10 ms·

Are you a naïve realist?

133 points by nsoonhui 4y ago

kerblang 4y ago
Maybe but let's have a huge argument about whether naive needs a diaeresis
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- lioeters 4y ago
  I wish the word was spelt "diaëresis" or "ümlaut".
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- pwdisswordfish9 4y ago
  How poïgnant of you to preëmpt that discussion.
hprotagonist 4y ago
Because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it’s going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way. And who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line. And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is. [...] If I choose to think this way in a store and on the freeway, fine. Lots of us do. Except thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic that it doesn’t have to be a choice. It is my natural default setting. It’s the automatic way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I’m operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the centre of the world, and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world’s priorities. The thing is that, of course, there are totally different ways to think about these kinds of situations. DFW, 2005
- germinalphrase 4y ago
  For anyone searching, this is from his 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College. It’s also been reprinted with the title “This is Water”.
  - pugworthy 4y ago
    And if you're searching for who DFW is, it's David Foster Wallace.
    - 4gotunameagain 4y ago
      - trwhite 4y ago
        Where is the downvote button?
        4gotunameagain 4y ago
        Why so much flak? Whenever I have considered suicide (I will never do it, just considering the options) one of my first concerns was to not create additional pain to the ones I love or witnesses. Leaving your blue headed corpse hanging for your wife to see sounds like an asshole move to me.
    - wawjgreen 4y ago
      didn't DFW kill himself because he was suffering from mental illness?
- bigDinosaur 4y ago
  I always disliked this 'insight' because what he was describing were features of life that we choose to make terrible: commutes and draining office work due to excessive work days as two examples. Working remotely and being able to take more breaks has dramatically reduced my fatigue, for example, and obviously has eliminated my commute and has been a major improvement to not having a 'dead-eyed' look by 5pm ever work day. He makes the assumption that my selfishness, if applied generally, would be bad for everyone, but I disagree: if I eliminated (or dramatically reduced) everyone's commute tomorrow, I think far more people would be happier than not, even though it stems from my own 'selfish' preference.
tangjurine 4y ago
Pretty sure there are a lot of people that are successful and reproduce because they got lucky, but they think it's because they're smart/better/etc. You have that going on for couple generations and pretty soon everyone will think they're better than they are.
ladyattis 4y ago
I had this belief for years where I was the smart one in the room until I finally lost it by actually listening to folks that were wiser or just experts in fields I barely had an inkling in. It was amazing to just give in to my curiosity and give up my foolish need to feel powerful or knowledgeable. Now, I still do feel competent in things like programming in C# for .Net apps and some general programming problems that I've kept up with but if say someone asks me about rendering graphics I'm gonna point them to someone else. What I fear is that loss of certainty is something that keeps some people into the naïve realist position or so I've noticed in my own social circles. For example, I've had someone on Second Life (virtual world platform) keep insisting that being transgender itself is a mental illness rather than some transgender people can have gender dysphoria (which I am trans and have gender dysphoria) which is a mental illness onto itself. Not everyone with gender dysphoria act on it. Not everyone transitions, some do suppress it all their lives or only express their gender identity in the margins. The point being this person in question keeps asking like why are transgender people proud of being transgender if it's a mental illness which I've tried and failed to explain the situation. It's like talking to a brick wall. And honestly, I've given up. It's just one tiny example in a sea of ignorance that I think we all find ourselves contributing to or trying to banish but I just wanted to share it in this context.
- bobthechef 4y ago
  Isn't this exactly an example of you assuming you know better? How have you verified your own position, your own beliefs about transgenderism and gender dysphoria? Is your position actually coherent and defensible? Putting aside how gender theory conflicts with common sense, there are plenty of philosophers and scientists who, as philosophers and scientists, find gender theory incoherent. Not just wrong, but incoherent. You wouldn't know that by listening to the journalistic fluff and ideologues, but these gatekeepers of "reality" are precisely those whom we need to be wary of. Have you tried to examine the best arguments against gender theory? > What I fear is that loss of certainty is something that keeps some people into the naïve realist position or so I've noticed in my own social circles. > It's like talking to a brick wall. And honestly, I've given up. It's just one tiny example in a sea of ignorance Are you certain about these claims? You seem to be fairly confident. While your interlocutors may not have the sophistication to have reasons for their positions (I don't know), that doesn't mean there aren't valid arguments against your convictions, and yet you seem quite certain that there aren't, whereas I claim that there are. I think what needs to be underscored is that, in the typical course of affairs, we make best judgements based on our prior beliefs and revise them when we have sufficient reason to revise them. You may not have come across such reasons (again, I don't know), but if you did, would you consider revising your position? Do you have good arguments for your position?
DoctorOetker 4y ago
>First, the naïve realist believes that their perceptions are realistic and “objective.” Accordingly, other people (at least, reasonable other people) should share their beliefs, preferences, and convictions. Second, the naïve realist expects that any reasonable, open-minded person will be persuaded to agree with the naïve realist if there is disagreement between parties. If there is disagreement, and if the disagreeing party is a reasonable person, presenting the “real facts” should restore harmony. Third, anyone who disagrees with the naïve realist after the presentation of real facts is unreasonable, biased, or irrational. Well, apart from the choice in naming, you can count me in as a "naive realist" then. I'd prefer "rationalism" or "ideologue" or "fundamentalism" (the quest to seek the least amount of assumptions to explain our observations). The beautiful thing about logic and mathematics is that derivations / proofs can be verified mechanically: if even a dumb computer can follow and verify the reasoning, so can indeed a reasonable person. So next there's disputes on observation, say in science, measurements for example. In theory standard measurement equipment and even cables could be produced in controlled conditions such that each cable end cryptographically signs its connection to some device port only after verifying a timely signed timestamped response to a challenge, a response by some external entity (centralized or decentralized). The device say an oscilloscope could similarly sign the measurements it made, when the circuit was in what topology etc... and all of these could have custom security envelopes with PUF's ... All the tools and assembly lines where those cables, oscilloscopes, etc are produced would have similar security controls in a way that the group can audit (at least statistically) that the expected intrusion rate is marginally low... A popular saying or adage goes like "In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice; but in practice, there is." I disagree not with the figurative meaning but with the literal one: There really is no difference between theory and practice. But there is a big difference between theory and malpractice. These psychologists and philosophers really seem to think they harbor very rare insights. But even a toddler knows different people have different opinions, views, ... nihil nove sub sole... It's a very sad world when people are stigmatized into nihilism in order to maintain the status quo. Oh how I yearn to live in a publically verifiable society, with verifiable desiderata.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago
  > The beautiful thing about logic and mathematics is that derivations / proofs can be verified mechanically: if even a dumb computer can follow and verify the reasoning, so can indeed a reasonable person. Even in mathematics and logic you have axioms which cannot be formally proven by mathematics and logic. You do try to minimize the axioms, but they will always be there. So even in the most pure of disciplines, you cannot be 100% "objective". Most real life issues are much messier than logic and mathematics.
nonrandomstring 4y ago
I'm a sceptical falliblist. At least I think I am.
- simonh 4y ago
  Used to be sceptical of everything, but now I’m not sure that’s the right answer.
skybrian 4y ago
I suppose naive realism when reading the news (and social media) means that you think you can spot the misinformation and other people can't. I try to notice my own ignorance and thereby avoid "instant expert" syndrome. If I just read a news story or two about some hot-button issue, I try not to assume that I know much about it. There are overconfident reactions everywhere, though. It's hard to resist poking at them.
- mikkergp 4y ago
  What's it called when you think you're uniquely incapable of spotting misinformation? Joking aside, I wonder how much this would be talking about obvious misinformation vs. opinion vs. unprovable misinformation.
martin1975 4y ago
Anyone noticed how we also tend to have different half-lives for labels describing people, e.g. someone who murders or rapes someone never loses the 'murderer' or 'rapist' label, however someone who stole something irrespective of its value or lied about something - material or not, do not tend to think of themselves as liars or thieves for as long as they are certain they got away with it or others have 'forgotten' it, or rationalized it away? Wonder why....
- gilmore606 4y ago
  Built bridges my whole life but you fuck ONE goat....
  - martin1975 4y ago
    I know, right? :)
  - jjgreen 4y ago
    Ah, you're that goaty-gilmore
cortesoft 4y ago
I think something that goes hand in hand with being a naive realist is believing in the accuracy of our own memory and in our conscious control of our own actions. Most people believe their memory to be an accurate account of their experiences and also believe that they choose how they act and behave. Any serious introspection, however, quickly shows how foolish those two beliefs are.
- googlryas 4y ago
  How should I go about disproving to myself that my memory is accurate and I am in conscious control of my actions? I hear it said, but every time I call upon my memory of something long ago that is externally verifiable, I am pretty much always accurate (either I get it right, or realize I don't know).
  - Jensson 4y ago
    These psychological results are only true for average people, note how in every experiment there are always many people who does the rationally correct thing to do. So there is no reason to believe based on those studies that people who have much higher levels of rationality doesn't exist. Its just, many will believe they are rational when they aren't, since their lack of rationality makes them unable to see all the ways they are irrational. But people who notice their own irrationality can just stop doing those things and change their views and therefore becomes much more rational than average. So we have several layers, we have those who don't see their own irrationality and call themselves rational, we have those who see their own irrationality and call themselves irrational since they are, and then we have the ones who see their own irrationality and takes measures to fix it and therefore call themselves rational. The last group would be the most rational ones, but is still often mistaken for the first group.
  - vorpalhex 4y ago
    Pick a room of your home growing up. Draw a picture of it, as best you can, from memory. Go ask your siblings or parents if you're right. Memory is a fluid thing.
wyager 4y ago
> Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac? If someone is driving faster than me, I usually respect them for having a greater risk tolerance of getting a speeding ticket.
- BLKNSLVR 4y ago
  I tend to think: that's just me of a few years ago, or me running late.
Barrin92 4y ago
I'm on board with 'naïve realism' as a concept, the tendency to attribute rationality to people one agrees with and irrationality and bias to everyone else seems natural and obvious. However I'm not sure how they're trying to apply this idea to solve conflict or 'political fractures'. It just sounds like.. marginally less naïve realism? The conclusion shouldn't be that we teach people about naïve realism and then we will solve our problems, I think the correct conclusion is that different people and groups can be entirely rational and also in fundamental opposition. Rationality is instrumental. If two people start with different assumptions or in different places they can both be entirely reasonable and unbiased and also arrive at two very different points. Teaching them to recognize this rather than thinking the other side is delusional is fine, but it doesn't actually resolve any conflict. It's naïve to think you're objectively right and everyone else isn't, but it's equally naïve to think being subjectively in disagreement is somehow less substantial. The "Golden rule" the authors provide in the end seems in fact to straight up contradict their diagnosis: "Proceed from the naïve but charitable assumption that when people respond in ways that are surprising or offensive, it is generally their perceptions, assumptions, and construals, rather than their basic values, that differ from our own" This is not charitable. If naïve realism is the problem then it is precisely our basic values in which we differ, not our perceptions or capacity to reason.
radford-neal 4y ago
The article says: "First, the naïve realist believes that their perceptions are realistic and “objective.” ... Second, the naïve realist expects that any reasonable, open-minded person will be persuaded to agree with the naïve realist if there is disagreement between parties. ... Third, anyone who disagrees with the naïve realist after the presentation of real facts is unreasonable, biased, or irrational." Of course. How could anyone think otherwise? The only thing missing here is that after both sides present the "real facts", as they see them, it could be either of the parties who change their view as a result of learning new facts. Assuming such an exchange of facts (and arguments) has taken place, whatever you now think is the correct view (which might be "we can't know, given available information") must be what you think is correct (duh...). If the other person has a different view, then you must think it is incorrect. This isn't "naive realism" (which is a term with a totally different meaning in philosophy, by the way), but simply the definition of a thinking entity with coherent beliefs.
- einpoklum 4y ago
  I also share your impression that we cannot hope to be anything other than "naive realists" as described in the article: Why would we intentionally doubt the veracity of what we've reached the conclusion is true? ... but then. if one thinks of the _process_ of discovering truth, or developing positions and views, then one may well think in terms of "That's what I can deduce based on my experience so far", and be aware that one's own views change - either through refinement or sometimes by a discard and adoption of a different position. Another point is realizing how aspects of your background - sometimes even just your momentary mood - color your perception of reality, the significance and weight you assign to different pieces of it, to compose the whole.
- mikkergp 4y ago
  1. I don't think all of my perceptions are realistic and objective. Some things are biased that I don't know, some things are biased and I do know, and somethings my perceptions aren't good enough to get a realistic sense of it. 2. Because of 1 I don't expect any reasonable open-minded person would agree with me. Plus there are some things I think about that most people don't think about. Or I think about them in a way that other people don't think about. Maybe because it's purely theoretical and not useful and I don't expect they'd see it my way.
blfr 4y ago
> Despite evidence to the contrary, nearly one-third of Americans still believe the 2020 presidential election was stolen. Speaking of naive realism, what evidence? I'm not even asking what evidence was provided, but what could be provided at all. You can't really prove that elections were fair, especially post factum. Best case, you can show that protections against known frauds were there. And compared to elections I took part in, American elections often look woefully inadequate in that regard. In fact, at least one American president, Lyndon B. Johnson, remains under serious suspicion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Box_13_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Box_13_scandal
- skybrian 4y ago
  Knowing what happened in a 1948 election is mostly irrelevant to figuring out what happened in 2020, other than "sure, in some election systems, fraud is possible." Lots has changed since then. Electronic voter machines didn't exist, new election laws were passed, and so on. I'm not going to say that figuring out for sure what happened in 2020 is easy, but you do need to look at things that happened the same year.
  - blfr 4y ago
    > Electronic voter machines didn't exist It's not one of Carlin's, I think, but there's this old joke Tech enthusiasts: My entire house is smart. Tech workers: The only piece of technology in my house is a printer and I keep a gun next to it so I can shoot it if it makes a noise I don't recognize.
    - ziddoap 4y ago
      While a funny joke, the point isn't really applicable here. Parent poster, as I understood their comment, wasn't asserting that electronic voter machines are impossible to defraud. They were pointing out that you cannot reasonably make a comparison between elections 70 years apart because way too much has changed (one large change being electronic voting machines) for them to be comparable anymore.
joe_the_user 4y ago
It seems like naive realism is often used as a term of abuse, including in the article. However, I don't think this position is justified and as wikipedia notes [1], plenty of illustrious philosophers have defended this position (Among contemporary analytic philosophers who defended direct realism one might refer to, for example, Hilary Putnam, John McDowell, Galen Strawson, John R. Searle, and John L. Pollock.). I don't think defender of naive realism take it as "my ideas are always true" or "I am the center of the universe" (as the article seems to imply). Rather, I'd take it as saying an immediate perception can remain true even when one expands the discussion of reality in a number of ways. I can say: "there's a fence around that house" and that can remain basically true even in you expand the area and categories of reality considerably - if someone points to minute gaps in the fence, I'd note the effective definition of "fence around the house" would intuitively expand to "a configuration dense enough to help keep something out of the house", etc. The point isn't that there aren't level divisions in reality. The point is there isn't some magical/theological level that trumps every level of reality below it. Not accepting "Plato's Cave" or proving/asserting "we're not all brains in a vat" [Hilary Putnam]. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Na%C3%AFve_realism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Na%C3%AFve_realism
- teucris 4y ago
  That’s a practical way of looking at things that works well until it doesn’t. And it doesn’t work more frequently than we imagine. People ask me what I do and I say I’m a product manager. This is an immediate perception - it says so on my business card - but there is a limit to its truth depending on the definition of product manager in the minds of those hearing my statement. Product management varies wildly across the industry and I am most certainly not a product manager in certain industries. So no, there isn’t a hierarchy. There are several billion different views of how concepts map to reality that often (depending on the circumstances) pragmatically align.
  - joe_the_user 4y ago
    The thing about your example is you're describing a truth supplanted by more detail. That's completely different from the philosophical position of the truth being fundamentally out of reach. As others have noted, the article substitutes a sort-of pop psychology idea of naive realist for the philosophical idea.
schoen 4y ago
This describes a bunch of recent psychological research that chose to use this terminology, but I don't think this psychological use corresponds exactly to the traditional (older) philosophical use of the term. In my understanding, the classic philosophical use of "naïve realism" refers to the position that there is an objective reality that we can usefully perceive and understand with our senses and reason. It doesn't assert that each person always perceives objective reality correctly on the first attempt or that nobody ever makes a mistake. It might accept many cases in which people make mistakes of perception and/or reasoning, but in most forms of naïve realism we would probably expect that those mistakes could potentially be detected and corrected somehow, whether or not particular people have the willingness, inclination, incentives, or resources to actually complete that process. As a few other people said, one might also expect disagreements to be tractable in principle but not to assume that one's own view is sure to prevail in every disagreement. Of course, I could be wrong. :-)
- atoav 4y ago
  I think the two aspects that really define naïve realism are - the believe there is (always?) an objective truth outside of the subjective observer - the believe that this subjective observer can experience undistorted if they just try hard enough Other than that there is an art movement that is called Naiver Realismus ("naive realism") in german, which for some reason translates to common-sense-realism.
gweinberg 4y ago
Carlin was a good comedian, and I'm sorry for spoiling the joke , but I don't think everyone who drives faster than me is a maniac and that everyone who drives slower than me is an idiot, and I don;t think most other drivers think that either. Rather, I think most drivers are going roughly the same speed as I am, the "speed of the road", and the problem drivers are the ones going MUCH faster or MUCH slower. But I think I encounter a disproportionate number of problem drivers, most drivers I pass are going conspicuously slow, most drivers that pass me are going conspicuously fast, I may never encounter a driver that is going the same speed as I am even if we're not very far apart, that's the way speed works. A very similar thing can happen with internet conversations that are dominated by a few extremist loudmouths. I think I probably am more reasonable than most of the time, I think probably a lot of the people who don't comment are more reasonable also. Not because the "silent majority" agree with me, of course they don't. But I think the silent majority are a lot more moderate than the vocal minority.
mikkergp 4y ago
I'm sure this is me, though I mostly think the world is too complex for me to understand. Was there voter fraud in the 2020 election? I don't think so but that doesn't mean there weren't any instances of it. What percentage has to occur for it to be true(I suppose about .5 percent or whatever the margin of victory was). One of my biases is that I fundamentally believe in the goodness of people, and therefor I'm less likely to believe in things like corruption unless the evidence is staring me in the face. I consider myself decently read but what weirds me out are the people who are way more confident than myself. Maybe I'm just dumb about most things and these people are confident and right? I have a relative who is very well read but largely believes all of the talking points conservative media advertises. I find his confidence interesting but I'm skeptical of anyone's perspectives are aligned too closely with a particular ideology. What I find interesting is that he'll say "I'm a conservative, therefor I believe X" Rather than "I believe X, Y, and Z, therefor I most closely identify as a conservative." I guess I would say that I am biased towards moderate beliefs and self-doubt. The more nuanced your beliefs the more likely I am to believe them. I like to think that my stance that most things are two complex too be truly knowable means I'm fairly accurate about what I know and don't know, but I'm curious where the glaring holes are. Maybe ironically, in my professional life, perhaps because I know so much more about the nuances of it, I am much more confident that I am wrong about many things. Much more confident about that wrongness than I am about the world. There just really is so much to know.
dctoedt 4y ago
Similarly: In the Navy there used to be a saying that when you relieve in a billet (i.e., take over a position from someone being transferred), your predecessor left you "a total can of worms," but when you get relieved, what you're leaving for your successor is "just a few loose ends to tie up."
- Nursie 4y ago
  When you inherit a software project, the people who made design decisions and have already moved on, well they made some terrible mistakes, how could they ever have thought that was a good idea? And now we have to live with their horrendous mess. I've got to put so much effort into working around it and fixing it all. And I fully acknowledge that when I move on, I will be one of those people to the next set of developers!
- Konohamaru 4y ago
  This has a name. It's called "Fundamental Attribution Bias."
tynpeddler 4y ago
Interesting article, but I feel like this article is built around assumptions of similarity that I don't feel really hold up. Take this quote for instance: > "We miscalculate the extent to which our opponents’ viewpoints differ from our own." A more accurate statement is that we tend to misunderstand the ways in which another person's viewpoints differ from our own. For example, my mom recently told me, in almost these exact words, that she is confidant in her opinions, but doesn't feel any need to rely on facts or evidence to build or maintain those opinions. That's a pretty radical outlook and puts her at direct odds with quite a number of other folks. I strongly suspect that there are very large differences in humanity's views on topics like epistemology, authority, institutionalization and other very core concepts. When I read articles like this, it's not really clear to me that the authors themselves understand just how divergent these views can be, or how best to get participants to elucidate their core feelings. For my own part, I've seen that under most situations, people will rely on euphemisms and fuzzy language to soften their most radical viewpoints. For example I had to be very direct with my mom to get her to make the admissions that she did, and she only did it because I backed her into a bit of a corner. In other conversations, she would deflect, change the subject, or use language in ambiguous ways in order to appear more reasonable. This article hints at the very reason why this article is difficult to take to seriously: >while it remains unclear exactly why this intervention works, Rodríguez and Halperin speculated that it has to do with the desire to maintain a positive self-view.” This only holds when the table stakes are low and the stakes are never low when it comes to someone's most core beliefs. It looks like the authors succeeded in coaching people on how to appear reasonable, but it's not clear to me that they succeeded in actually teaching people how to be more reasonable. In short, I wonder if this article is naive because I'm not sure if they ever got to the heart of any particular person, including themselves.
- primemvr 4y ago
  Very clean and clear observation here. The authors implicitly comment on other's objectivity, presumably from some (more perfect) place of (actual) objectivity. So the irony is kind of intense if you think about it. It's remarkable to me that when you describe your mother's POV you can do that without judgement though, so I envy you your equanimity here. Struggling myself to relate to/tolerate family like this, because it seems like they've just gone crazy. And sure, we can avoid political discussion, but underneath that it looks like values/life philosophy are kinda corrupted. In general, what usually makes people ignore (some) evidence or (some) authority is a desire for tactical and targeted hypocrisy.. i.e. not justice or truth in general but wins for their team. Regression to pure unapologetic tribalism seems more and more common these days, and it's hard for me to see that as "just" preferences for different epistemology. Generalizing more.. some story like "objective meets subjective and they disagree about who is who" seems naive, almost nostalgic. It reminds me of earnest science/religion debates I had with smart friends when I was a kid. Those debates now seem quite civilized and mature compared to most political/philosophical/even vaguely value-oriented discussions I see (or foolishly participate in) now. I would characterize recent modern discourse more directly as "open mind meets closed mind" or even more directly as "spiteful meets curious". As families, friends or whole society's I wish we were lucky enough to still argue in terms of things like objectivity/subjectivity, because hey, at least things like science/art cross-pollinate! But this is an increasingly irrelevant regime for discussion, post-truth and all that. This sucks, because I don't see the alternative curiosity-vs-spite regime bearing much fruit for anyone.
pessimizer 4y ago
This article gives me the distinct impression that the people who wrote it have thoroughly reasoned and rational opinions, unlike those nasty naïve realists who are blinded by their own biases and prejudices into believing the 2020 election was stolen and disagreeing with various elements of covid policy. They should realize that it was actually the 2016 election that was stolen, and that the Russians and the Chinese are trying to kill us all through mind control.
_gabe_ 4y ago
> the best inoculation against naïve realism—the illusion of personal objectivity—is a healthy dose of fact, aggregated from non-biased sources with no skin in the game. This seems to immediately contradict the prior statement: > Ross found that people thought their own views were shaped by rational considerations more than biased thinking. This statement implies that there's such a thing as a non biased source. This is just blatantly false. Here's a fact: >> Black U.S. residents (465 per 100,000 persons) were incarcerated at 3.5 times the rate of white U.S. residents (133 per 100,000 persons) at midyear 2020.[0] Now, depending on your outlook of the world, a republican might say this leads to the conclusion that black U.S residents must be likely for 3.5x more crime than white residents. Whereas a Democrat might conclude this is evidence of systemic racism. Then both sides will find the research papers that support their conclusion based on the exact same fact. Instead of pretending like there's some untapped source of unbiased neutral news that everybody is missing out on, it's much better imo to admit your bias, and then read up on sources that actively oppose your bias with an open mind. That seems like a much better "inoculation against naive realism" than a "healthy dose of fact" (which can just be interpreted however you want to interpret it.) [0]: https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/jail-inmates-2020-statistical-tables https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/jail-inmates-2020-s...
- lstamour 4y ago
  Reading up on sources that actively oppose your bias might be actively harmful if misinformation is widespread, though. If we define facts as indisputable evidence conveyed via trustworthy sources, then sure, go find more such facts that oppose your views. But the scary part is how much literal “fake news,” and false flag claims there are. By your assertion, if we are naturally biased about Ukraine, we should equally hunt down facts from “the other side,” but there are very few objectively trustworthy sources right now that are willing to go on the record. And nation-states waging active Information warfare campaigns. It’s obvious to any outsider that Ukraine has a bias, is biased as a source. But… they do allow reporters in, so I think there can be acknowledgement of bias without actively having to hunt down opposing opinions. Just be aware that what you’re seeing is one-sided and you’ll go farther in resetting your biases, is my thinking on this. Of course, being typed in haste, it’s probably wildly naive as the fine article describes. Perhaps talking it out with those of different biases holds part of the answer. (Or perhaps I naively still believe in an objective truth of events that cannot be easily proven to exist in digital mediums outside of our trust in math for cryptography?)
wawjgreen 4y ago
I think FAE is a pseudo-scientific construct; yes, keep blaming yourself but not anyone else. It smells like a conspiracy--to make you even more of a sheep.

133 points by nsoonhui 4y ago

kerblang 4y ago

Maybe but let's have a huge argument about whether naive needs a diaeresis

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
lioeters 4y ago
I wish the word was spelt "diaëresis" or "ümlaut".
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
pwdisswordfish9 4y ago
How poïgnant of you to preëmpt that discussion.

hprotagonist 4y ago

Because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it’s going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way. And who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line. And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is. [...] If I choose to think this way in a store and on the freeway, fine. Lots of us do. Except thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic that it doesn’t have to be a choice. It is my natural default setting. It’s the automatic way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I’m operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the centre of the world, and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world’s priorities. The thing is that, of course, there are totally different ways to think about these kinds of situations. DFW, 2005

germinalphrase 4y ago
For anyone searching, this is from his 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College. It’s also been reprinted with the title “This is Water”.
- pugworthy 4y ago
  And if you're searching for who DFW is, it's David Foster Wallace.
  - 4gotunameagain 4y ago
    - trwhite 4y ago
      Where is the downvote button?
      - 4gotunameagain 4y ago
        Why so much flak? Whenever I have considered suicide (I will never do it, just considering the options) one of my first concerns was to not create additional pain to the ones I love or witnesses. Leaving your blue headed corpse hanging for your wife to see sounds like an asshole move to me.
  - wawjgreen 4y ago
    didn't DFW kill himself because he was suffering from mental illness?
bigDinosaur 4y ago
I always disliked this 'insight' because what he was describing were features of life that we choose to make terrible: commutes and draining office work due to excessive work days as two examples. Working remotely and being able to take more breaks has dramatically reduced my fatigue, for example, and obviously has eliminated my commute and has been a major improvement to not having a 'dead-eyed' look by 5pm ever work day. He makes the assumption that my selfishness, if applied generally, would be bad for everyone, but I disagree: if I eliminated (or dramatically reduced) everyone's commute tomorrow, I think far more people would be happier than not, even though it stems from my own 'selfish' preference.

tangjurine 4y ago

Pretty sure there are a lot of people that are successful and reproduce because they got lucky, but they think it's because they're smart/better/etc. You have that going on for couple generations and pretty soon everyone will think they're better than they are.

ladyattis 4y ago

I had this belief for years where I was the smart one in the room until I finally lost it by actually listening to folks that were wiser or just experts in fields I barely had an inkling in. It was amazing to just give in to my curiosity and give up my foolish need to feel powerful or knowledgeable. Now, I still do feel competent in things like programming in C# for .Net apps and some general programming problems that I've kept up with but if say someone asks me about rendering graphics I'm gonna point them to someone else. What I fear is that loss of certainty is something that keeps some people into the naïve realist position or so I've noticed in my own social circles. For example, I've had someone on Second Life (virtual world platform) keep insisting that being transgender itself is a mental illness rather than some transgender people can have gender dysphoria (which I am trans and have gender dysphoria) which is a mental illness onto itself. Not everyone with gender dysphoria act on it. Not everyone transitions, some do suppress it all their lives or only express their gender identity in the margins. The point being this person in question keeps asking like why are transgender people proud of being transgender if it's a mental illness which I've tried and failed to explain the situation. It's like talking to a brick wall. And honestly, I've given up. It's just one tiny example in a sea of ignorance that I think we all find ourselves contributing to or trying to banish but I just wanted to share it in this context.

bobthechef 4y ago
Isn't this exactly an example of you assuming you know better? How have you verified your own position, your own beliefs about transgenderism and gender dysphoria? Is your position actually coherent and defensible? Putting aside how gender theory conflicts with common sense, there are plenty of philosophers and scientists who, as philosophers and scientists, find gender theory incoherent. Not just wrong, but incoherent. You wouldn't know that by listening to the journalistic fluff and ideologues, but these gatekeepers of "reality" are precisely those whom we need to be wary of. Have you tried to examine the best arguments against gender theory? > What I fear is that loss of certainty is something that keeps some people into the naïve realist position or so I've noticed in my own social circles. > It's like talking to a brick wall. And honestly, I've given up. It's just one tiny example in a sea of ignorance Are you certain about these claims? You seem to be fairly confident. While your interlocutors may not have the sophistication to have reasons for their positions (I don't know), that doesn't mean there aren't valid arguments against your convictions, and yet you seem quite certain that there aren't, whereas I claim that there are. I think what needs to be underscored is that, in the typical course of affairs, we make best judgements based on our prior beliefs and revise them when we have sufficient reason to revise them. You may not have come across such reasons (again, I don't know), but if you did, would you consider revising your position? Do you have good arguments for your position?

DoctorOetker 4y ago

>First, the naïve realist believes that their perceptions are realistic and “objective.” Accordingly, other people (at least, reasonable other people) should share their beliefs, preferences, and convictions. Second, the naïve realist expects that any reasonable, open-minded person will be persuaded to agree with the naïve realist if there is disagreement between parties. If there is disagreement, and if the disagreeing party is a reasonable person, presenting the “real facts” should restore harmony. Third, anyone who disagrees with the naïve realist after the presentation of real facts is unreasonable, biased, or irrational. Well, apart from the choice in naming, you can count me in as a "naive realist" then. I'd prefer "rationalism" or "ideologue" or "fundamentalism" (the quest to seek the least amount of assumptions to explain our observations). The beautiful thing about logic and mathematics is that derivations / proofs can be verified mechanically: if even a dumb computer can follow and verify the reasoning, so can indeed a reasonable person. So next there's disputes on observation, say in science, measurements for example. In theory standard measurement equipment and even cables could be produced in controlled conditions such that each cable end cryptographically signs its connection to some device port only after verifying a timely signed timestamped response to a challenge, a response by some external entity (centralized or decentralized). The device say an oscilloscope could similarly sign the measurements it made, when the circuit was in what topology etc... and all of these could have custom security envelopes with PUF's ... All the tools and assembly lines where those cables, oscilloscopes, etc are produced would have similar security controls in a way that the group can audit (at least statistically) that the expected intrusion rate is marginally low... A popular saying or adage goes like "In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice; but in practice, there is." I disagree not with the figurative meaning but with the literal one: There really is no difference between theory and practice. But there is a big difference between theory and malpractice. These psychologists and philosophers really seem to think they harbor very rare insights. But even a toddler knows different people have different opinions, views, ... nihil nove sub sole... It's a very sad world when people are stigmatized into nihilism in order to maintain the status quo. Oh how I yearn to live in a publically verifiable society, with verifiable desiderata.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago
> The beautiful thing about logic and mathematics is that derivations / proofs can be verified mechanically: if even a dumb computer can follow and verify the reasoning, so can indeed a reasonable person. Even in mathematics and logic you have axioms which cannot be formally proven by mathematics and logic. You do try to minimize the axioms, but they will always be there. So even in the most pure of disciplines, you cannot be 100% "objective". Most real life issues are much messier than logic and mathematics.

nonrandomstring 4y ago

I'm a sceptical falliblist. At least I think I am.

simonh 4y ago
Used to be sceptical of everything, but now I’m not sure that’s the right answer.

skybrian 4y ago

I suppose naive realism when reading the news (and social media) means that you think you can spot the misinformation and other people can't. I try to notice my own ignorance and thereby avoid "instant expert" syndrome. If I just read a news story or two about some hot-button issue, I try not to assume that I know much about it. There are overconfident reactions everywhere, though. It's hard to resist poking at them.

mikkergp 4y ago
What's it called when you think you're uniquely incapable of spotting misinformation? Joking aside, I wonder how much this would be talking about obvious misinformation vs. opinion vs. unprovable misinformation.

martin1975 4y ago

Anyone noticed how we also tend to have different half-lives for labels describing people, e.g. someone who murders or rapes someone never loses the 'murderer' or 'rapist' label, however someone who stole something irrespective of its value or lied about something - material or not, do not tend to think of themselves as liars or thieves for as long as they are certain they got away with it or others have 'forgotten' it, or rationalized it away? Wonder why....

gilmore606 4y ago
Built bridges my whole life but you fuck ONE goat....
- martin1975 4y ago
  I know, right? :)
- jjgreen 4y ago
  Ah, you're that goaty-gilmore

cortesoft 4y ago

I think something that goes hand in hand with being a naive realist is believing in the accuracy of our own memory and in our conscious control of our own actions. Most people believe their memory to be an accurate account of their experiences and also believe that they choose how they act and behave. Any serious introspection, however, quickly shows how foolish those two beliefs are.

googlryas 4y ago
How should I go about disproving to myself that my memory is accurate and I am in conscious control of my actions? I hear it said, but every time I call upon my memory of something long ago that is externally verifiable, I am pretty much always accurate (either I get it right, or realize I don't know).
- Jensson 4y ago
  These psychological results are only true for average people, note how in every experiment there are always many people who does the rationally correct thing to do. So there is no reason to believe based on those studies that people who have much higher levels of rationality doesn't exist. Its just, many will believe they are rational when they aren't, since their lack of rationality makes them unable to see all the ways they are irrational. But people who notice their own irrationality can just stop doing those things and change their views and therefore becomes much more rational than average. So we have several layers, we have those who don't see their own irrationality and call themselves rational, we have those who see their own irrationality and call themselves irrational since they are, and then we have the ones who see their own irrationality and takes measures to fix it and therefore call themselves rational. The last group would be the most rational ones, but is still often mistaken for the first group.
- vorpalhex 4y ago
  Pick a room of your home growing up. Draw a picture of it, as best you can, from memory. Go ask your siblings or parents if you're right. Memory is a fluid thing.

wyager 4y ago

> Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac? If someone is driving faster than me, I usually respect them for having a greater risk tolerance of getting a speeding ticket.

BLKNSLVR 4y ago
I tend to think: that's just me of a few years ago, or me running late.

Barrin92 4y ago

I'm on board with 'naïve realism' as a concept, the tendency to attribute rationality to people one agrees with and irrationality and bias to everyone else seems natural and obvious. However I'm not sure how they're trying to apply this idea to solve conflict or 'political fractures'. It just sounds like.. marginally less naïve realism? The conclusion shouldn't be that we teach people about naïve realism and then we will solve our problems, I think the correct conclusion is that different people and groups can be entirely rational and also in fundamental opposition. Rationality is instrumental. If two people start with different assumptions or in different places they can both be entirely reasonable and unbiased and also arrive at two very different points. Teaching them to recognize this rather than thinking the other side is delusional is fine, but it doesn't actually resolve any conflict. It's naïve to think you're objectively right and everyone else isn't, but it's equally naïve to think being subjectively in disagreement is somehow less substantial. The "Golden rule" the authors provide in the end seems in fact to straight up contradict their diagnosis: "Proceed from the naïve but charitable assumption that when people respond in ways that are surprising or offensive, it is generally their perceptions, assumptions, and construals, rather than their basic values, that differ from our own" This is not charitable. If naïve realism is the problem then it is precisely our basic values in which we differ, not our perceptions or capacity to reason.

radford-neal 4y ago

The article says: "First, the naïve realist believes that their perceptions are realistic and “objective.” ... Second, the naïve realist expects that any reasonable, open-minded person will be persuaded to agree with the naïve realist if there is disagreement between parties. ... Third, anyone who disagrees with the naïve realist after the presentation of real facts is unreasonable, biased, or irrational." Of course. How could anyone think otherwise? The only thing missing here is that after both sides present the "real facts", as they see them, it could be either of the parties who change their view as a result of learning new facts. Assuming such an exchange of facts (and arguments) has taken place, whatever you now think is the correct view (which might be "we can't know, given available information") must be what you think is correct (duh...). If the other person has a different view, then you must think it is incorrect. This isn't "naive realism" (which is a term with a totally different meaning in philosophy, by the way), but simply the definition of a thinking entity with coherent beliefs.

einpoklum 4y ago
I also share your impression that we cannot hope to be anything other than "naive realists" as described in the article: Why would we intentionally doubt the veracity of what we've reached the conclusion is true? ... but then. if one thinks of the _process_ of discovering truth, or developing positions and views, then one may well think in terms of "That's what I can deduce based on my experience so far", and be aware that one's own views change - either through refinement or sometimes by a discard and adoption of a different position. Another point is realizing how aspects of your background - sometimes even just your momentary mood - color your perception of reality, the significance and weight you assign to different pieces of it, to compose the whole.
mikkergp 4y ago
1. I don't think all of my perceptions are realistic and objective. Some things are biased that I don't know, some things are biased and I do know, and somethings my perceptions aren't good enough to get a realistic sense of it. 2. Because of 1 I don't expect any reasonable open-minded person would agree with me. Plus there are some things I think about that most people don't think about. Or I think about them in a way that other people don't think about. Maybe because it's purely theoretical and not useful and I don't expect they'd see it my way.

blfr 4y ago

> Despite evidence to the contrary, nearly one-third of Americans still believe the 2020 presidential election was stolen. Speaking of naive realism, what evidence? I'm not even asking what evidence was provided, but what could be provided at all. You can't really prove that elections were fair, especially post factum. Best case, you can show that protections against known frauds were there. And compared to elections I took part in, American elections often look woefully inadequate in that regard. In fact, at least one American president, Lyndon B. Johnson, remains under serious suspicion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Box_13_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Box_13_scandal

skybrian 4y ago
Knowing what happened in a 1948 election is mostly irrelevant to figuring out what happened in 2020, other than "sure, in some election systems, fraud is possible." Lots has changed since then. Electronic voter machines didn't exist, new election laws were passed, and so on. I'm not going to say that figuring out for sure what happened in 2020 is easy, but you do need to look at things that happened the same year.
- blfr 4y ago
  > Electronic voter machines didn't exist It's not one of Carlin's, I think, but there's this old joke Tech enthusiasts: My entire house is smart. Tech workers: The only piece of technology in my house is a printer and I keep a gun next to it so I can shoot it if it makes a noise I don't recognize.
  - ziddoap 4y ago
    While a funny joke, the point isn't really applicable here. Parent poster, as I understood their comment, wasn't asserting that electronic voter machines are impossible to defraud. They were pointing out that you cannot reasonably make a comparison between elections 70 years apart because way too much has changed (one large change being electronic voting machines) for them to be comparable anymore.

joe_the_user 4y ago

It seems like naive realism is often used as a term of abuse, including in the article. However, I don't think this position is justified and as wikipedia notes [1], plenty of illustrious philosophers have defended this position (Among contemporary analytic philosophers who defended direct realism one might refer to, for example, Hilary Putnam, John McDowell, Galen Strawson, John R. Searle, and John L. Pollock.). I don't think defender of naive realism take it as "my ideas are always true" or "I am the center of the universe" (as the article seems to imply). Rather, I'd take it as saying an immediate perception can remain true even when one expands the discussion of reality in a number of ways. I can say: "there's a fence around that house" and that can remain basically true even in you expand the area and categories of reality considerably - if someone points to minute gaps in the fence, I'd note the effective definition of "fence around the house" would intuitively expand to "a configuration dense enough to help keep something out of the house", etc. The point isn't that there aren't level divisions in reality. The point is there isn't some magical/theological level that trumps every level of reality below it. Not accepting "Plato's Cave" or proving/asserting "we're not all brains in a vat" [Hilary Putnam]. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Na%C3%AFve_realism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Na%C3%AFve_realism

teucris 4y ago
That’s a practical way of looking at things that works well until it doesn’t. And it doesn’t work more frequently than we imagine. People ask me what I do and I say I’m a product manager. This is an immediate perception - it says so on my business card - but there is a limit to its truth depending on the definition of product manager in the minds of those hearing my statement. Product management varies wildly across the industry and I am most certainly not a product manager in certain industries. So no, there isn’t a hierarchy. There are several billion different views of how concepts map to reality that often (depending on the circumstances) pragmatically align.
- joe_the_user 4y ago
  The thing about your example is you're describing a truth supplanted by more detail. That's completely different from the philosophical position of the truth being fundamentally out of reach. As others have noted, the article substitutes a sort-of pop psychology idea of naive realist for the philosophical idea.

schoen 4y ago

This describes a bunch of recent psychological research that chose to use this terminology, but I don't think this psychological use corresponds exactly to the traditional (older) philosophical use of the term. In my understanding, the classic philosophical use of "naïve realism" refers to the position that there is an objective reality that we can usefully perceive and understand with our senses and reason. It doesn't assert that each person always perceives objective reality correctly on the first attempt or that nobody ever makes a mistake. It might accept many cases in which people make mistakes of perception and/or reasoning, but in most forms of naïve realism we would probably expect that those mistakes could potentially be detected and corrected somehow, whether or not particular people have the willingness, inclination, incentives, or resources to actually complete that process. As a few other people said, one might also expect disagreements to be tractable in principle but not to assume that one's own view is sure to prevail in every disagreement. Of course, I could be wrong. :-)

atoav 4y ago
I think the two aspects that really define naïve realism are - the believe there is (always?) an objective truth outside of the subjective observer - the believe that this subjective observer can experience undistorted if they just try hard enough Other than that there is an art movement that is called Naiver Realismus ("naive realism") in german, which for some reason translates to common-sense-realism.

gweinberg 4y ago

Carlin was a good comedian, and I'm sorry for spoiling the joke , but I don't think everyone who drives faster than me is a maniac and that everyone who drives slower than me is an idiot, and I don;t think most other drivers think that either. Rather, I think most drivers are going roughly the same speed as I am, the "speed of the road", and the problem drivers are the ones going MUCH faster or MUCH slower. But I think I encounter a disproportionate number of problem drivers, most drivers I pass are going conspicuously slow, most drivers that pass me are going conspicuously fast, I may never encounter a driver that is going the same speed as I am even if we're not very far apart, that's the way speed works. A very similar thing can happen with internet conversations that are dominated by a few extremist loudmouths. I think I probably am more reasonable than most of the time, I think probably a lot of the people who don't comment are more reasonable also. Not because the "silent majority" agree with me, of course they don't. But I think the silent majority are a lot more moderate than the vocal minority.

mikkergp 4y ago

I'm sure this is me, though I mostly think the world is too complex for me to understand. Was there voter fraud in the 2020 election? I don't think so but that doesn't mean there weren't any instances of it. What percentage has to occur for it to be true(I suppose about .5 percent or whatever the margin of victory was). One of my biases is that I fundamentally believe in the goodness of people, and therefor I'm less likely to believe in things like corruption unless the evidence is staring me in the face. I consider myself decently read but what weirds me out are the people who are way more confident than myself. Maybe I'm just dumb about most things and these people are confident and right? I have a relative who is very well read but largely believes all of the talking points conservative media advertises. I find his confidence interesting but I'm skeptical of anyone's perspectives are aligned too closely with a particular ideology. What I find interesting is that he'll say "I'm a conservative, therefor I believe X" Rather than "I believe X, Y, and Z, therefor I most closely identify as a conservative." I guess I would say that I am biased towards moderate beliefs and self-doubt. The more nuanced your beliefs the more likely I am to believe them. I like to think that my stance that most things are two complex too be truly knowable means I'm fairly accurate about what I know and don't know, but I'm curious where the glaring holes are. Maybe ironically, in my professional life, perhaps because I know so much more about the nuances of it, I am much more confident that I am wrong about many things. Much more confident about that wrongness than I am about the world. There just really is so much to know.

dctoedt 4y ago

Similarly: In the Navy there used to be a saying that when you relieve in a billet (i.e., take over a position from someone being transferred), your predecessor left you "a total can of worms," but when you get relieved, what you're leaving for your successor is "just a few loose ends to tie up."

Nursie 4y ago
When you inherit a software project, the people who made design decisions and have already moved on, well they made some terrible mistakes, how could they ever have thought that was a good idea? And now we have to live with their horrendous mess. I've got to put so much effort into working around it and fixing it all. And I fully acknowledge that when I move on, I will be one of those people to the next set of developers!
Konohamaru 4y ago
This has a name. It's called "Fundamental Attribution Bias."

tynpeddler 4y ago

Interesting article, but I feel like this article is built around assumptions of similarity that I don't feel really hold up. Take this quote for instance: > "We miscalculate the extent to which our opponents’ viewpoints differ from our own." A more accurate statement is that we tend to misunderstand the ways in which another person's viewpoints differ from our own. For example, my mom recently told me, in almost these exact words, that she is confidant in her opinions, but doesn't feel any need to rely on facts or evidence to build or maintain those opinions. That's a pretty radical outlook and puts her at direct odds with quite a number of other folks. I strongly suspect that there are very large differences in humanity's views on topics like epistemology, authority, institutionalization and other very core concepts. When I read articles like this, it's not really clear to me that the authors themselves understand just how divergent these views can be, or how best to get participants to elucidate their core feelings. For my own part, I've seen that under most situations, people will rely on euphemisms and fuzzy language to soften their most radical viewpoints. For example I had to be very direct with my mom to get her to make the admissions that she did, and she only did it because I backed her into a bit of a corner. In other conversations, she would deflect, change the subject, or use language in ambiguous ways in order to appear more reasonable. This article hints at the very reason why this article is difficult to take to seriously: >while it remains unclear exactly why this intervention works, Rodríguez and Halperin speculated that it has to do with the desire to maintain a positive self-view.” This only holds when the table stakes are low and the stakes are never low when it comes to someone's most core beliefs. It looks like the authors succeeded in coaching people on how to appear reasonable, but it's not clear to me that they succeeded in actually teaching people how to be more reasonable. In short, I wonder if this article is naive because I'm not sure if they ever got to the heart of any particular person, including themselves.

primemvr 4y ago
Very clean and clear observation here. The authors implicitly comment on other's objectivity, presumably from some (more perfect) place of (actual) objectivity. So the irony is kind of intense if you think about it. It's remarkable to me that when you describe your mother's POV you can do that without judgement though, so I envy you your equanimity here. Struggling myself to relate to/tolerate family like this, because it seems like they've just gone crazy. And sure, we can avoid political discussion, but underneath that it looks like values/life philosophy are kinda corrupted. In general, what usually makes people ignore (some) evidence or (some) authority is a desire for tactical and targeted hypocrisy.. i.e. not justice or truth in general but wins for their team. Regression to pure unapologetic tribalism seems more and more common these days, and it's hard for me to see that as "just" preferences for different epistemology. Generalizing more.. some story like "objective meets subjective and they disagree about who is who" seems naive, almost nostalgic. It reminds me of earnest science/religion debates I had with smart friends when I was a kid. Those debates now seem quite civilized and mature compared to most political/philosophical/even vaguely value-oriented discussions I see (or foolishly participate in) now. I would characterize recent modern discourse more directly as "open mind meets closed mind" or even more directly as "spiteful meets curious". As families, friends or whole society's I wish we were lucky enough to still argue in terms of things like objectivity/subjectivity, because hey, at least things like science/art cross-pollinate! But this is an increasingly irrelevant regime for discussion, post-truth and all that. This sucks, because I don't see the alternative curiosity-vs-spite regime bearing much fruit for anyone.

pessimizer 4y ago

This article gives me the distinct impression that the people who wrote it have thoroughly reasoned and rational opinions, unlike those nasty naïve realists who are blinded by their own biases and prejudices into believing the 2020 election was stolen and disagreeing with various elements of covid policy. They should realize that it was actually the 2016 election that was stolen, and that the Russians and the Chinese are trying to kill us all through mind control.

_gabe_ 4y ago

> the best inoculation against naïve realism—the illusion of personal objectivity—is a healthy dose of fact, aggregated from non-biased sources with no skin in the game. This seems to immediately contradict the prior statement: > Ross found that people thought their own views were shaped by rational considerations more than biased thinking. This statement implies that there's such a thing as a non biased source. This is just blatantly false. Here's a fact: >> Black U.S. residents (465 per 100,000 persons) were incarcerated at 3.5 times the rate of white U.S. residents (133 per 100,000 persons) at midyear 2020.[0] Now, depending on your outlook of the world, a republican might say this leads to the conclusion that black U.S residents must be likely for 3.5x more crime than white residents. Whereas a Democrat might conclude this is evidence of systemic racism. Then both sides will find the research papers that support their conclusion based on the exact same fact. Instead of pretending like there's some untapped source of unbiased neutral news that everybody is missing out on, it's much better imo to admit your bias, and then read up on sources that actively oppose your bias with an open mind. That seems like a much better "inoculation against naive realism" than a "healthy dose of fact" (which can just be interpreted however you want to interpret it.) [0]: https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/jail-inmates-2020-statistical-tables https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/jail-inmates-2020-s...

lstamour 4y ago
Reading up on sources that actively oppose your bias might be actively harmful if misinformation is widespread, though. If we define facts as indisputable evidence conveyed via trustworthy sources, then sure, go find more such facts that oppose your views. But the scary part is how much literal “fake news,” and false flag claims there are. By your assertion, if we are naturally biased about Ukraine, we should equally hunt down facts from “the other side,” but there are very few objectively trustworthy sources right now that are willing to go on the record. And nation-states waging active Information warfare campaigns. It’s obvious to any outsider that Ukraine has a bias, is biased as a source. But… they do allow reporters in, so I think there can be acknowledgement of bias without actively having to hunt down opposing opinions. Just be aware that what you’re seeing is one-sided and you’ll go farther in resetting your biases, is my thinking on this. Of course, being typed in haste, it’s probably wildly naive as the fine article describes. Perhaps talking it out with those of different biases holds part of the answer. (Or perhaps I naively still believe in an objective truth of events that cannot be easily proven to exist in digital mediums outside of our trust in math for cryptography?)

wawjgreen 4y ago

I think FAE is a pseudo-scientific construct; yes, keep blaming yourself but not anyone else. It smells like a conspiracy--to make you even more of a sheep.