We get excited about democracy. It’s a bulwark against tyranny; a wall with out-turned guns. But you don’t love democracy the way I love it.
That’s not all, I know lots of other stuff, too. While you have your opinions, I’ve got the right one. I’m striving rationally in the right direction. Facts? I got your em right here:
Facts-schmacts
Sometimes I watch the news with a slanty perspective. They might be tastefully dressed, but once they open their mouths, my perspective changes. They’re wearing red & yellow striped jumpsuits. And juggling rabbits.
But I’m so much better than that, right? Joe Keohane says no.
Recently, a few political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information. It’s this: Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger. (Keohane, emphasis mine)
It’s one thing to have an arrogant presumption, but quite another thing when science validates it. Thanks, science.
My eyes have damned-near rolled out of my head at thoughts of my arrogant, ignorance, dumb-ass youthful self. Worse, now I’m channeling older-me who is convinced that current-me is also a dumb ass. At least I have the internet for fact-checking, right?
Nice try. Modern life could be complicating things further thanks to all this irritating, proliferate loose knowledge. How unseemly.
This effect is only heightened by the information glut, which offers — alongside an unprecedented amount of good information — endless rumors, misinformation, and questionable variations on the truth. In other words, it’s never been easier for people to be wrong, and at the same time feel more certain that they’re right. (Keohane)
We feel that we’re right, and that’s enough. There’s always some damned fool who will validate us, no matter how crazy we are.
It gets worse
Our actual knowledge of politics can fit in a spoon, but we’re all experts. And so far as evolution is concerned, we’re alive so everything’s going well.
In this classic tale of existential dread in American, Beaver confesses that he has been mugged by reality - cruelly spat upon by his own mind. Betrayed as both untrustworthy and helpless by the gray matter within.
Evolutionary change is all about good enough. But we don’t inhabit the world of our million-year-old ancestors and that may not cut it. And don’t think being a smarty-pants intellectual is going to help you:
In 1996, Princeton University’s Larry M. Bartels argued, “the political ignorance of the American voter is one of the best documented data in political science.”
A 2006 study by Charles Taber and Milton Lodge at Stony Brook University showed that politically sophisticated thinkers were even less open to new information than less sophisticated types. These people may be factually right about 90 percent of things, but their confidence makes it nearly impossible to correct the 10 percent on which they’re totally wrong. Taber and Lodge found this alarming, because engaged, sophisticated thinkers are “the very folks on whom democratic theory relies most heavily.” (Keohane, emphasis mine)
In the future, I anticipate many more hotly contested political arguments. I’ve enjoyed sitting in the distance, feeling so smug. I want to scout out arrogant nut-jobs and mark them on my Bingo-sheet.
But the center spot on the sheet is mine. I’m wearing the goddamn jumpsuit. And I’m no good at juggling.
Hat tip to 3 Quarks Daily. I’ll keep trying anyhow.
Our beliefs aren't arrived at by reason; them's just the breaks. But I think that people, including the scientists you cite, are looking at this from the wrong perspective.
We are deeply ignorant, this goes for individual scientists as much as it does for American voters. Any source of information we have is inherently uncertain; there is no way we can verify them, especially when they deal with subjects well beyond our own direct experience.
So it isn't as though “facts” lack the power to “change our minds.” It's that we have no easy way of determining what exactly a fact is, except through sources that we trust, but the criteria by which we decide which sources are trustworthy is inherently bundled up with beliefs about reality that we already have. Again, this applies to scientists, who cannot reproduce the results of every experiment that is relevant to their own line of research (because they haven't the time or resources to) and therefore have to assume that, just because they have read that other people have done so, it has, in fact, been done.
This is no more a problem for Democracy than it is for any other system of government, because it is an inherent–dare I use the word–fact of human nature. And political leaders, whether elected, inherited, or put in place by force, are all human.
I agree that we have problems making that distinction: saying “this is an accurate fact,” and all. But it's increasingly obvious that many of us are simply uninterested. It's not for lack of trying, it's for lack of caring.
And so far as politicians are concerned, I've increasingly become aware that I can't hate them as much as I used to because of what you pointed out: they're human. *I'm* human, and I haven't been given access to the institutions that would tempt me to be as much of a slimeball (if not worse).
I'd like to think better of myself, but that brain of mine's been acting shifty. I don't know if I trust it.
Thanks for the contribution, good sir.
No problem! On not caring, the GMU econ student in me is compelled to point you here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_ignorance
The individual voter gets only one vote; in other words, their vote will never, ever determine the outcome of an election–especially a national election, but even a very close, low-turnout local one. Information is costly–for the reasons we talked about, among others. Getting information about what goes on in government, when we, individually, are pretty much powerless to do anything about it, might not be worth it if the information is costly enough (and it usually is; especially costly to get accurate information on a regular basis).
Bottom line: most people just don't find it worth their while to even try to keep up with the facts when it comes to politics.
Great link. It'll go nicely with another quasi-uneducated post I'm working on. I wholeheartedly admit that there is a whole raft of things that, individually, we *don't* actually need to know about.
What I like, though, is that you've pointed to the “wisdom of the crowds” phenomena, where almost nobody's right on an individual basis, but the average of that stuff is very close to accurate. Now, if we could alter our political processes to take that into account… we'd be golden.
No problem! On not caring, the GMU econ student in me is compelled to point you here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_ignorance
The individual voter gets only one vote; in other words, their vote will never, ever determine the outcome of an election–especially a national election, but even a very close, low-turnout local one. Information is costly–for the reasons we talked about, among others. Getting information about what goes on in government, when we, individually, are pretty much powerless to do anything about it, might not be worth it if the information is costly enough (and it usually is; especially costly to get accurate information on a regular basis).
Bottom line: most people just don't find it worth their while to even try to keep up with the facts when it comes to politics.
Great link. It'll go nicely with another quasi-uneducated post I'm working on. I wholeheartedly admit that there is a whole raft of things that, individually, we *don't* actually need to know about.
What I like, though, is that you've pointed to the “wisdom of the crowds” phenomena, where almost nobody's right on an individual basis, but the average of that stuff is very close to accurate. Now, if we could alter our political processes to take that into account… we'd be golden.