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.
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...
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.
“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.
Certainly, but after WWII there was a decided PR campaign asking the women in the workforce to return home and give up their jobs to returning men. This seemed to have happened and was accepted, especially with so many families then deciding to form and have children. Hence the boomers. The 60‘s Feminist wave (2nd) legitimized women in outside of the home employment.
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.
With all due respect, I do think a lot of the emotional thinking is due to feminization. This can be seen everywhere.
Equity, for example, is simply the way in which a woman manages multiple children. Everyone knows the kids aren't all equal, but if that becomes the way the mother treats her children, the weakest get left the lowest amount of resources. Humans have succeeded using equity as a child-rearing mechanism. It works great in the home, but it is obviously ludicrous and even catastrophically harmful when extrapolated out onto society. No patriarchal society would have ever come up with the idea of "equity".
Also, women in groups don't seek truth, they seek concensus. This is perfectly well when placed in it's evolutionary niche, but once again, it's not how a civilization is built.
I think women are the reason civilizations are built, but they can't build them themselves.
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.
Exactly what i was thinking. During the pandemic all i saw was singing for supper. You nailed it. The more tied to the system the more dumb people were.
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.
I agree that Westerners are becoming more emotionally driven. And I agree the consequences are stark. However there are so many changes happening at once that it's extremely difficult to identify if there's one (or a small set) of causes, or a "perfect storm" of conditions feeding off each other to cause it. Even purely physical changes (such as the toxins in our food and drugs) could affect the ability of the general populace to think for themselves.
I wonder if maybe one of the root causes isn't just a lack of true threats to force people back to reality. In other words, we may be genetically predisposed toward accepting obviously ludicrous beliefs to foster group adhesion necessary for survival. And it may require the presence of real danger to provide enough shock value to create the proper balance.
In fact, many who have been "red-pilled" recently did so as a result of personal attacks to their reputation or even real physical danger. But once they made that switch, they seemed to have no difficulty with inductive reasoning that seemed wholly foreign to them before. So I suspect that if we were to enter an era of true physical danger (e.g. shooting war at home), the dominant thinking style would likely change dramatically very quickly.
Expanding that, I wonder if that tension between our group nature and our individual natures doesn't provide a framework for understanding both the development and dominance of these different types of thinking. Though I have neither the motivation or the time to research it, I wonder if the cycles of civilizations between between inductive reasoning and deductive reasoning as dominant thinking styles mirrors the cycles between early empire danger and late empire safety/comfort.
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!
Your unification inference capacity and impetus toward universality of thought are exemplified here par excellence. Thank you.
Extrapolating from the content of your articles, Julian Jaynes Bicameral Theory of mind, and Iain McGilchrist's work, we may take one further step toward unity and universality by considering a mathematical ontology in light of Godel's Incompleteness and Completeness Theorems, and self reference.
Godel's Theorems essentially state that given any first order logical system capable of arithmetic, if its consistent its incomplete, and if its complete its inconsistent. Godel's Theorems directly follow from self-referential recursion.
Supposing the ontological substance of which all things are comprised has an inherent mathematical form, we observe that the introduction of self reference into a mathematical (logical) system produces unprovable truths and unprovable falsehoods, subordinating provablity to self referential inference. Remarkably, a mathematical ontology, rather than being a system of infallible determinism, contains within itself a fundamental capacity for self-referential truth seeking, deception, uncertainty, and spontaneity.
The bicameral theory of the origin of consciousness (self-reference), essentially partitions the mind-brain into left brain consistency and right brain completeness, with consciousness being the result of symmetric and antisymmetric relations and trade-offs between the minds partitions.
Do you see the connection between self reference in the mathematical substance of which we are comprised, and the origins of self reference in the macroscopic structures (brains) comprised of such a substance; The bicameral theory of consciousness (self-reference) with its left brain consistency, and right brain completeness, mirrors Godel's Theorems which involve the relations and trade offs between consistency and completeness in light of self reference, and how certain self-referential truths cannot be proved.
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?
If you have not yet, you really need to read Daniel Khanmans “thinking fast thinking slow.” It will fill in some blanks for you regarding type 1 and type two thinking - ie the automatic intuited vs the painfully deductive and self assessing type 2 thought processes. Seems to me you are on the right track with your views. Have to wonder the extent to which our poor and in some cases poisoned nutritional landscape contributes to these problems. Likely somewhat but not by that much.
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.
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...
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.
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.
“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.
Very perceptive. Thank you.
The incorporation of women in the workforce as part of the WW2 effort might have been the spark for this
Certainly, but after WWII there was a decided PR campaign asking the women in the workforce to return home and give up their jobs to returning men. This seemed to have happened and was accepted, especially with so many families then deciding to form and have children. Hence the boomers. The 60‘s Feminist wave (2nd) legitimized women in outside of the home employment.
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.
With all due respect, I do think a lot of the emotional thinking is due to feminization. This can be seen everywhere.
Equity, for example, is simply the way in which a woman manages multiple children. Everyone knows the kids aren't all equal, but if that becomes the way the mother treats her children, the weakest get left the lowest amount of resources. Humans have succeeded using equity as a child-rearing mechanism. It works great in the home, but it is obviously ludicrous and even catastrophically harmful when extrapolated out onto society. No patriarchal society would have ever come up with the idea of "equity".
Also, women in groups don't seek truth, they seek concensus. This is perfectly well when placed in it's evolutionary niche, but once again, it's not how a civilization is built.
I think women are the reason civilizations are built, but they can't build them themselves.
Thank you!
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.
Exactly what i was thinking. During the pandemic all i saw was singing for supper. You nailed it. The more tied to the system the more dumb people were.
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.
I agree that Westerners are becoming more emotionally driven. And I agree the consequences are stark. However there are so many changes happening at once that it's extremely difficult to identify if there's one (or a small set) of causes, or a "perfect storm" of conditions feeding off each other to cause it. Even purely physical changes (such as the toxins in our food and drugs) could affect the ability of the general populace to think for themselves.
I wonder if maybe one of the root causes isn't just a lack of true threats to force people back to reality. In other words, we may be genetically predisposed toward accepting obviously ludicrous beliefs to foster group adhesion necessary for survival. And it may require the presence of real danger to provide enough shock value to create the proper balance.
In fact, many who have been "red-pilled" recently did so as a result of personal attacks to their reputation or even real physical danger. But once they made that switch, they seemed to have no difficulty with inductive reasoning that seemed wholly foreign to them before. So I suspect that if we were to enter an era of true physical danger (e.g. shooting war at home), the dominant thinking style would likely change dramatically very quickly.
Expanding that, I wonder if that tension between our group nature and our individual natures doesn't provide a framework for understanding both the development and dominance of these different types of thinking. Though I have neither the motivation or the time to research it, I wonder if the cycles of civilizations between between inductive reasoning and deductive reasoning as dominant thinking styles mirrors the cycles between early empire danger and late empire safety/comfort.
Very good points. I may plagiarize this for some later essay. :/
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!
Your unification inference capacity and impetus toward universality of thought are exemplified here par excellence. Thank you.
Extrapolating from the content of your articles, Julian Jaynes Bicameral Theory of mind, and Iain McGilchrist's work, we may take one further step toward unity and universality by considering a mathematical ontology in light of Godel's Incompleteness and Completeness Theorems, and self reference.
Godel's Theorems essentially state that given any first order logical system capable of arithmetic, if its consistent its incomplete, and if its complete its inconsistent. Godel's Theorems directly follow from self-referential recursion.
Supposing the ontological substance of which all things are comprised has an inherent mathematical form, we observe that the introduction of self reference into a mathematical (logical) system produces unprovable truths and unprovable falsehoods, subordinating provablity to self referential inference. Remarkably, a mathematical ontology, rather than being a system of infallible determinism, contains within itself a fundamental capacity for self-referential truth seeking, deception, uncertainty, and spontaneity.
The bicameral theory of the origin of consciousness (self-reference), essentially partitions the mind-brain into left brain consistency and right brain completeness, with consciousness being the result of symmetric and antisymmetric relations and trade-offs between the minds partitions.
Do you see the connection between self reference in the mathematical substance of which we are comprised, and the origins of self reference in the macroscopic structures (brains) comprised of such a substance; The bicameral theory of consciousness (self-reference) with its left brain consistency, and right brain completeness, mirrors Godel's Theorems which involve the relations and trade offs between consistency and completeness in light of self reference, and how certain self-referential truths cannot be proved.
As Above, So Below.
Very good points KM.
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.
If you have not yet, you really need to read Daniel Khanmans “thinking fast thinking slow.” It will fill in some blanks for you regarding type 1 and type two thinking - ie the automatic intuited vs the painfully deductive and self assessing type 2 thought processes. Seems to me you are on the right track with your views. Have to wonder the extent to which our poor and in some cases poisoned nutritional landscape contributes to these problems. Likely somewhat but not by that much.
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.