The Night of January 16th

Telling someone that you enjoy reading the works of Ayn Rand is different from admitting that your opinions are informed by Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus or that you relax with William Faulkner. I recently worked with a team of a dozen technical writers. In fact, I was the only true technical writer on the team. The core group held MAs in technical writing from Texas State, but they were doing it just because it was a job that paid well. Another was a kindergarten teacher. Probably the most talented member of the team was an unpublished novelist. Of course, we talked about writing and literature. One of my colleagues said that he does not like Ayn Rand. “What have you read?” Nothing, he admitted, correcting himself to say, “I find that I don’t like the people who like Ayn Rand.” Up to that point, I thought that we had been getting along quite well.  Apparently not…

When Gerald Ford became President, I heard a radio program (NPR most likely), on which the interviewer asked the expert what Ford would bring to the Oval Office. The expert replied that from his long service in the House of Representatives where he had been elected Speaker, Ford learned that “to get along, you have to go along.” That advice has served me well these past 40 years. I am not much for getting along or going along, but I understand those who do. 

My primary motivation is at the top of Maslow’s Hierarchy: self-actualization. That being as it may, I am not a recluse. I do not live in a cave in a forest. For me, the rewards in city life come from the anonymity of the division of labor: when you need a plumber, you don’t care who his cousin his, you just want the water line fixed. It may seem paradoxical, but the marketplace deeply engrains the personal ethics and moral behavior that makes socialization possible in the first place, and ultimately rewarding on all levels, physical, emotional, and spiritual. 

On the other hand, around the world most cultures are “high context” societies where who your cousin is makes a big difference. Spain, Sicily, Greece, Iraq, Iran, the Philippines... The “low context” societies are the advanced, industrial and now post-industrial, information-age leaders: the USA, Australia, NZ, and Canada, the UK especially the English, Scandinavia and Finland, Germany, Switzerland, and (oddly, perhaps) Israel. 

"The Weirdest People in the World?" is a paper published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, (2010), available online from the authors here. These mainstream psychologists sought to demonstrate that most of the research being carried out to find “human nature” is flawed because the test subjects are usually university students or their children. They sent a dozen teams to non-industrialized locales to interview people by carrying out a variety of standard psychological games from simple optical illusions to more complex interactions such as Dictator and Ultimatum. Among their many findings was that the degree of market integration predicts how deeply individuals internalize their sense of fairness. Basically, we share because we want to. Other people share—when they do, which they might not at all—because they have to. 

“Crime in the city” is an easy topic of casual conversation. But the gangs of New York came from high context societies. The best narrative I know about crime in the city is the movie Family Business. Sean Connery plays Jessie McMullen who married an Italian. Their son, Vito, was played by Dustin Hoffman. Vito married a Jewish girl. Matthew Broderick played their son, Adam. Ethnic cleansing is impossible in the city. Gang wars in the city (these days, usually over drug markets) are carried out by Hispanic and African-American high context cultures. As they say, “It takes a village…” 

The Night of January 16^th is a crime drama. It centers on a global financial fraud and includes a street hoodlum. What made the play popular was that the jury was drawn from the audience. Rand wrote two endings for the final act. A bad adaptation was created for the big screen, directed by William Clemens with a screenplay by Delmer Daves, Robert Pirosh, and Eve Greene.

“Though Rand was years away from articulating her own ideal, she had since childhood admired the individual who acts on his own judgments, defying social pressure. Thus the main characters in Night of January 16th are bold egoists who unapologetically seek the world’s rewards and pleasures for themselves.“Notably, however, this play’s heroes don’t embody Rand’s moral philosophy. ‘I do not think, nor did I think it when I wrote this play, that a swindler is a heroic character or that a respectable banker is a villain,’ she writes. ‘But for the purpose of dramatizing the conflict of independence versus conformity, a criminal — a social outcast — can be an eloquent symbol.’”  -- AynRand.org here.   

The screen adaptation mangled the plot. Names were changed for no apparent reason. Elements were added that sidetracked the integration of actions and motives which is an essential element of Ayn Rand's fiction.

“The story revolves around three people; Tycoon Bjorn Faulkner, who is being called upon by his board of directors to explain a missing $20,000,000; Kit Lane, his secretary who also has a personal interest; and Steve Van Ruyle, a sailor who has inherited a position on Faulkner's board of directors. Faulkner is (presumably) murdered, and Kit is falsely accused of the murder. Steve assumes the job of clearing her name.” -- IMDB.com  “Van Ruyle attempts to prove Lane's innocence with fake evidence, but his ruse is discovered. The two flee with evidence from Faulkner's apartment, which they use to track down the mysterious Haraba. They trace him to a hotel in Havana, Cuba, where they discover that "Haraba" is a pseudonym being used by Faulkner, who has faked his own death. When Faulkner takes Lane captive, Van Ruyle rushes with police to Faulkner's room to rescue her. Faulkner is arrested, and Van Ruyle and Lane decide to get married.” – Wikipedia.

Ludwig Wittgenstein denied the validity of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. He wrote it in the trenches while in the Austrian army. His military service did not protect him when the Nazis took over. He was forced to liquidate his family inheritance into gold and deliver it to the government in return for permission to emigrate to the UK. While in England, he worked out a different set of problems and solutions. He was accused of attacking Karl Popper with a fireplace poker. It is irrelevant today that both men were closet homosexuals. 

But is possible to discuss Wittgenstein’s metaphysics and epistemology or Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies, without having to answer for all of their philosophical errors or lifestyle foibles. Not so with Ayn Rand. She is a lightening rod. It was from a Theodore Sturgeon story that I learned that I am not the only one who falls in love where the lightening strikes.

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Ayn Rand and Star Trek 

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… that goddam Ayn Rand book…. 

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Why Democracy is Difficult

If you run the Declaration of Independence through a grammar and style checker, you will find that it takes a modern college education to understand.  I would argue that most of today’s graduates do not understand it, but perhaps that is only from the lack of trying.

The founders of our republic were not average.  They were successful merchants and farmers and craftsmen.  George Washington was a surveyor.  (Quick: what is the square root of three?  A surveyor has memorized that as securely as most literate Americans have memorized the letter after R.)  If you drink beer you know the Sam Adams brand. It seems common enough, until you extrapolate from zymurgy to genetic engineering.

Jonathan Trumbull's
Signing of the Declaration of Independence
from the Library of Congress website

Karl Popper’s ringing plea, The Open Society and Its Enemies, was an appeal to ignorance. We do not know everything. Indeed, we cannot. New discoveries reveal that what we know today might not be true tomorrow.  Against that the fascists and communists of Popper’s time and the jihadi of our own offer intransigent commitment to claims of absolute certainty. Thus, the collapse of Arab Spring led to the rise of ISIS.

But an alternative exists.  Reality, reason, egoism, capitalism, and romanticism comprise the parameters of philosophical objectivism.  Ayn Rand’s capital-O Objectivism is just one expression of that. The broader philosophical objectivism, i.e., rational-empiricism, is the foundation of political freedom and social tolerance. 

But it is not easy, and nothing in the stars says that it must be. When Ptolemy I Soter complained to Euclid that geometry was difficult, the latter said that there is no royal road. In other words, there is no way to make this easier. Thinking is hard work.  It is easy to condemn the physically lazy, but no special sin exists for the intellectually slothful—except, of course, sloth itself.  Among the Texas State Guard, my email sigline is “Sapientia ardua est.”

Widespread intelligence and education are the basis for political freedom.  Of axiomatic necessity, most people are average.  Therefore, it might be argued that it takes a committed engagement by an intellectual elite to bring about a better form of government. However, the Flynn Effect posits that we are all smarter now than our ancestors of 100 or 200 years ago.  Maybe we just are not applying our intelligence to the right problems.

 

Created for an article that I wrote:
"Did Thomas Jefferson Wear
Mirrorshades?"
(Loompanics, 1991)

On my Macintosh, I have Word 2008, and its Spelling and Grammar checker seems to have a ceiling of 12^th grade. Nothing scores more difficult.  So, I ran the Declaration of Independence through several readability engines available on a website created by one Brian Scott. (“ReadabilityFormulas.com is a non-commercial ‘passion project’ created by freelance writer Brian Scott. The website offers free information and tools to understand readability formulas.  Visit Brian's other websites, LousyWriter.com and FreelanceWriting.com.”)

  

FIRST TWO PARAGRAPHS

Readability Consensus 

Grade Level: 19

Reading Level: difficult to read.

Reader's Age: College graduate

LONG TRAIN OF ABUSES

Readability Consensus

Grade Level: 23

Reading Level: very difficult to read.

Reader's Age: College graduate

LAST THREE PARAGRAPHS

Readability Consensus

Grade Level: 16

Reading Level: difficult to read.

Reader's Age: College graduate

Modernizing the presentation does lower the readability to grade 7.8.  Now it resembles Peter Norvig’s PowerPoint presentation of the Gettysburg Address (here).

We hold these truths to be self-evident:

• All men are created equal.
• They are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.
• Among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
• To secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men.
• Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.
• Whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it.
•  The people may institute new Government.
• The foundation of the new Government rests on such principles as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
• The Government should organize its powers in such form.

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The Science of Liberty

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The Science of Liberty

The Science of Liberty: Democracy, Reason, and the Laws of Nature by Timothy Ferris is excellent assembly of cogent essays is an extended argument for freedom and science. The scientific revolution and liberal democracy are inseparable.  To limit one is to defeat the other.  According to Ferris, the scientific method is the root of political freedom.  In that, he continues the case made long ago by Karl Popper in The Open Society and Its Enemies.  

Like Popper, Ferris misses the center of the target.  It is not “liberal democracy” but capitalism that enabled and was empowered by the Enlightenment philosophy of rational-empiricism that we know today as Objectivism. To be fair, though, Ferris does devote an entire chapter to “The Science of Wealth” where he praises both free market capitalism and Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations.

Anyone who values freedom and science will find this book is well worth the time invested.  The essays are crisp, insightful, and backed by citation.  While Ferris does good work building up the material benefits of the scientific method and the human values in liberal democracy, the core of the book is a total demolition of claims that centralism and totalitarianism can lead to good science.  In one chapter, plus other material throughout, Ferris shows that Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia were scientifically bankrupt, and technologically inferior to the liberal democracies they opposed. 

In just under 300 pages, Ferris delivers a close and informative history of the scientific method, centered on Sir Francis Bacon's creation - and betrayal - of it.  Ancient Greeks such as Aristarchos and Demokritos, guessed correctly, reasoning well, that the Earth orbits the sun, and that matter is comprised of atoms.  But that was not science.  Science is a method of observation, questioning, investigation, tests, and reporting.  (To see why Aristotle's description of the chick embryo does qualify as science, see my review of Great Scientific Experiments, here.)  Science did not exist before the Renaissance; the creation of science led to the political Enlightenment. Like the chicken and the egg, of course, which came first is a moot point: you cannot have one without the other.  More to the point, Ferris argues well, the essence of liberal democracy, what it is that makes freedom work, is precisely the scientific method applied to social problems.

That said, Ferris is well aware of the essential weakness in liberal politics: experimental programs become permanent.  According to the scientific method as applied to civics, we, the people, vote on certain remedies, try them out, and if they fail, we pragmatically try something else.  Actually, that last never happens.  We go on to new attempts, but the old failures continue to be funded and staffed and enforced.  He has no solution for that.

Ferris does deliver a good history, especially of the American revolution as the triumph of citizen scientists.

In another chapter on “Academic Antiscience” Ferris reveals how Karl Popper’s theory of falsification and Thomas Kuhn’s theory of “paradigm” were misapplied at first innocently, and then wantonly, by “post modernists.”  Claiming that theirs was an agenda of liberation, Paul Feyerabend and those who followed him quickly moved on to demanding an end to science and an end to material prosperity.

Supplementing that demonstration is a chapter on Progress.  Post-modernists decry and deny it.  They claim that material progress leaves us spiritually impoverished.  Politically, they claim that progress is illusory, being only the looting of the poor by the rich. Ferris takes the second claim and shreds it with facts.  Even if the claim were true that the rich are evermore far richer than the poorest, the sheer numbers of the poor, multiplied by their material advantages today, bury any claims to injustice from progress.  The poorest are far better off than they were 50 or 100 years ago. 

The book closes with a chapter on global warming and the consequent ice age that will come “unless we do something.”  What is that “we” must “do” is less clear.  Once again, Ferris is mindful of the precarious state of the world’s poor.  Reducing greenhouse gases, however accomplished, must not come by taking their lives. Who can afford to make which sacrifices today in order to secure the future is a tough question for which Ferris has no answer.

“The point is that lightswitch ethics—pounding the table and insisting, “We must save the lives of our grandchildren” or alternately, “We must leave free enterprise alone”—are inadequate. … Responsible stewardship requires dealing in quantities and probabilties, with little recourse to comforting certitudes.” 

Ferris closes by comparing the universal, invariant nature of science with the universal and invariant nature of liberalism.  Both depend on and advocate truths that apply to all people in all times and places.

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Eyewitness Testimony: Popper, Wittgenstein, and the Innocence Project

News traveled quickly within academic philosophy that on the night of October 25, 1946, in Room H3 (number 3; staircase H) of the Gibbs Building, at Kings College, Cambridge, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper had gone at each other with red-hot fireplace pokers.  Of course, that is not what happened.  Yet, the true sequence of events remains uncertain and contested. 

Wittgenstein’s Poker: The Story of a Ten-Minute Argument Between Two Great Philosophers by David Edmonds and John Eidinow (HarperCollins, New York, 2001).

Juries are swayed by eye-witness testimony.  Yet it is highly unreliable – and is known to be subject to simple error as well as police misconduct and prosecutorial fraud.  Over the past 15 years, thanks largely to the Innocence Project, and the advocacy of academic criminologists, some changes in police procedure have been written into law.  However, on the streets, in the lock-ups, in the courtrooms across America, at the local level, tradition rules.  (If you do not know the case of Jennifer Thompson and Ronald Cotton - “What Jennifer Saw” PBS Frontline show here – you need to understand the limits of witness identification.  The Innocence Project page on this case is here.)

·                                 

In the matter of Wittgenstein’s Poker, an audience of perhaps 30 academics - students, dons, professors - fifteen professional philosophers at one of the world’s best universities, all of them at some level specialists in the theory of knowledge, did not agree on the details of a 10-minute drama. 

Beneath this is the foundation of science.  Sir Karl Popper invented the theory of falsification, presenting it in his 1935 work, The Logic of Scientific Discovery.  Simply put, a broad theory based on some evidence can explain much.  Astrology works like that.  You are a Libra; your partner is a Capricorn.  You think you are in love, but the charts say you are incompatible.  An astrologer will delve into your rising signs and conjunctions and aspects, and ultimately can produce almost any result you want.  Popper felt that this was true of Freudian psychology, which he called a pseudo-science.  Science is subject to disproof.  According to Popper a complete theory suggests its own testable limits.  This was revolutionary in 1935 but is accepted without question today. 

But social theories are largely not subject to disproof.  The failures of communism (and before that of fascism) are argued away by true believers, just as astrologers and creationists present ever more explanation to overcome difficulties.  (The easiest claim is that the USSR was not practicing true communism, but only state capitalist revisionism.  Actual communism would be successful.  Any failure must not be real communism.)  Ultimately, this applies to radical feminism, to postmodernism, to the broad spectra of both the left and the right.  The true believer finds no reason to be tolerant of other opinions because they are not interested in being proved wrong in the search for truth. 

That expresses Popper’s political philosophy, expounded in The Open Society and Its Enemies, for which he was knighted.  Written before World War II, but published only afterward, the book calls for tolerance based on ignorance.  We cannot know for certain that we are right.  Our ideas might be falsified.  Thus, we are mindful of the sensibilities of other people, even as we disagree.  In his essay “What Does the West Believe In?” (delivered as a lecture and then added to a compendium, In Search of a Better World: Lectures and Essays from Thirty Years) Popper notes that unlike the Marxists of that time, or too many other creeds and their variants, the West largely has no single doctrine.  The strength of our society, the source and expression of our freedom, is that we do not "believe in" any one thing.  Rather, we accept many things as being true, for as long as they stand up to scrutiny. 

How then did Popper come to promote his idea of falsifiability?  What if it later were falsified?  That would be a paradox, of course, as is his intolerance of intoleration.  It is ironic, then, that he denied the validity of the ideas of Ludwig Wittgenstein.  Wittgenstein claimed that there are few (if any) real problems in philosophy, but only apparent problems from loose language.  Clarify your concepts and problems disappear.  Wittgenstein’s Tracticus Logico-Philosophicus was nicely organized in outline form and relied heavily on the symbolic logic of Russell and Whitehead. 

The easy resolution is that word games aside (falsifying falsification; not tolerating intolerance), it is usually better to reserve judgment and be open to those who would prove you wrong. Ultimately, of course, right and wrong do exist; and the wrong is discarded for failing a single test, while the right stands up to probe after probe.  Unfortunately, the criminal justice system does not work that way. 

The incident is described on pages 16-20 in Chapter 2, “Memories are Made of This.” 

Both Popper and Wittgenstein are at the tops of their careers.  Both are accustomed to holding the attention of those to whom they speak. Popper is the guest speaker, but Wittgenstein will not yield.  They argue. 

“Consider this poker,” Peter Geach hears Wittgenstein demand of Popper, picking up the poker and using it in a philosophical example.  But, as the discussion rages between them, Wittgenstein is not reducing the guest to silence (the impact he is accustomed to), nor the guest silencing him (ditto).  Finally, and only after having challenged assertion after assertion made by Popper, Wittgenstein gives up.  At some stage he must have risen to his feet, because Geach sees him walk back to his chair and sit down.  He is still holding the poker in his hand.  With a look of great exhaustion on his face, he leans back in his chair and stretches his arm toward the fireplace.  The poker drops to the the tiles of the hearth with a little rattle.  At his point, Geach’s attention is caught by the host, Richard Braithwaite.  Alarmed by Wittgenstein’s gesticulating with the poker, he is making his way in a crouching position through the audience.  He picks up the poker and somehow makes away with it.  Shortly afterward Wittgenstein rises to his feet in a huff, quietly leaves the meeting, shutting the door behind him.”

Michael Wolff sees that Wittgenstein has the poker idly in his hand ... Peter Munz watches Wittgenstein suddenly take the poker - red-hot - out of the fire and gesticulate with it in front of Popper’s face.  Then Russell - who so far has not spoken a word - takes the pipe out of his mouth and says firmly, “Wittgenstein, put down that poker at once!” His voice is high-pitched and somewhat scratchy.  Wittgenstein complies, then, after a short wait, gets up and walks out, slamming the door.   From where Peter Gray-Lucas is sitting, Wittgenstein seems to be growing very excited about what he obviously believes is Popper’s behavior and is waving the poker about. ...  Stephen Plaister, too, sees the poker raised. ... To Stephen Toulmin, sitting only six feet from Wittgenstein, nothing at all out of the ordinary is occurring; nothing that in hindsight would merit the term “incident."

According to Edmonds and Eidinow, Hiram McLendon’s account is corroborated by Bertrand Russell: they remember that Wittgenstein became agitated, grabbed the poker and waved it.  John Vinelott supports Popper’s story published in 1974.  Popper recalled that when asked for an example of a moral principle, he replied, “Not threatening visiting lecturers with pokers.”  Defeated, Wittgenstein threw down the poker and stormed out. 

Several points are at issue, not the least of which is the threat with a red-hot poker. Did Wittgenstein leave abruptly, slamming the door, after he asked Popper for an example of a moral rule?  According to most retellings, Wittgenstein left the room before Popper offered the example.  It may remain forever impossible to falsify any explanation of the events. 


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"Karl Popper and the Black Swan"
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Systemic Injustice
The CSI Effect

THE PROBLEM OF INDUCTION: KARL POPPER AND HIS ENEMIES

The “Black Swan” refers to the fact that as far as Europeans knew, for thousands of years, hundreds of generations, all swans were white.  Then, after discovering Australia, they found black swans.  In the stock market, the "black swan" is the event no could have foreseen.  This is the problem of induction.  We can collect all the instances we want, but at some level, our knowledge must be admittedly contingent.  Objectivism asserts a positive solution to the problem of induction.

In the lecture series, “The Basic Principles of Objectivism” Nathaniel Branden said that if you disagree with someone on the relevant morality of some current political news topic, if you stay engaged, pretty soon the discussion gets down to philosophical principles at an ever more basic level until you must finally get to metaphysics.  For Ayn Rand, most disagreements centered on epistemology.  

In The Logical Leap, David Harriman provides one solution to the problem of induction:  a single example is enough if your generalization is based on reality.  (See my review on this blog.)

In the Open Society and Its Enemies, Karl Popper makes a plea for tolerance based on an admission of ignorance.  Ultimate knowledge eludes us: all claims are contingent.  Therefore, it is wrong to force your views on another person because you cannot be sure that your claims are not to be falsified at some later date.  This clearly rests on Popper’s statements in The Logic of Scientific Discovery that inductive reasoning is insecure and that falsifiability is the test of truth.  Moreover, says Popper, deductive reasoning is not much help.  The claim that all ravens are black leads to the equivalent claim that all non-ravens are non-black.  Thus, everything you see that is not black validates the claim that all ravens are black; and this is clearly ridiculous.

The solution via Ayn Rand and via David Harriman is that a proper induction is based on the essential characteristics.  In the cases of ravens and swans what was lacking was the knowledge of genetics, of the biochemistry of inheritance.  Indeed, when black swans were discovered, they were not called vorks or gabongs.  They were called swans because whiteness was not essential to swanness after all.  Objective knowledge is not an accumulation of instances.  Objective knowledge integrates reason and experience, theory and data.  It is true that lacking any understanding of physics, we could only say that the sun would come up tomorrow again in the east, but a little bit moved over, only because it always had.  The claim was inductive  only.  After Newton, this was no longer merely an inductive claim, but an objective one.  And, to the point, the problem with the precession of the perihelion of Mercury that was solved by Einstein, did not invalidate the entire body of knowledge.  Inductive claims are contingent.  Objective truths are not.

Admirable as Popper’s passion for an open society remains, the weakness of his argument is revealed by the absolutism of his opponents.  They are not so laissez faire.  They are absolutely sure of their claims.  They unequivocally assert the right to dictate for others. 


I posted this observation at the OrgTheory blog in the Comments for Occupy Everything:

Popper placed our problems in Plato’s lap. These Occupy people are acting out a desire for a coup d’etat by the Philosopher Kings. They know what is best. The idle class is not really the bourgeoisie that shows up to the office every day to trade equities. Those are only workers of a different trade. The true leisure class are the philosophers and writers who proscribe our fuels, our foods, our trades and deals, our monetary media and margins. Those hawks ... always win over the doves because those conflict managers have an agenda while the merchants of peace beg for reasoned debate. So, the Occupiers will push and shove for their goals, while the advocates of reason fail to mount a coordinated defense. In fact, one is not possible.
Perhaps the best thing is just to ignore them. No headlines. No sound bites. No tweets. A thousand years ago, Durk Pearson and Sandy Shaw penned an essay titled, “What if they gave a millennium and nobody came?” It was about securing your own personal freedom here and now.

In the news now, the Occupiers of Wall Street demand the power to decide what is best for everyone else.  Admitting that you are not certain will not carry the day.  Is your mind so open that a loose array of slogans from a flash mob can occupy it?  If not, then why not?  If your individual sovereignty is your inviolable right, what is the social extension of that? 

Despite the fact that we survive and thrive through trade and commerce based on productivity, by the nature of self-interest, the bourgeoisie is difficult to arouse.  The guardians march to their battle hymns and anthems, but we have no tuneful lyrics about open exchange or scientific discovery.  Perhaps this is as it must be.  In Systems of Survival, Jane Jacobs delineated the guardian and the trader as mutually exclusive modes.  Perhaps the bottom line only needs to be laissez nous faire. 

ADDENDUM

For more on Black Swan Theory see

This blurb from NUMB3RS on YouTube
Wikipedia on the Black Swan Theory here
The orignal work of Nassim Nicholas Taleb on Google Documents
Taleb's website here.

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LOVERS OFFLINE
Hypatia of Alexandria

Why Evidence is Not Enough

Generally, people rated authors as experts when the views coincided with their own. Kahan and his team created three authors and their books. All three had the same high level of academic standing. (Doctorates from major schools.) In every case, two different, opposing views were written for each author and randomly shown to subjects. The topics were gun control, nuclear power plants, and global warming.

Originally published by the Yale Law School as "Research Paper #205: Cultural Cognition of Scientific Consensus by Dan M. Kahan, Hank Jenkins-Smith and Donald Braman." The paper can be downloaded from the site of our comrades at Mother Jones who offer it here.

This is really just another arithmetic validation of what we know as the "confirmation bias" and the "attribution fallacy." Richard Feynman warned young scientists about the need for ruthless honesty in his famous speech on "Cargo Cult Science." (Available from the CalTech Engineering and Science Library here.)

In short, we tend to agree with and thereby validate experts who agree with us. When presented with facts opposed to our commitments, we denigrate the status of the provider. This ties in with another theme: The Big Sort by Bill Bishop. Over the past generation, Americans have come to socialize only with those who agree with them politically. In the 1960 Presidential election, Kennedy won over Nixon by about 1 vote per precinct, and largely, it was just that: a nation mostly divided narrowly near the middle. Now, precincts tend to be overwhelmingly Republican or Democrat.

It is not just gerrymandering (though there is that), but the fact that people choose to live among those whose political values already mirror their own. The research data show that this correlation is strongest among those with more education. The guys on the bowling team might disagree and still hang out; their bosses on the golf links do not.

Today, perhaps more than a third of working American adults hold bachelor degrees, with the master's being the new bachelor's. University education apparently failed to achieve the lofty goals of Karl Popper and Mark Van Doren two generations ago for a society open to ideas, whose participants benefited from a liberal education embracing literature, mathematics, science, and fine arts.

The blog OrgTheory is written by sociologists of economics, Brayden King, Fabio Rojas, and others. On April 11, 2011, Brayden King posted "When Evidence Isn't Convincing." It summarized research by Daniel Kahan and his colleagues.  Reading that and following the links to the original paper, I posted an earlier version of this blog article to the Objectivist site, Rebirth of Reason.

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