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Last weekend Sean asked his readers to weigh in on what major scientific concept most needs to be explained to the public. The obvious answer is Evolution, except that he ended up ruling that out for the quite sensible reason that Evolution has been explained very well many times, and it's not scientists' fault if people just don't want to listen. But my favorite answer was this one from Scott Aaronson:
"The skill of sharpening a question to the point where it could actually have an answer."
Like many scientific concepts, this one has resonance in real life. In fact I would argue that the recent election season would have been significantly less nauseating had any of the political candidates or professional media loudmouths had a handle on that concept!
4 comments:
Yes. If candidates and pundits who couldn’t seriously discuss solutions that are grounded in observable reality were laughed into irrelevance, our nation would be much better off.
Actually, I think SF & Fantasy Authors carry the greatest possible weight. It is to turn unpalatable logic into acceptable stories. Our whole biology is built in ways that render us susceptible to illusions (visual, auditory, memory, cognitive, etc). We infer causality from coincidence - the "I was just thinking of you when you called" spooky-artifact.
See New Scientists' editorial for the week ending 12th November, for example, on the importance of dealing with a majority people who would rather live in a happy cloud of comfortable miscomprehension, who claim that art (or economics) are more important than physics - and who'll still try the "what is reality, anyway" question.
Compelling stories that don't imply that evolution is directed to a continual upward progress, and that humans are the pinnacle; stories that unambiguously show the benefits of dealing with the world as it is, not as we wish it might be.
It's building a compelling mythology of problem solving and effective questioning, to mirror the aeons of superstitious myth building. Turning Daedelus from a greek tragedy of "knowing too much" into asking what the boundaries are. Turning Frankenstein into an inquiry of where we draw the line between dead and living and why?
The critical problem is that the artisitically inclined, who create the human resonant stories, are too frequently ignorant (there are many noble exceptions of course) of science, and their technophobia and avoidance of rationality to reach their interpretive state, results in a strong irrational content. That's the sucking wound at the heart of rationality in this culture.
Blast - that was longer and more pompous than I'd intended. No writer, me. :)
Actually, I agree completely! Both about the uses of science fiction and about most writers' and artists' astounding scientific illiteracy. (Scientists have been complaining about that since C. P. Snow, however, so I don't think it's going to change any time soon.)
The New Scientist article reminds me of the really intriguing work of two behavioral psychologists, Timothy D. Wilson and Martin Seligman. Wilson writes about the adaptive unconscious. Seligman is the guy who did the original experiments that established the concept of learned helplessness, and he's spent the rest of his career working on the relationship between people's behavior and their relative optimism or pessimism.
Both of them argue that most decisions people perceive as the result of rational thinking are actually instinctive. As they point out, if people applied rational, conscious thought to most everyday decisions they would't be able to function effectively in real time. So there's a huge adaptive benefit to bypassing rational thought in favor of quick and dirty instinct. The problem comes when the bypass mechanism leads us as a species to make unadaptive decisions. Groupthink is a well-known example of this phenomenon -- and obviously a plague in modern politics. Another example is the tendency to ignore or deny the existence of problems that are perceived as unsolvable (think global warming). If a problem is truly unsolvable then denial is a good practical solution that lets you get on with life and deal with the things you can control. But if the unsolvability is merely a lack of political will, then denial actually exacerbates the problem.
One of the most interesting things in Seligman's work is his discussion of US politics. He argues that the best decisions are made by organizations that balance the inputs of optimists and pessimists. But in practice the US electorate is systematically skewed toward electing optimists. Seligman and his co-author actually have a near-perfect track record of calling US Presidential elections based on an optimism rating of their major campaign speeches. It's hard to evaluate how well it works now, because starting with Bush 1, speechwriters began running their speeches through Seligman's rating program. (Hence Bush senior's "million points of light" speech, and the cloyingly familiar 'we're getting better every day in every way' tone to most Presidential verbiage.)
In short, it seems that people only think they are voting on policy, moral values, or even rational self-interest. Instead, a decisive margin of the US electorate simply votes for the most optimistic candidate every time -- regardless of party affiliation or any of the other supposed 'issues' in a given election cycle.
Okay. Long detour there. But getting back to your point (finally) ....
It seems to me that you hit the nail on the head when you say that we need "a compelling mythology of problem solving and effective questioning. " In essence, you're advocating science fiction as a way to spin narratives of what Seligman would call tempered (or balanced) optimism.
Basically, you're saying we ought to use science fiction to make rational thinking sexy ....
And that strikes me as a pretty good plan.
I think the key is to help people understand who they are, and give them tools and techniques to rise above the evolved obstacles to rationality. Education and stories... So who are we?
I work in digital marketing. Pretty much the entire basis of marketing is to disengage people from rational thinking and appeal to emotion. I have, as a result, absolutely no faith in "rational markets" and "rational actors" - and I now believe that this is why economics is a dismal science. You can't create a predictive model of an economy without understanding the emotional state *and the unexpected evolution of emotional states (aka script writers for politicians, journalists, authors and celebrities)* in the projected period.
If you wanted one cause of today's main social and political problems, it's John Nash's Equilibrium model. For example, that "rational agent" model leads us to believe that politicians are only it to line their pockets; I suspect that some are, but many get into politics as an emotional reaction to seeing that things aren't right and that they can help their fellows by putting it right. If you can believe that your political opponent is also trying, in their own strangely warped way, to do good, it helps consensus building rather than viciously instant opposition.
As you say, Seligman, Wilson - but also consider Bob Cialdini (who, for my world of interests, is one of the most illuminating researchers and writers). We have built in perceptions of fairness. Most of us are wired (it happens in chimps, too) to understand when an offer isn't fair and to reject it. And we punish those who aren't fair even if we are damaged somewhat as a result.
And the bystander effect - by and large, we'll all stand around watching someone getting beaten up. Unless someone acts to stop it, when we're socially authorized to take action.
This gives the the basis for a redemption from the cruel and impossible purely rational agent - bridging the gap between emotionality and materialism. The emotionally driven, but rationally capable and introspective hero who understands that sometimes, reacting is right and sometimes thinking is right. The hero who steps into a fight that isn't theirs, and helps resolve it fairly, with consensus building - and a sufficient force from allies recruited because of the hero's emotional competence and integrity.
But faith...
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