Ch. 3: Think Again by Adam Grant

[DWill]

The difference between a harmless Luddite crank and Kaczynski is of course the lengths the latter went to defeat his moral enemy, the modern world. It's not that he was wrong to think as he did about technology. Amish people who reject a lot of our technology aren't wrong. They keep to themselves as Kaczynski could have.

The interesting and harder to judge instances are those like John Brown, who believed he was justified in killing pro-slavery settlers in Kansas and in starting a race war by raiding Harpers Ferry. Very few whites in his day thought he was a hero, even those who abominated slavery. But now I think the view of John Brown is that a nation that is so morally bankrupt as to allow slavery to persist, needs a fanatic to bring the issue to a crisis point, allowing good and evil to slug it out.

[Harry Marks]

One problem, in the social sense, is that this type of dispassionate sifting of evidence isn't compatible with conviction--not really, in my opinion. If you see a conclusion as always provisional, you're not going to have that insistent certainty that causes others to follow you. When does refusal to commit to a truth come to seem like dithering?

Exactly, and that dithering lack of conviction is the shortcoming of Grant’s presentation of the scientist as morally superior to the prosecutor, the politician and the preacher. The challenge of changing the world is to integrate the open critical spirit of science with the rhetorical tools of persuasion.

Fascinating questions raised here. Worthy of Kahneman, I would say. I have always thought that the strongest "proof" for a scientific hypothesis was if it led to the asking of questions that wouldn't have been asked otherwise, followed then by investigations which confirm it. That is a two-step process, obviously, but it's hard to think of a field of human endeavor outside science that can claim a similar confirmation of intuitive insight. Maybe the superiority of government by consent, maybe the need for separation of governmental powers, and maybe the power of freeing markets. And, oh yes, the ability to rescue the modern industrial economy from a depression with free spending by the government.

Referencing some of the discussion that followed, I think it is possible to treat a "big" belief as provisional without losing the ability to commit to it. One regards it as provisional as long as the evidence doesn't decisively refute it. If one hears a viable alternative one should consider it, but real life is full of alternative notions like "that hobby is too expensive" and "giving Hitler the concessions he claims are needed for justice will take the wind out of his sails," which we can treat as discouragement rather than as warnings.

I rather lean toward DWill's version, that character involves a certain ability to commit to a worldview, but I combine it with Robert's challenge to demonstrate persuasiveness without abandoning the ability to critique our own notions. Of course what this often looks like is the process of moving the goalposts, or otherwise revising the version of reality we are committed to, to avoid being undermined by criticism. Our recent President 45 was a master at shifting rhetoric in response to inconvenient information. The internal process of self-questioning is crucial to integrity, but must be engaged at the level of weighing truth and kept private, rather than being indulged during the messy process of explaining why one's views make sense.