Epistemology is an interesting field of Philosophy. It is a very good question; when did we begin to know things?
Perhaps, metaphysically, there was a source of energy which gave us knowledge. Knowledge that we exist and that the world exists also. We are left in a dream to find what really gave us knowledge and to pinpoint discernible events that led to human knowledge and existence, when did we first see light?
Adam was obviously the first man, but what allowed him to see the world around him exists?
Perhaps we are consciously in a dream. When we die is when we awake from it.
Blog Archive
Saturday, March 24, 2007
Thursday, March 22, 2007
Intelligent Life in the Universe
The universe is full of intelligent life. Let's think for just a second that people are merely intelligences. It isn't hard is it? Anything created is intelligence so that makes human-beings and every animal completely intelligent doesn't it?
Well, If the universe was created in seven days so were people. Was the universe created in that short amount of time? It says in the scriptures that a day in heaven is one-thousand years, so the earth was created in seven-thousand celestial years. When did we break from celestial time? The answer might be when we became intelligent.
So fourteen-thousand years isn't prime so it is obviously composite. Meaning that it has a positive integer which has a positive divisor other than one or itself. We may be able to say that fourteen-thousand materials are what created the universe; because we say that given to our view of reality is what makes the universe what it is.
Well, If the universe was created in seven days so were people. Was the universe created in that short amount of time? It says in the scriptures that a day in heaven is one-thousand years, so the earth was created in seven-thousand celestial years. When did we break from celestial time? The answer might be when we became intelligent.
So fourteen-thousand years isn't prime so it is obviously composite. Meaning that it has a positive integer which has a positive divisor other than one or itself. We may be able to say that fourteen-thousand materials are what created the universe; because we say that given to our view of reality is what makes the universe what it is.
Wednesday, March 21, 2007
Why Smart People Defend Bad Ideas
#40 - Why smart people defend bad ideas
Scott Berkun
We all know someone who's intelligent, but who occasionally defends obviously bad ideas. Why does this happen? How can smart people take up positions that defy any reasonable logic? Having spent many years working with smart people I’ve catalogued many of the ways this happens, and I have advice on what to do about it. I feel qualified to write this essay as I’m a recovering smart person myself and I’ve defended several very bad ideas. So if nothing else this essay serves as a kind of personal therapy session. However, I fully suspect you’ll get more than just entertainment value (“Look, Scott is more stupid than we thought!”) out of what I have to say on this topic.
We all know someone who's intelligent, but who occasionally defends obviously bad ideas. Why does this happen? How can smart people take up positions that defy any reasonable logic? Having spent many years working with smart people I’ve catalogued many of the ways this happens, and I have advice on what to do about it. I feel qualified to write this essay as I’m a recovering smart person myself and I’ve defended several very bad ideas. So if nothing else this essay serves as a kind of personal therapy session. However, I fully suspect you’ll get more than just entertainment value (“Look, Scott is more stupid than we thought!”) out of what I have to say on this topic.
Success at defending bad ideas
I’m not proud to admit that I have a degree in Logic and Computation from Carnegie Mellon University. Majoring in logic is not the kind of thing that makes people want to talk to you at parties, or read your essays. But one thing I did learn after years of studying advanced logic theory is that proficiency in argument can easily be used to overpower others, even when you are dead wrong. If you learn a few tricks of logic and debate, you can refute the obvious, and defend the ridiculous. If the people you’re arguing with aren’t as comfortable in the tactics of argument, or aren’t as arrogant as you are, they may even give in and agree with you.
The problem with smart people is that they like to be right and sometimes will defend ideas to the death rather than admit they’re wrong. This is bad. Worse, if they got away with it when they were young (say, because they were smarter than their parents, their friends, and their parent’s friends) they’ve probably built an ego around being right, and will therefore defend their perfect record of invented righteousness to the death. Smart people often fall into the trap of preferring to be right even if it’s based in delusion, or results in them, or their loved ones, becoming miserable. (Somewhere in your town there is a row of graves at the cemetery, called smartypants lane, filled with people who were buried at poorly attended funerals, whose headstones say “Well, at least I was right.”)
Until they come face to face with someone who is tenacious enough to dissect their logic, and resilient enough to endure the thinly veiled intellectual abuse they dish out during debate (e.g. “You don’t really think that do you?” or “Well if you knew the rule/law/corollary you wouldn’t say such things”), they’re never forced to question their ability to defend bad ideas. Opportunities for this are rare: a new boss, a new co-worker, a new spouse. But if their obsessiveness about being right is strong enough, they’ll reject those people out of hand before they question their own biases and self-manipulations. It can be easier for smart people who have a habit of defending bad ideas to change jobs, spouses, or cities rather than honestly examine what is at the core of their psyche (and often, their misery).
Short of obtaining a degree in logic, or studying the nuances of debate, remember this one simple rule for defusing those who are skilled at defending bad ideas: Simply because they cannot be proven wrong, does not make them right. Most of the tricks of logic and debate refute questions and attacks, but fail to establish any true justification for a given idea.
For example, just because you can’t prove that I’m not the king of France reincarnated doesn’t make it so. So when someone tells you “My plan A is the best because no one has explained how it will fail” know that there is a logical gap in this argument. Simply because no one has described how it will fail, doesn’t necessarily make it the best plan. It’s possible than plans B, C, D and E all have the same quality, or that the reason no one has described how A will fail is that no one has had more than 30 seconds to scrutinize the plan. As we’ll discuss later, diffusing bad thinking requires someone (probably you) to construct a healthier framework around the bad thinking that shows it for what it is.
Death by Homogeny
The second stop on our tour of commonly defended bad ideas is the seemingly friendly notion of communal thinking. Just because everyone in the room is smart doesn’t mean that collectively they will arrive at smart ideas. The power of peer pressure is that it works on our psychology, not our intellect. As social animals we are heavily influenced by how the people around us behave, and the quality of our own internal decision making varies widely depending on the environment we currently are in. (e.g. Try to write a haiku poem while standing in an elevator with 15 opera singers screaming 15 different operas, in 15 different languages, in falsetto, directly at you vs. sitting on a bench in a quiet stretch of open woods).
That said, the more homogeneous a group of people are in their thinking, the narrower the range of ideas that the group will openly consider. The more open minded, creative, and courageous a group is, the wider the pool of ideas they’ll be capable of exploring.
Some teams of people look to focus groups, consultancies, and research methods to bring in outside ideas, but this rarely improves the quality of thinking in the group itself. Those outside ideas, however bold or original, are at the mercy of the diversity of thought within the group itself. If the group, as a collective, is only capable of approving B level work, it doesn’t matter how many A level ideas you bring to it. Focus groups or other outside sources of information can not give a team, or its leaders, a soul. A bland homogeneous team of people has no real opinions, because it consists of people with same backgrounds, outlooks, and experiences who will only feel comfortable discussing the safe ideas that fit into those constraints.
If you want your smart people to be as smart as possible, seek a diversity of ideas. Find people with different experiences, opinions, backgrounds, weights, heights, races, facial hair styles, colors, past-times, favorite items of clothing, philosophies, and beliefs. Unify them around the results you want, not the means or approaches they are expected to use. It’s the only way to guarantee that the best ideas from your smartest people will be received openly by the people around them. On your own, avoid homogenous books, films, music, food, sex, media and people. Actually experience life by going to places you don’t usually go, spending time with people you don’t usually spend time with. Be in the moment and be open to it. Until recently in human history, life was much less predictable and we were forced to encounter things not always of our own choosing. We are capable of more interesting and creative lives than our modern cultures often provide for us. If you go out of your way to find diverse experiences it will become impossible for you to miss ideas simply because your homogenous outlook filtered them out.
Thinking at the wrong level
At any moment on any project there are an infinite number of levels of problem solving. Part of being a truly smart person is to know which level is the right one at a given time. For example, if you are skidding out of control at 95mph in your broken down Winnebago on an ice covered interstate, when a semi-truck filled with both poorly packaged fireworks and loosely bundled spark plugs slams on its brakes, it’s not the right time to discuss with your passengers where y’all would like to stop for dinner. But as ridiculous as this scenario sounds, it happens all the time. People worry about the wrong thing at the wrong time and apply their intelligence in ways that doesn’t serve the greater good of whatever they’re trying to achieve. Some call this difference in skill wisdom, in that the wise know what to be thinking about, where as the merely intelligent only know how to think. (The de-emphasis of wisdom is an east vs. west dichotomy: eastern philosophy heavily emphasizes deeper wisdom, where as the post enlightenment west, and perhaps particularly America, heavily emphasizes the intellectual flourishes of intelligence).
In the software industry, the common example of thinking at the wrong level is a team of rock star programmers who can make anything, but don’t really know what to make: so they tend to build whatever things come to mind, never stopping to find someone who might not be adept at writing code, but can see where the value of their programming skills would be best applied. Other examples include people that always worry about money despite how much they have, people who struggle with relationships but invest their energy only in improving their appearance (instead of in therapy or other emotional exploration), or anyone that wants to solve problem X but only ever seems to do things that solve problem Y.
The primary point is that no amount of intelligence can help an individual who is diligently working at the wrong level of the problem. Someone with wisdom has to tap them on the shoulder and say, “Um, hey. The hole you’re digging is very nice, and it is the right size. But you’re in the wrong yard.”
Killed in the long term by short term thinking
From what we know of evolution it’s clear that we are alive because of our inherited ability to think quickly and respond to change. The survival of living creatures, for most of the history of our planet, has been a short term game. Only if you can out-run your predators, and catch your prey, do you have the luxury of worrying about tomorrow.
It follows then that we tend to be better at worrying about and solving short term issues than long term issues. Even when we recognize an important long term issue that we need to plan for, say protecting natural resources or saving for retirement, we’re all too easily distracted away from those deep thoughts by immediate things like dinner or sex (important things no doubt, but the driving needs in these pursuits, at least for this half of the species, are short term in nature). Once distracted, we rarely return to the long term issues we were drawn away from.
A common justification for abuse of short term thinking is the fake perspective defense. The wise, but less confident guy says “hey – are you sure we should be doing this.” And the smart, confident, but less wise guy says “of course. We did this last time, and the time before that, so why shouldn’t we do this again?”. This is the fake perspective defense because there’s no reason to believe that 2 points of data (e.g. last time plus the time before that) is sufficient to make claims about the future. People say similar things all the time in defense of the free market economy, democracy, and mating strategies. “Well, it's gotten us this far, and it’s the best system we have”. Well, maybe. But if you were in that broken down Winnebago up to your ankles in gasoline from a leaking tank, smoking a cigarette in each hand, you could say the same thing.
Put simply, the fact that you’re not dead yet doesn’t mean that the things you’ve done up until now shouldn’t have, by all that is fair in the universe, already killed you. You might just need a few more data points for the law of averages to catch up, and put a permanent end to your short term thinking.
How many data points you need to feel comfortable continuing a behavior is entirely a matter of personal philosophy. The wise and skeptical know that even an infinite number of data points in the past may only have limited bearing on the future. The tricky thing about the future is that it's different than the past. Our data from the past, no matter how big a pile of data it is, may very well be entirely irrelevant. Some find this lack of predictive ability of the future quite frustrating, while others see it as the primary reason to stick around for a few more years.
Anyway, my point is not that Winnebagos or free market economies are bad. Instead I’m saying that short term bits of data are neither reliable nor a wise way to go about making important long term decisions. Intelligent people do this all the time, and since it’s so commonly accepted as a rule of thumb (last time + the time before that), it’s often accepted in place of actual thinking. Always remember that humans, given our evolution, are very bad at seeing the cumulative effects of behavior, and underestimate how things like compound interest or that one cigarette a day, can in the long term, have surprisingly large impacts despite clearly low short term effects.
How to prevent smart people from defending bad ideas
I spent my freshman year at a small college in NJ called Drew University. I had a fun time, ingested many tasty alcoholic beverages, and went to lots of great parties (the result of which of course was that I basically failed out and had to move back to Queens with my parents. You see, the truth is that this essay is really a public service announcement paid for by my parents - I was a smart person that did some stupid things). But the reason I mention all this is because I learned a great bit of philosophy from many hours of playing pool in the college student center. The lesson is this: “Speed kills”. I was never very good at pool, but this one guy there was, and whenever we’d play, he’d watch me miss easy shots because I tried to force them in with authority. I chose speed and power over control, and I usually lost. So like pool, when it comes to defusing smart people who are defending bad ideas, you have to find ways to slow things down.
The reason for this is simple. Smart people, or at least those whose brains have good first gears, use their speed in thought to overpower others. They’ll jump between assumptions quickly, throwing out jargon, bits of logic, or rules of thumb at a rate of fire fast enough to cause most people to become rattled, and give in. When that doesn’t work, the arrogant or the pompous will throw in some belittlement and use whatever snide or manipulative tactics they have at their disposal to further discourage you from dissecting their ideas.
So your best defense starts by breaking an argument down into pieces. When they say “it’s obvious we need to execute plan A now.” You say, “hold on. You’re way ahead of me. For me to follow I need to break this down into pieces.” And without waiting for permission, you should go ahead and do so.
First, nothing is obvious. If it were obvious there would be no need to say so. So your first piece is to establish what isn’t so obvious. What are the assumptions the other guy is glossing over that are worth spending time on? There may be 3 or 4 different valid assumptions that need to be discussed one at a time before any kind of decision can be considered. Take each one in turn, and lay out the basic questions: what problem are we trying to solve? What alternatives to solving it are there? What are the tradeoffs in each alternative? By breaking it down and asking questions you expose more thinking to light, make it possible for others to ask questions, and make it more difficult for anyone to defend a bad idea.
No one can ever take away your right to think things over, especially if the decision at hand is important. If your mind works best in 3rd or 4th gear, find ways to give yourself the time needed to get there. If when you say “I need the afternoon to think this over”, they say “tough. We’re deciding now”. Ask them if the decision is an important one. If they say yes, then you should be completely justified in asking for more time to think it over and ask questions.
Find a sane person people listen to
Some situations require outside help. Instead of taking a person on directly, get a third party that you both respect, and continue the discussion in their presence. This can be a superior, or simply someone smart enough that the other person might possibly concede points to them.
It follows that if your team manager is wise and reasonable, smart people who might ordinarily defend bad ideas will have a hard time doing so. But sadly if your team manager is neither wise nor reasonable, smart, arrogant people may convince others to follow their misguided ways more often than not.
And yet more reasons
I’m sure you have stories of your own follies dealing with smart people defending bad ideas, or where you, yourself, as a smart person, have spent time arguing for things you regretted later. Given the wondrous multitude of ways the universe has granted humans to be smart and dumb at the same time, there are many more reasons why smart people behave in stupid ways. For fun, and as fodder for the forums, here’s a few more.
If you have some thoughts on this essay, or some more reasons to add, please head on over to the forums.
# Smart people can follow stupid leaders (seeking praise or promotion)
# Smart people may follow their anger into stupid places
# They may be trained or educated into stupidity
# Smart people can inherit bad ideas from their parents under the guise of tradition
# They may simply want something to be true, that can never be
Scott Berkun
We all know someone who's intelligent, but who occasionally defends obviously bad ideas. Why does this happen? How can smart people take up positions that defy any reasonable logic? Having spent many years working with smart people I’ve catalogued many of the ways this happens, and I have advice on what to do about it. I feel qualified to write this essay as I’m a recovering smart person myself and I’ve defended several very bad ideas. So if nothing else this essay serves as a kind of personal therapy session. However, I fully suspect you’ll get more than just entertainment value (“Look, Scott is more stupid than we thought!”) out of what I have to say on this topic.
We all know someone who's intelligent, but who occasionally defends obviously bad ideas. Why does this happen? How can smart people take up positions that defy any reasonable logic? Having spent many years working with smart people I’ve catalogued many of the ways this happens, and I have advice on what to do about it. I feel qualified to write this essay as I’m a recovering smart person myself and I’ve defended several very bad ideas. So if nothing else this essay serves as a kind of personal therapy session. However, I fully suspect you’ll get more than just entertainment value (“Look, Scott is more stupid than we thought!”) out of what I have to say on this topic.
Success at defending bad ideas
I’m not proud to admit that I have a degree in Logic and Computation from Carnegie Mellon University. Majoring in logic is not the kind of thing that makes people want to talk to you at parties, or read your essays. But one thing I did learn after years of studying advanced logic theory is that proficiency in argument can easily be used to overpower others, even when you are dead wrong. If you learn a few tricks of logic and debate, you can refute the obvious, and defend the ridiculous. If the people you’re arguing with aren’t as comfortable in the tactics of argument, or aren’t as arrogant as you are, they may even give in and agree with you.
The problem with smart people is that they like to be right and sometimes will defend ideas to the death rather than admit they’re wrong. This is bad. Worse, if they got away with it when they were young (say, because they were smarter than their parents, their friends, and their parent’s friends) they’ve probably built an ego around being right, and will therefore defend their perfect record of invented righteousness to the death. Smart people often fall into the trap of preferring to be right even if it’s based in delusion, or results in them, or their loved ones, becoming miserable. (Somewhere in your town there is a row of graves at the cemetery, called smartypants lane, filled with people who were buried at poorly attended funerals, whose headstones say “Well, at least I was right.”)
Until they come face to face with someone who is tenacious enough to dissect their logic, and resilient enough to endure the thinly veiled intellectual abuse they dish out during debate (e.g. “You don’t really think that do you?” or “Well if you knew the
Short of obtaining a degree in logic, or studying the nuances of debate, remember this one simple rule for defusing those who are skilled at defending bad ideas: Simply because they cannot be proven wrong, does not make them right. Most of the tricks of logic and debate refute questions and attacks, but fail to establish any true justification for a given idea.
For example, just because you can’t prove that I’m not the king of France reincarnated doesn’t make it so. So when someone tells you “My plan A is the best because no one has explained how it will fail” know that there is a logical gap in this argument. Simply because no one has described how it will fail, doesn’t necessarily make it the best plan. It’s possible than plans B, C, D and E all have the same quality, or that the reason no one has described how A will fail is that no one has had more than 30 seconds to scrutinize the plan. As we’ll discuss later, diffusing bad thinking requires someone (probably you) to construct a healthier framework around the bad thinking that shows it for what it is.
Death by Homogeny
The second stop on our tour of commonly defended bad ideas is the seemingly friendly notion of communal thinking. Just because everyone in the room is smart doesn’t mean that collectively they will arrive at smart ideas. The power of peer pressure is that it works on our psychology, not our intellect. As social animals we are heavily influenced by how the people around us behave, and the quality of our own internal decision making varies widely depending on the environment we currently are in. (e.g. Try to write a haiku poem while standing in an elevator with 15 opera singers screaming 15 different operas, in 15 different languages, in falsetto, directly at you vs. sitting on a bench in a quiet stretch of open woods).
That said, the more homogeneous a group of people are in their thinking, the narrower the range of ideas that the group will openly consider. The more open minded, creative, and courageous a group is, the wider the pool of ideas they’ll be capable of exploring.
Some teams of people look to focus groups, consultancies, and research methods to bring in outside ideas, but this rarely improves the quality of thinking in the group itself. Those outside ideas, however bold or original, are at the mercy of the diversity of thought within the group itself. If the group, as a collective, is only capable of approving B level work, it doesn’t matter how many A level ideas you bring to it. Focus groups or other outside sources of information can not give a team, or its leaders, a soul. A bland homogeneous team of people has no real opinions, because it consists of people with same backgrounds, outlooks, and experiences who will only feel comfortable discussing the safe ideas that fit into those constraints.
If you want your smart people to be as smart as possible, seek a diversity of ideas. Find people with different experiences, opinions, backgrounds, weights, heights, races, facial hair styles, colors, past-times, favorite items of clothing, philosophies, and beliefs. Unify them around the results you want, not the means or approaches they are expected to use. It’s the only way to guarantee that the best ideas from your smartest people will be received openly by the people around them. On your own, avoid homogenous books, films, music, food, sex, media and people. Actually experience life by going to places you don’t usually go, spending time with people you don’t usually spend time with. Be in the moment and be open to it. Until recently in human history, life was much less predictable and we were forced to encounter things not always of our own choosing. We are capable of more interesting and creative lives than our modern cultures often provide for us. If you go out of your way to find diverse experiences it will become impossible for you to miss ideas simply because your homogenous outlook filtered them out.
Thinking at the wrong level
At any moment on any project there are an infinite number of levels of problem solving. Part of being a truly smart person is to know which level is the right one at a given time. For example, if you are skidding out of control at 95mph in your broken down Winnebago on an ice covered interstate, when a semi-truck filled with both poorly packaged fireworks and loosely bundled spark plugs slams on its brakes, it’s not the right time to discuss with your passengers where y’all would like to stop for dinner. But as ridiculous as this scenario sounds, it happens all the time. People worry about the wrong thing at the wrong time and apply their intelligence in ways that doesn’t serve the greater good of whatever they’re trying to achieve. Some call this difference in skill wisdom, in that the wise know what to be thinking about, where as the merely intelligent only know how to think. (The de-emphasis of wisdom is an east vs. west dichotomy: eastern philosophy heavily emphasizes deeper wisdom, where as the post enlightenment west, and perhaps particularly America, heavily emphasizes the intellectual flourishes of intelligence).
In the software industry, the common example of thinking at the wrong level is a team of rock star programmers who can make anything, but don’t really know what to make: so they tend to build whatever things come to mind, never stopping to find someone who might not be adept at writing code, but can see where the value of their programming skills would be best applied. Other examples include people that always worry about money despite how much they have, people who struggle with relationships but invest their energy only in improving their appearance (instead of in therapy or other emotional exploration), or anyone that wants to solve problem X but only ever seems to do things that solve problem Y.
The primary point is that no amount of intelligence can help an individual who is diligently working at the wrong level of the problem. Someone with wisdom has to tap them on the shoulder and say, “Um, hey. The hole you’re digging is very nice, and it is the right size. But you’re in the wrong yard.”
Killed in the long term by short term thinking
From what we know of evolution it’s clear that we are alive because of our inherited ability to think quickly and respond to change. The survival of living creatures, for most of the history of our planet, has been a short term game. Only if you can out-run your predators, and catch your prey, do you have the luxury of worrying about tomorrow.
It follows then that we tend to be better at worrying about and solving short term issues than long term issues. Even when we recognize an important long term issue that we need to plan for, say protecting natural resources or saving for retirement, we’re all too easily distracted away from those deep thoughts by immediate things like dinner or sex (important things no doubt, but the driving needs in these pursuits, at least for this half of the species, are short term in nature). Once distracted, we rarely return to the long term issues we were drawn away from.
A common justification for abuse of short term thinking is the fake perspective defense. The wise, but less confident guy says “hey – are you sure we should be doing this.” And the smart, confident, but less wise guy says “of course. We did this last time, and the time before that, so why shouldn’t we do this again?”. This is the fake perspective defense because there’s no reason to believe that 2 points of data (e.g. last time plus the time before that) is sufficient to make claims about the future. People say similar things all the time in defense of the free market economy, democracy, and mating strategies. “Well, it's gotten us this far, and it’s the best system we have”. Well, maybe. But if you were in that broken down Winnebago up to your ankles in gasoline from a leaking tank, smoking a cigarette in each hand, you could say the same thing.
Put simply, the fact that you’re not dead yet doesn’t mean that the things you’ve done up until now shouldn’t have, by all that is fair in the universe, already killed you. You might just need a few more data points for the law of averages to catch up, and put a permanent end to your short term thinking.
How many data points you need to feel comfortable continuing a behavior is entirely a matter of personal philosophy. The wise and skeptical know that even an infinite number of data points in the past may only have limited bearing on the future. The tricky thing about the future is that it's different than the past. Our data from the past, no matter how big a pile of data it is, may very well be entirely irrelevant. Some find this lack of predictive ability of the future quite frustrating, while others see it as the primary reason to stick around for a few more years.
Anyway, my point is not that Winnebagos or free market economies are bad. Instead I’m saying that short term bits of data are neither reliable nor a wise way to go about making important long term decisions. Intelligent people do this all the time, and since it’s so commonly accepted as a rule of thumb (last time + the time before that), it’s often accepted in place of actual thinking. Always remember that humans, given our evolution, are very bad at seeing the cumulative effects of behavior, and underestimate how things like compound interest or that one cigarette a day, can in the long term, have surprisingly large impacts despite clearly low short term effects.
How to prevent smart people from defending bad ideas
I spent my freshman year at a small college in NJ called Drew University. I had a fun time, ingested many tasty alcoholic beverages, and went to lots of great parties (the result of which of course was that I basically failed out and had to move back to Queens with my parents. You see, the truth is that this essay is really a public service announcement paid for by my parents - I was a smart person that did some stupid things). But the reason I mention all this is because I learned a great bit of philosophy from many hours of playing pool in the college student center. The lesson is this: “Speed kills”. I was never very good at pool, but this one guy there was, and whenever we’d play, he’d watch me miss easy shots because I tried to force them in with authority. I chose speed and power over control, and I usually lost. So like pool, when it comes to defusing smart people who are defending bad ideas, you have to find ways to slow things down.
The reason for this is simple. Smart people, or at least those whose brains have good first gears, use their speed in thought to overpower others. They’ll jump between assumptions quickly, throwing out jargon, bits of logic, or rules of thumb at a rate of fire fast enough to cause most people to become rattled, and give in. When that doesn’t work, the arrogant or the pompous will throw in some belittlement and use whatever snide or manipulative tactics they have at their disposal to further discourage you from dissecting their ideas.
So your best defense starts by breaking an argument down into pieces. When they say “it’s obvious we need to execute plan A now.” You say, “hold on. You’re way ahead of me. For me to follow I need to break this down into pieces.” And without waiting for permission, you should go ahead and do so.
First, nothing is obvious. If it were obvious there would be no need to say so. So your first piece is to establish what isn’t so obvious. What are the assumptions the other guy is glossing over that are worth spending time on? There may be 3 or 4 different valid assumptions that need to be discussed one at a time before any kind of decision can be considered. Take each one in turn, and lay out the basic questions: what problem are we trying to solve? What alternatives to solving it are there? What are the tradeoffs in each alternative? By breaking it down and asking questions you expose more thinking to light, make it possible for others to ask questions, and make it more difficult for anyone to defend a bad idea.
No one can ever take away your right to think things over, especially if the decision at hand is important. If your mind works best in 3rd or 4th gear, find ways to give yourself the time needed to get there. If when you say “I need the afternoon to think this over”, they say “tough. We’re deciding now”. Ask them if the decision is an important one. If they say yes, then you should be completely justified in asking for more time to think it over and ask questions.
Find a sane person people listen to
Some situations require outside help. Instead of taking a person on directly, get a third party that you both respect, and continue the discussion in their presence. This can be a superior, or simply someone smart enough that the other person might possibly concede points to them.
It follows that if your team manager is wise and reasonable, smart people who might ordinarily defend bad ideas will have a hard time doing so. But sadly if your team manager is neither wise nor reasonable, smart, arrogant people may convince others to follow their misguided ways more often than not.
And yet more reasons
I’m sure you have stories of your own follies dealing with smart people defending bad ideas, or where you, yourself, as a smart person, have spent time arguing for things you regretted later. Given the wondrous multitude of ways the universe has granted humans to be smart and dumb at the same time, there are many more reasons why smart people behave in stupid ways. For fun, and as fodder for the forums, here’s a few more.
If you have some thoughts on this essay, or some more reasons to add, please head on over to the forums.
# Smart people can follow stupid leaders (seeking praise or promotion)
# Smart people may follow their anger into stupid places
# They may be trained or educated into stupidity
# Smart people can inherit bad ideas from their parents under the guise of tradition
# They may simply want something to be true, that can never be
Do we live in a Computer Simulation?
Nick Bostrom - New Scientist 2006
SCIENCE has revealed much about the world and our position within it. Generally, the findings have been humbling. The Earth is not the centre of the universe. Our species descended from brutes. We are made of the same stuff as mud. We are moved by neurophysiological signals and subject to a variety of biological, psychological and sociological influences over which we have limited control and little understanding.
One of our remaining sources of pride is technological progress. Like the polyps that over time create coral reefs, the many generations of humans that have come before us have built up a vast technological infrastructure. Our habitat is now largely one of human making. The fact of technological progress is also in a sense humbling. It suggests that the most advanced technology we have today is extremely limited and primitive compared with what our descendants will have.
If we extrapolate these expected technological advances, and think through some of their logical implications, we arrive at another humbling conclusion: the "simulation argument", which has caused some stir since I published it three years ago.
The formal version of the argument requires some probability theory, but the underlying idea can be grasped without mathematics. It starts with the assumption that future civilizations will have enough computing power and programming skills to be able to create what I call "ancestor simulations" . These would be detailed simulations of the simulators' predecessors- detailed enough for the simulated minds to be conscious and have the same kinds of experiences we have. Think of an ancestor simulation as a very realistic virtual reality environment, but one where brains inhabiting the world are themselves part of the simulation.
The simulation argument makes no assumption about how long it will take to develop capacity. Some futurologists think it will happen within the next 50 years. But even if it takes 10 million years, it makes no difference to the argument.
Let me state what the conclusion of the argument is. The conclusion is that at least one of the following three propositions must be true.
1. Almost all civilizations at our level of development become extinct before becoming technologically mature.
2. The fraction of the technologically mature civilizations that are interested in creating ancestor simulations is almost zero.
3. You are almost certainly living in a computer simulation.
How do we reach this conclusion? Suppose first that the the first proposition is false. Then a significant fraction of civilizations at our level of development eventually mature. Suppose, too, that the second proposition is false. Then a significant fraction of these civilizations run ancestor simulations. Therefore, if both one and two are false, there will be simulated minds like ours.
If we work out the numbers, we find that there would be vastly many more simulated minds than non-simulated minds. We assume that technologically mature civilizations would have access to enormous amounts of computing power.
So enormous, in fact, that by devoting even a tiny fraction to ancestor simulations, they would be able to implement billions of simulations, each containing as many people as have ever existed. In other words, almost all minds like yours would be simulated. Therefore, by a very weak principle of indifference, you would have to assume that you are probably one of these simulated minds.
Hence, if you think that propositions one and two are both false, you should accept the third. It is not coherent to reject all three.
It should be emphasized that the simulation argument is does not show that you are living in a simulation. The conclusion is simply that at least one of the three propositions is true. It does not tell us which one.
In reality, we don't have much specific information to tell us which of the three propositions might be true. In this situation, it might be reasonable to distribute our credence roughly evenly between them.
Let us consider the options in a little more detail. Proposition one is straightforward. For example, maybe there is some technology that every advance civilization eventually develops. and which destroys them. Let us hope this is not the case. Proposition two requires that there is a strong convergence among all advanced civilizations, such that almost none of them are interested in running ancestor simulations. One can imagine various reasons that may lead civilizations to make this choice. Yet for proposition two to be true, virtually all civilizations would have to refrain. If this were true, it would be an interesting constraint on the future evolution of intelligent life.
The third possibility is philosophically the most intriguing. If it is correct, you are almost certainly living in a computer simulation that was created by some advanced civilization. What Copernicus and Darwin and latter-day scientists have been discovering are the laws and workings of the simulated reality. These laws might or might not be identical to those operating at the more fundamental level of reality where the computer that is running our simulation exists. (which, of course, may itself be a simulation). In a way, our place in the world would be even humbler then we thought.
What kind of implications would this have? How should it change the way you live your life?
Your first reaction might think that the three is true, then all bets are off and you would go crazy. To reason thus would be an error. Even if we are in a simulation, the best methods of predicting what will happen next are still familiar ones - extrapolation of past trends, scientific modeling and common sense. To a first approximation, if you thought you were in a simulation, you should get on with your life in much the same way as if you were convinced that you were leading a non-simulated life at the "bottom" of reality.
If we are in a simulation, could ever know for certain? if the simulators don't want us to find out, we probably never will. But if they choose to reveal themselves, they could certainly do so. Another event that would let us conclude with a high degree of confidence that we are in a simulation is if we ever reach a point when we are about to switch on our own ancestor simulations. That would be very strong evidence against the first two propositions, leaving us only with the third.
Nick Bostrom is the director of the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford
SCIENCE has revealed much about the world and our position within it. Generally, the findings have been humbling. The Earth is not the centre of the universe. Our species descended from brutes. We are made of the same stuff as mud. We are moved by neurophysiological signals and subject to a variety of biological, psychological and sociological influences over which we have limited control and little understanding.
One of our remaining sources of pride is technological progress. Like the polyps that over time create coral reefs, the many generations of humans that have come before us have built up a vast technological infrastructure. Our habitat is now largely one of human making. The fact of technological progress is also in a sense humbling. It suggests that the most advanced technology we have today is extremely limited and primitive compared with what our descendants will have.
If we extrapolate these expected technological advances, and think through some of their logical implications, we arrive at another humbling conclusion: the "simulation argument", which has caused some stir since I published it three years ago.
The formal version of the argument requires some probability theory, but the underlying idea can be grasped without mathematics. It starts with the assumption that future civilizations will have enough computing power and programming skills to be able to create what I call "ancestor simulations" . These would be detailed simulations of the simulators' predecessors- detailed enough for the simulated minds to be conscious and have the same kinds of experiences we have. Think of an ancestor simulation as a very realistic virtual reality environment, but one where brains inhabiting the world are themselves part of the simulation.
The simulation argument makes no assumption about how long it will take to develop capacity. Some futurologists think it will happen within the next 50 years. But even if it takes 10 million years, it makes no difference to the argument.
Let me state what the conclusion of the argument is. The conclusion is that at least one of the following three propositions must be true.
1. Almost all civilizations at our level of development become extinct before becoming technologically mature.
2. The fraction of the technologically mature civilizations that are interested in creating ancestor simulations is almost zero.
3. You are almost certainly living in a computer simulation.
How do we reach this conclusion? Suppose first that the the first proposition is false. Then a significant fraction of civilizations at our level of development eventually mature. Suppose, too, that the second proposition is false. Then a significant fraction of these civilizations run ancestor simulations. Therefore, if both one and two are false, there will be simulated minds like ours.
If we work out the numbers, we find that there would be vastly many more simulated minds than non-simulated minds. We assume that technologically mature civilizations would have access to enormous amounts of computing power.
So enormous, in fact, that by devoting even a tiny fraction to ancestor simulations, they would be able to implement billions of simulations, each containing as many people as have ever existed. In other words, almost all minds like yours would be simulated. Therefore, by a very weak principle of indifference, you would have to assume that you are probably one of these simulated minds.
Hence, if you think that propositions one and two are both false, you should accept the third. It is not coherent to reject all three.
It should be emphasized that the simulation argument is does not show that you are living in a simulation. The conclusion is simply that at least one of the three propositions is true. It does not tell us which one.
In reality, we don't have much specific information to tell us which of the three propositions might be true. In this situation, it might be reasonable to distribute our credence roughly evenly between them.
Let us consider the options in a little more detail. Proposition one is straightforward. For example, maybe there is some technology that every advance civilization eventually develops. and which destroys them. Let us hope this is not the case. Proposition two requires that there is a strong convergence among all advanced civilizations, such that almost none of them are interested in running ancestor simulations. One can imagine various reasons that may lead civilizations to make this choice. Yet for proposition two to be true, virtually all civilizations would have to refrain. If this were true, it would be an interesting constraint on the future evolution of intelligent life.
The third possibility is philosophically the most intriguing. If it is correct, you are almost certainly living in a computer simulation that was created by some advanced civilization. What Copernicus and Darwin and latter-day scientists have been discovering are the laws and workings of the simulated reality. These laws might or might not be identical to those operating at the more fundamental level of reality where the computer that is running our simulation exists. (which, of course, may itself be a simulation). In a way, our place in the world would be even humbler then we thought.
What kind of implications would this have? How should it change the way you live your life?
Your first reaction might think that the three is true, then all bets are off and you would go crazy. To reason thus would be an error. Even if we are in a simulation, the best methods of predicting what will happen next are still familiar ones - extrapolation of past trends, scientific modeling and common sense. To a first approximation, if you thought you were in a simulation, you should get on with your life in much the same way as if you were convinced that you were leading a non-simulated life at the "bottom" of reality.
If we are in a simulation, could ever know for certain? if the simulators don't want us to find out, we probably never will. But if they choose to reveal themselves, they could certainly do so. Another event that would let us conclude with a high degree of confidence that we are in a simulation is if we ever reach a point when we are about to switch on our own ancestor simulations. That would be very strong evidence against the first two propositions, leaving us only with the third.
Nick Bostrom is the director of the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford
Rousseau - Social Contract
5. THAT WE MUST ALWAYS GO BACK TO A FIRST CONVENTION
TO subdue a multitude is not to rule a society. If scattered individuals were enslaved by one man, I see merely a master and his slaves, not a people and its ruler. Even if he has enslaved half the world, he is still only an individual; if he dies, his empire dies, as an oak falls and dissolves into ashes before the fire.
A people, says Grotius, can give itself to a king. Which assumes some public deliberation. The rule of majority voting is itself something established by convention, which presupposes unanimity, on one occasion at least.
TO subdue a multitude is not to rule a society. If scattered individuals were enslaved by one man, I see merely a master and his slaves, not a people and its ruler. Even if he has enslaved half the world, he is still only an individual; if he dies, his empire dies, as an oak falls and dissolves into ashes before the fire.
A people, says Grotius, can give itself to a king. Which assumes some public deliberation. The rule of majority voting is itself something established by convention, which presupposes unanimity, on one occasion at least.
Tuesday, March 13, 2007
Lobachevsky
Russian mathematician who developed a non-Euclidean geometry, denying the truth of Euclid's parallel postulate by supposing that there may be two or more such lines passing through a given point.
Monday, March 12, 2007
Chrysippus
Primary author of the stoic philosophy. Although none of his many writings survived antiquity, Chrysippus reportedly made significant contributions to the development of logic and ethics. He is generally credited with invention of the propositional calculus and eloquent expression of the doctrine of eternal return.