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This is not a blog which opines on current events. It rather uses incidents, books (old and new), links and papers to muse about our social endeavours.
So old posts are as good as new! And lots of useful links!

The Bucegi mountains - the range I see from the front balcony of my mountain house - are almost 120 kms from Bucharest and cannot normally be seen from the capital but some extraordinary weather conditions allowed this pic to be taken from the top of the Intercontinental Hotel in late Feb 2020

Saturday, January 8, 2022

Deep Scepticism

I haven’t, so far in this blog, deigned “Fake news” with a single post although I have referred to the increasing polarization in societies with some concern. When I type “fake news” into the Zlibrary, it reveals a lot of titles on the subject – most of recent vintage but some going back a decade. Kurt Andersen wrote a couple of recent intellectual histories which explored the phenomenon brilliantly – with the usual suspects being rounded up namely   

- the “relativity” elaborated in the various proponents of postmodernity discussed from p142 of Voices in the Air – the 2021 posts

- the ease with which new social media have undermined the legitimacy of newspapers; and trivialised and polarised everything 

Do we really need a 200 page book to tell us that “fake news” is in the eye of the beholder? Or indeed that, when we decry those who deny climate change and the benefits of vaccination, WE are guilty of the same behaviour – namely that we choose to trust our own preferred groups of people. This is the basic message of  a new book - Bad beliefs – “Why they happen to good people” (2022) - by philosopher Brian Levy which has just been made freely available by the publisher and author but which I don’t recommend because it contains so much jargon.

Very few of us have the scientific training to “follow the science”. What those of us who accept that climate change is a reality have done is defer to those with the expertise. Those who deny simply don’t share our faith in science – let alone government – and choose to trust those found on social media.

Of course, there is the little matter of the “falsifiability” embodied in scientific method – requiring theories to be set aside when evidence emerges that challenges them.    

Something called The Institute for Arts and Ideas (IAI) expressed things rather nicely in its “aims” - 

There is little that we can be certain about, but we can be confident that a time will come when our current beliefs and assumptions are seen as mistaken, our heroes - like the imperial adventurers of the past - are regarded as villains, and our morality is viewed as bigoted prejudice.

So the IAI seeks to challenge the notion that our present accepted wisdom is the truth. It aims to uncover the flaws and limitations in our current thinking in search of alternative and better ways to hold the world.

The IAI was founded in 2008 with the aim of rescuing philosophy from technical debates about the meaning of words and returning it to big ideas and putting them at the centre of culture. Not in aid of a more refined cultural life, but as an urgent call to rethink where we are.

 

That rethinking is urgent and necessary because the world of ideas is in crisis. The traditional modernist notion that we are gradually uncovering the one true account of reality has been undermined by a growing awareness that ideas are limited by culture, history and language. Yet in a relative world the paradoxes of postmodern culture has left us lost and confused. We do not know what to believe, nor do we know how to find the answers. 

I’ve made no secret of my sympathies for those who see multiple realities – who assert that there is no single truth. How could I do otherwise when I have argued there were 57 different ways of understanding capitalism? Or when I celebrate that outsiders are generally more insightful by virtue of the sense of different worlds they bring with them?

But in all this, I insist on proofs of falsifiability. Mere assertion is no use – what disturbs me is that the new “deep sceptics” (who bring the scepticism I have always admired into gross disrepute) have no such criterion – or preferred group. They seem to oppose just for the hell of it.

It’s at times such as this that I begin to question my admiration for such contrarians as Chris Hitchens who took such joy in the process of disputation. The profession of lawyers has that same inclination and is it, therefore, any wonder that the USA, having the largest number per capita of litigious lawyers, just happens to be the country in which “fake news” has become so dominant? 

The author of the book with which I started this post – Brian Levy – has a more readable article here in which he reasserts his basic point that we all need a group we can trust 

No doubt, psychological biases play a role in what people end up believing (though the extent to which we are irrational when we rely on these biases is open to question). No doubt there are many irrational and uninformed people around. But these facts don’t explain the partisan split we see on surveys, or indeed the many bizarre claims attributed to our fellow citizens.
Many of these reports are hugely exaggerated; inflated through some combination of expressive responding, the use of partisan heuristics or the sheer unwillingness to admit ignorance and downright trolling. To the degree there is a partisan divide, it doesn’t arise from their stupidity or our rationality. It arises from the fact that we place our trust in different sources. 

A simple question, therefore – where do we find the verifiable sources quoted by the “deep sceptics”??

1 comment:

  1. "we can be confident that a time will come when our current beliefs and assumptions are seen as mistaken, our heroes - like the imperial adventurers of the past - are regarded as villains, and our morality is viewed as bigoted prejudice."

    My mind went straight to Star Trek III "The Voyage Home", in which McCoy coming across a 20th century patient waiting for a kidney transplant in a corridor of a hospital, gives her a pill that grows her a healthy new kidney, and comments that the medicine of the day was barbaric and carried out by butchers.

    One of the things I have noted in the monolithic wall of propaganda from the media over COVID is that they continually talk about, being led by the science, as though scientific opinion was itself not divided on the matter, a belief they would no doubt want us all to accept.

    And, on climate change, even if we accept, as I do, that most of the cause of global warming is the result of human action, that does not at all mean that the response to it is unanimous. If holding back development does not really change that much in terms of consequences, but does impoverish developing economies, the question surely has to be raised as to whether some other solution is preferable as Lomborg has said. As with most things, the answer lies in more development and raising the poor countries that would be most affected out of poverty, not the opposite.

    The same applies with all of the wall of propaganda about trees. As Lomborg says, a hectare of wind turbines actually reduces Co2 in the atmosphere, by more than a hectare of trees. And, whilst everyone talks about CO2, what about the fact that each year, tees shed billions of tons in leaves that rot, releasing methane which is 25 times more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas, and each year, billions of tons of trees themselves simply die, and rot again releasing large amounts of methane into the atmosphere.

    If we look at many of the interventions in the past supposedly led by science, they have had bad effects that were not anticipated. All of the flood defences put in in the US, tended to cause further environmental damage, and to cause even worse flooding downstream for example.

    As I wrote recently, in relation to Britain, every year when houses get flooded, its now linked to climate change, rather than the obvious point that this is what happens when you build lots of houses in flood plains, and when you cram all of your residential property on to just 1% of the land mass, and then concrete over all of the area around it, preventing adequate run off.

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