Social Learning Links, 12/7/2024

Me on Michael Huemer; Bryan Caplan on same; invitation to a discussion with Caplan and Rachel Ferguson on same; Musa al-Gharbi on epistemic tribalism; Ilya Shapiro and Noam Josse on campus tribalism;

[I have decided to move away from the generic “links to consider” to links collected by topic. This will mean that sometimes links will be less recent. “Social Learning” means the process by which we form beliefs. It includes links on the topic of higher education.]

I reviewed Michael Huemer’s Progressive Myths.

Michael Huemer believes that some important components of progressive ideology rest on flimsy empirical foundations. By exposing these as myths, he hopes to guide truth-seekers away from the misguided elements of progressivism. But he is not optimistic.

So did Bryan Caplan.

Michael Huemer’s Progressive Myths is the best book on wokeness. One of its many strengths is its focus on basic facts.

On January 22 at 3 PM New York time, I will be discussing this book with Bryan Caplan and Rachel Ferguson. It’s free to join, but first you must register.

Musa al-Gharbi writes,

thinking is not something that occurs exclusively within our individual corporeal forms – it occurs primarily in conjunction with others, in dialogue with our physical and social surroundings, and with the use of human-produced tools and resources alongside other cultural artifacts. At a fundamental level, we think with and through other people and our environments in much the same way as we think with and through our physical bodies.

My shorthand is that we decide what to believe by deciding who to believe.

The TL;DR from his essay (even though it is long I did read it all and strongly recommend doing so):

far from being independent thinkers who come to their positions on issues through a careful deliberation of “the facts,” who change their minds readily in accordance with “the facts,” and who make wise decisions by deferring to “the facts,” the kinds of people most likely to become symbolic capitalists (highly-educated, academically high-performing, cognitive sophisticated) are more likely than most to be dogmatic ideologues or partisan conformists.

Some more excerpts, with a few of my comments added.

When good things happen that could be plausibly laid at our feet, we attribute those positive outcomes to stable and internal factors that are within our control – i.e. positive characteristics we possess and wise actions we took. When bad things happen, we tell the opposite story. Adverse outcomes are attributed to contingent and fleeting circumstances – things external to us and outside of our control.

We don’t just tell these systematically skewed stories for ourselves, but also for groups, movements and institutions we identify with. And for folks we disidentify with, the dynamics are reversed: we attribute good outcomes to luck, privilege, fleeting circumstances, and so on – and we attribute bad outcomes to durable characteristics and willful actions.

In fact, most cognitive biases can be boiled down to a handful of self-serving assumptions like these:

People typically think their beliefs are correct – morally, factually, and otherwise. We further assume that we arrived at our beliefs in a good way, that we think the things we think for good reasons. We view our own experience as a good guide to how the world works. We perceive ourselves to be personally representative of the groups and institutions we identify with.

Remember the robot/baby model of Daniel M. Wegner and Kurt Gray. The robot is the aspect of us that has agency, carrying out intentions. The baby aspect experiences feelings but is subject to external forces. When good things happen to us or to our tribe, we think of ourselves as the robot. When bad things happen, we think of ourselves as the baby. We reverse this attribution for individuals and groups that we dislike. If you identify as pro-Palestinian, then Palestinian violence is not an agentic choice but instead is just a reflexive response to circumstances, and any Israeli who is harmed is getting what they deserve. If you identify as pro-Israel, it is the other way around.

Al-Gharbi goes on to point out that even when we are aware that humans are fallible with respect to our understanding of the world, it is very difficult for me as an individual to remember my own fallibility. In fact, if I were to dwell on my own fallibility I might be less functional and less happy.

It is not natural, in fact it’s often deeply unpleasant, to slow down our judgements and think more carefully – taking care to avoid biases, oversights or errors. It’s not natural to work amicably with people across lines of profound difference, making decisions about things like admissions, hiring and promotion primarily on the basis of merit. It is not natural – and in fact, it is very difficult (but also quite important) – to recognize and publicly acknowledge our error, and then revise our attitudes, beliefs and actions in accordance with the best available evidence – irrespective of our own expectations, interests and preferences.

We often use our brains in what Julia Galef calls Soldier Mindset—to defend our beliefs—rather than what she calls Scout Mindset—to search for truth. Al-Gharbi says that intellectuals are particularly good at the defense game.

we might likewise expect that the kinds of people the symbolic professions select for (cognitively sophisticated, academically high-performing, highly educated) may be especially prone to tribalism, virtue signaling and self-deception. And, unfortunately, there is a lot of empirical evidence that seems to pull in this direction.

Scientists are not exempt from bias.

scientists cannot simply “follow the data” and arrive at ‘big-T’ truths. In fact, even the act of converting messy and complicated things and people “in the world” into abstract and austere data that can be easily communicated, transformed and operationalized -- this is itself a highly contingent process, deeply informed by the assumptions, limitations and desires of the data collector.

Al-Gharbi points out that it is in the contentious process of scientists competing with one another that the truth emerges.

under the right circumstances, it’s possible to collectively check and transcend our own individual cognitive limitations and vices. In contexts where researchers approach questions with different sets of knowledge and experiences, different material and ideal interests, using different methods, and drawing on different theoretical frameworks and value systems, we can produce something together and over time that approaches objective, reliable and comprehensive knowledge.

Al-Gharbi points out that the symbolic capitalists have taken on views that differ from those of the non-college-educated. And this has resulted in mutual hostility.

Similarly, Ilya Shapiro and Noam Josse write,

If colleges and universities don’t course-correct, however, they will continue to alienate themselves from the American mainstream and lose even more public trust. If they continue to teach destructive ideas about the American Founding and intersectional-privilege hierarchies as basic curriculum—if, in other words, the illiberal takeover of higher education proceeds apace—then these institutions will become increasingly irrelevant in American public life.

…If the second Trump administration has a mandate for anything, it’s to help halt the ongoing radicalization of America’s colleges and universities.

There is a tendency among some on the right is to see the election as a vindication for our point of view. See, the people reject the social justice left. But I do not regard the voting public as the ultimate arbiter of truth. I see the best arbiter of truth as the sort of competitive process that al-Gharbi describes or what Jonathan Rauch calls the Constitution of Knowledge. It is the abandonment of this process that has damaged the college campus.

In the election, you were a “double-hater” if you thought that neither Harris nor Trump was a worthy candidate for President. Similarly, I am a “double-hater” when it comes to epistemic tribalism. I think that neither the populist tribe nor the social justice tribe is worthy of being the people I choose to believe.