In contrast to former Microsoft chief Steven Ballmer’s belief that putting data into the hands of citizens will help democracy, a new book – The Knowledge Illusion – argues that more individual knowledge isn’t going to help.
People Have Limited Knowledge. What’s the Remedy? Nobody Knows – The New York Times
According to Sloman (a professor at Brown and editor of the journal Cognition) and Fernbach (a professor at the University of Colorado’s Leeds School of Business), providing people with more and better information is unlikely to improve matters. Scientists hope to dispel antiscience prejudices by better science education, and pundits hope to sway public opinion on issues like Obamacare or global warming by presenting the public with accurate facts and expert reports.
Such hopes are grounded in a misunderstanding of how humans actually think. Most of our views are shaped by communal groupthink rather than individual rationality, and we cling to these views because of group loyalty. Bombarding people with facts and exposing their individual ignorance is likely to backfire. Most people don’t like too many facts, and they certainly don’t like to feel stupid. If you think that you can convince Donald Trump of the truth of global warming by presenting him with the relevant facts — think again.
The boundaries between “knowledge” and “ignorance” are less clear than one might think: http://quillette.com/2016/07/27/what-experts-do-and-dont-know/
Worthwhile article. Though with an ironic weakness. It illustrates the weakness of expert knowledge by suggesting that the “common-sense” argument for the lack of women in subjects like physics is correct: women avoid it because that sex is less attracted to impersonal subject matter.
I don’t know about physics, but in the case of computer programming there initially were many women. The reason they left wasn’t that the field was impersonal, but that status-seeking men professionalized it and pushed them out. It was the formation of expertise itself that excluded perfectly capable women.
I actually find the degree of resistance to the idea of sex differences more intriguing than sex differences themselves. After all, status-seeking itself (or tribalism/territorialism) is itself a sex-differentiated behaviour. So the commoners might be more right than they know, the experts more wrong than they know 🙂
You long comment below is much appreciated; I will be chasing down de Certeau and Thomas Frank to learn more.
That’s an interesting point about status-seeking behaviour. However, whatever the impact of innate sex differences on women’s participation rate, a static factor cannot explain a dynamic change. Ensmenger’s The Computer Boys Take Over is a great book about the professionalization of programming in the 1960s and 70s.
I love de Certeau’s book, The Experience of Everyday Life, but if you don’t want to read French philosophy about everyday resistance to hegemonic capitalist domination, it may not be to your taste. Also, as I recall, there is an entire chapter that I could not make head nor tail of.
Thomas Frank is a straightforward polemic by a left-winger angry at what the Democratic party has become. I find that a bit of a drag because I am less interested in sectarianism than in the role of the professions.
Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions is fantastic (it’s the origin of the term “paradigm shift”). Anyone who wants to understand science should read it (including particularly scientists).
I frequently read things not to my taste (or at least skim them), but these all sound promising; thank you for the summaries. I wish I were as good at articulating the key take-aways of most of what I read!
I’ve been studying the professions and the use of expertise for some time, and I’d argue that it rounds out the analysis to read Steven Lukes “Power, a Radical View”. My edition has some updates from the 1970 original. And because professionals are always functioning within systems (which is what I’m trained to analyze), reading Jamshid Gharajedaghi may lead to unexpected insights as well.
As for filters, this beautiful writer makes the point (elliptically, perhaps) that the people who think they know most may most need to clear theirs: https://regiehammblog.wordpress.com/2017/03/07/the-wrecking-ball/
Sorry for yet another long comment.
The article’s premise is sound – “not just rationality but the very idea of individual thinking is a myth” – but it develops in a fundamentally anti-democratic direction: “the world will probably become far more complex than it is today . . . How could we then vest authority in voters and customers who are so ignorant and susceptible to manipulation?” Setting ordinary people apart from scientists like this fundamentally misunderstands science.
“People rarely appreciate their ignorance, because they lock themselves inside an echo chamber of like-minded friends and self-confirming newsfeeds, where their beliefs are constantly reinforced and seldom challenged,” says the article. Compare this with Thomas Kuhn’s analysis of science: “Scientific knowledge, like language, is intrinsically the common property of a group or else nothing at all.” “One of the strongest . . . rules of scientific life is the prohibition of appeals to heads of state or to the populace at large in matters scientific. . . . The group’s members, as individuals and by virtue of their shared training and experience, must be seen as the sole possessors of the rules of the game or of some equivalent basis for unequivocal judgments.” Kuhn argues convincingly that the foundation of scientific knowledge is not reason or evidence, but persuasion and consensus. Scientific consensus is indeed one of the soundest arguments for climate change; the gated community of science is necessary, but insufficient: for science to matter, the scientist must apply that knowledge outside the discipline, where the context that reason has stripped away (for that is the essential nature of rationality) must be reconstituted. Here is Michel de Certeau:
“Experts intervene ‘in the name of’ – but outside of – their particular experience. . . . They do it through a curious operation which ‘converts’ competence into authority. Competence is exchanged for authority. Ultimately, the more authority the Expert has, the less competence he has, up to the point where his fount of competence is exhausted . . . That is the (general?) paradox of authority: a knowledge is ascribed to it and this knowledge is precisely what it lacks where it is exercised.”
This has political implications. I am currently reading Listen, Liberal, where Thomas Frank argues that experts constitute an political and economic class whose interests conflict with those of the mass of the population. Members of the professional class associate mostly with people like themselves and become detached from the experiences of the majority of the population. “Professionals . . . are life’s officer corps.” They fetishize education and knowledge: “Educational achievement is . . . the foundation of the professions’ claim to higher status.” But “the people with the highest status aren’t necessary creative or original thinkers. . . . what they are actually brilliant at is defending and applying a given philosophy. . . . ‘ideological discipline is the master key to the professions’.” This is a logical consequence of Kuhn; Frank argues that it is politically disastrous.
I suspect that the know-nothing ignorance we witness today is a reflection of how many experts present themselves. In its echo-chamber righteousness, Trumpism and its ilk echo the form, if not the content, of technocracy. If I am right, then experts are responding in exactly the wrong way. Instead of listening to and engaging with their critics, many instead amplify their assertions and their authority. Do as I say, not as I do.
In the short term, experts may be able to impose their policies. In many cases (but certainly not all), those policies will lead to better outcomes. But in the long run, I believe, this is a recipe for ruin. Democracy is both inherently desirable and necessary for social peace, and should not be sacrificed on the altars of convenience and efficiency.
I believe that what is needed is persuasion. Not propaganda which aims to manipulate, but sincere engagement that combines passion with humility, a willingness to listen, compromise and be wrong. The NYT article suggests that there is no solution for ignorance. I disagree. I do not believe that ignorance is the problem: for I do not believe that reason is the greatest human faculty. I believe that it is secondary to the capacity of diverse people to communicate and work together. If we do that, imperfect knowledge is but another manageable facet of what it means to be human.
Filters matter.
There is so much information out there – especially now with the internet, Twitter, Facebook, blogs, SnapChat, Google etc that no one can understand it all. As such, people filter knowledge out. Filters are created and/or influenced by upbringing, culture, race, gender, families, education, genes, age, an abusive parents, a loving grandma, travel, the weather etc .. i.e. a wide variety of factors so that the same fact is perceived differently, or utterly ignored, by different people !
Is that really new?
You are entirely correct about filtering. It is a necessary process – and always has been, because we cannot reason without it.
Rationality is a filter. In order to reason about a phenomenon, we reduce it to something we can model. Then we can apply logical reasoning to the model. But the model is not the real thing: creating it entails making choices about what to include.
If we wish to reason about human well-being, for example, we cannot account for all of the experiences of diverse individuals: even if we tried (e.g. by asking them all), we would have to develop some framework for doing so, which would fall prey to its own weaknesses (just as the responses to polls are influenced by the question). We often model well-being as wealth, for instance.
The things we measure become socially agreed-upon “facts”; the things we don’t are neglected. As you say, different people make different choices about what is important. These choices result in different models. But while each model may be justifiable and internally consistent, different models are usually mutually inconsistent. There is no reliable basis for choosing one over another. Which is not to say it’s a free for all and nothing is true (climate change is real), but that there is no objective way of deciding.
Expertise provides us with coherent, consistent models for reasoning about phenomena. This is good. Science works extraordinarily well. The danger is that we begin to mistake the model for the reality: the fact agreed upon for an objective truth. We then exclude other models. This leads us to exclude people who do not follow ours. Regardless of whether that’s a problem for knowledge, it’s a much bigger problem for living together, for the human interactions that make collective life possible and worth living.
The term expert is subjective in that it is based on the word “experience” and anyone can be an expert or go through some formal institutional process and be certified as an expert. This helps to validate merit, but it does not mean one cannot be an expert simple because one is not certified yet have much more “experience” than a certified expert. The certification though is a quick way for us to be certain there is a standardized level of competence we can rely on. But then you have the paradox of 3 experts all saying 3 different and contradictory things. So we need to be careful when utilizing experts. It’s still a matter of trust, whether the expert we are dealing with, or the institutions that certified them.
On the topic of the futility of knowledge, I think knowledge in of itself is void of meaning until we apply that knowledge to some purpose, increasing the semantic value of that knowledge, with the output being meaning and purpose that we use to define “local truths” in our daily lives, and eventually “universal truth” for questions such as “what is life all about?” (with the “grand unification theory” being an attempt at such a truth in a scientific approach to holistically understand the forces of nature). And we need truth(s) to validate our ego and existence, which is why we naturally seek it and need it.
However science, a means of systematically acquiring knowledge, is but a window into reality, limited by our human facilities that we rely on to “observe”. Science seeks certainty of reality, but we are finding in the last 100 so years that the essence of reality may actually be founded on uncertainty, throwing a wrench into our basic premise and dependence of time-dependent logic (taking out the axis of time, and everything is certain, but i’m not 100% sure….) Whatever true reality is–and whether we can actually “know” reality beyond what we perceive it to be with our feeble human facilities (i.e. 5 senses)–it can be certain (if I can use that word) that we will never know true reality, at least via the window of science. This is based on the premise we only know of the version of reality that is perceived by our human senses, and I can’t guarantee or be certain my version of reality is the same as yours. In essence, all we are are simply observers in which we believe that we exist in a construct called reality via our philosophical acceptance that we have consciousness. And only through observation, or witnessing knowledge, can we judge the meaning or value/worth of that knowledge.
So in that sense yes, knowledge is an illusion. And alone without interpretation, it is futile. No different to the post-Newtonian view that time and space is an illusion.
Going back to Ballmer’s attempt at a data-driven democracy, I agree knowledge is limited and it’s how we *use* the “grains of data” that are refined into “bricks of knowledge”, that matters. And the “bricks of knowledge” in of themselves is void of meaning without interpretation or application. In other words, what you construct and the design with the “bricks of knowledge” is what matters. With bricks, you can build a wall to segregate people, or build a home to provide inclusive shelter. Knowledge is therefore a double edged-sword and can be used for good or bad. It is hoped it is used for good, but then you need to bring in the concept of “judgement” and “wisdom” to the discussion, which I believe is a higher semantic form of knowledge. That would be part 2 of this philosophical rambling, which ends now as does my lunch break.