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Those who never retract their opinions love themselves more than they love truth. -- Joseph Joubert

What liberals think conservatives get right, and vice-versa

January 26th, 2012 · Civility, Critical Thinking, Politics

On CivilPolitics.org, Jonathan Haidt passes along the results on an investigation conducted by journalist Tom Edsall. Edsall asked some liberals what they think conservatives are right about, and then asked some conservatives what liberals are right about.

Here’s what the liberals praised conservatives on:

They appreciate more instinctively the need for fiscal balance.

They understand people’s more innate belief in hard work and individual responsibility and see government as too often lacking that understanding.

They are more suspicious from a philosophical point of view of big government as an answer to many issues and are suspicious of Wall Street institutionally and not just their high salaries, and bad practices.

They respect the need for private sector economic growth (although their prescription is lacking).

They are more pro-small business.

And here’s what conservatives praised liberals on:

Liberals recognize the real problems facing the poor, the hardships resulting from economic globalization and the socially destructive force of increasing inequality.

Liberals do not dismiss or treat as ideologically motivated scientific findings, especially the sharpening scientific consensus that human beings contribute significantly to climate change.

Liberals stand with those most in need, and believe in the inclusion of such previously marginalized groups as blacks, Hispanics, women and gays.

Fascinating. Both sides see good in the other side’s positions, but usually seem unable to take those positions themselves. I’m not sure whether to be encouraged or troubled. Perhaps both.

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Language matters: a criticism of global warming science defenders

January 26th, 2012 · Creationism, Critical Thinking, Global Warming, Politics, Science, Scientific studies

The choice of words being used in the global warming debate indicates something about the people choosing those words.

For a long time now, many defenders of global warming science (e.g., Phil Plait) have been using the phrase “global warming denier” to intentionally put certain people in the same intellectual and moral sorting bucket as holocaust deniers. More recently, some have attempted to equate global warming skepticism with creationism. This Science Insider article, for example, asks the question “Is climate change education the new evolution?” and complains about “an ideological drive from pressure groups to ‘teach the controversy’ where no scientific controversy exists.”

There are certainly many closed-minded ideologues in the global warming debate who have earned such scorn. But neither those who use the “denier” pejorative, nor those who attempt to put global warming skepticism on par with creationism, have precisely defined who they are talking about when dishing out that kind of scorn, and consequently they are unfairly painting many legitimate skeptics as crackpots.

As I discussed here, there exists an entire spectrum of beliefs about global warming. Some believe global warming isn’t happening; some believe it is happening but is caused by natural factors; some believe it is caused by both human and natural contributions, but are uncertain about which dominates; some believe it is dominated by human contributions; and some believe it is caused virtually entirely by human activity.

Exactly which of these people are being referred to by those who cry “deniers”?

Exactly which of these people are among those who are calling to “teach the controversy” where, it is claimed, “no scientific controversy exists”?

Some of the controversy that exists is legitimate; thus it is important, if we wish to be fair-minded, to make a distinction between “deniers” and legitimate skeptics.

It is not controversial that the globe has been warming. The temperature record is quite clear, and anybody who claims that global warming isn’t happening is either misinformed or in denial of the evidence. So one could fairly call those people “deniers” (but it would be nice to explicitly define that this is what you mean).

It is also beyond legitimate controversy that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and adding it to the atmosphere, all other things being equal, will raise the global average temperature over time.1

It should also be noncontroversial that there is, or at least there has been in modern times, a natural component to modern global warming (without yet claiming whether it’s the predominant factor). The Little Ice Age ended around or not long after 1849, at which point the earth began naturally warming. Given the kinds of time scales usually discussed in the context of global warming cycles, it is not unreasonable to think the warming continuing to date since then might include at least a component of natural warming related to this emergence from a cold period.

There is quite a bit of legitimate controversy surrounding the use of current climate models, which simplify or neglect many phenomena and rely not just on CO2 but on questionable positive feedback mechanisms to account for as much as 70%-80% of the predicted warming (in the more catastrophic predictions).

So it is entirely legitimate to question the degree to which scientists have pinned down the exact balance of  human vs. natural contributions, and to be skeptical of the more catastrophic predictions being made.

But because of the ambiguity of the phrase “global warming denier” and claims that “no controversy exists”, one is left with the impression that all these types of skeptics are being referred to. Lumping the legitimate skeptics in with the true deniers is misleading and unfair. It is at best an unintended over-generalization, and at worst a deplorable and  intellectually dishonest attempt to discredit legitimate skeptics and quash their concerns with the ongoing climate science by associating them with crackpots.

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1 Note, though, that this is a diminishing effect; the more CO2 you add, the less the temperature rises. If, for example, adding 200 parts per million (ppm) of CO2 to the atmosphere raises the temperature by 1C, then to raise the temperature by another 1C you need to add 400 parts per million; to raise it by yet another 1C, you need to add 800 ppm; and so on.

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Lies, damn lies, and statistics

January 23rd, 2012 · Critical Thinking, Demagoguery, Economics, Media, Politics

This chart has been going around the web lately:

This post on the Washington Post’s “The Fact Checker” explains why this chart is bogus.

By comparing the percentage increase of the debt rather than the absolute value of the debt, this chart gives the false impression that both Reagan and Bush increased the federal debt more than did Clinton or Obama. A $1T increase to a $3T debt, for example, is a 33% increase; but a $1T increase to a $10T debt is only a 10% increase. The chart-makers also cherry-picked data to paint Obama in a favorable light, by using the statistics for gross debt rather than public debt (a more commonly used debt figure which includes Medicare and Social Security bonds).

If one instead calculated public debt increases by each president as a percentage of GDP — since GDP is a realistic measure of our ability to repay the debt that was incurred at each point in time — then the numbers look like this:

Reagan: plus 14.9 percentage points
GHW Bush: plus 7.1 percentage points
Clinton: down 13.4 percentage points
GW Bush: plus 11.6 percentage points
Obama: plus 19.7 percentage points

In summary: As a percentage of GDP, no president in recent history has increased the debt more than Obama. And he isn’t even done with his first term yet, whereas Reagan and Bush both served two.

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Prog Rock Friday: therhythmisodd, “Subway”

January 20th, 2012 · Music, Prog Rock

therhythmisodd (formerly known as TRIO) is a progressive rock instrumental band from Sweden, that I learned about from the excellent Bands Like Rush website.

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The New Groupthink?

January 19th, 2012 · Brain, Creativity, Critical Thinking, Myers-Briggs

This NY Times article by Susan Cain highlights the research of psychologists who have identified what Cain refers to as the “new groupthink.”

Solitude is out of fashion. Our companies, our schools and our culture are in thrall to an idea I call the New Groupthink, which holds that creativity and achievement come from an oddly gregarious place. Most of us now work in teams, in offices without walls, for managers who prize people skills above all. Lone geniuses are out. Collaboration is in.

But there’s a problem with this view. Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption. And the most spectacularly creative people in many fields are often introverted, according to studies by the psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Gregory Feist. They’re extroverted enough to exchange and advance ideas, but see themselves as independent and individualistic. They’re not joiners by nature.

One explanation for these findings is that introverts are comfortable working alone — and solitude is a catalyst to innovation. As the influential psychologist Hans Eysenck observed, introversion fosters creativity by “concentrating the mind on the tasks in hand, and preventing the dissipation of energy on social and sexual matters unrelated to work.” In other words, a person sitting quietly under a tree in the backyard, while everyone else is clinking glasses on the patio, is more likely to have an apple land on his head. (Newton was one of the world’s great introverts: William Wordsworth described him as “A mind for ever/ Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.”) …

Culturally, we’re often so dazzled by charisma that we overlook the quiet part of the creative process. Consider Apple. In the wake of Steve Jobs’s death, we’ve seen a profusion of myths about the company’s success. Most focus on Mr. Jobs’s supernatural magnetism and tend to ignore the other crucial figure in Apple’s creation: a kindly, introverted engineering wizard, Steve Wozniak, who toiled alone on a beloved invention, the personal computer…

In his memoir, Mr. Wozniak offers this guidance to aspiring inventors:

“Most inventors and engineers I’ve met are like me … they live in their heads. They’re almost like artists. In fact, the very best of them are artists. And artists work best alone …. I’m going to give you some advice that might be hard to take. That advice is: Work alone… Not on a committee. Not on a team.”

I think there is much value to what these psychologists are pointing out, but I suspect Cain has misstated some of this. Research has probably shown that some people are more creative when they work in solitude, but not all people or people in general. Creativity in groups versus creativity in isolation is thus a false dichotomy. Many people — the “lone genius” types — can be creative in isolation in ways that group interaction stifles for them, but other research has shown that the interaction of multiple personality types in a group environment can often produce creative results that could never have been achieved alone. So a combination is needed. And it’s certainly fair to point out where organizations have gone overboard on emphasizing collaboration, but “groupthink” is the wrong term to apply here.

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Is there a “conservation of fairness?”

January 19th, 2012 · Critical Thinking, Economics, Politics

Bruce Charlton wonders if “fairness” is a zero sum game:

Trying to make the world less unfair can only be accomplished by making it unfair in some other way.

There is conservation of fairness; it is a corollary of the conservation laws of physics.

That just strikes me as true.

We can move fairness around but we cannot make the world more fair.

But we are not supposed to move fairness around – that is a meaning of the injunction not to ‘judge’.

Maybe fairness is like energy – it is conserved, it cannot be destroyed, but when fairness is deployed it is dissipated into slightly raising the background heat.

In other words, he thinks “fairness” is like a fixed pie; more fairness for me means less fairness for someone else.

Is “fairness” really something that is conserved, or can it be created (and occasionally destroyed) like wealth?

My initial reaction is that this question is unanswerable, largely because the very term “fair” is a value judgment and hence has different meanings in the context of different value sets. A libertarian would say that aggregate world fairness can be increased by increasing liberty worldwide; an egalitarian would say that aggregate world fairness could be increased by increasing social and economic equality; and so on.

But looking at the original quote on which Charlton was commenting — “trying to make the world less unfair can only be accomplished by making it unfair in some other way” — has a seed of truth in it. If you make the world more fair for libertarians, you have made it less fair for egalitarians, and vice versa.

So maybe the most aggregately “fair” thing to do would be to stop trying to make the world more “fair”.

(HT to The Fourth Checkraise.)

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Quote of the Day

January 18th, 2012 · Critical Thinking, Economics, Politics, Quotes

“Lord, enlighten thou our enemies,” prayed nineteenth-century British economist and moral philosopher John Stuart Mill in his “Essay on Coleridge.” “Sharpen their wits, give acuteness to their perceptions, and consecutiveness and clearness to their reasoning powers: we are in danger from their folly, not from their wisdom; their weakness is what fills us with apprehension, not their strength.”

For every left-of-center American economist in the second half of the twentieth century, Milton Friedman (1912-2006) was the incarnate answer to John Stuart Mill’s prayer. His wits were smart, his perceptions acute, his arguments strong, his reasoning powers clear, coherent, and terrifyingly quick. You tangled with him at your peril. And you left not necessarily convinced, but well aware of the weak points in your own argument.

– from Brad DeLong’s 2006 eulogy of Milton Friedman

Milton Friedman was one of the greatest critical thinkers of the 20th century, and serves as a perfect example of civility in political discourse. Here’s an example of how congenial he could be while disagreeing with someone.

HT to Cafe Hayek.

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On Self-Righteousness and Critical Thinking

January 18th, 2012 · Civility, Critical Thinking, Ethics, Media, Politics

This is a re-post (with a few minor corrections and revisions) of one of my more popular posts (original here).

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“You can’t convince a believer of anything; for their belief is not based on evidence, it’s based on a deep seated need to believe.”
– Carl Sagan

This post on  Overcoming Bias poses an interesting question: Are the self-righteous righteous? The post defines righteous as upright, moral, and justified, and self-righteous as confident of being righteous; hence, the question examines whether or not a self-righteous person’s confidence in his/her righteousness is misplaced. The question could be restated more clearly as: Are people who believe themselves to be righteous correct in this belief?

To answer this question, Overcoming Bias looks to this Washington Post article about the research performed by Scott Reynolds and Tara Ceranic at the University of Washington. (The article is towards the bottom of the page). According to the article:

[Their] research highlights the idea that people with exceptionally strong convictions about their moral goodness are likely to follow extreme courses of action because they can convince themselves that whatever they do is good.

Although Overcoming Bias never directly answers the question it poses, the implication is clear. And this article on Reynold’s and Ceranic’s study (which was published in the November 2007 issue of the Journal of Applied Psychology) as much as says the same thing: Since the self-righteous — people who believe in their own moral superiority — will often lie, cheat, and steal to further their moral cause, they are therefore not in fact morally superior.

The Killian document controversy (a.k.a. “Rathergate”) is a good illustrative example of this phenomenon. In September 2004, less than two months before a presidential election, Dan Rather ran a news story on 60 Minutes about the Killian documents — six documents critical of President George W. Bush’s service in the National Guard, alleged to have been written in the early 1970′s — even though the documents had not been authenticated by CBS. The documents have since been shown to be forgeries created on a modern-day computer. Dan Rather has continued to stand by his story, and in subsequent interviews has stated that even if the documents are false, the underlying story is still true. Hence, not only does Rather believe in something in spite of a lack of evidence, but he also considers it acceptable to use false evidence to convince others. When it comes to a strongly held conviction, the end justifies the means.

One of the comments posted in response to the Overcoming Bias post referred to an article by author David Brin. Brin has this to say on the subject of self-righteousness:

While there are many drawbacks, self-righteousness can also be heady, seductive, and even… well… addictive. Any truly honest person will admit that the state feels good. The pleasure of knowing, with subjective certainty, that you are right and your opponents are deeply, despicably wrong.

Sanctimony, or a sense of righteous outrage, can feel so intense and delicious that many people actively seek to return to it, again and again. Moreover, as Westin et. al. have found, this trait crosses all boundaries of ideology.

Indeed, one could look at our present-day political landscape and argue that a relentless addiction to indignation may be one of the chief drivers of obstinate dogmatism and an inability to negotiate pragmatic solutions to a myriad modern problems. It may be the ultimate propellant behind the current “culture war.”

I think that Brin’s analysis is correct, but I would add that a distinction between convictions and opinions is fundamental to understanding the phenomenon of self-righteousness. Opinions are based on facts, evidence, and sound rational arguments; convictions (for lack of a better word) are based on faith, ideology, or something else (e.g., a belief in God). Opinions are the matter of critical thinking; convictions are a matter of religion and dogmatism. As I’ve said before here on The Thinker, “strong in one’s convictions” is often just a euphemism for “closed-minded and opinionated.” These people live in castles, not tents. And in the course of defending their castle — and recruiting new soldiers to join their moral army — they will often resort to intellectually dishonest tactics. It is the worst form of arrogance to believe yourself to be so right that you are justified in incivility towards those who disagree with you, or in lying to get people to share your convictions.

Putting all this discussion of self-righteousness into the context of critical thinking, it seems that the following would be good advice for the critical thinker to follow:

  • Learn to recognize a conviction versus an opinion — both in yourself and in others.
  • To the extent possible, try to convert your convictions into opinions. Opinions are more justifiable, being based on facts, evidence, and sound arguments, and you will be far less likely to descend into self-righteousness. Some convictions (e.g., a belief in God) may not be convertible into an opinion due to a lack of evidence one way or the other. That’s okay; just be honest with yourself regarding which of your positions are convictions and which are opinions.
  • Be intellectually honest with others when discussing your convictions. Don’t dress them up as opinions and try to argue them on rational grounds; you’ve already admitted to yourself there are no such grounds, since it’s a conviction and not an opinion.
  • Introspectively examine your thought processes and recognize when you are descending into the seductive mode of self-righteousness and indignation. Bad. Bad critical thinker. No donut.
  • Don’t bother engaging others in a debate on their convictions. As Carl Sagan said in the opening quote, you can’t convince a believer of anything; therefore debating them would be tilting at windmills. And as the research would suggest, believers with strong moral convictions may have a tendency to lie and cheat to get you to buy into their belief. This is true regardless of whether the belief is a religious one (e.g., arguing with a creationist about evolution) or a dogmatic one (e.g., arguing with a “birther” or a “9/11 truther”).

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Nerdgasmic news: free online courses from Stanford and MIT

January 18th, 2012 · Critical Thinking, Education, Engineering, Geekery, Science

Stanford University and a couple other colleges are offering free courses. I just signed up for this one on Model Thinking. Scroll to the bottom and you can see the other courses offered.

Also, in case you were unaware, MIT now offers free online course material through their MIT Open Courseware site.

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Effective Thinking…

January 18th, 2012 · Critical Thinking

… is the name of a new blog run by the Center for Effective Thinking. I have corresponded with the Center’s founder (William Minto) on and off for the past couple of years, and I’m very excited that he is now blogging. This is definitely one to add to your bookmarks, RSS feeds, etc.

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