show evidence that they’re right.
One of those concepts is individuality. The lefty concept looks something like “I’m an individual, standing up against the crowd, bravely dissenting from the accepted wisdom in the knowledge that time shall prove me right”, while the right-wing one is perhaps akin to “I can look after myself. Anything that my family wants, that my town wants, that my church wants, we can build ourselves, and we will.” The right looks at things like communism, big government, and tariffs and wonders how anyone who claims to be an “individual” can either be so incapable of looking after themselves to want that stuff, while the lefty looks at the disciples gathered in church all reading from the same page of the same book, or the ministers and executives who toe the party line religiously, and wonder how anyone who doesn’t haven’t an opinion of their own could possibly count as an individual.
I don’t actually wonder either of those things. What I do wonder is why we’ve got such adverse definitions for individuality. Why should you have to imagine yourself surrounded by people who unthinkingly disagree with you, or alone on a prairie, with no one to turn to and no hope of help, just in order to think of yourself as an individual?
Clearly, right and left need to come together and turn to the world of fashion to establish a new conceptualisation of the crucially important issue of how we shall comport ourselves as individuals.
Wed, 27 Oct 2004
Hrmph. Since my laptop keeps dying on the other post I’m trying to make, I might blog about James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds instead. Here’s a section from p187 about small group dynamics:
Talkativeness may seem like a curious thing to worry about, but in fact talkativeness has a major impact on the kinds of decisions small groups reach. If you talk a lot in a group, people will tend to think of you as influential almost by default. Talkative people are not necessarily well liked by other members of the group, but they are listened to. And talkativeness feeds on itself. Studies of group dynamics almost always show that the more someone talks, the more they are talked to by others in the group. So people at the center of the group tend to become more important over the course of a discussion.
This might be okay if people only spoke when they had expertise in a particular matter. And in may cases, if someone’s talking a lot, it’s a good sign that they have something valuable to add. But the truth is that there is no clear correlation between talkativeness and expertise. In fact, as the military-flier studies suggest, people who imagine themselves as leaders will often overestimate their own knowledge and project an air of confidence and expertise that is unjustified. And since, as political scientists Brock Blomberg and Joseph Harrington suggest, extremists tend to be more rigid and more convinced of their own rightness than moderates, discussion tends to pull groups away from the middle. Of course, sometimes truth lies at the extreme. And if the people who spoke first and most often were consistently the people with the best information or the keenest analysis, then polarization might not be much of a problem. But it is.
And unlike other recent contributions it’s a serious enough endeavour that it actually proposes solutions to the problems it identifies, and looks at the problems those solutions create.
Top book, highly recommended.
Wow. At least to me, those excerpted paragraphs read completely differently on the web versus on paper. The paper version seems calm, collected, and to be building up a point in a measured, albeit anecdotal, way. The web version feels staccato and amateurish. Amazing the differences texture, brightness and font can make.
Thu, 21 Aug 2003
There’s an interesting dichotomy of opinions on opinions: half the time people are intensely interested in what everyone else’s opinions on things are, and half the time everyone’s nodding in wry agreement to comments such as “opinions are like assholes, everybody’s got one”. This difference is also found in the reaction to government polling: sure, it’s great to be in a democracy and get to vote in your leaders, and it’s great to be able to get a rough take on what everyone thinks about an issue via professional pollsters, but as well as being responsive to the electorate, we want our leaders to have their own principles and provide, well, leadership to match.
What’s the difference here? It’s not simply a matter of getting annoyed when people have opinions that are diametrically opposed to yours; at the best of times, those can be the most fun, and conversely, having everyone be mindlessly agreeable can be pretty obnoxious too. I’m inclined to think it’s one of opinion versus insight.
Everyone has an opinion on most issues: they’ve got whatever facts they’ve picked up on the topic, their life’s experience, and common sense, and if they’ve got the time and the inclination, they’ll happily put all that together for you, stir, simmer, and serve up as the canonical take on events. Such are the standard dishes of talk radio, and taxi cab conversations.
By contrast, depending on how well informed you are already, it might be difficult to find someone that has any additional insight to offer. On most topics, most people are about equally well (or poorly) informed. On most topics, most people’s backgrounds aren’t relevant. And common sense is called that because, mostly, it is pretty common. Certainly, if you’re poorly informed on an issue, or you’re talking to someone who’s in a position to be much better informed than you are, you can gain some insight rather than just another opinion, and similarly if you’re talking to someone who’s older and wiser, or better at putting two and two together.
Unfortunately, if you just poll for opinions, it’s very easy for the insight to get lost amongst the assholes.