I credit [Sheldon Richman, editor of The Freeman] with training me in an important aspect of how to think. He wasn’t my professor. He didn’t lecture to me. All we did was discuss things, random things of passing interest. Every day. But by listening to his own approach to thinking, I discovered a serious deficiency in my own approach and established a new ideal for which I’ve been shooting ever since.

… We were both working in Fairfax, Va., and nearly every day for several years, we went to lunch together. We were both interested in politics, libertarian thinking and Austrian School economics.

But politics create bad mental habits. If you are following around a tribe that has “positions on the issues,” it becomes too easy to grab a position and hold it without thinking too much. I’m for this. I’m against that. This is a good guy. This is a bad guy. This policy is no good. That policy is good.

We are tempted to be self-satisfied by being on the right team, making the right noises, echoing the approved sentiments. Bromide replaces logic. Bluster replaces reasoning.

The trouble is that this is not thinking. This is just the training of a reflex.

You see this habit of mind every day on television. This is how the commentators talk. They assert their views and then argue with each other. The biggest bully wins.

In fact, this is how the whole of modern politics want us to go about things. We are given two simple paradigms in a vending machine. We push this button or that button based on whatever biases we hold. Our product arrives, and we consume it. Then we spit it back out on cue.

Sheldon taught me that holding and consuming opinions is not the same thing as thinking seriously. He taught me this by example.

One of us would throw out a news item. My instinct was to blurt out my opinion. That’s what I did. Sheldon would nod and wait. Then he would begin to offer a series of reasons for holding this view. He would offer up a logical argument. He would cite evidence from history. He would refer to the literature. When he felt that he had made a well-rounded case, he would stop, and then he would raise additional questions and posit possible applications that would generate new topics.

I was always struck by this. He wasn’t doing this to show off or to interrupt the flow of conversation. He did it to satisfy his own craving for intellectual rigor. It was never enough for him to hold the “right view.” He did it to check himself to make sure that he wasn’t operating by habit, but rather that he was capable of making an impenetrable argument that made sense even apart from his own bias.

Why was it is that I wasn’t doing this? Actually, I wasn’t even sure that I could do this. So I began to listen more carefully to how he went about this. I began trying this myself and I discovered that, actually, it is not so easy. It is much easier to just throw out a point of view with the brain very comfortably disengaged. Again, this is how politics want us to going about it. It is far more difficult to actually do the hard work of making a case for or against something using clear reasoning, evidence and citations.

Shut up. Just shut up. You had me at “politics create bad mental habits.”

HT to Steve Horwitz via FB.

Thinking is much harder than merely having opinions. © 2012 by Jeffrey Ellis / The Thinker. All rights reserved. Use of this feed on any other site is a copyright violation. Scraping is not permitted.

Nobody I can think of exemplifies this more than local Houston KNTH radio personality Lyndon Joslin.

I call him a “radio personality” because I’m not sure what he really is. He comes on between major talk shows to do little 5 minute news segments, but they are really opinion pieces in disguise. The format is as follows:

1. Report on a particular news item. Example: “Russia threatens NATO missile sites…”
2. Finish with a sarcastic/snarky comment. Example: “… the way they never did when we had a real president.”
3. Repeat until time segment is over.

His voice is so dripping with self-righteous superiority you can easily imagine the smug look on his face as he delivers what he no doubt believes to be a well-deserved smackdown of the left.

I don’t question KNTH’s right to broadcast this kind of right-wing cheerleading, and I don’t question Joslin’s right to exercise his freedom of speech to preach to the choir. (And that’s what he’s doing: preaching to the choir. If he was interested in actually winning new converts, he would be using honey, not vinegar.) But I am calling him and his ilk out as the main problem with social and political discourse in this country: the promulgation of snarky incivility towards those of different ideologies.

It seems we are stuck in a vicious cycle. Snark sells. Many people enjoy an insulting put-down of the other tribe, so that’s what the talking heads deliver. Over time, that influences a growing number of people to accept this as the norm, so the snark just incrementally increases to serve a growing market.

That’s what I’m up against, as an evangelist for critical thinking and civility. The vicious cycle of snark.

Some mornings, it seems like it’s not even worth chewing through the leather straps.

The forces I’m up against © 2012 by Jeffrey Ellis / The Thinker. All rights reserved. Use of this feed on any other site is a copyright violation. Scraping is not permitted.

Mark Perry provides some commentary:

As one University of Minnesota undergraduate student explained the rising GPA trend when evaluating a professor known as a rigorous grader, “We live in a grade-inflated world.”  That University of Minnesota anthropology professor Karen-Sue Taussig suspects that today’s “grade-inflated world” can be traced to the growing cost of a college degree, i.e. today’s “tuition-inflated world.” As Taussig told the Star Tribune, “They’re paying for it, and they worked really hard, and they put in time, and therefore they think they should get a good grade.”

Last year, Professor Rojstaczer and co-author Christopher Healypublished a research article in the Teachers College Record titled “Where A Is Ordinary: The Evolution of American College and University Grading, 1940–2009.” The main conclusion of the paper appears below (emphasis added), and is illustrated by the chart below showing the rising share of A letter grades over time at American colleges, from 15% in 1940 to 43% by 2008. Starting in about 1998, the letter grade A became the most common college grade.

Grade inflation: the most common grade at U.S. colleges and universities is now an “A” © 2012 by Jeffrey Ellis / The Thinker. All rights reserved. Use of this feed on any other site is a copyright violation. Scraping is not permitted.

I don’t get it. I don’t doubt that what SpaceX is doing, and what surely other commercial companies will soon follow suit in doing, is important, and yes, even historical. But I seriously doubt that it has much to do with space “exploration.” More likely, space exploitation. Don’t get me wrong: space is, to some extent, a resource for humankind, and it is perfectly reasonable for us to exploit it. And history has certainly shown that the best way to accomplish that sort of task is to hand it to the private sector (of course, that’s not at all without potentially extremely serious drawbacks in and of itself, but that’s another story). What history has also clearly shown is that basic science and exploration are best done by scientists who work without the constraints of financial interests, and these days this means government funding (in Galileo’s time it was the government too, but in the form of some rich nobel family running the city).

So according to Massimo, the private sector is only good for “exploitation”; science and exploration should only be entrusted to the government, or at least to the government-funded.

First of all, Massimo is missing the point. The benefit of the endeavors of companies like SpaceX is not exploration itself, at least not directly; rather, the benefit in having multiple companies competing for crew and cargo launch services in low earth orbit is competition, which will lower the cost of access to space over time — thereby enabling more exploration. Getting to low earth orbit is the largest and most expensive part of getting to anywhere else in the solar system. And competition, and the lowering of prices thereby, is something that the private sector can do in spades, and the government can’t do at all.

Second, history has not clearly shown that science, technology, and exploration are best done by the government or government-funded scientists. All the tremendous advancement of humankind over the past two centuries — the science, technology, and dramatic improvements in the human condition — all occurred only after much of the western world had transitioned from feudalism and mercantilism to free market economies. (See here and here for more.) It is not the absence of financial interests, but rather capitalism’s channeling of this self-interest into win-win scenarios, that has made the innovations of the past two centuries possible.

Government successes in space exploration have been incredible, but have also been at an incredible cost — and the cost of manned space flight has not appreciably dropped during the last 50 years, in spite of technological advancements. Nor will they, with no competition. Consider that NASA had to pioneer much of the computing technology that made the Apollo missions possible, but the private sector has long since passed up NASA, to the point where NASA’s computing needs are now mostly met with off-the-shelf technology. The private sector made these advancements through competition, as the growing market for computing technologies drove (and continues to drive) competition between chip/component makers, in turn driving prices down and technology forward. Competition, not government, is the engine of innovation and advancement.

Competition, not government, is the engine of innovation and advancement. © 2012 by Jeffrey Ellis / The Thinker. All rights reserved. Use of this feed on any other site is a copyright violation. Scraping is not permitted.

Any human who becomes a preference aggregator will, must, present a false face to all. — Garrett Jones

Quote of the Day © 2012 by Jeffrey Ellis / The Thinker. All rights reserved. Use of this feed on any other site is a copyright violation. Scraping is not permitted.

To be a successful software engineer (or indeed, any engineer), one first needs to be utterly and completely broken by failure. One must be so humiliated by a complex system that they give up and realize that the only chance of moving forward comes from being a supplicant to the complexity, by approaching it with humility and caution, not with hubris. You have to listen to the system, coax it into behaving. Commanding it does not work.  – Vivek Haldar

HT to Engineering Revision.

Quote of the Day (for engineers) © 2012 by Jeffrey Ellis / The Thinker. All rights reserved. Use of this feed on any other site is a copyright violation. Scraping is not permitted.

From the front cover flap:

A novel of huge ambition, beautifully told, Ireland is the unstoppably readable story of a remarkable nation. On a November evening in 1951, an itinerant storyteller, the last of a fabled breed, arrives unannounced and mysterious at a house in the Irish countryside. By the fire, he begins to tell the story of this extraordinary island. One of his listeners, a nine-year-old boy, grows so entranced by the storytelling that, when the old man leaves, he devotes his life to finding him again.

It is a search that uncovers both passions and mysteries, in the boy’s life as well as the old man’s. In addition, a remarkable document is quoted from throughout the book – the Storyteller’s own chronicle, poignant, sharp and frequently amusing. Together they comprise the narrative of a people, the history of a nation, the telling of Ireland in all its drama, intrigue and heroism, its philosophy, its spirit, its national ego.

Ireland travels through the centuries by way of story after story, from the savage grip of the Ice Age to the green and troubled land of brochures and headlines. Along the way, we meet foolish kings and innocent monks, god-heroes and great works of art, shrewd Norman raiders and envoys from Rome, leaders, lovers and poets. Each illuminates the magic of Ireland, the troubling power of England and the eternal connection to the raw earth.

From the epic sweep of its telling to the ‘insider’ precision of its characters – great and small, tragic and comic - ‘Ireland – a novel’ rings with the truth of a writer passionate about his own country.

One of the very best books I’ve ever read.

Now Reading (for about the 4th time)… © 2012 by Jeffrey Ellis / The Thinker. All rights reserved. Use of this feed on any other site is a copyright violation. Scraping is not permitted.

[T]here has been a severe contraction in the quality of higher education in America. Did we really think we could open the floodgates and not affect the quality of graduates? Can you turn college into the new high school, and not get high school-like results?  Grade inflation will only keep the problem concealed for so long before the general public becomes aware that outside of a few highly challenging programs and majors, the quality of American higher education is plummeting. Graduates are mastering fewer facts, can’t think critically about the facts they have mastered, and can’t express whatever ideas they have mastered in clear, cogent, grammatically correct sentences. Employers already know this.

Moreover, most college students seem unaware of this erosion of quality in higher education, and they graduate believing themselves to be just as bright, educated, and capable as previous generations of college graduates.

College is the new high school © 2012 by Jeffrey Ellis / The Thinker. All rights reserved. Use of this feed on any other site is a copyright violation. Scraping is not permitted.

The Trayvon Martin shooting case is turning into the world’s biggest example of confirmation bias, starting with the shooting itself.

We now know that the shooter, Zimmerman, thought Martin fit the general description of the two men (young, male, African-American) who had been spotted robbing homes in the neighborhood. Martin’s hoody served as a partial disguise, which probably made Zimmerman’s confirmation bias go through the roof. My best guess is that everything Martin did up to his death, including the fight, contributed to Zimmerman’s confirmation bias that he was dealing with a dangerous hardened criminal.

On the flip side, Martin probably made up his mind quickly that Zimmerman was some sort of racist, bully, thug wannabe who was just looking for a fight. After all, what kind of guy gets out of his car and follows you down the street in the dark? The last thing that might occur to you is “Neighborhood Watch.”

When the story first broke, and the public had scant information, much of it incorrect, most of us jumped to an initial assumption. People who have had experiences with bullies and racists probably assumed Zimmerman fit the mold. Therefore, he must be prosecuted.

[...]

My question to you is this: If you made up your mind about Zimmerman’s guilt when the story first broke, has the flood of new information changed your mind? Or has confirmation bias allowed the new information to harden the opinion you already had?

Adams is spot on here. Zimmerman’s confirmation bias caused him to believe Trayvon to be a dangerous criminal; Zimmerman’s confirmation bias made him assume that Zimmerman was a racist bully trying to pick a fight; and the public’s confirmation bias made everyone immediately take one side or another based on scant information filtered through their own ideologies.

And, as Adams suggests, many people will be “doubling down” right now in the face of evidence that counters their entrenched opinions (although it’s the backfire effect, not just the confirmation bias, that’s the culprit).

A prime example of confirmation bias: the Trayvon Martin case © 2012 by Jeffrey Ellis / The Thinker. All rights reserved. Use of this feed on any other site is a copyright violation. Scraping is not permitted.

I was gratified to be able to answer promptly. I said, “I don’t know.”
– Mark Twain

Do you suffer from the answer syndrome?

Answer syndrome is the affliction of the hyper-educated, the detail-oriented, the obsessive, and the internet-saturated. It plagues people whose highly technical and specialized knowledge means that they often spend their days explaining things to people who have no idea what they are talking about [...] People with answer syndrome get used to having all the answers. And then . . . they don’t know when to stop.

Answering is a terrible addiction. It starts out with little things, like dropping a few bits of (correct) trivia you gleaned on Wikipedia about the history of the term “free market.” But then it snowballs, and suddenly you’re flailing wildly, convincing yourself that it’s perfectly legitimate to inform everyone about how Adam Smith really wouldn’t qualify as a capitalist today. After all, you know that it’s true. How do you know? Well, it seems right. Based on what you’ve read, which by now seems to encompass several books, because after all the people who wrote the Wikipedia entry on free markets cited hundreds of sources — plus, there was that economics book you read that included a section on Smith. So surely that means that you have absorbed the relevant knowledge from at least a dozen sources.

At this point, you’re in denial. At some deep level, you realize you don’t really know what you’re talking about, but you convince yourself otherwise. Answer syndrome, at its worst, is a form of self-delusion. But like all the most potent delusions, it’s founded on truth. In the information overload age, we all know a little bit about everything. We’ve read a zillion headlines. And because we’re human, we have opinions about stuff we’re pretty hazy on. The person who suffers from answer syndrome, however, takes it to the next level. That person feels as if he or she is qualified to be an expert with all the answers — usually, as I said earlier, because he or she genuinely is an expert in one or two topics already.

The trick to overcoming the answer syndrome lies in intellectual humility: the ability and willingness to admit to yourself that you are not as smart as you think you are, not as knowledgeable as you think you are, not as right as you think you are. Intellectual humility is the cornerstone of critical thinking.

Intellectual humility means being able to say, “I don’t know.”

HT to Sarah Skwire via FB.

The Answer Syndrome © 2012 by Jeffrey Ellis / The Thinker. All rights reserved. Use of this feed on any other site is a copyright violation. Scraping is not permitted.