\nWhat we\u2019re seeing in the Baroque Cycle is the beginning of scientific rationalism and the idea that we can find ways to agree on what is true, which was a new development. You know, Barbara Shapiro has a book called \u201cA Culture of Fact\u201d that tells the origin story of the idea of facts, which is not an idea we always had. Another thing I\u2019ve been reading recently is \u201cThe Fixation of Belief\u201d by an American philosopher named Charles Sanders Peirce. He was writing in the 1870s, and he goes through a list of four methods that people use to decide what they\u2019re going to believe. The first one is called the method of tenacity, which means you decide what you\u2019re going to believe and you stick to it regardless of logic or evidence. <\/p>\n
Sounds familiar. <\/strong>Yeah, this all <\/em>sounds depressingly familiar. The next method is called the method of authority, where you agree with other people that you\u2019re all <\/em>going to believe what some authority figure tells you to believe. That\u2019s probably most common throughout history. The third method is called the a priori <\/em>method, and <\/em>the idea is, let\u2019s be reasonable and try to come up with ways to believe things that sound reasonable to us. Which sounds great, but if it\u2019s not grounded in any fact-checking methodology, then you end up just agreeing to believe things by consensus \u2014 which may be totally wrong. The fourth method is the scientific method. It basically consists of accepting the fact that you might be wrong, and since you might be wrong, you need some way for judging the truth of statements and changing your mind when you\u2019ve got solid evidence to the contrary. What you\u2019re seeing in the Baroque Cycle is the transition from Method No. 3 to No. 4. You\u2019ve got all these people having what seem like reasoned, logical arguments, but a lot of them are just tripping. So a few come in, like Hooke and Newton, and begin using actual experiments and get us going down the road toward the rational world of the Enlightenment. But <\/em>what we\u2019ve got now<\/em> is almost everybody using Method 1, 2 or 3. We\u2019ve got a lot of authoritarians who can\u2019t be swayed by logic or evidence, but we\u2019ve also got a lot of a priori <\/em>people who want to be reasonable and think of themselves as smarter and more rational than the authoritarians but are going on the basis of their feelings \u2014 what they wish were true \u2014 and both of them hate the scientific rationalists, who are very few in number. That\u2019s kind of my Peircian analysis of where things stand right now.<\/p>\n Do you see a way out of that? <\/strong>When people find that they can obtain lots of money and power by believing certain things and following certain ways of thinking, then you can bet that they\u2019ll enthusiastically start doing that. The reason that Enlightenment thinking became popular was that people figured out that it was in their financial best interest to avail themselves of its powers. The spread of very financially successful enterprises like, let\u2019s say, steam engines for long-range ocean navigation was a direct outgrowth of the practical application of the scientific method. To that you could also add a lot of financial apparatus that came into existence around then with the Bank of England and various ways of managing financial affairs. In other words, people don\u2019t necessarily follow scientific rationalism because they\u2019re noble and pure seekers of the truth, although some of them definitely do it for that reason. More people do it out of self-interest.<\/p>\nIt may be the unfortunate case that there\u2019s more obvious financial self-interest to be gained by promoting irrational and counterfactual thinking. <\/strong>If you don\u2019t have any perceptible downside or negative consequences, then why not sign up with or co-sign the latest conspiracy theory? I do think negative consequences definitely exist, but maybe the cause-and-effect relationship isn\u2019t immediately obvious.<\/p>\n What are those negative consequences? What do people stand to lose? <\/strong>Well, the negative consequence is our entire civilization.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\nObviously there are people out there making money off gullible fools; it has always been so. And there are people out there (generally conservatives) who prioritize short-term profits (coal!) over the long-term health of the planet, or even their grandchildren’s lives. Alas as Stephenson notes, putting profit over rational thinking may doom the planet.<\/p>\n
Alas I have not read the three books in Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, though I have them all, and as the years have passed and my interests have both deepened and broadened, they sound like my cup of tea. But they’re so long! Each one is some 800 or 900 pages.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Sunday’s New York Times Magazine had an interview with SF writer Neal Stephenson, whose latest novel is Termination Shock. NYT Times Magazine: Neal Stephenson Thinks Greed Might Be the Thing That Saves Us<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,20,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13561","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-psychology","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13561","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=13561"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13561\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13563,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13561\/revisions\/13563"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13561"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13561"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13561"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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