Yesterday I removed from a certain community's spam folder a post consisting of 94 slides about some sterotypical pseudoscience theory. The usual stuff : "Let us begin with E = mc^2..."
No. Let's not do that, because it's obvious that you haven't got a clue what you're talking about. Lo and behold, it got rapidly worse, with some boiler-plate text praising God at the top of each slide. Aaaarrgggh. If you want to praise God, then fine, but do it in your own time, mate. Not in an internet-based slideshow you apparently expect people to read.
Total ignorance is indeed never damaging, providing one understands that one is totally ignorant and not put in a position where expertise might be required. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing as well. But a lot of knowledge without proper understanding is much, much worse.
The truly informed are the least-convinced of their own positions. The facts grin at them, never taking sides, always hinting at a host of contradicting evidence of which even the informed are ignorant.
ReplyDelete"The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt." - Bertrand Russell
- as for religion, speaking as a man of faith, nature abhors a vacuum, mathematics abhors an infinity and I abhor proselytising.
OK, let's take a step back and imagine a world where intelligent are not full of doubt.
ReplyDeleteDone?
How would that world advance at all? If all of us is sure about everything, how could we ever find out we were wrong, somewhere? That's not "the problem with the world", it's the quality.
And as for the stupid, no one expect us to do something clever or useful, so we can just claim the Earth is flat and go on with our lives, convinced that we are right and happy as a dog about it.
Ivan Petkovic
ReplyDeleteOK, let's take a step back and imagine a world where intelligent are not full of doubt.
Those who don't doubt are not intelligent by definition.
Rhys Taylor Citation needed - show me that definition, please?
ReplyDeleteIvan Petkovic I'll cite that well-respected authority on intelligence, Doctor Who :
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Ivan Petkovic Plato kinda laid this out with the Philosopher Kings in the Republic. Philosophers don't want to be kings. That's the terrible paradox of learning anything, or examining philosophy in depth: such an education pulls back the curtain, exposing the silly old charlatans cranking away at the handles of the illusion machinery.
ReplyDeleteAs for the stupid, nobody expects them to do anything clever or useful. What we have come to expect of the stupid is a great deal of noisy bollox, making a virtue of their ignorance and burning of books and scientists, too. If only the stupid were quiet and kept to themselves, their private opinions about the geometry of the earth and God in heaven wouldn't matter. But that's not the way this ever works out. The voice of reason is quiet and hesitant but the braying of every ordained donkey in the world drowns out the voice of reason.
To expand : there's not only a difference between knowledge and wisdom, but intelligence and wisdom. Or if you prefer, there are different kinds of intelligence. There's the ability to look at a set of technical data, form a hypothesis and test it, which is purely analytical. But there's also the sort of critical thinking, a.k.a. wisdom, which goes deeper and says, "Is that the only possible interpretation ? What would it take to disprove it ? How should I best apply my discovery to the real world ?" One may possess tremendous external analytical skills but almost no internal, self-analysis or interest in broader implications. There's probably a correlation between the two, but I don't think they're necessarily the same thing.
ReplyDeleteSee also :
https://plus.google.com/u/0/+RhysTaylorRhysy/posts/Ft1ay9wpxTA
The moral of this conversation: only play devil's advocate if you can out-word your opponents. Of course you are both right. I'm troubled with "braying of every ordained donkey in the world" just as much - I just wish I wasn't, sometimes.
ReplyDeleteIvan Petkovic Your advocacy is commendable, in the abstract. Attempting to take a step back and imagine the intelligent are brave enough to act on their better judgement instead of maundering on like Hamlet, clutching at their hair, that's what Plato attempted.
ReplyDeleteYou ask how that shiny happy world might advance. In this Bizarro World where Competence has triumphed over Stupidity, the human race would come to terms with its role in the destruction of the planet - and the species would not go extinct. Negotiators would be paid vast sums of money and replace breathless stories about Neymar being picked up by Paris St-Germain. The newsfeed chyrons would scroll headlines such as "McFarlane prevents yet another outbreak of hostilities between China and India"
That sort of thing.
Though illiteracy remains common and education levels are shockingly low in many places, these are merely ignorant, not stupid people. The stupid set themselves up as the enemies of progress. They are not content with mere stupidity, which might exhibit the common decency to stay within its bounds - no, the Confederacy of Dunces arises to oppose every aspect of progress and evolution of our species, right down to denying evolution itself.
What I was trying to imagine is a world in far future, where science advanced so far that rare unknowns are those of human nature origin, since nearly everything else is already understood and generally recognized as True.
ReplyDeleteSad truth is, such a world can only exist in a dream - stupidity wins, has been winning, and will continue to win even harder as we helplessly watch from margins. How did we ever progress at all?
Ivan Petkovic It's an interesting thought experiment. Science has a way of annoying the scientist - no sooner does some clever builder of experiments clear a few metres of the path into the forest than we see the mathematicians and theoretical guys out in front, surveying the next few hundred metres of the path.
ReplyDeleteThere will always be more Forest. And every generation has its sillies, who assure us we're nearing the asymptote of knowledge, that we can rest easy, we Know Enough.
Truth is something of a polite fiction. Truth isn't binary, though we do accept the general premise of True and False. Stupidity depends on just that sort of simplicity for its arguments. Some Congressional jackass brings a snowball onto the floor of the Senate, holds it up and laughs at the premise of global warming.
Stupidity, at its core, is a rebellion against the complexity of the universe, the complexity of the human existence. The wise and thoughtful eventually triumph, first in small ways, then larger. We must have hope. Despair isn't a viable option, though I'm tempted, every day (mostly every night) to give up in the obdurate bloody-mindedness of a world seemingly gone mad.
I have hope, anyway. I cultivate the friendships of people wiser than myself, I try to stay abreast of progress. The human being may still be best described as a vicious little hominid intent upon wrecking his world, but there are enough counterexamples to warrant a daily reconsideration of that description as a definition.
Total ignorance over an entire field is never dangerous? Seriously? Never say never...
ReplyDeleteDran Fren As I said (and Plato intended) : providing one understands that one is totally ignorant and not put in a position where expertise might be required.
ReplyDeleteRhys Taylor well I think I get the point - but I have the suspicion the sentence is badly translated - the first part is weak, and the second part also: "to know a subject intimately and in great detail" actually suggest, that you know it pretty well - but what is meant here is, that you think you are an expert, while in reality you are not, and your knowledge is flawed... At least that's my reading...
ReplyDeleteDran Fren Possibly. The translator notes that Plato never released Laws in his lifetime; some other parts of the text feel more obviously like they need revising.
ReplyDeleteI think the provision, "as long as you're not in a position where you need expert knowledge" is obvious enough that it doesn't really need to be stated.
The second part is a bit clearer in context, which is a discussion of what sort of knowledge citizens should have. I think the point is that anyone can memorise a bunch of facts as well as any expert, but actually understanding their meaning and relations to one another requires expert tutelage. Like trying to learn advanced mathematics from Wikipedia, for example... :) Which is distinct from the other sort of "false expertise", where one thinks one understands a field without ever having even studied it badly.
Dran Fren Yes, it's the first one I'm using. I extracted the quote during a complete reading of the entire corpus, of which I have a hard copy (it isn't just something I found on the internet). That said, I like the Jowett version of this part better.
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