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- The Study[1]: 400 people from Amazon's Mechanical Turk were given an online poll, where they were asked to guess how many dots were in a given picture. They w

by otalp 7y ago

- The Study[1]: 400 people from Amazon's Mechanical Turk were given an online poll, where they were asked to guess how many dots were in a given picture. They were then given some information about dot density to see if they changed their mind. While there was some correlation between radicalism and dogmatism(more heavily tilted when it comes right-wing radicalism, according to the study), there were still a significant portion of political radicals who were just as open minded, or even less dogmatic than moderates, implying that there could be a subsection of "radicals" who are skewing the whole group slightly towards more dogmatism. - The Headline: "Political radicals don’t evaluate their own errors– about anything". "Moderates are much better at figuring out when they're likely to be mistaken." I find articles like this a disgrace to both journalism and science, but unfortunately you need clicks and shares to progress in both. [1] (https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(18)31420-9?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS0960982218314209%3Fshowall%3Dtrue#secsectitle0025 https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(18)...)

claudiawerner 7y ago
I'm rather confused as to how this fits in with the strong radicalism we see many academics take - academia is all about (or supposed to be all about) critical investigation. For instance, Adorno and Horkheimer had very radical views yet they were more than happy to evaluate their own errors, and criticise the positions they once held. Marx held radical views but re-examined them significantly during the course of his life time. Many Marxists have decided to re-work significant portions of Marx's theory they once held dear. John Roemer has been very critical of the orthodox Marxism he used to profess and has been more than happy to admit a limitation people have pointed out in some of his theories. Radical feminists such as Kate McGowan and Rae Langton have been happy to admit errors in their previous work on pornography and speech act theory. Contemporary psychoanalysts have moved beyond Freud's "experiments". I'm also skeptical of what the implications for this study are in a broader sense. Radicals seem to me to be needing to confront a barrage of controversy, as if the whole world has the deck stacked against them. To maintain a radical opinion it's usually the case (or we'd like to believe it's the case) that they have at some point confronted the status quo. I think this is more than most non-radicals do: non-radicals don't get many chances to experience this contradiction with the world, nor contradiction within their minds. Is the result a sign of stubbornness, or ignorance? I can think of some things which I'd be very glad to be stubborn about defending - in which case at best the study shows that this stubbornness carries over to places where it is inappropriate (evaluating the number of dots). As the saying goes, we want to be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains fall out.

by otalp 7y ago

claudiawerner 7y ago

I'm rather confused as to how this fits in with the strong radicalism we see many academics take - academia is all about (or supposed to be all about) critical investigation. For instance, Adorno and Horkheimer had very radical views yet they were more than happy to evaluate their own errors, and criticise the positions they once held. Marx held radical views but re-examined them significantly during the course of his life time. Many Marxists have decided to re-work significant portions of Marx's theory they once held dear. John Roemer has been very critical of the orthodox Marxism he used to profess and has been more than happy to admit a limitation people have pointed out in some of his theories. Radical feminists such as Kate McGowan and Rae Langton have been happy to admit errors in their previous work on pornography and speech act theory. Contemporary psychoanalysts have moved beyond Freud's "experiments". I'm also skeptical of what the implications for this study are in a broader sense. Radicals seem to me to be needing to confront a barrage of controversy, as if the whole world has the deck stacked against them. To maintain a radical opinion it's usually the case (or we'd like to believe it's the case) that they have at some point confronted the status quo. I think this is more than most non-radicals do: non-radicals don't get many chances to experience this contradiction with the world, nor contradiction within their minds. Is the result a sign of stubbornness, or ignorance? I can think of some things which I'd be very glad to be stubborn about defending - in which case at best the study shows that this stubbornness carries over to places where it is inappropriate (evaluating the number of dots). As the saying goes, we want to be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains fall out.