decline of rationality

[James Warren]

https://tinyurl.com/zb7sjhfn

[HRM Resident]

James Warren <jwwar...@gmail.com> wrote:
> https://tinyurl.com/zb7sjhfn
>

From the above, “What precisely caused the observed reversal of the
long-term trend around 1980 remains perhaps even more difficult to
pinpoint.”

It’s pretty obvious to me. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.

They also cite social media as a cause, but that’s not the reason.
That’s technology, not a shift in mentality. It was Reagan and Thatcher,
and that’s not “I believe,” or “I think.” It’s a fact.

--
HRM Resident

[Mike Spencer]

James Warren <jwwar...@gmail.com> writes:

> https://tinyurl.com/zb7sjhfn

From the article:

Scientists from Wageningen University and Research (WUR) and
Indiana University have discovered that the increasing irrelevance
of factual truth in public discourse is part of a groundswell
trend that started decades ago.

It doesn't say what kind of "scientists" they are.

JOHAN BOLLEN is a professor of informatics at Indiana
University....

He has published more than 75 articles on computational social
science, social complexity, health, well-being, machine learning,
and informetrics. (indiana.edu)

MARTEN SCHEFFER is a Dutch ecologist, mathematical biologist and
professor of Aquatic Ecology and Water Quality Management at
[WUR].....

...praised Scheffer for his contributions "to our understanding of
critical transitions in complex systems, varying from shifts in
shallow lakes to climate change and the collapse of ancient
cultures". (Wikipedia)

Okay, they're both into complex systems. From the article:

"Inferring the drivers of long-term patterns seen from 1850 until
1980 necessarily remains speculative," [Scheffer]....

What precisely caused the observed reversal of the long-term trend
around 1980 remains perhaps even more difficult to

pinpoint. However, according to the authors there could be a
connection to tensions arising from changes in economic policies
since the early 1980s, which may have been defended on rational
arguments but the benefits of which were not equally distributed.

Seems to me that there were warning flags in the 60s.

+ Educators began to emphasize "self esteem" over any explicit
evidence of learning. Rather than encouraging (requiring)
teachers to detect the cognitive styles of students and teach
individuals accordingly (a project demanding greatly increased
staffing & expense, major changes in training and, worse, a new
paradigm for career education theorists), they told misfits,
fuck-ups and people who might have learned well under a
different approach that they were doing great, great that you
participated, great that you were here, promoted/graduated.

+ The hippies of the 60s began to be part of the establishment in
the 80s. The hippy ethic was generally getting stoned (thus
ignoring/escaping reality), anti-intellectual posture/attitude
and (putting the two together) doing what seemed groovy at the
moment. Those with some tilt toward reading stuff were reading
the I Ching, Kalil Gibran, Maslow on self actualization,
Buddhist mysticism or the works of crackpot gurus. All that
crap settled into the cognitive substrate and then they grew up,
built putatively adult lives on that base. [1]

+ The Boomers -- people just 2 to4 years younger than I -- hit
university age while at the same time, a college degree was
becoming the entry ticket to a respectable middle-class career.
Facing a demand for seats and eventual credentials from a large
number students without the inclination or intellectual
capability to meet the rigor of logic, science, math, or even
hard-core literary criticism, the "liberal arts" exfoliated new
"disciplines" that gave all that hard stuff and end run.

When the 80s & 90s got under way, that generation was writing much of
corpus from which the researchers are now drawing their conclusions.

From the article:

The authors did find that the shift from rationality to sentiment
in book language accelerated around 2007 with the rise of social
media,

I have some thought on that, too, but it's late and I'm going to bed.
More later.




[1] Disclaimer: I was never a hippy. I looked like one, drove a VW
microbus with Snoopy painted on the side, played banjo and dropped
out of career-track life. But I never liked drugs and I was
reading stuff about chemistry, medicine, metallurgy, carburetors,
cognitive science etc. learned two trades and so on. This was
similarly true of a slim majority of my hippy-appearing friends.



--
Mike Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada

[James Warren]

I am in complete agreement with your analysis. My university years
were in the 60s. I witnessed some of the hippy movement and I read
some of Maslow and other self help gurus. Many even had PBS specials.

I posted here some time ago about how the
Psychology grads who entered the school system in the 70s had
a bad influence on the educational system. The emphasis on
self-esteem and refusing to accept the importance of failure in
development. We have bred a generation or two of narcissists.


Science, once respected, is now just another dude's opinion.
Facts are devalued as just another opinion having no more
weight than a speculation. Expertise is just despised elitism.
The end result is conspiracy theories and Trumpism.

Social media has amplified this. It can also amplify the
cure if we make the effort to use it for education and
debunking the nonsense.

Can the ship be saved? Maybe.

[Mike Spencer]

James Warren <jwwar...@gmail.com> writes:

> I posted here some time ago about how the Psychology grads who
> entered the school system in the 70s had a bad influence on the
> educational system.

Several of the psychology majors I knew back when seemed to me to have
chosen psychology because it seems to promised to answer the question,
"Why am I so shpxrq up?" As behaviorism/Skinner/rat-running was still
then ascendant, it failed to do so. At least one I know stuck with it
until time to start his thesis in grad school, then finally dropped
out and remained shpxrq up without access to an explanation.

> The emphasis on self-esteem and refusing to accept the importance of
> failure in development. We have bred a generation or two of
> narcissists.
>
> Science, once respected, is now just another dude's opinion.
> Facts are devalued as just another opinion having no more
> weight than a speculation. Expertise is just despised elitism.
> The end result is conspiracy theories and Trumpism.

Narcissism (I surmise) is only one aspect. The conflation of fact and
opinion, especially when few facts have been acquired *as facts*, is
(to make perhaps too fine a distinction) an intellectual failing rather
than a personality pathology.

> Social media has amplified this. It can also amplify the cure if we
> make the effort to use it for education and debunking the nonsense.

I recently came across this little squib when re-reading one of Terry
Pratchett's Diskworld novels. The person whose thoughts are recounted
has assembled a group of minions under the guise of a Secret Society
(to which they are supposedly uniquely privileged to have been
admitted) with the intent to overthrow the civil government and
reestablish monarchy.

What a shower, he told himself. A bunch of incompetents no other
secret society would touch with a ten foot Sceptre of Authority.
The sort to dislocate their fingers with even the simplest secret
handshake.

But incompetents with possibilities nevertheless. Let other
societies take the skilled, the hopefuls, the ambitious, the
self-confident. He's take the whining, resentful ones, the ones
with a belly full of spite and bile, the ones who knew they could
make it big if only they'd been given the chance. Give him the
ones in which the floods of venom and vindictiveness were dammed
up behind thin walls of ineptitude and low grade paranoia.

And stupidity, too. They'd all sworn the oath but not a man jack
of 'em has even asked what a figgin is.

Fifty years ago, pulling a congeries of such people together into a
functioning conspiracy, cult, religious denomination, commune
etc. required a lot persistent of effort, preferably including a
cash-cow con and subsequently a TV show. The problem was that
although millions might have been susceptible to whatever demented
canon you offered, lacking the successful con and TV, you could easily
reach only those who actually came to your camp meeting/seance/orgy in
person.

Now social media means *anybody* can do it with minimal investment.
Video-capable cell phone, net access, twitter and U-tube account and
literally millions of people with the above-cited qualifications are
reachable. You just have to persist, tweak your message/rant/sneer
to provide more & more of whatever elicits clicks.

> Can the ship be saved? Maybe.

What odds are the bookies offering on collapse of the USA into
authoritarian single-party state by 2025? How much is Lloyd's asking
for an insurance policy against such and eventuality?

[James Warren]

On 2022-01-19 8:07 PM, Mike Spencer wrote:
> James Warren <jwwar...@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> I posted here some time ago about how the Psychology grads who
>> entered the school system in the 70s had a bad influence on the
>> educational system.
>
> Several of the psychology majors I knew back when seemed to me to have
> chosen psychology because it seems to promised to answer the question,
> "Why am I so shpxrq up?" As behaviorism/Skinner/rat-running was still
> then ascendant, it failed to do so. At least one I know stuck with it
> until time to start his thesis in grad school, then finally dropped
> out and remained shpxrq up without access to an explanation.

I quit because I didn't think that behaviourism was up to the task
of explaining human behaviour because a black box approach could
only go so far in creating a deep enough understanding. Cracking
open the skull and looking inside offered a better chance.
Behaviourism was not wrong. It just could not go far enough.

He anticipated Trump!

>
> Fifty years ago, pulling a congeries of such people together into a
> functioning conspiracy, cult, religious denomination, commune
> etc. required a lot persistent of effort, preferably including a
> cash-cow con and subsequently a TV show. The problem was that
> although millions might have been susceptible to whatever demented
> canon you offered, lacking the successful con and TV, you could easily
> reach only those who actually came to your camp meeting/seance/orgy in
> person.

The election of Trump was a perfect storm of several elements that
had to come together at the same time.

>
> Now social media means *anybody* can do it with minimal investment.
> Video-capable cell phone, net access, twitter and U-tube account and
> literally millions of people with the above-cited qualifications are
> reachable. You just have to persist, tweak your message/rant/sneer
> to provide more & more of whatever elicits clicks.

The "anybody" includes you and me and those like us who wants to
"spread the good news" of science and reason.

>
>> Can the ship be saved? Maybe.
>
> What odds are the bookies offering on collapse of the USA into
> authoritarian single-party state by 2025? How much is Lloyd's asking
> for an insurance policy against such and eventuality?
>

I try to be optimistic but I would not bet the farm on a
favourable outcome.

[Mike Spencer]

James Warren <jwwar...@gmail.com> writes:

> The "anybody" includes you and me and those like us who wants to
> "spread the good news" of science and reason.

Yeah, that's so. But to exploit the medium we'd have to appeal (very
methodically and reasonably, of course) to all the lowest common
denominator avenues of manipulation, modify that dynamically to
reinforce the most effective triggers, make it appeal to

...the whining, resentful ones, the ones with a belly full of spite

and bile, the ones who knew they could make it big if only they'd

been given the chance....the ones in which the floods of venom and

vindictiveness were dammed up behind thin walls of ineptitude and
low grade paranoia.

Do we want another Scientology? Christian Science? The notion of
"science and reason" is that they should be convincing in their own
right, on their own terms. But some large fraction of the population
is far more responsive to factors -- confirmation, feel-good, semantic
anxiolysis, familiarity etc. -- that end-run reason.

The Third Reich was keen on science but presented its own version in
emotional terms that persuaded, especially when begun at age 6:

...Hitler, in his genius, understood that the language that would
grab the elites most powerfully was the language of science. After
all, what did he want most? For them to take him seriously. He had
no problem with the masses and the workers. His problem was with
the intellectuals: how to reformat them, as we would say
today. His solution was that he would not come to them with a
political agenda, but rather with a different scientific religion
that reordered the world. All this required evidence and proof, so
they simply produced it. Professors in the most prestigious
universities offered seminars, and their students did research and
doctoral theses that were bound in leather, asserting that in
order to rediscover this special Aryan genome, it was necessary to
take action internationally. First to isolate the German people
from the other races and then to improve the race. [1]

The inference is that fake "science" will flourish better than real
science because real science & reason require effort, a critical
attitude toward authority and acceptance of I Don't Know.

Heaven's Gate, whose members committed suicide [in 1997] in order
to undertake a space journey. The leader does not necessarily grab
people at their weak spot. On the contrary, he grabs them where
they feel smart and superior. He speaks to them in high language.



[1]
https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/europe/.premium.MAGAZINE-how-hitler-won-germans-over-with-his-scientific-religion-1.5474185

[James Warren]

Fuck Mike! All is lost! We need to build bunkers fast!

[HRM Resident]

James Warren <jwwar...@gmail.com> wrote:


>snip<

>
> Fuck Mike! All is lost! We need to build bunkers fast!
>

Mike is a wealth of information on many things, and while I hope he’s
wrong on this, I suspect he is correct. I watched Biden’s press conference
last night. His demeanour and how he answered questions didn’t inspire a
lot of confidence. Mind you, he’s 1000 times the man that the previous guy
was, but he is too old. And there’s an article on the BBC website today
asking the rhetorical question, “Is the USA ungovernable?” Sadly, I
suspect so.

As for bunkers, are you behind! I dug mine ten years ago! I have a
water pistol and a homemade sword to defend it too. Get your water pistol
now as they are in short supply. Fill it with Kool-Aid like we did in
elementary school. The sugar gets in the other guy’s hair and makes it
sticky. That’s sure to deter anyone who tries to steal your stash of
canned beans. :-)

--
HRM Resident

[James Warren]

Fuck man! That's a real good idea! I'm on it! :)

[HRM Resident]

On 2022-01-20 11:11 a.m., James Warren wrote:
> On 2022-01-20 10:36 AM, HRM Resident wrote:

>snip<

>
> Fuck man! That's a real good idea! I'm on it! :)
>

You can use Gatorade or any pop that's gone flat. Substitution is
allowed. Water pistols full of any sugary water can be fun! :-)

--
HRM Resident

[Mike Spencer]

James Warren <jwwar...@gmail.com> writes:

> Fuck Mike! All is lost! We need to build bunkers fast!

James, pay attention! Nova Scotia *is* your bunker.

When I moved here '69, I had projected that the US had a decade to run
before it fell over the edge of some metaphorical cliff. I keep
seeing articles and/or graphs that suggest that the Reagan
administration was some kind of threshold between decades (or even
centuries) long trends and the present, very different ones so that
matches my 1968-9 plus a decade estimate.

But 1980 wasn't "fall off a cliff". Watergate looked a bit cliff-like
but the US got through that. No cliff appeared out of the fog until
Trump was elected and the country zinged over the edge of sanity.

The jury's still out on whether the country is in free fall
exacerbated (to muddle a metaphor) by malice or is merely skittering
down a 75 degree slope, grasping for twigs and roots in the faint hope
of arresting decent.

This bunker won't be proof against climate change, chemical pollution,
sea level rise, loss of diversity etc. but we're protected from the
political derangements of the USA as least as well as a back-yard
bunker would protect against WW III.

[James Warren]

Is NS really safe? If the US goes rogue the whole world will feel
the quake. The US would only have to whisper invasion and Canada
will surrender. Resistance would be futile.

Our safety will last a while but it is not assured.

[Mike Spencer]

James Warren <jwwar...@gmail.com> writes:

> Is NS really safe?

For default values of "really", no, of course not.

> If the US goes rogue the whole world will feel the quake.

Has already, is doing so just now.

> The US would only have to whisper invasion and Canada will
> surrender. Resistance would be futile.

Depends on who's who in Canada at the time. Read the novel
Exxoneration for comeuppance rendered to US politicians who arrogantly
assumed the same in that fictional projection.

> Our safety will last a while but it is not assured.

Nothing is forever.

[Lucretia Borgia]

On 20 Jan 2022 19:56:27 -0400, Mike Spencer

<m...@bogus.nodomain.nowhere> wrote:

>
>James Warren <jwwar...@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> Is NS really safe?
>
>For default values of "really", no, of course not.
>
>> If the US goes rogue the whole world will feel the quake.
>
>Has already, is doing so just now.
>
>> The US would only have to whisper invasion and Canada will
>> surrender. Resistance would be futile.

I haven't really followed the discussion, but saw that and know, even
in my dotage if the US yelled invasion I would be ready set to kill
any one USian who dared to breach our shores!! I am, as a friend
said, like a Roman Catholic, more bigoted for being converted than
born :)

[James Warren]

On 2022-01-20 8:44 PM, Lucretia Borgia wrote:
> On 20 Jan 2022 19:56:27 -0400, Mike Spencer
> <m...@bogus.nodomain.nowhere> wrote:
>
>>
>> James Warren <jwwar...@gmail.com> writes:
>>
>>> Is NS really safe?
>>
>> For default values of "really", no, of course not.
>>
>>> If the US goes rogue the whole world will feel the quake.
>>
>> Has already, is doing so just now.
>>
>>> The US would only have to whisper invasion and Canada will
>>> surrender. Resistance would be futile.
>
> I haven't really followed the discussion, but saw that and know, even
> in my dotage if the US yelled invasion I would be ready set to kill
> any one USian who dared to breach our shores!! I am, as a friend
> said, like a Roman Catholic, more bigoted for being converted than
> born :)

Bravo! Unfortunately your martyrdom would be futile. :)

[itsjoan...@webtv.net]

On 1/20/2022 7:44 PM, Lucretia Borgia wrote:
> On 20 Jan 2022 19:56:27 -0400, Mike Spencer
> <m...@bogus.nodomain.nowhere> wrote:
>>> The US would only have to whisper invasion and Canada will
>>> surrender. Resistance would be futile.
>
> I haven't really followed the discussion, but saw that and know, even
> in my dotage if the US yelled invasion I would be ready set to kill
> any one USian who dared to breach our shores!!
>

LOL