LOGO-L> Re: Why is accurate thinking so unpopular?

[bh@anarres.CS.Berkeley.EDU (Brian Harvey)]

Bob Gorman <bgorman@kncell.org> writes:
>I used to think that thinking skills went from 0, for non-thinkers to some
>large number for those that are enraptured by it. But certain things didn't
>make sense, till I realized the scale actually goes negative! Simple
>laziness was not enough to explain why people would think carefully
>in some areas but not in others.   [...]
>It's not that people can't see what's going on around them, or understand it,
>but
>rather because (?) of higher level needs (ego and identity) they actively
>avoid sensing and interpreting what is going on right in front of them.

I agree that a lot of people believe wrong things in a lot of areas, but
perhaps you're too harsh in putting the blame on their emotional needs.

Very little in the world is like mathematics, in which wrong things are
manifestly wrong because they're self-contradictory.  In other areas,
things are contingently wrong -- something that might have been true, in
a different history, just happens to be false.  How do we ever know about
any of those things?  There are many things that you believe because
you've been told them by people you took as authoritative, such as
parents or teachers.  How do you know, for example, that water is made of
two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen?  At some point, in high school,
you probably did the experiment of separating water into those components,
but you probably knew about H2O before that, and even the experiment
proves its conclusion only by way of a lot of interpretation of the meaning
of the results.  (Specifically, you have to believe that equal numbers of
atoms of two different gases will have the same volume, rather than the
same weight.)

It makes *sense* to believe your teachers about things like that.  There
isn't enough time for you to recapitulate the entire intellectual history
of the human race; you have to believe people about most things.  So it's
not so surprising if one believes the same people about ideas like
democracy in the USA, or chemical weapons in the Sudan, or Vietnam
attacking US Navy ships in the Gulf of Tonkin, or that Iraq is more
aggressive than Indonesia, or any of the other lies that we're told with
the same kind of authority.

The only reason you or I know better is that at some point we met other
authority figures who told us contradictory things -- and *then* we had
to use our critical thinking capabilities to sort out what's really true.


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