Ideas and Ego

I’ll often approach things by assuming that the world is right and I am wrong. I just finished a powerful book by Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society, which epitomized the role of humility in approaching ideas.

Sowell’s book is a backlash against a group of people he calls intellectuals – those whose professions begin and end in ideas. In many ways, battles between ideas are shaped more by emotion than by rational intellect. Much of intellectual debate rests upon empty arguments. Retorts you commonly hear in the media – “you’re oversimplifying the issue”, “you just have too much faith in the free market”, “you’re not seeing the complexities of the issue” – don’t hold much ground.

What begins as a simple and even-handed look at intellectuals, by the last chapter, turns into a rather acidic critique. But even this progression is rather fascinating, as it is the opposite of what we’re used to, which is a passionate and fiery introduction to a subject, later supported by facts, and ending in a call to action.

Sowell looks at intellectual's influence in the media – where events are skewed with such liberal bias that society hardly recounts Stalin murdering 6 million plus Ukrainians or Hoover’s interventionist and philanthropic ways – their influence in academia – where ideas are judged in an insular way by like-minded peers – and their influence in the law – where inconsistent calls for judicial activism and social justice seem to undermine the law’s purpose.

Sowell paraphrases Schumpter, writing how huge social catastrophes can kill millions of people without having the least effect on advancing theory.

The book culminates in two long chapters about intellectuals and war. If anything, Sowell shows that wars do have an effect on intellectuals, but it is more of an emotional effect than a rational one. French intellectuals widely adopted pacifism after World War I. School teachers went so far as to imbue it in the nation’s children, to the extent where Hitler decided to invade France based largely on their lack of support for engagement. His commanders advised against this – and later studies reveal France to be superior militarily – but Hitler attacked based on his views of the French morale. Such widespread pacifism in Europe also delayed England from mounting an effective response, and made the war much more costly than it might have been otherwise.

To a degree, the intellectual attitude before the war was that one must live and fight for one’s ideals. After the war, it was that men’s courage is a fickle thing, and war is a silly game. The point, however, in focusing so heavily on war is to show how such events go far in shaping intellectuals' emotional reactions without in the least sharpening their quality of thought.

The events that unfolded in the ‘60s were somewhat similar. America lost the Vietnam War not because of its lack of manpower – and not because of the difficult battle terrain – but due to its lack of support at home. The North Vietnamese intentionally made it a war of endurance, and despite their stunning losses – up to and through the Tet Offensive – their saving grace, as they later admitted, was the war’s unpopularity in America. Such lack of military backbone escalated the Cold War as well, which – despite intellectual calls for disarmament – was won by Reagan’s purposeful decision to make it an arms race rather than a traditional war.

Such examples chip away at the notion that pacifism breeds peace. More important than one’s conclusion, however, is the recognition that things like the of idea of pacifism are more like hypotheses – subject, to the degree possible, to historical support – than truths.

We all have values, judgments, assumptions about the world. But to hide certain beliefs from real-world scrutiny only does them a disservice. If one believes in a certain policy, for instance, because it reduces poverty, then certainly it behooves that person to see whether it actually reduces poverty.

Certainly not every idea or notion that has real-world implications need be supported by reason. One can go on acting kindly to their fellow men without necessarily needing a specific or good reason for doing so. Parents don't need to adopt an ideology to love their children. But it is a common mistake to assume that such ideas are based on a neat underlying logic, as if a pious Christian who says that he loves God because of all his beautiful creations might re-assess his love for God, should the evidence overwhelmingly suggest that his creations were in fact not beautiful, or that his creations were in fact not created by him. Such is often a confusion of induction and deduction. In all likelihood, one starts out liking God, and then finds a reason why. But that reason, then, is hardly useful for convincing others. This sort of confusion is much more common in discussions of social policy, where arguments are more often cloaked in objectivity.

To a large degree, the world has accepted the notion that many ideas need real-world verification. However, a deceptively large amount of arguments use reason, but are more like the example with the pious man, where the reason falls second to the conclusion, in turn revealing that the conclusion is more of an assumption. This has simply created a process whereby people look for whatever verification supports their theory and scrap the rest.

On the contrary, when one looks at the wealth of available real-world knowledge – ranging from history to news and the internet, from publicly available data to nationwide trends and scientific analyses, from society’s vast collections of mundane everyday experiences to the narrow yet advanced scope of select experts – one is rather awed by a sense humility rather than empowerment. Indeed, real-world knowledge does not exist simply to be cherry-picked according to one’s own beliefs, but to be made sense of, and to form one’s beliefs. I am often struck by it all with an overwhelming crushing of ego. But at the same time, ego is precisely not the point.

-KJ
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Media (in order of appearance)

Photos: (1)Thomas Sowell, Stephen Camarata; (2) Raising the Flag, 10/07/2009, P.E.S.H.; (3)radiotelecopen, radio telescopes HDR, 09/25/2008, Bram Reinders. Sphere: Related Content

The Soft Science of Positive Psychology

Modern philosophy – and more recently science and psychology – have shared the revelation that reality is all in your head. Change your head, goes one line of thought, and you change your reality.

In psychology this has spurned positive psychology: The study of the positive mindset is implicitly carried out in contrast to the study of negative mindsets, which consist of most of psychology’s history.

Positive psychology, however, remains more of a movement than an area of study. It has yet to prove itself, and most of the innovation has occurred in semantics – where, for instance, exercise might have been said to treat depression, positive psychologists would say that it provides a buffer against depression. (I wrote a bit more on the topic here.)

And it’s not as if the scientists haven’t been trying – positive psychology remains a well-funded area of research, considered in academic circles to be fresh and forward-looking. It’s just lacked many groundbreaking findings.

In all fairness, it’s still considered a new topic, with roots that go back only one or two decades. Researchers are just warming up. But as a movement, it’s already starting to outstay its welcome.

As might be expected from any movement, it’s now undergoing a backlash. Cancer survivor Barbara Ehrenreich recently railed against the infusion of cancer treatment and positive psychology. After being diagnosed with breast cancer

She discovered that a positive attitude was more or less compulsory. Most of her fellow sufferers thought it would help them recover. Some even said that cancer was a “gift” that helped one find life’s purpose. Ms Ehrenreich disagreed…She complained about the debilitating effects of chemotherapy, recalcitrant insurance companies and, most daringly, “sappy pink ribbons”…

More generally, Ms Ehrenreich sees an “ideological force in American culture…that encourages us to deny reality.”…At a confab for motivational speakers, she is told that anyone can achieve “infinite power” by resonating in tune with the universe. From a popular preacher in Houston, she discovers that God will give big houses and nice tables in restaurants to those who sincerely wish for them. After slogging through countless books and lectures, she learns that food doesn’t make you fat unless you think it will, and that you can solve many of life’s problems by avoiding negative people. (The Economist, 12/17/09)

Ehrenreich, along with a handful of other authors, have recently published books that mock positive psychology as a feel-good movement devoid of any true science.

Between the movement and the backlash, positive psychology has a very American feel: It has more connections to alternative medicine than to clinical science, and its practical pop-science-for-the-masses approach bears some resemblance to America’s 19th century Spiritualist and Evangelical practices.

Areas such as a positive psychology are why psychology is still – and will long be – considered a soft science. In almost any other area of science, the creation of a new field of study would be spurned by some scientific breakthrough. Not so in positive psychology. Here, the change has occurred in the researchers’ minds, where they have made a conscious decision to focus on the positive instead of the negative.

Yet in itself, explicitly redirecting your thoughts isn’t necessarily a bad thing. This is what you do when you're testing assumptions: You change them and examine the consequences. This process can be powerful. It has given birth to non-Euclidian geometry and to Godel’s incompleteness theorems.

But in positive psychology it has produced very little. Highly studied emotions in positive psychology include flow, elevation, hopefulness, and appreciation. But in the current state of the things, these remain empty constructs and definitions, with few empirical connections.

The insight of empirical science is that, when increasing knowledge, we turn to the outside world. Reality is all in your head, but that does not deny the existence of a very real, concrete, palpable world outside of you. The stubborn inability to learn from this world, in politics, has led to true suffering; in business, has led to bankruptcy; in personality, has led to delusion; and in psychology, has led to positive psychology.

-KJ



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Media (in order of appearance)

Image: (1)Radioactive Happiness, 06/10/2006, Netsrot; (2) Woman getting massage, 12/08/2006, hop sungtrieu; (3) BP716 Rainbow and Bird, 07/14/2006, listentoreason. Sphere: Related Content

Things Fall Apart

England’s anti-drug department has spent the past two years denying a freedom of information request in regard to its domestic strategy to battle drugs. The Economist reported last week that this sort of behavior is symptomatic of England’s freedom of information act, passed in 2000, which contains 23 “get outs” in order to prevent bureaus from having to hand over classified information. Too often these requests get caught up in a legal quagmire and take up to a few years to grant. What separates this case, however, is the creative justification by the Home Office for not releasing the records:

The reason is that next March the National Audit Office (NAO), a public-spending watchdog, is due to publish a report of its own on local efforts to combat drugs. The Home Office says that to have two reports about drugs out at the same time might confuse the public, and for this reason it is going to keep its report under wraps.

The Economist calls this “the most inventive interpretation to date” with regard to the FOI act:

This is believed to be the first time that a public body has openly refused to release information in order to manage the news better. The department argues that releasing its internal analysis now “risks misinterpretation of the findings of the [National Audit Office] report”, because its own analysis is from 2007 and predates the NAO’s findings. The argument uses section 36 of the FOI act, which provides a broad exemption for information that could “prejudice the effective conduct of public affairs”.

It’s a bit ironic that a law passed to increase transparency is being enacted in a manner that’s anything but. Were this a bank hiding info from their shareholders, the public might be angrier.

But what’s more revealing about this case is the way in which laws breakdown overtime.

One of the most admirable accomplishments of the founders was to create a foundation that would stand the test of time. The constitution is in a sense radical, but it is also practical and realistic in its approach. A lack of long-term foresight is one of the largest underestimated factors playing into new legislation. Too often the debate surrounds the magnitude of the problem rather than on the solution.

The idea that we can fix deep problems like healthcare or the economy in one bill is not only unrealistic, but it underestimates the dynamic nature of the problem. A close analogy is found in large struggling firms which seek to rectify their problems with a silver bullet: They’ll hire an outsider CEO, pursue large mergers and acquisitions, or try extreme new strategies.

In a report this week on Toyota, The Economist discusses how often the best solutions are the least flashy and exciting. The subject of the report is Toyota, whose CEO worries they are on the path to failure and is working carefully to rectify the situation. He is reportedly working with tips from Jim Collins’ book, How the Mighty Fall. In the book, Collins

advocates old-fashioned management virtues such as determination, discipline, calmness under pressure and strategic decision-making based on careful sifting of the evidence. Often, the leader best able to halt a downward spiral will be an insider who knows how to build on proven strengths while simultaneously identifying and eradicating weaknesses.

In line with this, continues The Economist:

Mr Toyoda’s approach is not visionary. It is simple, incremental and requires painstaking attention to what the customers want. That is its virtue.

Occasionally I’ll be watching late night (or early morning) business TV, and news anchors will often ask CEOs “How did you do it? What’s your secret?” And by now it’s a cliché for the CEO to answer that there are no secrets and the only recipe to success is doing a good job, taking care of fundamentals, and perhaps an ounce of fortune here or there.

In a sense, the sentiment that there must be some secret to success is even more fascinating than the fact that there is isn’t. The sentiment is somewhat understandable, especially given how many perceived geniuses see the world in a radically unique manner.

But there is something different from such academic or theoretical smarts and business smarts. What distinguishes the latter is not clarity of mind and vision, but an ability to be completely in tune with the details of their products and with what people want. From this perspective, it’s obvious why radical shifts make the least amount of sense, particularly when it looks like they’re being done for the sake of change, rather than to alter the underlying content. Rather it’s a question of inspecting resources, using them to their full potential, seeing how they’ve worked in the past, and making the sort of detailed tweaks here and there that, say, an inquisitive public looking for an overarching secret to success wouldn’t be interested in.

It’s also, once again, an issue of focusing on the solution not the problem. A radical problem – even a crisis – need not always require a radical solution. An appliance that won’t turn might just have a minor wiring problem. Debilitating diseases are often rectified by targeting just one type of molecule.

Too often these sorts of small but effective solutions are confused with finding a silver bullet to solve a whole problem. The smarter solutions are distinguished however in their scope, their maximized use of available resources, and their ability to work within the system rather than to replace it. For instance, we do have an advanced healthcare system, and it can align patients’ needs with doctors. But we do not have enough doctors. An analogy is to a new computer which won’t turn on because it’s unplugged.

It is this sort of nuanced thinking which needs to be applied to legislation: An eye for the long-term effects – when deciding on item prices, Costco CEO Jim Senigal thinks about the effect they will have 20 years down the road – maximizing current resources, and a careful expert look at the details involved and how they work. Where these approaches can't be used due to the nature of politics - say, a lack of expertise in government, or an inability to be flexible - then the solution needs to be reformulated or dropped. A half-assed solution is the worst kind.

-KJ

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Media (in order of appearance)

Photo: (1)Toyota Camry, 02/26/2009, ogieabatillas; (2)Akio Toyoda, 10/24/2009, Shimoken; (3)Weird Al in Line at Costco, 12/26/2006, Vaguely Artistic.

Video: (1)Video, MrAlstec channel, of the song "Things Fall Apart" by Built to Spill from their 2009 album There is No Enemy. Sphere: Related Content