As somebody who has been in many political debates, I have to agree. A good many are addicted to authority figures to tell them how to think.
Another frustrating aspect of human nature is that most people don't know how to be logical. I strive to be logical as a personal goal, but it's often not valued in the work-place, or anywhere.
Keep in mind "logical" is not necessarily the same as "being right", at least not my working definition. Being logical is being able to back up your viewpoint and claims using a clear chain of logic. I define any assumptions I make as givens, and my conclusion can be formed directly from those givens. I don't necessarily write it out in formal logic, but if one questions a specific informally-written step, I can and do formalize/clarify it.
Most don't return the favor. "My guts have proven accurate and I'd rather trust my gut feelings" is a common response. Screw Guts, I want logic, damn humans! Human guts have proven dumb.
On the one hand, average population do not agree on what can be construed as "self-evident". On the other hand, what seems self-evident within our limited capacity is often misguided or frustratingly incomplete. Even if we sorted both these out, being logical means having to deal with details. My experience has been that average person does not like to deal with the details.
This really only applies if you require absolute certainty. But most of the time being reasonably certain is enough to operate in the world. And you can be reasonably certain about lots of stuff.
If it varies too much, then explore the reasons for the different estimates. Often times it comes down to different past experience, which is obviously going to vary per individual. (Ex: "when users see X on UI screens, they usually do Y, in my experience".) But at least one can narrow down recommended decision logic to observed patterns of history. Narrowing down the point of disagreement is often still helpful even if both sides still disagree.
Stubbornness may be a survival trait for a social animal. We humans are flooded with facts and logic contrived to cause us to sacrifice our own self interest in favor of someone else's. I've even read that the game of social manipulation is why we evolved our huge brains.
I was born stubborn, according to my parents. The same people who accuse me of being stubborn are often the ones who are the most vigorously opposed to gathering additional information that they can't predict or control.
A lot of what people call logic are things like "not expecting a different result from the same behavior" and "not follow an impulse with no relation to reality" but even those are heuristics. Usually good heuristics but not logic.
That can be semi-formal logic if it's stated as a given rule-of-thumb. Most of the time your debate partner(s) will agree with such rules of thumb, barring some odd edge case. If an edge case is allegedly in play for the context, that path is then explored in more detail.
In IT, often rules of thumb will conflict, such as "a stitch in time saves 9" versus "keep it simple" (YAGNI). In such cases I often use labor hours and finance-like decision making techniques, not unlike deciding on insurance: what are the monthly premiums (ongoing costs), how likely is the targeted/prevented event to happen, and what's the cost of not having the prevention or preparation in place. It's not a perfect model, but at least is a numeric framework to discuss with rather then "I feel that...". Probabilities and money (labor hours).
I have yet to find a forum - in ~25 years of near daily discussions on forums online - where incredibly obvious logic failures don't happen persistently. And I'm only talking about the basics, nothing complex.
The worst and most common, I believe, is: because you said X, therefore you must believe / endorse / be implying Y. It's some kind of emotional transitive property of logic failure.
Example concepts:
I say: Bush did X. Response: Yeah but Obama did a thing, he's worse, how can you support him?!? (Obama isn't part of the conversation at all, there was no statement endorsing Obama whatsoever)
I say: the US did X. Response: Yeah but Russia (or China etc) is evil and did a thing, they're even worse because of a thing! (the other countries aren't part of the conversation at all, I never suggested the other countries are good or bad or did or didn't do a thing).
I say: I'm in favor of an immigration system like Canada or Australia. Response: how can you support internment camps and murdering children at the border? Or more calmly: why are you against immigration? (there was no mention of being against immigration at all, Canada allows plenty of immigration via their approach)
Some of it is obviously an emotional attempt at diversion, an irrational reflex to change the conversation away from what it's pointing at for one reason or another. Logic is in part about self-control and my observation is that it's a rare quality.
I've yet to find a forum where this doesn't happen constantly, basically in every large thread. You spend half your effort on forums either trying to pre-empt very primitive logic failure responses via how you structure what you write so you don't have to waste your time later correcting people, or you have to waste time responding after the fact and noting that no, in fact you didn't endorse x y z.
Ideas and subcultures are in a constant fight for mindshares, I disagree with how pervasive and hypocrite this battle is, but it is not like there is no reason for it.
We humans spent most of our history interacting with people in a more direct way, and having out 'gut' conclude things about another person based on what they say, do, how they look, how they sound, and so on, was and is important to our survival.
If I meet a person face to face who says 'Bush did x', I might also notice the tone of voice, that the have a Southern drawl, that they're wearing camo and a red hat with MAGA on it. In this situation I'm not likely to conclude that they're pro-Obama despite their critical statement wrt Bush.
I've noticed this flaw in myself as well, and it's frustrating and takes effort to counter. When I see a politically loaded comment on HN, I really have to make an effort to not jump to conclusions.
All that said, I have a little plugin that allows me to tag users and while plenty of commenters surprise me, I find that most are almost shockingly consistent when it comes to which 'bucket' I put them in (right, alt-right, conservative, liberal, socialist, libertarian, evangelical, etc.). So perhaps it's not so strange or inaccurate that many of us jump to conclusions based on very limited information.
(not that I think it's a good thing to do so. I do agree with your comment.)
Stereotypes are convenient when you need to make decision in a pinch, but they are horribly ignorant and misguided when talking to people. You can easily dispel your ignorant bias by asking a single pointed question.
As far as politically loaded hyperbole and labeled stereotype buckets I find Bush and Obama far more in common than Trump and that Trump and Clinton have far more in common. When I look at these people I don’t care what their politics are or how charming they are. I am trying to examine their motivations and how they interact with people. I am not sure which labeled bucket that would put me in and I don’t really care because I despise political labels.
Like with stocks, the price depends on what other people think the price is, so you can be correct and lose your shirt because everyone else thinks something that is wrong. (Which also makes them right!)
Similarly, it's likely that common illogical arguments like whataboutism persist exactly because they are effective in convincing non-logical people and may be a logical strategy if you actually want to achieve some kind of political change.
That said, stocks are fundamentally safer. If you own company X and they succeed/profit well longterm, you receive great dividends regardless of the stock price.
There are, also, plenty logical proofs of how Schiff conducted a biased investigation.
It is easy to prove any point by selecting your evidences.
Saying "I don't know" is one of the most honest and correct things a human can say about most problems. Then starting from that they may attempt to gather some (partial) information and build a logic to support some solution. But if instead we're starting with "let's do this" then we already lost.
It is wrong to pretend to have a logical reasoning behind your gut feeling where there is none, but there is nothing wrong in not wanting to work with a company because they give a 'bad feeling"
It is wrong to codify gut feelings into objective rules ("smiling too much is now a crime" obviously does not work). We should also strive not to be dominated by our gut feeling and to be self critical of how appropriate they are in any given situation.
Sometimes the rational position is to realize that strict rationality is not the perfect solution to every problem.
How large is the difference between arriving at an answer by "using your gut", vs. arriving at the answer using a Machine Learning system?
Especially in cases where the ML system is a simulated neural net?
In both cases you are using a neural net based optimizer, and in both cases it is hard to apply (post-hoc) introspection.
I value objectivity a lot, but recognize that there are lots of issues in human interactions that you just cannot solve well with this approach. In trying to break it down to something tractable, you throw out the important bits.
I suspect that sometimes the resistance you find is not due to you applying logic, but instead misapplying it. For what it's worth, I also suspect that sometimes it is more like you present. And sometimes you just have different axioms, even if both parties cannot articulate them formally well enough to see this.
While generally I do agree that trying to be 'objective' in the way you describe is a solid approach, I've met plenty of people and had plenty of experiences where this backfired because I or others had too much trust in the ability to be 'objective' about something, overruling our very subjective but also correct 'gut feeling'.
You can’t pretend to be objective when the appearance of such is convenient, because then you are just lying to yourself about dodging the emotional considerations that compose a decision. This sort of self deception is far more common than you might find comforting. Even highly objective people sometimes need guard rails to ensure their decisions are objectively quantifiable.
All decision making is a highly emotional experience in all cases for all people. It’s just how our primate brains work. For highly objective people a careful consideration of data and perceptions of balance are a fundamental part of that emotional experience in a way they cannot be for other people.
Handwavy: often what you need is more rough-and-ready approximate statistics than any real logic. You are still approaching it with an objective mindset, but you are being realistic about the limitations of your data and modeling capabilities.
And at the end of the day a lot of what is important is also subjective.
Logic can only get you so far. Your argument can be perfectly chained together logically, but logic says nothing about whether your premises/givens are true this is the difference between sound and valid arguments. This is probably what you meant by being logical is not always being right. Honestly you can be as valid in your arguments as you want, but that doesn’t always make your argument sound, because when your givens turn out to be false your whole chain of logic is moot and your conclusion is not true (as some might think) but instead inconclusive [1]. Just as someone with invalid logical chains and possibly even correct assumptions conclusion would be inconclusive and not false as some may presume (I’m thinking of the fallacy fallacy [2].) Sure it’s important to have a valid argument, but people with unsound valid arguments can make a lot of confusion too and possibly even more so.
> Most don't return the favor. "My guts have proven accurate and I'd rather trust my gut feelings" is a common response. Screw Guts, I want logic, damn humans! Human guts have proven dumb.
Your givens you describe on setting up your logic could also be categorized as a gut feeling as well. As they say it’s turtles all the way down.
Now don’t get me wrong I agree we should be more logical in our arguments. I just think people can take your reasoning too far which is why I added some input.
[1]: https://simple.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_false_prem...
As I mentioned nearby, finding each side's "givens" is part of the process of narrowing down the points of disagreements.
For example, after long debates with die-hard conservatives I've discovered that they are not necessarily against social safety nets, but rather they feel the more society relies on them the more powerful gov't gets in general, giving it more control over OTHER things, not just safety nets. They'd rather risk dying than let "the beast" grow. That's their personal choice. It's the "feeding the beast" theory. But they won't admit this up front, one has to tease it out of them.
I think this is a very good way to look at it. If you can find each others givens you can know how you differ. But, not always is one given more correct than another, but instead sometimes just shows a different perspective. For example in euclidean geometry by changing certain axioms you can create other non-euclidean geometries. Neither is more correct than another only they're true under different circumstances.
> For example, after long debates with die-hard conservatives I've discovered that they are not necessarily against social safety nets, but rather they feel the more society relies on them the more powerful gov't gets in general, giving it more control over OTHER things, not just safety nets. They'd rather risk dying than let "the beast" grow. That's their personal choice. It's the "feeding the beast" theory. But they won't admit this up front, one has to tease it out of them.
I'm a pretty die-hard conservative myself and social safety nets are good for the down-trodden or those who are disabled or those who cannot work for whatever reason, but sometimes what I've heard is that they disincentivize work for those who are able this hurts not only those being taxed, but the economy, and likely the able bodied person collecting welfare. I think feeding the beast is another problem the government obviously needs to reduce spending and cutting an d reducing spending on government programs could help with that in my mind. Do economists really agree on these things though? Is the given that feeding the beast really that inherently bad? Feel free to educate me my mind is a pretty open book. I think the main problem with big government is it could lead to tyranny and less economic freedom.
I agree it can be hard to distinguish between the truly needy and intentional slackers. But, it would cost even more tax money to inspect harder to find out. Inspectors ain't cheap. It may be counter-intuitive, but it's sometimes cheaper to let some degree of riff-raff slip thru the cracks. The third alternative is that nobody gets anything.
That is exactly what I’ve heard and I completely agree with your statement. Although I never really meant to imply that we should have investigators follow people around and kick them off welfare.
Again, I’m not against welfare for the disabled, poor and destitute, but I also thinks it disincentivizes work to those that want to and I think though that people are disincentivized to work for economic reasons and not just social reasons. The economic reasons we can fix and the social disincentives might be able to be fixed too, but I wouldn’t think hiring inspectors is the right way to do that. For an example of economic disincentives for work in the US welfare system, if someone makes just enough money to get off of particular kinds of welfare because they got a job or even a better paying job they may end up making less which could disincentivize them from working or holding a better job. The answer as pointed out here is to ween people off of benefits in a way that would make financial sense to the individuals themselves [1].
Basically my thought with saying previously that these bad incentives can be bad for the person on welfare themselves is if we disincentivize people from climbing the job ladder above a certain rung they may feel inclined to always stay below that rung due to that incentive. Thus leading to their own poverty and thus hurting the economy as well, and this is because not only we have to continue paying their welfare, but also because they don’t contribute as much to our workforce.
I understand that for the large part of people on welfare their personal intention is to get off of it and pass that barrier/rung and get off welfare, but they still have some amount of disincentive to not do so which if the welfare program were better maybe it would have better incentives.
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/PoliticalDiscussion/comments/32rr5p...
To be fair, if you have (for example) a high school education, simply taking the word of someone who has (for example) a PhD in X subject is a best practice.
From the article:
In theory, resolving factual disputes should be relatively easy: Just present the evidence of a strong expert consensus.
Though I've spent time in an anti-vax community -- because it was a good source of useful health info if you could sidestep the emotional baggage and conspiracy theories -- and some members had PhDs and at least one was also a published author. So they had their own respected and credentialed experts to argue against the respected and credentialed experts that friends and family were trying to use to attack them.
Most don't return the favor.
Regardless of argumentation style or approach, most people are basically saying "This is my best understanding of life, the universe and everything." This includes people claiming to have the logic high ground for some reason and lots of people have been burned by people looking to win the argument and making no effort to understand why they might see it differently.
Many human philosophies reject logic (Or any mechanical system of derivation) as a valid epistemological device. Logic in the west is heavily shaped by Greek philosophers, like Plato and Aristotle, and then Latin Catholicism's embrace of them in the medieval times (logic is not particularly important in the eastern churches). Without the effort of the Church in the West, logic would not exist as a common form of 'proof' today. In Arabia, Greek logic was embraced by the Muslims. But, it is not a universally embraced philosophical framework.
In fact, there's not even any such thing as 'logic'. There are multiple logics in Western thought (and in mathematics and philosophy and even computer science) that are often at odds with one another and cannot be reconciled. Western philosophers like Godel even admit that logic cannot explain everything.
Of course 'logic' (and it's now in quotes to refer to your conception of it, which we've already established is ill-defined given the number of extant logical systems) in normal discourse now includes the law of excluded middle, which undermines the entire system, and is incompatible with logic's own embrace of rationality.
Let's take a quick tour around the world though.
Several branches of western philosophy do not admit logic (the way you think of it at least) as a valid epistemology:
1. Mathematical Constructivists reject universal applicability of the law of excluded middle. In the intuitionistic logic they use, the phrase 'P is either true or not true' is not one that can be assigned a truth value. This is not to say there are no propositions which one could argue successfully are individually true or untrue, they just reject the universal applicability of the law. This is really important, because in 'formal logic' the way you conceive it, the law of excluded middle makes the entire logic unsound.
2. Pragmatists (John Dewey, Charles Sanders Pierce) often reject logic outright (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmatism#Logic).
Many branches of non-western philosophy do not admit logical inference as fully valid, or augment it such that it no longer fits with western conceptions.
1. For example, the Charvaka philosophy from India rejects logically inferred knowledge as always doubtful. In that philosophy, the only unqualifiably true knowledge is that which one observes. Studying 'logic' in an attempt to be 'rational' is not useful in that system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charvaka.
2. The Vaisheshika school of philosophy accepts inferences based on prior knowledge, but also accepts as true the testimony of reliable experts (shabda), thus invalidating logic as a means to truth (truth in the western sense). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pramana#Vaisheshika_school
3. The Mohist philosophy of China (from the followers of Confucius) admits analogy as a form of knowledge, but rejects formal logic in the western way.
4. Zen Buddhism often castigates logic as not only useless but potentially harmful in one's quest to arrive at truth: http://ccbs.ntu.edu.tw/FULLTEXT/JR-JOCP/jc26600.htm
Your idealism of 'logic' (and given that you didn't even specify which logic, I'm taking it mean you think there is only one, and that it is right) is, when considering the grand arc of human history, indefensible. You argue that it is 'right' and the way to the 'truth', but you can't even fathom that many societies, cultures, groups, and philosophers did not think it useful or necessary or valid.
Simply believing logic is right, without any consideration for an alternative, amounts to a religious belief. Indeed, given that logic remains popular mainly due to the theological musings of Thomas Aquinas, it is moreover, a heavily Christian (from Aquinas) or Muslim (from the Muslim theologists studying Aristotle) belief.
People can reject what they want, but rejecting hammers doesn't make them less capable of hitting nails.
>logic remains popular mainly due to the theological musings (...)
It's a flourishing field, popular for its usefulness in formal proofs, etc., not a dead remains of the past.
Real formalization either does not admit very obvious axioms, like excluded middle, or cannot prove theorems we would consider obvious, like function equivalence.
In formal methods in computer science and math we as of yet do not even have a complete logic that can encapsulate all the things we want to prove (homotopy type theory is an attempt but there is no accepted computational interpretation). Stop pretending 'logic' is a thing that is self evidentiary.
Don't we all know that at least since Gödel.
>very obvious axioms, like excluded middle
I don't consider it something obvious. If you read Nagarjuna's Mulamadhyamaka-Karik, you might even consider it something inappropriate.
Then that puts you in the minority of those using 'logic' when arguing about non-mathematical things. By and large, most lines of reasoning engaged in those attempting to be 'rational' rests on excluded middle.
I also wrote a literature review on when humans should and should not trust their gut.
It was a personalized assignment that I fought to obtain as it was not a standard assignment.
Writing it taught me a lot.
If you’re interested, email me and I’ll send it to you.
How does one test for this? I would like to mark my own belief to market.
After testing at the hedge fund I was able to see my scores and assessments. The other place is an elite military group, and I was not allowed to see my scores unless I accepted the job. The military group followed the on screen tests by a one on one with a psychologist.
I passed both assessments but chose to not accept either job due to unrelated conditions like a competing job offer, bad timing, life conditions.
PS. You don’t really binary pass/fail the assessments. They tend to inform whether and how you and others can complement or guardrail each other on mission as a team.
Also, hello username buddy.
>Political scientists Charles Taber and Milton Lodge experimentally confirmed the existence of this automatic response. They found that partisan subjects, when presented with photos of politicians, produce an affective “like/dislike” response that precedes any sort of conscious, factual assessment as to who is pictured.
>In ideologically charged situations, one’s prejudices end up affecting one’s factual beliefs. Insofar as you define yourself in terms of your cultural affiliations, information that threatens your belief system — say, information about the negative effects of industrial production on the environment — can threaten your sense of identity itself. If it’s part of your ideological community’s worldview that unnatural things are unhealthful, factual information about a scientific consensus on the safety of vaccines or GMOs feels like a personal attack.
If you are objective, you are not threatened by surprising new information, even if it might have some negative implications that jump to mind. You evaluate it against every other relevant information source you have on the topic, sometimes requiring more complex chains of information, and assign a level of trust to the new info.
Thinking about it, the only way that this course of action is "not logical" is that it is not "deciding on a course of action and following it regardless of the approach of one's fellows", maybe that it's not oriented to looking the terrain instead of following emotions. But all these more like skills or "personality makeup" and as such, they aren't even applicable to every situation. If you're starting a situation where individual would be bonding over a long period, congregating with one's fellows may be a good or "objective" strategy.
The problem with a lack of initiative is that it undermines security. If you don’t know what you should be doing then at least you can secure part of the group’s perimeter by seeking cover and looking outward until told otherwise.
IE, you're talking of specific skills and understanding as if they were a general thing, "logic". Not that I'd disagree with comment about what should be done.
Most humans are hardwired to seek mutual security, which means banding together as a stress coping mechanism. That incidentally means some natural revulsion of originality, objectivity, individuality, and even honesty. More important are group conformance, mutual reassurance, and perceptions of social security.
This is readily observable when you take a group of people who have never worked together and are generally unfamiliar with the outdoors and drop them into an outdoor military training exercise, such as college ROTC junior classmen. Naturally they congregate really closely together and wait for somebody to tell them what to do with minimal or no initiative, all of which is a bad idea in modern military training.