Skeptic @lemmy.world streetlights @lemmy.world 5 mo. ago

Why Smart People Believe Stupid Things

Steven Pinker explains the cognitive biases we all suffer from and how they can short-circuit rational thinking and lead us into believing stupid things. Skip to 12:15 to bypass the preamble.

88 comments

I can't say I'm a big fan of Pinker. RationalWiki goes over the multiple reasons: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Steven_Pinker

The biggest (non-personal) one though is that Evo Psych is garbage.
- Oh my, what happened to rationalwiki? Reading that you wouldn't have the first clue about who Pinker is or what contributions he's made. It's just a list of quote articles from critics of varying levels of note.
  
  His work on linguistics and cognition is seminal. I would heartily recommend "the language instinct" and "rationality".
  
  On evo-pysch, lots of garbage gets published because the tabloids love "women enjoy shopping because science" stories, and the field itself suffers from charlatans that grift in it. The principle behind it, namely that animal behaviour is subject to evolutionary forces, however is of course true.
  
  Sorry... you don't think printing what notable critics of Pinker say about him is relevant? Is his so-called science above criticism? Is the racism much of his so-called science is based upon also beyond criticism?
  
  And no, evo psych is garbage because it's garbage. Or at least mostly garbage.
  
  Let's start with the Center for Inquiry. I hope, as someone posting in a skeptic community, you consider them a valid source: https://cdn.centerforinquiry.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/29/2006/03/22164612/p23.pdf
  
  But in case you don't, here's more, from numerous sources and of varying degrees of complexity:
  
  https://philpapers.org/rec/ESMIEP-2
  
  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10113342/
  
  https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2019/04/09/i-almost-felt-pity-for-evolutionary-psychology/
  
  https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/out-the-darkness/201412/how-valid-is-evolutionary-psychology
In my experience it's just plain old greed.

I have a lot of highly educated and very intelligent friends. The kind of people that can tell me a lot about things like art history, politics, science, physics and medicine. And almost all of them are conservative politically with a mindset that frames the world only for themselves.

They show empathy but only in the immediate circumstance. They will be kind open and caring and honest with someone in person at the moment. But get them to have a conversation about their feelings about wealth inequality and they cringe at the thought of giving up a penny for anyone.
- There is that for sure, but "smart people believing stupid things" occurs outside the political/economic realms as well.
  
  I have seen my share of book smart university educated people doing absolutely stupid things.
- Greed certainly influences a lot of behaviour that we'd otherwise consider....questionable.
  
  Do you tend to find they believe in conspiracy theories and nonsense that benefit them personally?
  
  That's the contradictory part .... they are intelligent enough to see through the outlandish conspiracy theories and fringe fascist ideas but at the same time, they are the kind of people that wouldn't mind if a more conservative or even fascist government took over if it meant they could pay less taxes or 'get rid of the poor'.
  
  I remember once having a talk with a friend of mine with a great education in physics and science. He works in power generation as a major contractor making him a small millionaire. I talked to him about wealth equality once and he claimed that the work he does, he enjoys and doesn't really do it for the money but to apply his knowledge and expertise. I suggested the idea of providing a wealth cap to the richest people in the world ... to cap off wealth at $100 million and cut the person off from everything after and let them live their life to make way for others. He cringed at the thought and told me 'but that would remove the incentive for anyone to do anything in any field. Why work all your life only to be stopped by a cultural limit to wealth?'. I reminded him about his comment about not working for the money ... and our conversation became an exercise in complicated twisted logic to explain away why no one should be limited with their wealth. It ended by him casually, playfully but not directly referring to me as a communist.
  
  They represent the third of the population that would causally stand by and watch the world burn if it meant that it wouldn't affect their wealth or position in life. They would rather watch a fascist third take over with authoritarian government, fight the bottom third ... as long as no one bothered them.
Garbage psuedointellectual analysis.

Absolutely ridiculous to compare the Warren Commission to established scientific theories. Months before Kennedy's assassination, Allen Dulles, the man who turned the CIA into an organization that specialized in assassinating world leaders and covering it up, was fired by JFK. After his death, Dulles was placed on Warren Commission, in charge of investigating the event. Aside from this blatant conflict of interest, the commission proceeded to make an absolute joke of the proceedings, with key evidence such as the bullet that killed him having a breach in the chain of custody. There are real causes to be suspicious of the official story, and it's not really possible for anyone to conduct an independent investigation, basically the whole thing requires the assumption that Dulles is above suspicion.

Science does not do that. In science, you don't have to trust any one individual, because experiments are meant to be replicated and subject to peer review. By placing these things on the same level, Pinker is lending credibility to the US government and intelligence community at the expense of science.

He then goes on to lend credence to ridiculous COVID conspiracy theories and minimizes far-right, pro-Trump conspiracy theories, including Alex Jones.

Then he starts talking about Russia, "You see that Russia has tsars, then the Soviet Union, then Putin, so there's this historical continuity there," which an absolutely insane thing to say, arguing that Russians are just innately prone to rejecting "Enlightenment values" and to "authoritarianism." It's an extremely trite and lazy analysis which simply doesn't care about the vast historical differences between those three forms of government of the vastly different philosophical framework behind each. Has Stephen Pinker considered the possibility that the reason smart people believe stupid things is that overconfidence causes them to make broad sweeping judgements about fields outside their expertise without doing a thorough investigation?

Stopped watching as they start going into AI, not worth my time.
- So who really killed Kennedy?
  
  Likely Lee Harvey Oswald, but that doesn't mean that he was acting alone. The fact that he was killed before he could testify could indicate a cover-up.
  
  I believe that Dulles orchestrated the assassination. The CIA had been assassinating democratically elected leaders in every far corner of the globe, if they were willing to overthrow the government of Guatemala over some bananas, I find it hard to believe that they didn't have a plan for what to do in the event that a US president went against their interests.
  
  Dulles had both the means and motive to pull it off and cover it up afterwards, that doesn't conclusively prove he did it, but it's enough to establish reasonable suspicion.
Is it because they're not really smart and they try to learn things from youtube rather than reading?
- What if I read the transcript in book form?
  
  You're attacking the medium rather than the content. You can learn things from video just as you can a lecture.
  
  Books aren't special. And they can be very wrong too.
  
  You can learn things from video just as you can a lecture.
  
  So...
  
  You think people walk into lectures completely unprepared, listen for 25 minute, and walk out and they magically have learned stuff?
  
  Maybe you're just still in highschool, or never took a serious class in college.
  
  How it works is:
  
  Do the reading.
  
  Attend the lecture while taking notes.
  
  Review the notes
  
  Then later, after doing this with different topics, reviewing the same information again.
  
  Books aren’t special. And they can be very wrong too.
  
  There's a lot bigger barrier of entry, compared to uploading a video to fucking YouTube.
  
  You know what's crazier? There's still a shit ton more reasons, but I already know that even if you have managed to read this far, you can't remember the 1-4 steps without looking back up.
  
  Reading let's you do that, quickly scan the text for what you want and referring to it.
- Not a bad guess. The moving picture medium has been around for a while though and complements the written word, rather than supplant it, as a tool for learning.
  
  You want to learn how to get a garbage disposal unstuck?
  
  Watch a YouTube video.
  
  You want to learn to learn about psychological concepts in 25 minutes by watching a video?
  
  Cool, it won't ever work but I respect your wishes.
  
  But no smart person would believe just watching a quick video is actually learning anything more advanced then: there's a place for an Allen key under the disposal

You've viewed 88 comments.