Don't Feed the Animals is a blog, written by Andrew Gonsalves, about humans: how we act, how we mate, how we talk and how we live. The term "Don't Feed the Animals" is a vague reference to a page in Chuck Palahniuk's book Choke where the narrator describes how animals in a zoo, stripped of all necessity to use their natural survival instincts, resort to masturbating all day in their cages. As society progresses and technology allows us to take the most basic things for granted, we're left with inventing innumerable ways to occupy ourselves during all the free time we have. We make the cage our home.
Our knowledge of things tends to make us arrogant about what we know. I fall victim to this every day at my job, where I blindly call out the most probable cause and solution to a number of technical problems based on a description from a non-technical person and many years of running into every issue imaginable (and just because I can't imagine it doesn't mean it can't happen). I am probably wrong half the time, but the other half of the time I look like a hotshot computer genius, so it's OK. At least that isn't what I really get paid for. There are people who we call experts who perform their most important duties using the same methods and bravado that I solve tech problems with. Market forecasters, school counselors, therapists, and financial advisers all use their ample expertise to take wild guesses. Advice is just a realm of business where you can get paid for simply appearing to know something without having to show results. The truth is that no matter how much you know, the future always knows more.
Arrogance of knowledge is not limited to the amply experienced either. In an experiment to judge the effect of incremental information, two groups of people were shown a very blurry picture of a fire hydrant. This picture was too blurry to identify, but incrementally un-blurred versions of the picture were revealed to each group until the image was a bit easier to see. The end image was the same for each group, but one group was subjected to 5 increments of de-blurring and the other was subjected to 10. The first group (with 5 increments) was more accurate in guessing that it was a picture of a fire hydrant than the second group. Why? People only need a few pieces of information to make a decision, and once that decision is made, they stick with it no matter what. To explain why the first group was more accurate, many of them had not made a decision before the final slide. Meanwhile, the group that was given more bits of information made their decisions midway and used each subsequent piece to justify it. Even if the later increments contradicted their guesses, they didn't revise their initial idea.
Arrogance of knowledge is not limited to the amply experienced either. In an experiment to judge the effect of incremental information, two groups of people were shown a very blurry picture of a fire hydrant. This picture was too blurry to identify, but incrementally un-blurred versions of the picture were revealed to each group until the image was a bit easier to see. The end image was the same for each group, but one group was subjected to 5 increments of de-blurring and the other was subjected to 10. The first group (with 5 increments) was more accurate in guessing that it was a picture of a fire hydrant than the second group. Why? People only need a few pieces of information to make a decision, and once that decision is made, they stick with it no matter what. To explain why the first group was more accurate, many of them had not made a decision before the final slide. Meanwhile, the group that was given more bits of information made their decisions midway and used each subsequent piece to justify it. Even if the later increments contradicted their guesses, they didn't revise their initial idea.
We treat our ideas like possessions and we do not like to let them go. Once they are created, they are ours and nobody can take them away from us. This was demonstrated in another experiment where students were given the option to take one of two tests. Test A was difficult, but came with generous bonus points. Test B was easy, but had no bonus. Admirably, 81% of the students chose Test A. Then came the big reveal! It turned out that Test A did not come with any bonus, but was still just as hard. The students were offered the chance to switch if they wanted. Stubbornly, 75% of the students who chose Test A stuck with their decision. You say, "That's stupid, I would have chosen Test A for the challenge anyhow." Well, a control group had 31% of the students choosing the harder test knowing there was no reward, so there are many people like you out there, but it took that initial deception to double that number.
Whether our choices are on what test we want to take or on the big political debate du jour, the amount of information we get in either direction rarely matters once we've decided. If we say we know "because..." then this is more arrogance we are using to shield our egos from alternative views. Then, this tower of information we build up only blinds us to the creeping contradictions. I've always said that I never wanted to learn what is already known. This made sense to me, but not to anyone else. I saw knowledge as this trap that we get stuck in because when we learn the rules, we also play by them. If I flipped a coin 99 times and it landed on heads each time, a statistician would say that the probability of tails on the next flip was still 50%. A thinker would say it was rigged.
How much we know, how learned we are or how long we've been doing something usually only serves to condition us to color within the lines. When a commenter on this blog bothered to insult me in the same breath he claimed to be a part of some Ivy League program, I laughed at the idea of someone taking themselves so seriously. Understanding a little bit of history may not help us predict the future, but it can help us understand radical ideas. History doesn't crawl, it jumps. Spurred by leaps in ideas, events and inventions, our world is driven by the extraordinary. Embracing commonly held boundaries does little to move us forward. Think thoughts that nobody has thought before. Don't be a turkey.
7 nibbles:
I like your blog, every post makes me realize a new thing in life. keep it up!!!
"you should be 100% certain that this"
Alas no. While I concur with much of what you've written Andrew, I had to swallow my indignation with this opener. Should? Says who? In fact the reason I raise it is because this theme continue in piece ... namely a failure to distinguish between the picture of an apocryphal ordinary man that you pain and an equally valid picture we have culturally, that of a professional who knows what they don't know and is open about it.
This latter class of professional is not rare, and it is generally in my experience lauded and held with esteem. It requires them to know much as well for it to be seen highly, but beyond a certain level of experience, the drawing of boundaries tends to heighten the esteem we hold in them.
Said another way we are not bad either, as detectors of arrogance and hubris and it makes us (the apocryphal ordinary man) suspicious. We are not as gullible as you suggest.
Still, the trends of what you point at are real and out there and poignant in large group dynamics especially, or in other words, in politics. When the number of voices reaches a certain threshold then a need for time efficiency causes many of us ultimately to listen to the loudest most forceful voices not the most sage. This is why critical thinking and an appraisal of sources is so important on an individual level. And yes, I concur that there is a mass of people to whom these thinking tools are not yet available.
I'll add two distinct themes that your post brings to mind.
1) News ain't news
This is a recurring conversation I have. It is positively stunning to me time and time again how many mature and otherwise sensible folk I know and meet (though granted it is concentrated among the younger folk - see next theme) who think genuinely that news (be it in newspapers, on the television, from Reuters or the ABC/BBC etc) is something more noble and important than soap operas. I can feel the objections now as I write it. It is simply entertainment. A selection of ostensibly true things chosen from what has in the last half century become such an awe inspiringly large pool of events spanning all scales from global down to your 'burb, by people with agendas, the first of which is to maintain a base of readers/viewers ... that is, interest you, oh, did I say entertain ... almost analogous in the end. Of course it's nice to know something, and I don't advocate a complete news blackout, but it is a large step forward to be aware of what role this selection process has in your perception of the world ... you pay the piper ... oh and the entertainment of which I speak includes a large dose of the hubris that comes of being in the know and able to converse at dinner parties about Obama's latest policy on ... for example.
2) Knowing what you don't know is itself learning ...
I had a graph on my wall once in the 1980s, a photocopy form someone else, in the days when such things propagated via photocopy machines not email. I have lost it since to my present chagrin but the image sticks with me as it was beautifully relevant to these themes of knowledge. It was a simple X-Y plot with time across the X-axis and knowledge along the Y-axis, and it plotted out the human lifespan. On the left is a baby with minimal knowledge and the curve rises as we move to the right through childhood, around the end of high school and start of university this line has reached a point on the Y-axis labeled "knows everything!" and from there we move through the bachelors degree, then the masters, and doctoral degree, the first few jobs, professional life to retirement and all the while the curve is coming down the Y-axis again ... in the end we have a very familiar bell-curve plotting "knowledge" in life. It was annotated along the way, wittily in such a way that the first degree had "realizes there's a little more to things than previously thought", the masters "realizes there's quite a lot more to things ...", the doctoral "realizes we know very little at all really" and ends up in retirement with something like "realizes we don't know jack anyway". I love this bell curve, and I think it captures for me what you missed, namely that part of growing older and wiser is to leave behind this hubris of youth in the realization that reality is a little more complicated than that ... It reminds me of a quotation attributed I believe to George Bernard Shaw that ran something like: If my son were not a communist by the age of 20 I should shoot him, and if he were still a communist by the age of 30 I should shoot him ...". Capturing much the same sentiment. Namely that youth is full of energy and passion (and this is its strength and beauty) but with it comes a good of idealism and simplification or ignoring of life's rich complexities and age exposes people to those forcing a degree of pragmatism. It was also captured by Tim Brookes in his "A Hell of a Place to Lose a Cow" who lamented openly, as an ex-hippie, that the saddest thing the hippies did with their abundant energy and idealism was to remove this from the very society they wished to change and run to the hills (retreat) thereby failing to change anything at all ... (not that the young socialists have made much more progress on the American landscape for all their engagement with society).
Thanks for the sub-blog, Bernd. Your point about knowing more thus realizing we know less and less is a good point, but not entirely in line with the idea I was going off of. It seems to me as more of a stereotypical folkism at this day and age. I would actually feel redundant in making that point because I kind of assume that my audience already sees it coming.
> I would actually feel redundant in making that point because I kind of assume that my audience already sees it coming.
You must know your audience well Andrew. I certainly can't pick that nuance of foreknowledge, and would have guessed anyone who knows this (the bell curve of learning) also knows about the rest of what you wrote ... they all friends of yours?
Certainly information overload, and defensive bias are not new things either. One of my favourite quotes is on the subject of defensive bias (the habit of biasing your thinking in defense of an opinion simply because you expressed it, not because it's right or better):
Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before. He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way. - Bokonon
Cheers,
Bernd.
I'm not sure what you're saying here. That I'm just defensive about what you wrote? Or are you being defensive about what I wrote?
“Quotation is a serviceable substitute for wit.” - Oscar Wilde
:p
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