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Pinker: “But the main reason we should retire the post truth cliché is that it’s corrosive, perhaps self-fulfilling.

‘The implication is we may as well give up on reason and truth and just fight the bad guys’ lies and intimidation with lies and intimidation of our own. We can aim higher.

 

What the hell?  It’s as though he thinks: “lies and intimidation with lies and intimidation of our own. ”    Is all we have.  I say that because all Pinker offers is changing the subject: “Let’s return to the claim that Homo sapiens is irredeemably irrational, …”  That’s simply more dog chasing its tail.

Is all we have to offer?

I’m asking – Why the hell not enunciate that it’s about confronting lies and intimidation with exposure and harsh demanding questions about who the hell gives these people that right to ignore facts and answer everything with lies, diversions, transference of motivations, slander and intimidation???

What about a little militancy for honesty?

In his book The Last Word, the philosopher Thomas Nagel showed that truth, objectivity, and reason are not negotiable. [2]

Why not a little more focus on that thought and how to re-impress that on today’s people?

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In a wonderful paper by John Tooby and Irven DeVore (with Leda Cosmides as an unacknowledged coauthor),5 these evolutionary psychologists argue that Homo sapiens evolved to fill the “Cognitive Niche,” living by a combination of social cooperation, language, and technological know-how. …

These next few paragraphs are fascinating about the way hunter gathers were skeptical observers and rational processes of information.  It all seems pretty self-evident to me, so no revelation here but it was wonderfully written, even if Pinker was just doing the reporting on someone else’s work.

Why were truth and rationality selected for? The answer is that reality is a powerful selection pressure.

As the science fiction author Philip K. Dick put it, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” [10]

Very cool, now that’s a quotable.

The cognitive psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer has shown that many of illusions and fallacies vanish when information is framed in ways that harmonize with human intuition. [13]

Very cool point.  One that deserves more attention I imagine.

Though I would add that harmonize doesn’t mean to coddle, it’s about resonating with something inside of people.  That can happen by hitting ’em below their dogma belt.  Why not strive to create doubt in people’s faith-shackled dogmas?

Especially when you can do it on a foundation of honesty, rational constructive evaluation, respecting physical facts over ego driven desires.

Group loyalty is an underestimated source of irrationality in the public sphere, especially when it comes to politicized scientific issues like evolution and climate change. Dan Kahan has shown that, contrary to what most scientists believe, a denial of the facts of human evolution or anthropogenic climate change is not a symptom of scientific illiteracy [16]

The problem is that what’s rational for the individual may not be rational for the nation or the planet. Kahan calls it the “Tragedy of the Belief Commons.” [17]

Another paradox of rationality is pluralistic ignorance, or the “spiral of silence,” in which everyone believes that everyone else believes something but no one actually believes it.   …

Need to work all that into one’s calculations, for sure.

The drags on reason—boundedness rationality, the novelty of truth-enhancing institutions, self-presentation, costly signaling, pluralistic ignorance—are depressing in their number and weight. But there are also forces that can empower the rational angels of our nature. These rationality enhancers have been explored by psychologists such as Jonathan Baron, Dan Sperber, Hugo Mercier, Steven Sloman, and Jason Fernbach, [22] and many of them draw their power from another principle articulated by Abraham Lincoln: “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and you can fool all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.” There are prods and nudges and norms and institutions that allow us to be more rational collectively than any of us is individually. [23]

Hmmm, think they mean, we need each other to keep ourselves honest?