Maybe I’m misinterpreting this article (or maybe the NY Times isn’t exactly presenting everything correctly), but doesn’t Hugo Mercier seem to be coming pretty close to saying something like “this whole attempt at identifying and correcting biases is misguided—flaws in reasoning are ‘natural,’ so we should be okay with them.” I mean, consider the following excerpt:
Mr. Mercier, a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, contends that attempts to rid people of biases have failed because reasoning does exactly what it is supposed to do: help win an argument.
“People have been trying to reform something that works perfectly well,” he said, “as if they had decided that hands were made for walking and that everybody should be taught that.”
Am I missing something, or is this one of the most absurd statements about human rationality ever made? We shouldn’t try to get rid of biases, not because the effort is futile, but because flawed reasoning works? I guess that’s why most people are so successful at handling personal finances, calculating risk, evaluating political proposals, and questioning ingrained religious beliefs.
Reading his essay here: http://edge.org/conversation/the-argumentative-theory it appears that he does indeed come off as pessimistic with regard to raising the sanity line for individuals (ie teaching individuals to reason better and become more rational on their own). However, he does also offer a way forward by emphasizing group reasoning such as what the entire enterprise of science (peer review, etc.) encourages and is structured for. I suspect he thinks that even though most people might be able to understand that their reasoning is flawed and that they are susceptible to biases on an academic level, they will still not be able to overcome those strongly innate tendencies in practice, hence his pragmatic insistence on group deliberation to put the individual in check.
IMO, what he fails to take into consideration is the adaptability of human learning through experience and social forces, such that with the proliferation of and prolonged participation in communities like Less Wrong or other augmented reasoning systems, one would internalize the rational arts as habits and override the faulty reasoning to some extent much of the time. I still agree with him that we will always need a system like peer review or group deliberation to reach the most rational conclusions, but in the process of using those systems we individually become better thinkers.
Maybe I’m misinterpreting this article (or maybe the NY Times isn’t exactly presenting everything correctly), but doesn’t Hugo Mercier seem to be coming pretty close to saying something like “this whole attempt at identifying and correcting biases is misguided—flaws in reasoning are ‘natural,’ so we should be okay with them.” I mean, consider the following excerpt:
Am I missing something, or is this one of the most absurd statements about human rationality ever made? We shouldn’t try to get rid of biases, not because the effort is futile, but because flawed reasoning works? I guess that’s why most people are so successful at handling personal finances, calculating risk, evaluating political proposals, and questioning ingrained religious beliefs.
Reading his essay here: http://edge.org/conversation/the-argumentative-theory it appears that he does indeed come off as pessimistic with regard to raising the sanity line for individuals (ie teaching individuals to reason better and become more rational on their own). However, he does also offer a way forward by emphasizing group reasoning such as what the entire enterprise of science (peer review, etc.) encourages and is structured for. I suspect he thinks that even though most people might be able to understand that their reasoning is flawed and that they are susceptible to biases on an academic level, they will still not be able to overcome those strongly innate tendencies in practice, hence his pragmatic insistence on group deliberation to put the individual in check.
IMO, what he fails to take into consideration is the adaptability of human learning through experience and social forces, such that with the proliferation of and prolonged participation in communities like Less Wrong or other augmented reasoning systems, one would internalize the rational arts as habits and override the faulty reasoning to some extent much of the time. I still agree with him that we will always need a system like peer review or group deliberation to reach the most rational conclusions, but in the process of using those systems we individually become better thinkers.