20 ms·

'We conclude' or 'I believe'? Rationality declined decades ago

65 points by gsatic 4y ago

Ebree 4y ago
1970 curse again
plaguepilled 4y ago
The actual research (https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2107848118 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2107848118) seems to indirectly comment on the fact that some terms could have been present due to their recency and relevance (e.g. 'Facebook') in their bias section, but I'm still unimpressed. I believe that kind of effect should have been measured and quantified for this study to be useful.
WaxProlix 4y ago
The money bit, I think: > “Inferring the drivers of long-term patterns seen from 1850 until 1980 necessarily remains speculative.” Says lead author Marten Scheffer of WUR. “One possibility when it comes to the trends from 1850 to 1980 is that the rapid developments in science and technology and their socio-economic benefits drove a rise in status of the scientific approach, which gradually permeated culture, society, and its institutions ranging from the education to politics. As argued early on by Max Weber, this may have led to a process of ‘disenchantment’ as the role of spiritualism dwindled in modernized, bureaucratic, and secularized societies.” > What precisely caused the observed reversal of the long-term trend around 1980 remains perhaps even more difficult to pinpoint. However, according to the authors there could be a connection to tensions arising from changes in economic policies since the early 1980s, which may have been defended on rational arguments but the benefits of which were not equally distributed.
- unity1001 4y ago
  > What precisely caused the observed reversal of the long-term trend around 1980 remains perhaps even more difficult to pinpoint Not at all. https://newrepublic.com/article/161603/john-birch-society-qanon-trump https://newrepublic.com/article/161603/john-birch-society-qa... John Birch society that was founded in 1950s to bring back mid 1800s American anti-intellectualism and religious fundamentalism grew until 1980 and eventually put Reaganites into power. Then this setup exported it to everywhere else it could export itself. Even recently, Trump was openly saying that the US was going to support right-wing movements in Europe a short time before he left the White House. Its the old, religious anti-intellectual fundamentalists that dominated the middle America in 1800s who came back and never left.
  - TaylorAlexander 4y ago
    A perfectly plausible story but society is so complex it’s probably unrealistic to pin it all on just that phenomenon.
    - unity1001 4y ago
      Unfortunately it is not a story. The group started with people who convened in small bible study groups who met in each others' homes and churches. These people thought that 'America' was lost, and it should be 'taken back'. They organized and slowly grew like a sect, eventually gaining great political and economic power with those who converted to their cause and especially through the business they exclusively did among their own lot. Its not a unique story. It follows the typical religious sect proliferation mechanics that are seen in any other country. > it’s probably unrealistic to pin it all on just that phenomenon This phenomenon is the head that decides the direction of the broader American conservative spearhead groups from Reaganites to later 'Tea Party' types. They are pretty much meshed with the Evangelists now though, hard to tell them apart.
      - SequoiaHope 4y ago
        Stories can be true. But I could just as easily say that a rise in unfettered capitalism led to a loss of public good research combined with regulatory capture and large corporations pushing against any research that disagreed with them. Then there was the rise of corporate media which further eroded public inquiry to ensure that the large corporations could maintain their control over narratives. This control by the corporate media necessarily required that the viewers be trained to follow directions rather than promoting curiosity. What I said above is true also, but does not say anything about religion. So how can you say that the reason for loss of rationality is caused by the group you mention, rather than the expansion of capitalism as I have mentioned? My point is that we can say something that is definitely true but that does not prove it is the primary cause. Proving something is the primary cause in a complex system is extremely difficult.
        4y ago
- hindsightbias 4y ago
  Americans think of fundamentalist movements behind ME terrorism, Sandinistas and elsewhere were just foreign things that popped up during that era. We are still living in Reagan's world and people who weren't alive at the time just can't grok how different it all is. It's like living in an M. Night Shyamalan universe.
  - euroderf 4y ago
    (nods head in vigorous agreement) I think recent American political history can be divided into pre-Reagan and post-Reagan. It really was a fundamental change in the nature of public political discourse.
smitty1e 4y ago
> What precisely caused the observed reversal of the long-term trend around 1980 remains perhaps even more difficult to pinpoint. Alan Bloom knew[1]. Paraphrasing Churchill, "If you're going through a Dark Age, floor it." One hopes that the passing of the current crop of U.S. "leadership" supports actual reform. Tech understands the need to decentralize; politics rather more resembles a singularity, and we only seem to grasp the danger in the party we abhor. May we pass through this dip swiftly. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Closing-American-Mind-Education-Impoverished/dp/1451683200/ref=mp_s_a_1_1 https://www.amazon.com/Closing-American-Mind-Education-Impov...
- goto11 4y ago
  Did Bloom use "intuition"-language or "rationality"-language?
  - smitty1e 4y ago
    Bloom correlated the origin of wave of dunces arriving at college (and currently leading the country astray) with the Summer of Love in the 1960s.
    - yesenadam 4y ago
      I read it a long time ago and loved it, though wasn't at all sure how true its account was. Wasn't there a lot about how Nietzsche had taken over the USA and was just the air we breathe? - e.g. our talk of "values" and "lifestyle", key Nietzschean terms. I learned elsewhere how much Nietzsche got from Emerson, and how much Emerson in turn had got from Germans. A convoluted story! Also, the philosopher of the Summer of Love was German—Marcuse, from the Frankfurt School.
    - goto11 4y ago
      But the described language change correlates with 80's Reaganism rather then late-60s summer of love and counterculture. So I guess Blooms correlation have been falsified?
nico 4y ago
Just based on the charts, I love the trend. We are learning that we are often wrong and that we should be open to new ideas. Our perception of the world is individual and subjective. We are admitting that we are not rational thinking machines. We are accepting that feelings are ok and we are figuring out how to express them.
- m0llusk 4y ago
  The Romantic Spirit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oi_dVNN7p9I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oi_dVNN7p9I
- recuter 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - nico 4y ago
    That’s it. Great job expressing a feeling!
    - recuter 4y ago
      Thanks Princess Unikitty! ◦°˚\(*‿*)/˚°◦ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpzlRnzNCQ0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpzlRnzNCQ0
swatcoder 4y ago
This is such a beautiful example of how isolated academic fields are from each other. Any art, philosophy, literature, critical theory, culture studies, or sociology journal has hundreds of articles tracking and analyzing this phenomenon over the last 200 years from all sorts of different perspectives, but here we see some data scientists just drop into the problem and their most salient reference is Max Weber. And I don’t mean to be criticizing the work. It’s a cool illustration and it’s interesting to see this kind of quantitative analysis of the topic and what research in this style can uncover — it’s just striking how disconnected it seems to be from so many richly developed ongoing discussions elsewhere.
- jrumbut 4y ago
  And, to make more explicit what is implicit in your post, this practice of data analysis without much theoretical underpinning might lead you to say "I believe" instead of "I conclude."
  - drewcoo 4y ago
    > And, to make more explicit what is implicit in your post, this practice of data analysis without much theoretical underpinning might lead you to say "I believe" instead of "I conclude." Strike that. Reverse it. That's the threat.
- Groxx 4y ago
  Any links to those articles? I'm kinda curious what they think the cause/meaning/etc of it all is. Personally it doesn't seem particularly worrying. E.g. you'd expect to see fewer grand, unsubstantiated claims when people's use of language / society's critical analysis of what they are claiming becomes more precise. And in some places this has definitely happened. Not that I think that's what it is. Just that there are lots of good and bad contributors, and I don't want to ignore the clearly negative and alarmist implications of "rationality declined" and "post-truth era".
- mrbungie 4y ago
  Some (or maybe a lot depending on your environment and domain) data "scientists" focus more on analyzing/processing data than reviewing the state-of-the-art and main ideas/discussions about the domain in question. Quite amusing, but even more amusing is that those backward ways of studying a subject almost always introduce biases.
rayiner 4y ago
How much of this trend is changes in how people express themselves? I say “I feel this would be a good idea.” But what I mean is “this is obviously the correct course of action why are we even having this conversation.”
jasonhansel 4y ago
I'm skeptical. It seems like this could just be the result of increasing epistemic humility, rather than a shift away from rationality per se.
- jhbadger 4y ago
  Yes, the idea that one should be humble in assertions has a long history, even by great Enlightenment figures like Benjamin Franklin who surely believed in rationality. As he wrote: "I even forbid myself, agreeably to the old laws of our Junto, the use of every word or expression in the language that imported a fix’d opinion, such as certainly, undoubtedly, etc., and I adopted, instead of them, I conceive, I apprehend, or I imagine a thing to be so or so; or it so appears to me at present. When another asserted something that I thought an error, I deny’d myself the pleasure of contradicting him abruptly, and of showing immediately some absurdity in his proposition; and in answering I began by observing that in certain cases or circumstances his opinion would be right, but in the present case there appear’d or seem’d to me some difference, etc. I soon found the advantage of this change in my manner; the conversations I engag’d in went on more pleasantly. The modest way in which I propos’d my opinions procur’d them a readier reception and less contradiction; I had less mortification when I was found to be in the wrong, and I more easily prevail’d with others to give up their mistakes and join with me when I happened to be in the right."
  - kthejoker2 4y ago
    I love how instantly memorable this passage is, all time great. Here's Pascal on thesame subject: "When we wish to correct with advantage, and to show another that he errs, we must notice from what side he views the matter, for on that side it is usually true, and admit that truth to him, but reveal to him the side on which it is false. He is satisfied with that, for he sees that he was not mistaken, and that he only failed to see all sides. Now, no one is offended at not seeing everything; but one does not like to be mistaken, and that perhaps arises from the fact that man naturally cannot see everything, and that naturally he cannot err in the side he looks at, since the perceptions of our senses are always true."
canjobear 4y ago
This line of research is junk that doesn't control for the fact that the composition of their corpus changes over time in a way that reflect changes in what genres were likely to be archived in various sources, not changes in what people are talking about. See https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2115010118 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2115010118
barrysteve 4y ago
In theory, we could reach a complete saturation point for hearing what others think is a good idea and feel and believe. Given a century and a half of this, we might change our minds again. Maybe in the future, ChatGPTv42.0 has hidden away all books, documents and knowledge behind blackbox LLMs. Our rational base for defining words, is washed away by computing. One might yearn for speech to have concrete meaning again. No matter what you feel/believe/emote and no matter what words the computer generates, I mean to follow through on my actions with steely conviction, for reasons known only to me. People would say what they mean and behave how they desire. And we could be supported in this behaviour and speech, because words and feelings would have lost their basis in rational reality.
goto11 4y ago
"Analysing language from millions of books" - I assume this means they just did a Google Ngram search? https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=rationality&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=rationality&ye... It is funny they talk about the "post truth" society, while categorizing the word "truth" among the intuition-related words rather than the rationality related words.
IIAOPSW 4y ago
What is "conclusion" if not belief in the limit as strength of belief goes to infinity. Besides, every "fact" is actually a belief that something is true. Every fact is stated by a speaker, and every speaker may be out of sync with the underlying reality.

65 points by gsatic 4y ago

1970 curse again

The actual research (https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2107848118 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2107848118) seems to indirectly comment on the fact that some terms could have been present due to their recency and relevance (e.g. 'Facebook') in their bias section, but I'm still unimpressed. I believe that kind of effect should have been measured and quantified for this study to be useful.

WaxProlix 4y ago

The money bit, I think: > “Inferring the drivers of long-term patterns seen from 1850 until 1980 necessarily remains speculative.” Says lead author Marten Scheffer of WUR. “One possibility when it comes to the trends from 1850 to 1980 is that the rapid developments in science and technology and their socio-economic benefits drove a rise in status of the scientific approach, which gradually permeated culture, society, and its institutions ranging from the education to politics. As argued early on by Max Weber, this may have led to a process of ‘disenchantment’ as the role of spiritualism dwindled in modernized, bureaucratic, and secularized societies.” > What precisely caused the observed reversal of the long-term trend around 1980 remains perhaps even more difficult to pinpoint. However, according to the authors there could be a connection to tensions arising from changes in economic policies since the early 1980s, which may have been defended on rational arguments but the benefits of which were not equally distributed.

unity1001 4y ago
> What precisely caused the observed reversal of the long-term trend around 1980 remains perhaps even more difficult to pinpoint Not at all. https://newrepublic.com/article/161603/john-birch-society-qanon-trump https://newrepublic.com/article/161603/john-birch-society-qa... John Birch society that was founded in 1950s to bring back mid 1800s American anti-intellectualism and religious fundamentalism grew until 1980 and eventually put Reaganites into power. Then this setup exported it to everywhere else it could export itself. Even recently, Trump was openly saying that the US was going to support right-wing movements in Europe a short time before he left the White House. Its the old, religious anti-intellectual fundamentalists that dominated the middle America in 1800s who came back and never left.
- TaylorAlexander 4y ago
  A perfectly plausible story but society is so complex it’s probably unrealistic to pin it all on just that phenomenon.
  - unity1001 4y ago
    Unfortunately it is not a story. The group started with people who convened in small bible study groups who met in each others' homes and churches. These people thought that 'America' was lost, and it should be 'taken back'. They organized and slowly grew like a sect, eventually gaining great political and economic power with those who converted to their cause and especially through the business they exclusively did among their own lot. Its not a unique story. It follows the typical religious sect proliferation mechanics that are seen in any other country. > it’s probably unrealistic to pin it all on just that phenomenon This phenomenon is the head that decides the direction of the broader American conservative spearhead groups from Reaganites to later 'Tea Party' types. They are pretty much meshed with the Evangelists now though, hard to tell them apart.
    - SequoiaHope 4y ago
      Stories can be true. But I could just as easily say that a rise in unfettered capitalism led to a loss of public good research combined with regulatory capture and large corporations pushing against any research that disagreed with them. Then there was the rise of corporate media which further eroded public inquiry to ensure that the large corporations could maintain their control over narratives. This control by the corporate media necessarily required that the viewers be trained to follow directions rather than promoting curiosity. What I said above is true also, but does not say anything about religion. So how can you say that the reason for loss of rationality is caused by the group you mention, rather than the expansion of capitalism as I have mentioned? My point is that we can say something that is definitely true but that does not prove it is the primary cause. Proving something is the primary cause in a complex system is extremely difficult.
      - 4y ago
hindsightbias 4y ago
Americans think of fundamentalist movements behind ME terrorism, Sandinistas and elsewhere were just foreign things that popped up during that era. We are still living in Reagan's world and people who weren't alive at the time just can't grok how different it all is. It's like living in an M. Night Shyamalan universe.
- euroderf 4y ago
  (nods head in vigorous agreement) I think recent American political history can be divided into pre-Reagan and post-Reagan. It really was a fundamental change in the nature of public political discourse.

smitty1e 4y ago

> What precisely caused the observed reversal of the long-term trend around 1980 remains perhaps even more difficult to pinpoint. Alan Bloom knew[1]. Paraphrasing Churchill, "If you're going through a Dark Age, floor it." One hopes that the passing of the current crop of U.S. "leadership" supports actual reform. Tech understands the need to decentralize; politics rather more resembles a singularity, and we only seem to grasp the danger in the party we abhor. May we pass through this dip swiftly. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Closing-American-Mind-Education-Impoverished/dp/1451683200/ref=mp_s_a_1_1 https://www.amazon.com/Closing-American-Mind-Education-Impov...

goto11 4y ago
Did Bloom use "intuition"-language or "rationality"-language?
- smitty1e 4y ago
  Bloom correlated the origin of wave of dunces arriving at college (and currently leading the country astray) with the Summer of Love in the 1960s.
  - yesenadam 4y ago
    I read it a long time ago and loved it, though wasn't at all sure how true its account was. Wasn't there a lot about how Nietzsche had taken over the USA and was just the air we breathe? - e.g. our talk of "values" and "lifestyle", key Nietzschean terms. I learned elsewhere how much Nietzsche got from Emerson, and how much Emerson in turn had got from Germans. A convoluted story! Also, the philosopher of the Summer of Love was German—Marcuse, from the Frankfurt School.
  - goto11 4y ago
    But the described language change correlates with 80's Reaganism rather then late-60s summer of love and counterculture. So I guess Blooms correlation have been falsified?

nico 4y ago

Just based on the charts, I love the trend. We are learning that we are often wrong and that we should be open to new ideas. Our perception of the world is individual and subjective. We are admitting that we are not rational thinking machines. We are accepting that feelings are ok and we are figuring out how to express them.

m0llusk 4y ago
The Romantic Spirit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oi_dVNN7p9I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oi_dVNN7p9I
recuter 4y ago
[flagged]
- nico 4y ago
  That’s it. Great job expressing a feeling!
  - recuter 4y ago
    Thanks Princess Unikitty! ◦°˚\(*‿*)/˚°◦ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpzlRnzNCQ0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpzlRnzNCQ0

swatcoder 4y ago

This is such a beautiful example of how isolated academic fields are from each other. Any art, philosophy, literature, critical theory, culture studies, or sociology journal has hundreds of articles tracking and analyzing this phenomenon over the last 200 years from all sorts of different perspectives, but here we see some data scientists just drop into the problem and their most salient reference is Max Weber. And I don’t mean to be criticizing the work. It’s a cool illustration and it’s interesting to see this kind of quantitative analysis of the topic and what research in this style can uncover — it’s just striking how disconnected it seems to be from so many richly developed ongoing discussions elsewhere.

jrumbut 4y ago
And, to make more explicit what is implicit in your post, this practice of data analysis without much theoretical underpinning might lead you to say "I believe" instead of "I conclude."
- drewcoo 4y ago
  > And, to make more explicit what is implicit in your post, this practice of data analysis without much theoretical underpinning might lead you to say "I believe" instead of "I conclude." Strike that. Reverse it. That's the threat.
Groxx 4y ago
Any links to those articles? I'm kinda curious what they think the cause/meaning/etc of it all is. Personally it doesn't seem particularly worrying. E.g. you'd expect to see fewer grand, unsubstantiated claims when people's use of language / society's critical analysis of what they are claiming becomes more precise. And in some places this has definitely happened. Not that I think that's what it is. Just that there are lots of good and bad contributors, and I don't want to ignore the clearly negative and alarmist implications of "rationality declined" and "post-truth era".
mrbungie 4y ago
Some (or maybe a lot depending on your environment and domain) data "scientists" focus more on analyzing/processing data than reviewing the state-of-the-art and main ideas/discussions about the domain in question. Quite amusing, but even more amusing is that those backward ways of studying a subject almost always introduce biases.

rayiner 4y ago

How much of this trend is changes in how people express themselves? I say “I feel this would be a good idea.” But what I mean is “this is obviously the correct course of action why are we even having this conversation.”

jasonhansel 4y ago

I'm skeptical. It seems like this could just be the result of increasing epistemic humility, rather than a shift away from rationality per se.

jhbadger 4y ago
Yes, the idea that one should be humble in assertions has a long history, even by great Enlightenment figures like Benjamin Franklin who surely believed in rationality. As he wrote: "I even forbid myself, agreeably to the old laws of our Junto, the use of every word or expression in the language that imported a fix’d opinion, such as certainly, undoubtedly, etc., and I adopted, instead of them, I conceive, I apprehend, or I imagine a thing to be so or so; or it so appears to me at present. When another asserted something that I thought an error, I deny’d myself the pleasure of contradicting him abruptly, and of showing immediately some absurdity in his proposition; and in answering I began by observing that in certain cases or circumstances his opinion would be right, but in the present case there appear’d or seem’d to me some difference, etc. I soon found the advantage of this change in my manner; the conversations I engag’d in went on more pleasantly. The modest way in which I propos’d my opinions procur’d them a readier reception and less contradiction; I had less mortification when I was found to be in the wrong, and I more easily prevail’d with others to give up their mistakes and join with me when I happened to be in the right."
- kthejoker2 4y ago
  I love how instantly memorable this passage is, all time great. Here's Pascal on thesame subject: "When we wish to correct with advantage, and to show another that he errs, we must notice from what side he views the matter, for on that side it is usually true, and admit that truth to him, but reveal to him the side on which it is false. He is satisfied with that, for he sees that he was not mistaken, and that he only failed to see all sides. Now, no one is offended at not seeing everything; but one does not like to be mistaken, and that perhaps arises from the fact that man naturally cannot see everything, and that naturally he cannot err in the side he looks at, since the perceptions of our senses are always true."

canjobear 4y ago

This line of research is junk that doesn't control for the fact that the composition of their corpus changes over time in a way that reflect changes in what genres were likely to be archived in various sources, not changes in what people are talking about. See https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2115010118 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2115010118

barrysteve 4y ago

In theory, we could reach a complete saturation point for hearing what others think is a good idea and feel and believe. Given a century and a half of this, we might change our minds again. Maybe in the future, ChatGPTv42.0 has hidden away all books, documents and knowledge behind blackbox LLMs. Our rational base for defining words, is washed away by computing. One might yearn for speech to have concrete meaning again. No matter what you feel/believe/emote and no matter what words the computer generates, I mean to follow through on my actions with steely conviction, for reasons known only to me. People would say what they mean and behave how they desire. And we could be supported in this behaviour and speech, because words and feelings would have lost their basis in rational reality.

goto11 4y ago

"Analysing language from millions of books" - I assume this means they just did a Google Ngram search? https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=rationality&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=rationality&ye... It is funny they talk about the "post truth" society, while categorizing the word "truth" among the intuition-related words rather than the rationality related words.

IIAOPSW 4y ago

What is "conclusion" if not belief in the limit as strength of belief goes to infinity. Besides, every "fact" is actually a belief that something is true. Every fact is stated by a speaker, and every speaker may be out of sync with the underlying reality.