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One of the aspects of the COVID situation I find most disturbing was the way decision makers as a class professed to reject the concept of a cost benefit analysis as a way to weigh potential actions. However, looking at their behavior, it's clear that almost nobody actually eschewed cost benefit analysis. (Almost: there's a famous Seattle bartender who drove his formerly renowned Wallingford bar out of business because he refused to give up COVID mask protocols after everyone else had moved on.) It was illuminating to see mass confabulation of reasoning processes and ret-conning of decision making procedures.
Ever spend time with someone who doesn't have a sense of inter-temporal consistency in analyzing his own behavior? One day, he'll be in favor of X, the next ~X, and then X again, all enthusiastically, and usually in absolute denial of having ever felt differently. If you present them with incontrovertible evidence of their having changed positions, they'll change the subject, talk over you, leave the room, and so literally anything except address the substance of what you've said. These people always have some kind of narrative that justifies (if only to themselves) their current feelings. That their narrative might make no scientific or factual or tactical sense doesn't faze them: they have a narrative, and it's enough to quell the background anxiety they must otherwise feel all the time about the wisdom of their actions.
I don't think these people are lying --- not exactly: their brains are merely censoring anything anything that interferes with weaving a story in which their present situation is consistent with their self image. They literally can't sense contrary data: their neural "operating system" filters it out at a low level and reacts to it with a fight or flight response. Imagine Blanche DuBois from "A Streetcar Named Desire".
Everyone has some element of this duplicity in them. When low IQ people behave this way, it's annoying. When high IQ people behave this way, it's dangerous. What's fascinating about COVID is that the situation elicited this behavior from essentially the entire leadership structure of society. What prompted it was of course fear --- first of the virus, then of ostracism. It makes me wonder whether the people who behave the way I describe above do so because deep down they're deathly afraid of something they can't articulate. It's sad.
I think most people aren’t taught to be consistent or to actually think. In the American public school system, unless you’re getting your critical thinking skills elsewhere, you’ll not really get them.
Part of it is that it’s hard to teach at scale; you need to spend time taking apart a text, time to teach (and practice) logic, and time to grade the essays that result. There are simply no real shortcuts to teaching logical, critical thinking. You have to teach textual analysis, you have to teach logic, you have to teach empirical thinking, and you have to teach data analysis. This is further complicated by poor literacy and numeracy in public schools— kids cannot read or do math well enough to learn logic on top of the critical reading and data analysis that they can’t do either.
The other problem is that logical thinkers are exceptionally hard to manipulate. If you know statistics, then you have a much better grasp of risk and thus become much harder to scare into compliance. If you can critically reason, you’ll look into multiple viewpoints, analyze them, and make a decision about the issue. On the other hand, someone lacking those skills will be forced to go with cruder methods like popularity of media attention, or their perceived risk (based mostly on how scary something feels).
Most American schools like to say they teach logic and critical thinking, but they can’t and don’t. They need to pretend they are, because it’s a big educational buzz phrase that employers say they want (up until the person questions the boss) and the political class say they want (up until the public starts to question the favored doctrines). But nobody really wants to create critical thinkers, and anyway, it’s hard. So, instead they go with stupid worksheets that list the canonical fallacies, tell kids to trust mainstream sources and government sources, and then tell them that passing a multiple choice test on these concepts makes them capable of thinking clearly. People are then stuck using whatever TV tells them the science says, and what the authorities tell them to do.
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Haven't read it, could you explain the analogy?
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