Tuesday 1 March 2022
The courage to believe in experience
Science and reasonable virtue, which plunge their roots in the soil of nature, are to this day only partially welcome or understood. Although they bring freedom in the end, the approach to them seems sacrificial, and many prefer to live in the glamour of intuition, not having the courage to believe in experience.
George Santayana - Scepticism and Animal Faith (1923)
It does take courage to believe in experience. As a consequence it is possible to condition people to be dumb. Straightforward stimulus, response and reinforcement will do it. Reward people for being dumb with social and official approval. Reward them socially or financially for saying dumb things. It happens on a vast scale and we know it happens.
Tell people we are all doomed by climate change and it’s our fault. Offer social or official approval when they demonstrate a range of appropriate behaviours, particularly verbal behaviours such as deploring consumption, condemning capitalism and praising sustainable energy. That’s it and it works. We know it works if we have the courage to believe in experience.
Science and reasonable virtue, which plunge their roots in the soil of nature, are to this day only partially welcome or understood. These are the antidotes, but even today they are only partially welcome or understood. In some respects it seems to be worse than it was in Santayana’s day. Experience suggests there will be reasons for that too.
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5 comments:
I like the idea of "the glamour of intuition". That's another quick and easy sell from those who would control us: the idea that we can all have a quick flash of insight which reveals the truth more effectively than studying and weighing the evidence. Very pernicious and almost ineradicable, because weaning people off it means showing them that they are less interesting than they thought.
I always remember the phrase voiced by one of the founders of the Full Gospel Businessmens' Fellowship, "Truth divorced from experience will always dwell in the realm of doubt".
Whilst I agree with Sam, as usual, flashes of insight can and do happen, ask any scientist or engineer including me. But this phenomena has a real world cause being the result of accumulated learning and experience coup!ed with the unconscious mind. It is, in my own opinion, nothing to do with the magical or mystical. Otherwise I
concur that the hard work of examining the data and evidence a la Feynman underpins
most of our understanding of the truth; something that Paul Homewood does every day and gets ignored by most of the media for doing.
The only,only remedy for this is improvement in Sec School education. Dream On!
It's an uncomfortable truth that almost everybody (including me) is not a rational being.
Our bodies and minds, and those of our ancestors, have been trained by experience to respond to the social and physical environment in a quick and efficient manner - where passing on your genes is more important than rational Truth.
Reason, and more recently science, can be used to second guess our initial emotional responses. Jumping away from a snake in the grass first, *then* inspection from a distance to confirm whether it is something else, is the order imposed on our thinking by evolutionary processes.
Of course the capability and willingness to go beyond the initial emotional response varies from person to person...
Sam - good point, we see it everywhere too. A particularly pernicious aspect is how young people are encouraged to value the glamour of intuition via social media. Some will never grow out of it just as some have never grown out of the political ideologies of their youth.
DAD - yet the realm of doubt is so fascinating and alluring. All those attractive possibilities.
Tammly - what I like about Paul Homewood's work is that he bases it on official data, published financial accounts and so on. I don't know how he gets through such a large amount of blogging, because he must spend a considerable amount of time on each post.
From what I hear from our grandson, I don't see an improvement in Sec School education coming soon. It sounds like a mess to me.
DJ - "Of course the capability and willingness to go beyond the initial emotional response varies from person to person."
Indeed it does and I suspect the main problem is a basic ability to go beyond the initial emotional response. Because it comes first, it naturally has to be dealt with first and dealing with it seems to depend quite critically on rate at which it subsides.
For some people it seems to subside too slowly and it isn't clear what they can do about that apart from medication.
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