Why We’re Dumb at Politics
blackredyellow
Posts: 5,889
Good read... I think most of us realize this, but unfortunately it seems like many of the loudest political voices in our everyday lives don't.
Why We’re Dumb at Politics
Jason Brennan
Smart Doesn’t Pay
You cross the street only when you think it’s clear. If you’re wrong, you die. So, you have every incentive to form beliefs about whether the street is clear in a rational way.
Now suppose you are about to vote. What happens if you make a mistake? Alas—not much.
Suppose Obama credibly promises me $10 million from the treasury if he is re-elected. If so, then from a selfish standpoint, having Obama win is worth $10 million more to me than having Romney win. However, that doesn’t yet show it’s worth my time to vote for Obama. My vote is just one of many. I have a better chance of winning Powerball than changing the outcome of the election.
People are fairly rational about checking for street traffic—and they’re not perfect about that—because irrationality is punished. They are irrational about politics because rationality does not pay and irrationality goes unpunished.
When you go to a new restaurant, you probably spend some time looking over the menu. Maybe you ask the waiter which dishes are best. Maybe you deliberate about pasta or pizza. You put in the effort because you get what you choose.
Imagine a restaurant with a hundred million customers. Each customer places an order. However, customers don’t automatically get the meal they order. Instead, everyone gets the same meal—the most popular item on the menu. In this restaurant, if you order pizza, this has almost no chance of helping you get pizza. You are more likely to win Powerball than to place a tie-breaking order for pizza. In a restaurant like that, you might not even bother to look at the menu. You might not even bother place an order. Putting in effort to make a good choice seems pointless.
Now you know why so many citizens are ignorant and irrational about politics. Regardless of whether we care about others or just ourselves, most of us don’t invest in political knowledge because political knowledge doesn’t pay. We are ignorant because we lack the incentive to be well-informed. We are irrational because we lack the incentive to correct our biases.
Dumb Pays
Psychologist Jonathan Haidt says, ”Reasoning was not designed to pursue truth. Reasoning was designed by evolution to help us win arguments.” Robert Wright concurs that the human brain evolved to be “a machine for winning arguments,” that is, for seeking victory, not truth.
Motivated reasoning occurs when the brain tries to arrive at beliefs a person finds pleasing. According to the theory of motivated reasoning, we have preferences over beliefs. We enjoy some beliefs. We tend to believe what we prefer to be true. Motivated reasoning occurs when the brain tries to arrive at beliefs that maximize good feelings and minimize bad feelings. Our beliefs are determined by emotions, not evidence. For example, I might prefer to think I am smart, I might prefer to think Democrats are good and Republicans are selfish, or I might prefer to think God created the earth 6,000 years ago.
Psychologist Drew Westen performed a famous experiment in which he scanned committed Democrats’ and Republicans’ brains as they engaged in motivated reasoning. One scary finding: As the partisans denied and evaded evidence right in front of their faces, pleasure centers in their brains lit up. Our brains reward us for intellectual vice.
In politics, dumb is fun. It’s fun to think my coalition is made up of all the good guys. It’s fun to feel superior to the other side—to imagine they are all ignorant and corrupt. It’s fun to allow our political beliefs to form an essential part of our identities. It’s fun to treat the Democrat-Republican rivalry like the Red Sox-Yankee rivalry.
We can afford to indulge pleasurable but grossly irrational political beliefs. And, so, most of us do.
The News Once Again Indicates I Was Right All Along
When we first begin thinking about politics, we don’t start as agnostics. That is, we don’t start with the attitude, “Oh, I don’t know anything, so I will withhold judgment until I first study a whole bunch.”
Few of us form our original political beliefs after first weighing the evidence. Instead, when we first start thinking about politics, we come to the table with groundless political beliefs. We begin with bents to believe some things and disbelieve others. For no good reason, each of us starts off left or right, libertarian or authoritarian, market-friendly or anti-market, and so on.
Our political beliefs are at least moderately hereditable. You genes dispose us to vote one way rather than another. Early childhood experiences also push you one way rather than another. By sheer accident, you might come to associate the Democrats with compassion or the Republicans with responsibility. For you, for the rest of your life, the word “Democrat” will automatically conjure up positive emotions. For the rest of your life, you’ll have a bent—based on no evidence at all—to vote one way rather than another.
When people first start thinking about politics, they come to the table with (often strongly held) pre-existing beliefs. That’s already a worry. Yet if we were really good at assessing evidence and changing our beliefs in light of evidence, then our non-rational bents would not be so bad. Sure, we’d start with groundless, baseless beliefs, but we’d end up with well-grounded beliefs. Young people would start as hacks, but end up as sages.
Alas, we are bad at assessing evidence. Most of us stay hacks.
In politics—but not only in politics—we exhibit strong confirmation bias. This means we tend to pay strong attention to and accept evidence in favor of beliefs we already hold, and tend to ignore, reject, or be bored by evidence against beliefs we hold. We tend to be impressed by evidence that confirms our pre-existing beliefs. We tend to ignore or be suspicious of evidence that this confirms our pre-existing beliefs. We are bored by evidence that tends to confirm views we reject. We cannot even be bothered to evaluate it. We give every benefit of the doubt to arguments and to people who support our views. We are quick to dismiss arguments and people who reject our views.
Confirmation bias means we don’t act like good scientists when thinking about politics. Instead, it means we act like highly corrupt scientists. We don’t care about the truth. We care about defending our turf.
Confirmation bias explains how we consume news. Thanks to the Internet, information is cheaper and easier to get than ever before. Why isn’t everyone much better informed and much less biased, then? Here’s the problem: People seek out news sources that identify and promote their own points of view. Libertarians read libertarian blogs. Left-liberals read left-liberal newspapers, such as the New York Times. Republicans flock to Fox News. People who consume news want to be informed—they want to be informed that they were right all along.
Jason Brennan is assistant professor of ethics at Georgetown University. He is the coauthor of A Brief History of Liberty.
http://press.princeton.edu/blog/2012/09 ... -politics/
Why We’re Dumb at Politics
Jason Brennan
Smart Doesn’t Pay
You cross the street only when you think it’s clear. If you’re wrong, you die. So, you have every incentive to form beliefs about whether the street is clear in a rational way.
Now suppose you are about to vote. What happens if you make a mistake? Alas—not much.
Suppose Obama credibly promises me $10 million from the treasury if he is re-elected. If so, then from a selfish standpoint, having Obama win is worth $10 million more to me than having Romney win. However, that doesn’t yet show it’s worth my time to vote for Obama. My vote is just one of many. I have a better chance of winning Powerball than changing the outcome of the election.
People are fairly rational about checking for street traffic—and they’re not perfect about that—because irrationality is punished. They are irrational about politics because rationality does not pay and irrationality goes unpunished.
When you go to a new restaurant, you probably spend some time looking over the menu. Maybe you ask the waiter which dishes are best. Maybe you deliberate about pasta or pizza. You put in the effort because you get what you choose.
Imagine a restaurant with a hundred million customers. Each customer places an order. However, customers don’t automatically get the meal they order. Instead, everyone gets the same meal—the most popular item on the menu. In this restaurant, if you order pizza, this has almost no chance of helping you get pizza. You are more likely to win Powerball than to place a tie-breaking order for pizza. In a restaurant like that, you might not even bother to look at the menu. You might not even bother place an order. Putting in effort to make a good choice seems pointless.
Now you know why so many citizens are ignorant and irrational about politics. Regardless of whether we care about others or just ourselves, most of us don’t invest in political knowledge because political knowledge doesn’t pay. We are ignorant because we lack the incentive to be well-informed. We are irrational because we lack the incentive to correct our biases.
Dumb Pays
Psychologist Jonathan Haidt says, ”Reasoning was not designed to pursue truth. Reasoning was designed by evolution to help us win arguments.” Robert Wright concurs that the human brain evolved to be “a machine for winning arguments,” that is, for seeking victory, not truth.
Motivated reasoning occurs when the brain tries to arrive at beliefs a person finds pleasing. According to the theory of motivated reasoning, we have preferences over beliefs. We enjoy some beliefs. We tend to believe what we prefer to be true. Motivated reasoning occurs when the brain tries to arrive at beliefs that maximize good feelings and minimize bad feelings. Our beliefs are determined by emotions, not evidence. For example, I might prefer to think I am smart, I might prefer to think Democrats are good and Republicans are selfish, or I might prefer to think God created the earth 6,000 years ago.
Psychologist Drew Westen performed a famous experiment in which he scanned committed Democrats’ and Republicans’ brains as they engaged in motivated reasoning. One scary finding: As the partisans denied and evaded evidence right in front of their faces, pleasure centers in their brains lit up. Our brains reward us for intellectual vice.
In politics, dumb is fun. It’s fun to think my coalition is made up of all the good guys. It’s fun to feel superior to the other side—to imagine they are all ignorant and corrupt. It’s fun to allow our political beliefs to form an essential part of our identities. It’s fun to treat the Democrat-Republican rivalry like the Red Sox-Yankee rivalry.
We can afford to indulge pleasurable but grossly irrational political beliefs. And, so, most of us do.
The News Once Again Indicates I Was Right All Along
When we first begin thinking about politics, we don’t start as agnostics. That is, we don’t start with the attitude, “Oh, I don’t know anything, so I will withhold judgment until I first study a whole bunch.”
Few of us form our original political beliefs after first weighing the evidence. Instead, when we first start thinking about politics, we come to the table with groundless political beliefs. We begin with bents to believe some things and disbelieve others. For no good reason, each of us starts off left or right, libertarian or authoritarian, market-friendly or anti-market, and so on.
Our political beliefs are at least moderately hereditable. You genes dispose us to vote one way rather than another. Early childhood experiences also push you one way rather than another. By sheer accident, you might come to associate the Democrats with compassion or the Republicans with responsibility. For you, for the rest of your life, the word “Democrat” will automatically conjure up positive emotions. For the rest of your life, you’ll have a bent—based on no evidence at all—to vote one way rather than another.
When people first start thinking about politics, they come to the table with (often strongly held) pre-existing beliefs. That’s already a worry. Yet if we were really good at assessing evidence and changing our beliefs in light of evidence, then our non-rational bents would not be so bad. Sure, we’d start with groundless, baseless beliefs, but we’d end up with well-grounded beliefs. Young people would start as hacks, but end up as sages.
Alas, we are bad at assessing evidence. Most of us stay hacks.
In politics—but not only in politics—we exhibit strong confirmation bias. This means we tend to pay strong attention to and accept evidence in favor of beliefs we already hold, and tend to ignore, reject, or be bored by evidence against beliefs we hold. We tend to be impressed by evidence that confirms our pre-existing beliefs. We tend to ignore or be suspicious of evidence that this confirms our pre-existing beliefs. We are bored by evidence that tends to confirm views we reject. We cannot even be bothered to evaluate it. We give every benefit of the doubt to arguments and to people who support our views. We are quick to dismiss arguments and people who reject our views.
Confirmation bias means we don’t act like good scientists when thinking about politics. Instead, it means we act like highly corrupt scientists. We don’t care about the truth. We care about defending our turf.
Confirmation bias explains how we consume news. Thanks to the Internet, information is cheaper and easier to get than ever before. Why isn’t everyone much better informed and much less biased, then? Here’s the problem: People seek out news sources that identify and promote their own points of view. Libertarians read libertarian blogs. Left-liberals read left-liberal newspapers, such as the New York Times. Republicans flock to Fox News. People who consume news want to be informed—they want to be informed that they were right all along.
Jason Brennan is assistant professor of ethics at Georgetown University. He is the coauthor of A Brief History of Liberty.
http://press.princeton.edu/blog/2012/09 ... -politics/
My whole life
was like a picture
of a sunny day
“We can complain because rose bushes have thorns, or rejoice because thorn bushes have roses.”
― Abraham Lincoln
was like a picture
of a sunny day
“We can complain because rose bushes have thorns, or rejoice because thorn bushes have roses.”
― Abraham Lincoln
Post edited by Unknown User on
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Comments
i would also add that i think our "dumbness" at politics is manufactured and conceived ... and that this did not happen by chance ...
-Eddie Vedder, "Smile"
"This means we tend to pay strong attention to and accept evidence in favor of beliefs we already hold, and tend to ignore, reject, or be bored by evidence against beliefs we hold."
This is it right here. I also think that it comes from a lack of knowledge. Knowledge is difficult to obtain; it's easier to sit in front of the boob tube than to devote yourself to acquiring knowledge. (And yes, this brings up the discussion of what "knowledge" is, but that is for another thread)
Personally, I take the Socrates approach to learning: "All I know is that I know nothing." (It is a paraphrase)
It is easier, actually more convenient, to go through the drive thru, then it is to cook a meal at home.
Cable News networks are essentially the fast food of the news industry.
When you go through the drive-thru, you are poisoning your body; when you sit on the couch and watch con-men on cable news networks, you are poisoning your mind.
Long Live the Fast Food Nation!!!
Right there with you. If people spent more time trying to "learn" rather than being right, we'd be a lot better off.
I've tried listening to almost every source of news out there and found that for me, the best source for information without all of the sensationalism is NPR/PBS. I have no problem with funding them and giving them money.
While I do think that it's easy to swat some voters with dumb-ass rumors, half-truths and fear I also know that I'm extremely impressed with just how informed most of the electorate is now.
While it would have been easy back in the 1980s to get away with the silly rumors and made-up stories, it isn't anymore. And now, the knowledge that it's a lie becomes a bigger story than the ripple caused by telling it.
Cases in point... Michele Bachmann saying that the president was taking "34 warships, 3,000 people, renting 870 rooms in high-price hotels and spending $200 Million per day" on a trip to India. Before the days of Twitter and Facebook and Snopes, that kind of thing would have just been heard by the people meant to hear it - in this case, the viewers of Anderson Cooper. But this happened last year. And it was front page news because it had blown up so fast on Twitter.
Paul Ryan's speech at the RNC was being ripped to pieces for all the fabrications, warped history and outright lies before it was even done. And that was being done by the viewers who were watching and Googling the facts.
HOWEVER...
It's also meant that untrue things have made it into household knowledge because of how well the message has been spread. There really are people out there who think that Al Gore claimed to invent the internet.
The new reality means that the facts belong to the people who won the news cycle. And if you don't pounce on misleading information, it's VERY hard to spread the actual truth.
(and I have to say that watching the losing side of any election cycle try a different strategy every 4-5 days can be a bit entertaining. After "We Built It" and "Apology Tour" were met with a collective groan, the three newest angles of the Romney campaign have been "Obama is Bush on Steroids," "Obama hasn't called out the Chinese Currency Manipulators" and "people only vote for the Democratic Party because they're dumb and lazy."
But I don't think he gives quite enough credit to the experiences through which we form our original "bents" when he says they form "for no good reason". Experience, I think, is often a very good reason to form beliefs. I don't mean, though, that we should go with our own experience & ignore the experiences of others. I mean that experience can often broaden our world view to be more inclusive of the experiences of others.
For instance, I recognize that - although I didn't realize it at the time - my political bent was drastically changed when I moved from Memphis to the Navajo reservation at age 14. Through that experience, I gained a whole new perspective on what life is like for other people. And I saw first-hand so many good people work thir asses off and still struggle to put food on the table. So now no one can tell me that wealth is necessarily a direct & inevitable & proportionate consequence of hard work. I have first-hand knowledge that this is not true. I can't unlearn what I learned through my experience. And I don't think that's arbitrary or no good reason have the political bent that I do.
Personally, I really think the media is what drives our ignorance & I think that would have been worth exploring more in the article. While I agree that people tend to seek out news sources that support their views - or, more accurately, avoid the ones that don't - I think this is largely because so much of the news can't be trusted. And it's not really news. While I would genuinely be interested in factual information & well-reasoned arguments that support "the other side," I don't believe that Fox News, for instance, is a good place to find that information. They present so much bullshit information & inflammatory opinion that it seems nearly impossible to find the valuable stuff that may exist. If they were truly interested in presenting actual news, I would be more inclined to listen. And that's why we're not any smarter about politics today than we were before so much information was so readily-available. We're so inundated with bullshit that we just can't sift through it all. We don't have time to watch all the "news" channels or read all the papers. And, as he said in what I think is the most important sentence in the article, "we at bad at assessing evidence". So we narrow our news sources down to the ones we trust. (Of course how we decide which ones to trust is important.) And those of us who really make an effort to use primary sources and assess evidence have to narrow the issues we research down to the ones that are most important to us, lest we have to quit our jobs just to have time to research everything.
ETA: Okay, sorry, but now that I mentioned "the issues" I can't get this song out of my head: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EmLHOGT0 ... ata_player
It's really way past time that we started holding them accountable and it's a shame on us citizens that we don't.
Heck, the few things I actually liked about Obama's platform the last election - Guantanamo and getting the troops home immediately - didn't happen.
We can't trust any of them.
...are those who've helped us.
Right 'round the corner could be bigger than ourselves.
http://www.theoryofknowledge.info/theor ... e-realism/
Naive Realism
Naive realism is the common sense theory of perception. Most people, until they starting thinking philosophically, are naive realists. This theory is also known as “direct realism” or “common sense realism”.
Naive realism holds that the view of the world that we derive from our senses is to be taken at face value: there are objects out there in the world, and those objects have the properties that they appear to us to have. If I have an experience as of a large apple tree, then that’s because there’s a large apple tree in front of me. If the apples on the tree appear to me to be red, then that’s because there are objects in front of me, apples, that have the property redness; simple.
Plausible though naive realism may be, it has serious problems, among which is the problem of the variability of perception. The same object may appear differently to different people, or to the same person at different times. The apples may appear to be red in the daytime, but at dusk they are a shade of grey. If naive realism is to be taken seriously, and colours are out there in the world, then apples regularly change colour depending on how much light is around them. It is much more plausible, though, to think that the apples are the same as they ever were, that all that has changed is our experience of them.
****End of article/definition
We are all born into a system: religious, psychological, ideological. And, as we grow older we are condition by a myriad of outside forces. Perception is reality, even if reality is confined to our tiny little bubble of knowledge. Out of all the knowledge in the world, does anyone think they have the ability to grasp event he smallest amount of it? Our Jupiter-sized egos tell us can attain it, but that which is far bigger than us would disagree.
a. We get the information from which we base our political opinions from 1 minute bites on television.
b. We equate politics with sports.
c. We only hear and believe the lies from 'Our Team'.
d. We don't understand Government because we ditched Government 101 in high school.
e. We fail to see the reality that the opposition is merely a fellow citizen that possesses an opinion that differs from ours.
f. We think we are politically informed... when, in truth, we are not.
Hail, Hail!!!
It's all about the EGO, man, all about the EGO!
We lack knowledge, REAL KNOWLEDGE, but that's okay because we have our EGOS (and superstitions, prejudices, etc.) to prop us up.
The truth was a mirror in the hands of God.
It fell, and broke into pieces.
Everybody took a piece of it,
and they looked at it
and thought they had the truth.
--Rumi
Brilliant. I love it.