Rational Philosophy

More on the philosophy of thought.

I wrote yesterday about how we don’t think as much as we think we think. I opined that perhaps that’s OK most of the time, but pointed out that lack of thought on some things can be dangerous. I’ve since landed on a few examples.

The faculty and administration at the University of Kentucky have been struggling since last April to dispel a baseless rumor that the school had dropped its Holocaust course for fear that it would offend muslim students. (The rumor began when a school in Birmingham, UK, stopped teaching a Holocaust class.) Thousands of people have gone to the lengths of sending e-mail to the university faculty and administration complaining of the cancelation… which never happened.

In another piece, the Times reports on a report from a new education advocacy group called Common Core. The piece tells us that many teenagers are woefully ignorant of basic aspects of history and literature. It then connects this ignorance to the focus of No Child Left Behind on reading and math tests, that have, apparently, reduced schools’ focus on liberal arts.

But the piece didn’t compare the ignorance of teenagers now to the level of ignorance prior to No Child Left Behind. Which left me curious. I dug out the Common Core report and found that it claimed that its methodology made such a direct comparison impossible. I then dug around and found an education advocacy website that had dug out Federal testing data that does show comparative numbers. Apparently, teenagers may actually know a little more now about history and literature than they did a few years ago.

(I’d love to take an opportunity to slam No Child Left Behind, but Common Core’s data can’t help me there!!)

Which brings us to the master of thoughtlessness, our current president, George Bush. Bush criticizes higher taxes for gas companies saying it will only make gas prices higher. And that we should be investing in oil refineries close to home to increase widespread use of renewable energy.

In each case, a little bit more thought would go a long way.

Before sending an e-mail criticizing an institution for some action or inaction, it would seem wise to verify that the source of our information is legitimate. A chain e-mail, for instance, shouldn’t be deemed sufficient.

As for the NY Times, it shouldn’t require its readers to go and fact check a story’s rhetoric. One would expect the reporter to have thought about the impact of the story and done the appropriate homework to verify its claims and hype.

And Bush should be enrolled in a class for remedial thinking. His over-simplistic and emotional reaction to energy policy ignores the basic problem. Burning hydrocarbons has a much higher price tag than the cost of extracting and refining those hydrocarbons. Reducing or reversing global warming, if it’s possible, will result in huge costs. We need to begin acknowledging those costs and collecting them now through a gas company surcharge or at the pump.

But how do we know when we should give things more thought? Ironically, I’ve noticed that I tend to prefix my own ill-conceived rhetoric with words like “I think” or “I believe.” When I can catch myself speaking from the hip, I can sometimes acknowledge that I haven’t really thought something through as fully as I need to if I’m going to express an opinion on it.

On a brighter note I came across a wonderful new venture — the creation of an on-line encyclopedia of species — The Encyclopedia of Life! A worthy effort to spread knowledge.

For more rational, science-based explanations of life’s meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive.

On selecting apartments, predicting future enjoyment, and enjoying canine company.

My wife and I, in the process of selling our home while renovating another, have found ourselves in a bit of a bind; it seems we will have to find a temporary place to live. Claiming short term reduction in her cognitive ability due to advanced pregnancy (who am I to claim otherwise), my wife has delegated to me the process of thinking through our rental options. I find the task and the factors to be considered bewildering: There is the cost of the rental accommodation, the number of bedrooms, the degree to which it is furnished or unfurnished, the minimum rental period, the broker’s fee, the location, the parking available… Each of these factors must be measured and compared through some system of relative importance that keeps tripping me up. Unfortunately, my wife’s cognitive ability is not so impaired that she’s unable to point out the flaws in my approach to solving the problem. I’ve realized that I don’t often think very hard about such things. That I tend to pick an obvious criterion and let that determine my choice.

Applying conscious decision making is quite hard. Made more difficult, no doubt, by our predilection for keeping our options open (as I wrote about yesterday).

Harvard Psychologist Daniel Gilbert has conducted experiments that seem to indicate that people aren’t very good at predicting to what extent they will enjoy a particular activity, and he thinks he’s found out why. Gilbert believes that people compare enjoyment of a projected experience to certain imagined alternatives — lying on a beautiful beach versus sitting in a frigid office, for instance — whereas when lying on a beautiful beach the enjoyment will be what it is, no more or less.

This seems to coincide with common human experience: Fun things can be a bore. Dreaded things can be quite fun.

And in another experiment, this one quite bizarre, researchers pitted a robot dog against a real dog in a challenge to see who could win the hearts and improve the spirits of people in a nursing home. The study showed that the real dog had little if any therapeutic advantage over the robot dog. (Any dog was better than no dog at all.)

These three examples can, I think, tell us a good deal about the philosophy of thought.

1. The perplexing apartment decision: We tend to think rationally and analytically less than we imagine we do. Much of what we pass off as thought results from a subconscious or arbitrary choice that we then rationalize.

2. The poor predictive ability: We aren’t very good at thinking about reality. We tend to color or editorialize our thinking.

3. The response to the robot dog: Our conscious thinking process can be easily bypassed or fused by emotional or subconscious impulses.

These phenomena seem to be connected by a common theme: We think less than we think we do; and we are perhaps primarily governed by subconscious or non-rational impulses.

But, rationally, this perhaps isn’t surprising. Much of what we do works just fine without overt rational analysis. The additional cost of analyzing something rationally doesn’t pay off. Further, to arrive at a rational decision can often be complex or impossible. with so many variables and so much uncertainty, thinking things through may be impossible.

The problem is that we’re often not aware of the difference between rational thought and rationalizing. We’re so used to sidestepping logic that we don’t always recognize and respond correctly to those situations where logic would really help us out. And in those cases, if we make a poor choice, we end up acting or looking stupid…

For more rational, science-based explanations of life’s meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive.