This is a very insightful article, thank you! As far as I can see, there is not always an inability to inductive enquiry, there is regularly also a conscious refusal, caused by what I would call a 'religious attitude': mainstream 'facts' must be adhered to, because I don't want to be excommunicated and my social status is based upon it.
There appears to be a lot of it about particularly within the Professional Managerial class who in the form of large bureaucracies eg The EU commission led by Ursula Van der Leyden, are currently it appears doing their utmost to destroy the European union.
Excelling in the hierarchical compliance-economy of late-stage empire does not require a suite of cognitive functions which monitor and assess the developing environment for threats, problems, and potential tools and assets to overcome them.
People like that are bad for the orderly functioning of hierarchical bureaucracies.
I've always been independently minded like that. Maybe my cohort is 5% or so. 2/3 of people believe what the 2 people next to them believe. That is probably essential to social coordination and cohesion, but independent outliers may also help prevent an entire society from dying due to one mistake periodically.
I'm not going to go into our 3% of sociopaths, but it makes a harsh form of apex-predator-ecosystem-management sense...
I hate being the gamma nitpicker but I can’t help myself: helicopters DO have wings, not fixed wings, but rotary wings.
But ignore this trivia: I would like to thank you for your text because it helped me to understand a phenomenon that has been baffling me for a long time: the existence of the PhD idiot.
Couldn't the pattern of Western domination that has been so well nurtured, voluntarily or otherwise, have led to this decadence of thought? “Resting on one's laurels" (especially if they are imaginary) can only impoverish the future.
Western “leaders” (our representatives!) are so lacking in common sense, the narratives are so outré and the population's acceptance so infantile that decadence seems irreversible.
It's hard to accept living through the end of a civilization.
Be interesting to see if the cognitive faults/dysfunctions you name occur at differing frequencies depending on occupational activity. I'd bet that modern battery chicken humans (e.g., cosseted academics) have reduced functional abilities while their plumbers and HVAC repairmen are still firing on all of their cognitive cylinders.
That aligns with the above comment of the Phd idiot who I know or your cosseted academic. Maybe comfortable with the present status quo they enjoy/benefit from.
Inductive analysis tests deductive logic through our intuition and experience, it is a feeling, a nuance, a thing of beauty. It is nothing less than human intelligence deployed. It is the stuff of leadership. It is the source of success.
The woman sounds like an idiot. Much damage is done in this world by people of her ilk. I am in business and meet them all the time they cause much mischief and misery.
My Persian colleague- advisor describes them as donkeys carrying a lot of books. He suffers terribly from the illogic of eastern mind - for him facts are always subjective - but he can see these people as fools immediately.
In the time period of our ancient ancestral evolution, our forebears largely competed in a natural environment that exacted serious and prompt negative consequences for mental deficiency. This feedback mechanism promoted and rewarded improved mental functioning such as described in this essay (enhanced pattern recognition and novel problem-solving conceptualization). Improved mental functioning resulted in better survival prospects and higher reproductive success.
Then civilization happened and evolution was changed fundamentally. Instead of the natural environment of lifeform antiquity (about a billion years), we invented man-made artificial environments and its attendant artificial evolutionary drivers. Survive-and-thrive were no longer driven by natural fitness, but rather large-scale social expediency took prominence, and the same time, technology-driven affluence drove extreme hardship and existential threat into extinction. The old drivers gave way to a new evolutionary modality in which artificial feedback loops promoted aptitude and traits that had nothing to do with long-term, trail-and-error selection success.
Most importantly, our current environment no longer includes the gauntlets that necessitate frequent mental exercise and determinative failure/success feedback. It is too easy to get by with minimal effort and not get severely penalized for this deficiency.
Last, nothing changes until the environment changes. In other words, we cannot talk our way out of the mess we're in. Or vote or indoctrinate or coerce or simply purge the non-conformists. Our core essence will continue to decline until extinction puts us out of our misery.
Final thought. The collapse is the cure. It restarts our ancestral evolutionary machine of survival of the fittest.
Wow, what a fascinating unpacking of cognitive processes, all the way through to their sociopolitical dimension. Insightful and useful: by exploring the mechanisms by which this dysfunction has progressed, there appear to be at least some remedial possiblities to explore, at least on the interpersonal front. Much to chew on here - thank you!
“I have suggested that people have been becoming more and more driven by emotions in the last half century. There is a huge amount of evidence for this, including the massive increase in diagnosed emotional problems, and the emotionally unhinged nature of our societies. “
I suspect we have a shift in the type of people having visibility in today’s society—specifically due to feminism that promoted women into positions outside of home and family. The feminization of society beginning in the 1960’s should not be ignored.
When it comes to reasoning in professional or intellectual settings like academia, I'm not convinced that women are any more susceptible to overly-emotional thinking than men in the same fields – or that this was ever the case. What you explain with "feminization" is more attributable to "groupthink," IMO. And we all know that men in the workplace are more likely to form homogenous groups than women are, which implies that they're at least as likely to engage in mindless conformity.
I'd say that this herd mentality is mostly a result of the rise of mass media since the '60s, not a result of women leaving the house or whatever.
Ahem. Inductive reasoning can and has been logically formalized. It is called "statistics", particularly of Bayesian kind augmented with apparatus for handling counterfactuals and such (Judea Pearl's do-calculus).
In fact, the whole field of machine learning (aka "AI") is solely about inductive reasoning. How do you derive "knowledge" of a language from examples without induction? (Hint: it is just an optimization problem, minimizing error function.)
The woman you mentioned sounds like a high-functioning autist, an aspie. Fixation on specifics at the expense of the big picture is typical.
“Human freedom involves our capacity to pause between the stimulus and response and, in that pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight. The capacity to create ourselves, based upon this freedom, is inseparable from consciousness or self-awareness."
A creative thesis, and the exposition is sound. It explains general obliviousness in major segments of society, along with lack of consistency. But where does morality fit in? Do you have anything other than a secular explanation, or is that a violation of the current age's intellectual dignity?
Possibly and perhaps "filling in the blanks" tests as well. Some research shows that introverts are slightly better at these things and one could assume that introverts are better at inductive reasoning since they are more inward looking. Still, it's my opinion that the inductive part is neglected. There can be a huge difference between two people (say scientists) who have identical IQs and even similar subscores on the IQ test. One can be useless as a scientist while the other one does breakthrough stuff based on insight. There is something really big in intelligence that's not being measured - or not measured enough. But then we come to the practical issues. I'm not sure how this could be measured unless there were some standardized ways to measure problem solving of unclear problems over an extended periods of time. That would actually be an interesting task for an enthusiastic IQ researcher.
Enthusiastic IQ researchers easily find themselves staring down the barrel of a very angry NYT. The ruling class is scientistic rather than scientific. Lots of elite companies administer IQ tests in disguise, but have to keep it hush-hush lest they be sued — IQ tests are illegal in certain jurisdictions.
I'm so sick of the endless hairsplitting over metaphysics and cognitive processes. I'm prepared to just flat out admit at this point that hypocrisy is unavoidable. The reason our world is full of so many paradoxes is because the mind shouldn't exist. Why are there are so many questions without answers? Because there was never meant to be a mind capable of asking them.
"Both Plato and the Stoics considered self-knowledge dictated by the oracle to be a fundamental element in life, especially with regard to knowing one's own limitations and one's position in the world. They claimed that self-knowledge is the basic principle of wisdom, and from it one can reach the rest of knowledge. However, it is not an easy task: according to these thinkers, knowing oneself is one of the most difficult tasks we can face."
Isn't much in this context also susceptible to statements that have just become fashionable? I had psychology as a minor subject for communication science and at that time transaction analysis was made. Emotional intelligence was added later, but when this rather spiritualistic NLP came along, I was glad I hadn't taken psychology as my main course. Nevertheless, thank you for your detailed explanations. Let me just add that inductive and deductive conclusions are ultimately rather complementary and what we might think is political idiocy is actually quite deliberate misdirection. They can't be as stupid as some people make out, otherwise they wouldn't have got to these positions, they knew exactly how to gain advantages. See the German foreign minister Baerbook, the economy minister who is destroying the country's industry. And when it comes to the Rothschild baby in Paris, it is quite obvious that it is ignorance rather than stupidity, self-indulgence and taking advantage rather than empire. Inductive conclusions are probable but not certain, whereas deductive conclusions are logically certain if the premises are true. Inductive reasoning is often used in scientific research to formulate hypotheses, while deductive reasoning is used in mathematics and formal logic to prove theorems. Empirical evidence is information acquired by observation or experimentation. It is data that can be verified through direct experience or observation. While deductive reasoning itself is not inherently empirical, it can be applied to empirical data. For instance, you might use deductive reasoning to draw conclusions from established scientific laws or theories based on empirical observations.
This is a very insightful article, thank you! As far as I can see, there is not always an inability to inductive enquiry, there is regularly also a conscious refusal, caused by what I would call a 'religious attitude': mainstream 'facts' must be adhered to, because I don't want to be excommunicated and my social status is based upon it.
There appears to be a lot of it about particularly within the Professional Managerial class who in the form of large bureaucracies eg The EU commission led by Ursula Van der Leyden, are currently it appears doing their utmost to destroy the European union.
The EU is the WEF's global fascism alpha test.
Excelling in the hierarchical compliance-economy of late-stage empire does not require a suite of cognitive functions which monitor and assess the developing environment for threats, problems, and potential tools and assets to overcome them.
People like that are bad for the orderly functioning of hierarchical bureaucracies.
I've always been independently minded like that. Maybe my cohort is 5% or so. 2/3 of people believe what the 2 people next to them believe. That is probably essential to social coordination and cohesion, but independent outliers may also help prevent an entire society from dying due to one mistake periodically.
I'm not going to go into our 3% of sociopaths, but it makes a harsh form of apex-predator-ecosystem-management sense...
Oops.
I hate being the gamma nitpicker but I can’t help myself: helicopters DO have wings, not fixed wings, but rotary wings.
But ignore this trivia: I would like to thank you for your text because it helped me to understand a phenomenon that has been baffling me for a long time: the existence of the PhD idiot.
Me too. I thought that, too. It is still a wing in the essence of a wing, Bernoulli's principle.
A fixed-wing was clearly the image, but a good propellor is a wing.
A bad propellor can be like a crude fan blade from an early fan, but it works badly...
Couldn't the pattern of Western domination that has been so well nurtured, voluntarily or otherwise, have led to this decadence of thought? “Resting on one's laurels" (especially if they are imaginary) can only impoverish the future.
Western “leaders” (our representatives!) are so lacking in common sense, the narratives are so outré and the population's acceptance so infantile that decadence seems irreversible.
It's hard to accept living through the end of a civilization.
Be interesting to see if the cognitive faults/dysfunctions you name occur at differing frequencies depending on occupational activity. I'd bet that modern battery chicken humans (e.g., cosseted academics) have reduced functional abilities while their plumbers and HVAC repairmen are still firing on all of their cognitive cylinders.
That aligns with the above comment of the Phd idiot who I know or your cosseted academic. Maybe comfortable with the present status quo they enjoy/benefit from.
Probably a case of "use it or lose it" (like muscle tissue).
Inductive analysis tests deductive logic through our intuition and experience, it is a feeling, a nuance, a thing of beauty. It is nothing less than human intelligence deployed. It is the stuff of leadership. It is the source of success.
The woman sounds like an idiot. Much damage is done in this world by people of her ilk. I am in business and meet them all the time they cause much mischief and misery.
My Persian colleague- advisor describes them as donkeys carrying a lot of books. He suffers terribly from the illogic of eastern mind - for him facts are always subjective - but he can see these people as fools immediately.
In the time period of our ancient ancestral evolution, our forebears largely competed in a natural environment that exacted serious and prompt negative consequences for mental deficiency. This feedback mechanism promoted and rewarded improved mental functioning such as described in this essay (enhanced pattern recognition and novel problem-solving conceptualization). Improved mental functioning resulted in better survival prospects and higher reproductive success.
Then civilization happened and evolution was changed fundamentally. Instead of the natural environment of lifeform antiquity (about a billion years), we invented man-made artificial environments and its attendant artificial evolutionary drivers. Survive-and-thrive were no longer driven by natural fitness, but rather large-scale social expediency took prominence, and the same time, technology-driven affluence drove extreme hardship and existential threat into extinction. The old drivers gave way to a new evolutionary modality in which artificial feedback loops promoted aptitude and traits that had nothing to do with long-term, trail-and-error selection success.
Most importantly, our current environment no longer includes the gauntlets that necessitate frequent mental exercise and determinative failure/success feedback. It is too easy to get by with minimal effort and not get severely penalized for this deficiency.
Last, nothing changes until the environment changes. In other words, we cannot talk our way out of the mess we're in. Or vote or indoctrinate or coerce or simply purge the non-conformists. Our core essence will continue to decline until extinction puts us out of our misery.
Final thought. The collapse is the cure. It restarts our ancestral evolutionary machine of survival of the fittest.
Civilization reproduce the tropical ease that enables the stupid to thrive and reproduce.
Wow, what a fascinating unpacking of cognitive processes, all the way through to their sociopolitical dimension. Insightful and useful: by exploring the mechanisms by which this dysfunction has progressed, there appear to be at least some remedial possiblities to explore, at least on the interpersonal front. Much to chew on here - thank you!
“I have suggested that people have been becoming more and more driven by emotions in the last half century. There is a huge amount of evidence for this, including the massive increase in diagnosed emotional problems, and the emotionally unhinged nature of our societies. “
I suspect we have a shift in the type of people having visibility in today’s society—specifically due to feminism that promoted women into positions outside of home and family. The feminization of society beginning in the 1960’s should not be ignored.
When it comes to reasoning in professional or intellectual settings like academia, I'm not convinced that women are any more susceptible to overly-emotional thinking than men in the same fields – or that this was ever the case. What you explain with "feminization" is more attributable to "groupthink," IMO. And we all know that men in the workplace are more likely to form homogenous groups than women are, which implies that they're at least as likely to engage in mindless conformity.
I'd say that this herd mentality is mostly a result of the rise of mass media since the '60s, not a result of women leaving the house or whatever.
Ahem. Inductive reasoning can and has been logically formalized. It is called "statistics", particularly of Bayesian kind augmented with apparatus for handling counterfactuals and such (Judea Pearl's do-calculus).
In fact, the whole field of machine learning (aka "AI") is solely about inductive reasoning. How do you derive "knowledge" of a language from examples without induction? (Hint: it is just an optimization problem, minimizing error function.)
The woman you mentioned sounds like a high-functioning autist, an aspie. Fixation on specifics at the expense of the big picture is typical.
“Human freedom involves our capacity to pause between the stimulus and response and, in that pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight. The capacity to create ourselves, based upon this freedom, is inseparable from consciousness or self-awareness."
Rollo May
A creative thesis, and the exposition is sound. It explains general obliviousness in major segments of society, along with lack of consistency. But where does morality fit in? Do you have anything other than a secular explanation, or is that a violation of the current age's intellectual dignity?
I promised a follow-up essay on this and morality will be a part of that. I hope I'll get it done soon.
Don't shape-rotation psychometric tests measure inductive reasoning to some extent?
Possibly and perhaps "filling in the blanks" tests as well. Some research shows that introverts are slightly better at these things and one could assume that introverts are better at inductive reasoning since they are more inward looking. Still, it's my opinion that the inductive part is neglected. There can be a huge difference between two people (say scientists) who have identical IQs and even similar subscores on the IQ test. One can be useless as a scientist while the other one does breakthrough stuff based on insight. There is something really big in intelligence that's not being measured - or not measured enough. But then we come to the practical issues. I'm not sure how this could be measured unless there were some standardized ways to measure problem solving of unclear problems over an extended periods of time. That would actually be an interesting task for an enthusiastic IQ researcher.
Enthusiastic IQ researchers easily find themselves staring down the barrel of a very angry NYT. The ruling class is scientistic rather than scientific. Lots of elite companies administer IQ tests in disguise, but have to keep it hush-hush lest they be sued — IQ tests are illegal in certain jurisdictions.
I'm so sick of the endless hairsplitting over metaphysics and cognitive processes. I'm prepared to just flat out admit at this point that hypocrisy is unavoidable. The reason our world is full of so many paradoxes is because the mind shouldn't exist. Why are there are so many questions without answers? Because there was never meant to be a mind capable of asking them.
"Both Plato and the Stoics considered self-knowledge dictated by the oracle to be a fundamental element in life, especially with regard to knowing one's own limitations and one's position in the world. They claimed that self-knowledge is the basic principle of wisdom, and from it one can reach the rest of knowledge. However, it is not an easy task: according to these thinkers, knowing oneself is one of the most difficult tasks we can face."
Isn't much in this context also susceptible to statements that have just become fashionable? I had psychology as a minor subject for communication science and at that time transaction analysis was made. Emotional intelligence was added later, but when this rather spiritualistic NLP came along, I was glad I hadn't taken psychology as my main course. Nevertheless, thank you for your detailed explanations. Let me just add that inductive and deductive conclusions are ultimately rather complementary and what we might think is political idiocy is actually quite deliberate misdirection. They can't be as stupid as some people make out, otherwise they wouldn't have got to these positions, they knew exactly how to gain advantages. See the German foreign minister Baerbook, the economy minister who is destroying the country's industry. And when it comes to the Rothschild baby in Paris, it is quite obvious that it is ignorance rather than stupidity, self-indulgence and taking advantage rather than empire. Inductive conclusions are probable but not certain, whereas deductive conclusions are logically certain if the premises are true. Inductive reasoning is often used in scientific research to formulate hypotheses, while deductive reasoning is used in mathematics and formal logic to prove theorems. Empirical evidence is information acquired by observation or experimentation. It is data that can be verified through direct experience or observation. While deductive reasoning itself is not inherently empirical, it can be applied to empirical data. For instance, you might use deductive reasoning to draw conclusions from established scientific laws or theories based on empirical observations.