{"id":12146,"date":"2021-09-26T17:14:35","date_gmt":"2021-09-27T00:14:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/?p=12146"},"modified":"2021-10-05T16:35:53","modified_gmt":"2021-10-05T23:35:53","slug":"lsqs-rationality-and-fear","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/2021\/09\/26\/lsqs-rationality-and-fear\/","title":{"rendered":"Ls&Qs: Rationality and Fear"},"content":{"rendered":"

Two long quotes today, from opposite ends of the spectrum from rationality to fear.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

NYT Magazine, 3 Sep 21: Steven Pinker Thinks Your Sense of Imminent Doom Is Wrong<\/a><\/p>\n

Interview with Pinker, whose new book Rationality<\/b><\/a> comes out on Tuesday.<\/p>\n

\nYour new book is driven by the idea that it would be good if more people thought more rationally. But people don\u2019t think they\u2019re irrational. So what mechanisms would induce more people to test their own thinking and beliefs for rationality? <\/strong><\/p>\n

Ideally there\u2019d be a change in our norms of conversation. Relying on an anecdote, arguing ad hominem \u2014 these should be mortifying. Of course no one can engineer social norms explicitly. But we know that norms can change, and if there are seeds that try to encourage the process, then there is some chance that it could go viral. On the other hand, a conclusion that I came to in the book is that the most powerful means of getting people to be more rational is not to concentrate on the people. Because people are pretty rational when it comes to their own lives. They get the kids clothed and fed and off to school on time, and they keep their jobs and pay their bills. But people hold beliefs <\/em>not because they are provably true or false but because they\u2019re uplifting, they\u2019re empowering, they\u2019re good stories. The key, though, is what kind of species are we? How rational is Homo sapiens? The answer can\u2019t be that we\u2019re just irrational in our bones, otherwise we could never have established the benchmarks of rationality against which we could say some people some of the time are irrational. I think the answer is, especially for publicly consequential beliefs: We achieve rationality by implementing rules for the community that make us collectively more rational than any of us are individually. People make up for one another\u2019s biases by being able to criticize them. People air their disagreements, and the person with the strongest position prevails. People subject their beliefs to empirical tests.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

“We achieve rationality by implementing rules for the community that make us collectively more rational than any of us are individually.”<\/p>\n

\\\\<\/p>\n

Or, on the other hand, you can close yourself off from the larger community to preserve your irrationality.<\/p>\n

Salon, 28 Aug 21: Evangelicals, science and the vaccine: Refusal is built on deep-seated fear<\/a><\/p>\n

Subtitled, “Too many of my fellow evangelicals see science as the mortal enemy of faith. It doesn’t have to be that way.”<\/p>\n

\nFrom Darwin to COVID the church has been wrong.\u00a0It’s really about fear among the Christian faithful when they turn away from science.\u00a0Even scientific theory is dismissed out of hand by the church because of a fear that somehow science will prove that God does not exist.\u00a0As the pandemic spreads from one church to another\u00a0and global warming continues to be ignored by the evangelical movement, it is clear that practitioners of the current Christian faith have\u00a0not evolved from their ancestors who condemned Galileo and Darwin.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

This is why it has been so difficult to get evangelicals to accept things proven by the scientific\u00a0community.\u00a0You have probably\u00a0noticed that many Republicans still will not confirm that climate change is even a thing.\u00a0They almost certainly know better but are\u00a0spineless, too afraid to alienate their hardcore Christian\u00a0constituency, despite the clear ignorance behind\u00a0the evangelical understanding of the climate crisis.<\/p>\n

As I said, this is about fear.\u00a0Understand that for many people of faith it has become very challenging to hold onto that faith.\u00a0Christians are asked to believe in an invisible being in the sky who keeps score of all our sins, and in the literal truth of\u00a0a\u00a0giant book put together over thousands of years that describes\u00a0people rising from the dead,\u00a0seas parting\u00a0and water becoming wine. Because of this intense insecurity, which they cannot admit, some Christians cannot tolerate any information that weakens the case for the existence of God. (The more liberal Protestant denominations and the Catholic Church have made some progress in this area, although even there the relationship to science remains uneasy.) When science becomes the\u00a0enemy,\u00a0something\u00a0like a\u00a0vaccine cannot be trusted \u2014 because it was created by the same people that are trying to destroy God.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Two long quotes today, from opposite ends of the spectrum from rationality to fear.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,12,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12146","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-religion","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12146","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12146"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12146\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12235,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12146\/revisions\/12235"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12146"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12146"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12146"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}