"As 1997 begins, we've seen several virus alerts. None of them were real. And all of them were probably driven by a previously unwritten law of human nature. This newly-discovered theory explains how ideas are able to travel faster than the speed of thought. The theory may be stated thus:
Think about it. By removing the actual thinking process, thoughts can travel uninhibited and thus exceed all logical bounds. In addition, such thoughts often tend to become hyperdriven (adj. driven by hype). This explains a lot of phenomena. For example, sales are often hyperdriven. Indeed, marketing often depends on the buyer engaging in rational thought only after the fact.
More importantly however, it explains how stories on the Internet can spread so quickly."
"The human propensity to accept ideas at face value -- no matter how illogical -- is the fertile soil in which pseudoscience grows. ... Why do people embrace irrational belief systems even after repeated disconfirmation by scientists?I didn't care for the huge font used in this, but the quotes, sources, and links are good.
'When people can't reconcile scientific data with their own beliefs, they minimize one of them -- science -- and escape into mysticism, which is more reliable to them', says Dr. Jeffrey Schaler, adjunct professor of psychology at American University.
Dr. Robert Glick, head of the Columbia Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, calls belief systems "societal pain relievers." 'People will recruit anything from their environment that will ensure and protect their safety', he says. 'It gives you a sense that you're not alone, and helps ease feelings of being powerless.' Power -- whether an increase in a person's perceived power or an abdication of it -- is a major component of pseudoscience, and Glick explains people's relations to power in Freudian terms. He describes belief systems as a metaphoric representation of our parents, providing a release from authority and responsibility. 'People have a built-in predilection that wishes for assistance and support. This is an extension of childhood, where there were always people around us who control our life. Beliefs like astrology and even religion are a projection that there are forces in the heavens that are like your parents'. "
"A word about my orientation: computer software development, or programming, first got its hooks into me in high school, and has been my mainstay (income-wise) since I got my degree in computer science over 20 years ago. The experience of programming teaches an important lesson, which I've always thought everybody could use: what initially seems true is often totally false. A software program you are convinced is correct actually turns out to be rife with errors. This can be quite astonishing if you are willing to face it squarely. It means everyone should be skeptical of their intuition.Emphasis and links are mine.
Of course, we all know this is the very reverse of normal Western thinking. "Gut instinct" is celebrated in business and politics. Why do people place so much importance on body language, non-verbal cues, facial expressions? Why was Clinton's sex life such an enduring story in the news? Why did people view this opportunity to peer into his personal life to be news at all? The simple answer is intellectual laziness, or intellectual incompetence. On such questions, people can have what they imagine to be informed opinions -- effortlessly. (Of course, once it's a major story, that fact alone makes it news.)
Laziness or incompetence like this (or any other significant ailment) are not natural conditions. If a large proportion of people in a society are thus afflicted, it signifies a problem in the environment.
In the long run, who benefits from this intellectual vacuum? The moneyed interests do, because what the people naively think of as "gut instinct" can be directly shaped through advertising, slanted news reporting, etc. Money wins in the competition for the people's "instincts." In a rational environment, by contrast, it's much harder to subvert nominal social goals like equality, fairness, and all the ideals associated with "democracy."
- Consensus & Cooperation -Emphasis and links are mine -- ed.
A central ideal of this consulting service, this website, this individual, is that the universal language of rationality has the potential to produce consensus and guide people to work cooperatively towards shared objectives.
Rationality, were it ever to arrive, would not only transform business and politics. It would represent a leap in our social evolution, analogous in significance to the unaccountable development of individual intelligence when evolution produced our species.
Our political and government institutions represent our society’s current level of achievement in consensus and cooperation. As we all recognize, mismanagement, confusion, deception, and discord are the rule.
Discord is often considered an inevitable consequence of the diverse interests of government’s many constituents. This view is wrong. Much of the discord would evaporate in a rational environment. Many policy proposals are incompatible with the only legitimate objective of public policy -- the promotion of the public good. Proposals that depend on confusion and faulty reasoning would no longer be viable in a rational environment.
The public good is not as controversial as our messy government processes suggest. As individual citizens, our conception of the public good is highly uniform. We want a society that offers its members justice, safety and security, economic opportunity, sound education and adequate health care. Rationality, by producing consensus and cooperation, could help us realize these shared aspirations for our society. ...
- Towards Rationality -
- Competition -
In a society that is supposed to understand the benefits of competition, it is remarkable that in both business and government, decisions are taken and policies enacted without conducting effective intellectual exercises to explore the strengths and weaknesses of competing ideas. Effectiveness would entail written conferences (via computer) to avoid the obvious rationality-distorting influences that occur in oral exchanges. Written conferences (Internet newsgroups demonstrate the technology -- as well as the necessity in practical applications of having moderators) also have the advantage of enabling asynchronous participation by many more productive participants than would otherwise be practical.
Competitive intellectual arenas, properly run, have tremendous potential to produce superior ideas.
- Infrastructure -
Consider the incremental process of developing insight. Basic insights necessarily precede advanced ones. Advanced insights in turn form the basis for still more advanced insights. This accumulation of successive layers of insight represents the process of maturation in individuals, as well as of scientific progress over the ages.
In public policy discussions, however, intellectual progress does not occur because basic insights fail to get established. Attempts to develop consensus on advanced insights get bogged down because the basic insights on which they depend are not in place. We have no intellectual infrastructure.
“Relativism” is an example of a popular outlook in our society that incapacitates the intellectual process before it can even get started. Adherents believe that all perception is relative, that objectivity is meaningless, and that no point of view is ever more “valid” than any other.
The intellectual infrastructure needed for progress includes understanding basic logical reasoning and argumentation -- processes that have been known for thousands of years -- and awareness of basic principles of reasoning and public policy.
- Clarity & Simplicity -
Obscurity and gratuitous complexity are primarily useful for deceiving people or excluding them from information affecting them. Our politics and government are suffused with obscurity and gratuitous complexity.
Clarity and simplicity are necessary for intellectual progress. This insight must be part of the infrastructure referred to above."