Folks were asked to name a scientific concept that deserves to be better known.
Lisa Randall nominates “effective theory.”
an effective theory tells us precisely its limitations—the conditions and values of parameters for which the theory breaks down. The laws of the effective theory succeed until we reach its limitations when these assumptions are no longer true or our measurements or requirements become increasingly precise.
Matthew D. Lieberman nominates naive realism.
If I am seeing reality for what it is and you see it differently, then one of us has a broken reality detector and I know mine isn’t broken. If you can’t see reality as it is, or worse yet, can see it but refuse to acknowledge it, then you must be crazy, stupid, biased, lazy or deceitful.
In the absence of a thorough appreciation for how our brain ensures that we will end up as naïve realists, we can’t help but see complex social events differently from one another, with each of us denigrating the other for failing to see what is so obviously true.
Matthew O. Jackson nominates homophily.
New parents learn from talking with other new parents, and help take care of each other’s children. People of the same religion share beliefs, customs, holidays, and norms of behavior. By the very nature of any workplace, you will spend most of your day interacting with people in the same profession and often in the same sub-field.
…Homophily lies at the root of many social and economic problems, and understanding it can help us better address the many issues that societies around the globe face, from inequality and immobility, to political polarization.
Dylan Evans nominates need for closure.
However great our desire for an answer may be, we must make sure that our desire for truth is even greater, with the result that we prefer to remain in a state of uncertainty rather than filling in the gaps in our knowledge with something we have made up.
Gary Klein nominates decentering.
Decentering is not about empathy—intuiting how others might be feeling. Rather, it is about intuiting what others are thinking. It is about imagining what is going through another person’s mind. It is about getting inside someone else’s head.
…Being able to take someone else’s perspective lets people disagree without escalating into conflicts.
Adam Waytz nominates the illusion of explanatory depth.
If you asked one hundred people on the street if they understand how a refrigerator works, most would respond, yes, they do. But ask them to then produce a detailed, step-by-step explanation of how exactly a refrigerator works and you would likely hear silence or stammering. This powerful but inaccurate feeling of knowing is what Leonid Rozenblit and Frank Keil in 2002 termed, the illusion of explanatory depth (IOED), stating, “Most people feel they understand the world with far greater detail, coherence, and depth than they really do.”
Cristine H. Legare nominates Cumulative Culture.
Cumulative culture requires the high fidelity transmission of two qualitatively different abilities—instrumental skills (e.g., how to keep warm during winter) and social conventions (e.g., how to perform a ceremonial dance). Children acquire these skills through high fidelity imitation and behavioral conformity. These abilities afford the rapid acquisition of behavior more complex than could ever otherwise be learned exclusively through individual discovery or trial-and-error learning.
If someone had asked me, I would have proposed something similar: cultural intelligence.
Eric R. Weinstein gives us Russell Conjugation.
the human mind is constantly looking ahead well beyond what is true or false to ask “What is the social consequence of accepting the facts as they are?” While this line of thinking is obviously self-serving, we are descended from social creatures who could not safely form opinions around pure facts so much as around how those facts are presented to us by those we ape, trust or fear. Thus, as listeners and readers our minds generally mirror the emotional state of the source, while in our roles as authoritative narrators presenting the facts, we maintain an arsenal of language to subliminally instruct our listeners and readers on how we expect them to color their perceptions.
Sarah Demers nominates blind analysis.
The idea is to fully establish procedures for a measurement before we look at the data so we can’t be swayed by intermediate results. They require rigorous tests along the way to convince ourselves that the procedures we develop are robust and that we understand our equipment and techniques. We can’t “unsee” the data once we’ve taken a look.
John Tooby nominates coalitional instincts.
These programs enable us and induce us to form, maintain, join, support, recognize, defend, defect from, factionalize, exploit, resist, subordinate, distrust, dislike, oppose, and attack coalitions. Coalitions are sets of individuals interpreted by their members and/or by others as sharing a common abstract identity
…to earn membership in a group you must send signals that clearly indicate that you differentially support it compared to rival groups. Hence, optimal weighting of beliefs and communications in the individual mind will make it feel good to think and express content conforming to and flattering to one’s group’s shared beliefs, and feel good attacking and misrepresenting rival groups.
Need a name for the cognitive error mistaking cognitive errors for science.
Had people learned Weinstein’s 2011 entry, “kayfabe,” they would be better equipped to understand Trump and the media process.
Thanks for that pointer.
Nice to see Trivers mentioned, too. Don’t get me started on raving “Trivers is genius I tell you…”
Looking into Trivers, assuming I got the right one, it’s sad how someone like that can still be tested like garbage by a university that probably doesn’t even deserve him.
Tested=treated
Anyways, I finally got Twitter working so I might make it a project this year to show people how to do kayfabe with Trump.
I am still avoiding twitter which must be like digital crack.
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Robert L Trivers, accept no substitutes. He sounds like a wild man–perhaps he was bi-polar as a youth, according to the anecdotes. IIRC he had trouble with his college career because he kept ending up hospitalized from breakdowns.
I perceive him as being more honest and self-reflective than many scholars. And relentlessly curious.
For me the best work of his is
Trivers, R. L. (2002) Natural Selection and Social Theory: Selected Papers of Robert L. Trivers. (Evolution and Cognition Series) Oxford University Press, Oxford.
It has key papers reprinted with preferatory context and then post publication reflections.
Some people hated _The folly of fools_ and accused him of anti-semitism and who knows what else.
I’ve yet to glance at _Wild life_.
To a kid with a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail. Having recently read The Secret of Our Success, this all looks like Joseph Henrich.
Remarkable how many of these orbit around the problem of socially-influenced bias leading to factionalization and unreliable claims.
I would nominate scientific method. As we face ever more politicization of science — increasingly pushed by scientists themselves — we need to recognize just how far off the rails of the scientific method the policy proponents of, e.g., climate science and economics have gone.
Off topic and HT Cowen: http://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/9/the-real-reason-your-city-has-no-money
I strongly recommend the entire John Tooby piece – an absolute masterpiece.
The only example that is truly a scientific issue is blind analysis.
The problem with MacroEconomics is that it hasn’t really seemed to create a consensus on what is “effective theory” on growth, employment, and stable prices. Arnold’s work on PSST may be seen as more effective, over time.
(I’d suggest a rebranding to PST – Patterns of Specialization and Trade; the first ‘Sustainability’ in PSST makes it awkward. Like “Entrepreneur” is a terrible term for an important concept.)
Naive Realism – drivers who are slower are idiots, those faster are maniacs! – is also important, but fails if there really is a Clash of Civilizations.
The ancient and continuing rivalry of rural vs urban point of view (see VDH on Athens & Sparta) remains two key factions in all democracies. Yet laws will, inevitably, favor one PoV over the other, and it’s sort of naive of Ivory Tower types to think otherwise. Scott Adams’ Dilbert blog talks about the two very different movies in the heads of Trump haters & supporters.
While homophily, grouping with likes, influences many human behaviors, studying it more in order to reduce inequality seems like very INeffective theory. One of the main reasons poor folk remain poor in the US today is because of the incentives, basic Econ 1 (or web 2 things of Econ): incentives matter. What Jackson fails to mention is that small towns have LESS homophily than big cities, where there are more folk with similar weird ideas & tastes.
Need for Closure is certainly important, but Mark Twain said it better: It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.
This “knowing for sure” seems to be the Need for closure that is leading to the trouble. Most Trump haters are in just that kind of trouble; many Trump supporters might well be, as well.
Decentering, trying to THINK the thoughts somebody else is thinking, is hard and it has not been solved much yet. While author Klein drifts towards an AI entity speculation, he avoids reference to the large literature of “walking in anothers shoes”. Insofar as this becomes a way to rationalize illegal or harmful behavior (ex. excessive drinking), it is already somewhat discredited and with BLM, is likely to become more discredited. And those doing bad stuff will NOT become more decent.
The Illusion of Explanatory Depth is a huge issue. Most of those surveyed, after being asked to describe a process step by step, will report that their understanding
“The IOED provides us much-needed humility.” Virtually all the non-Christian elites, and many of the Christians as well, need more humility about the depth of their knowledge. Quite related to the NFC to “have an answer”.
Cumulative Culture is a good phrase for describing how humans, and so far humans alone, use tools and group rituals to progress. “Cumulative culture affords collective insights of previous generations to be harnessed for future discoveries in ways that are more powerful than the solitary brainpower of even the most intelligent individuals. ” << This was happening even before books, but exploded after books and literacy.
Arnold's Cultural Intelligence (much longer) is similar but far more relevant: "two sets of institutions in particular — markets and traditional social and familial practices — are the most important products of the process of social evolution building on cultural intelligence because they are the foremost means by which that process operates in free societies. It should hardly surprise us, therefore, that these two sets of institutions are also the foremost targets and objects of scorn of today's progressive planners."
<< Tho I would quibble that there are institutions: family, non-monetary social, and markets. And for all culture, there should be another institution – religion. It seems likely to me that cultural intelligence started booming with religion. (Complex communication was a per-requisite).
Incredibly important from Henrich (along with superiority of monogamy): "Across human societies, we see that seeking prestige, often more than wealth itself, drives much human behavior. However, prestige derives from success, skill, or knowledge in locally valued domains. While not infinitely malleable, what constitutes a valued domain is amazingly flexible. The differential success of societies and institutions will hinge, in part, on what domains are valued."
<< what needs to change among the poor is a re-emphasis on sex only in marriage, and prestige to those guys with successful marriages & kids.
(a BIG stimulus for married folk would help here, based on years of marriage and kids).
Emotive Conjugation (not known as "Russell" and emotive is now better) 3 descriptions: I am firm! You are obstinate. He is pigheaded.
The emotional synonym choice is important. Related to Naive Realism – we make judgments based on emotions. Then use our rational minds … to rationalize our judgments. It's easy to be "wrong" when there are no consequences. Farmers seldom have that option when choosing crops; being wrong is very expensive.
"Blind Analyses force scientists to approach their work with humility," << this is great, plus with excellent examples of how to measure effects and establish results before looking at the data.
This could be extended a bit for looking at decisions before knowing the outcome.
On Coalitional Instincts, It's hard to take Tooby seriously when he concludes: "No one is behaving either ethically or scientifically who does not make the best-case possible for rival theories with which one disagrees. " Actually, he is serious, but not behaving ethically when, earlier he states: "unusual, exaggerated beliefs, such as supernatural beliefs (e.g., god is three persons but also one person), alarmism, conspiracies or hyperbolic comparisons are unlikely to be said except as expressive of identity, because there is no external reality to motivate nonmembers to speak absurdities. "
None know God well enough in factual way to know His characteristics, but the atheist coalition, which Tooby implicitly is boot-licking here, likes to claim believers are absurd. Absolutely no humility by Tooby on this, and clearly showing his own anti-scientific Need for Closure.
Yet, on the Coalitional Instinct, Tooby is likely very correct, and provides a casual example of his own anti-Christian coalition whose purpose is more to denigrate Christians than to illustrate an absurd belief.
Thanks, Arnold, for great pointers. Important thoughts.