Ernie : This was not supposed to be a problem. The way the framers of the Constitution planned it, a system would arise that motivated people to become informed citizens. For a while, say until ca 1820, this was more-or-less true, there was something like such a system. But all along it assumed entry level competence, educated citizens would become more educated and the system would flourish. Then the floodgates opened to the great "miscellaneous majority" and all traces of this system, certainly most traces, were washed away. Chaos, or no better than near-chaos, became the new normal. Actually we see a new version of the pre-1820 system in today's continued growth in college enrollments and graduation levels. But for those who never get there --which remains most people-- they fall further and further behind in terms of useful ( non-vocational ) knowledge. That is, they may well become increasing adept at their jobs but , even when they learn some things outside of their vocations, they don't learn nearly at a level that would allow them to compete with intellectual elites in the general culture. These are a few opening considerations. What has struck me is that most voters deserve to be classified into the kinds of categories suggested in the article you recommended about "Anosognosticism." People who make decisions about who to vote for based on their incompetencies in evaluating candidates. Which, at least now and then, is a problem for absolutely everyone. Part of the problem concerns objective qualities of knowledge itself. See excerpts from another article, included below, about how knowledge often is not "solid" but changes over time. Like medical knowledge in 1850 compared to 2012. Or knowledge in physics, psychology, and many other fields. We simply cannot be competent in a "pure" sense when the very basis of competence, knowledge, changes under our feet. Much more solid is logic, its rules don't exactly squish into one shape one year, and into another shape the next. Indeed, rules of syllogistic reasoning, to the extent they can still be meaningful ( it depends, very much so, or incidental ) are basically what they were when Thomas Aquinas was alive. OK, this seems to identify something to have "faith" in. Is there a Radical Centrist Logic we can develop ? And market to the public ? Billy ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- - NY Times June 20, 2010, 9:00 pm The Anosognosic’s Dilemma: Something’s Wrong but You’ll Never Know What It Is (Part 1) By _ERROL MORRIS_ (http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/author/errol-morris/)
Dunning and Kruger argued in their paper, “When people are incompetent in the strategies they adopt to achieve success and satisfaction, they suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it. Instead, like Mr. Wheeler, they are left with the erroneous impression they are doing just fine.” It became known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect — our incompetence masks our ability to recognize our incompetence. But just how prevalent is this effect? DAVID DUNNING: Well, my specialty is decision-making. How well do people make the decisions they have to make in life? And I became very interested in judgments about the self, simply because, well, people tend to say things, whether it be in everyday life or in the lab, that just couldn’t possibly be true. And I became fascinated with that. Not just that people said these positive things about themselves, but they really, really believed them. Which led to my observation: if you’re incompetent, you can’t know you’re incompetent. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------- Philosophy by the Way Monday, December 19, 2011 False knowledge and wrong knowledge Knowledge can become out of date, because what we thought to know appeared not to be true. The case of Galileo that I described two weeks ago is an instance of this: the sun does not turn around the earth, as people thought in his days, but it is the other way round, as Galileo showed. So what we thought to know has never been the case. Actually, it has never been knowledge: it was false knowledge. But is it so that all supposed knowledge that later appeared to be false knowledge always has been false knowledge? Take the so-called bystander effect, the phenomenon that most persons do not help a victim in an emergency situation (for instance a drowning person), when other people are present, while they would help, if they were there alone. However, now I read in an article that it has become difficult to replicate the bystander effect in an experimental setting. Apparently people have changed – maybe because the phenomenon got much attention in the media and in publications – and the bystander effect does no longer exist: people do help now in emergency situations, even when they are in a group. What once was true has now become false and has been replaced by new knowledge. On the face of it, it seems here that a piece of knowledge simply has become out of date and has been replaced because we know better now. However, there is an important difference with the Galileo case. There the original idea that the sun turns around the earth has always been false, but the bearers of this supposed knowledge were not acquainted with this. However, the bystander effect has not become out of date because it never has been true, for once it was. It has become superseded because reality has changed. This is typical for the social sciences: people get knowledge of certain social facts, which are true at the moment they hear about it. However, for one reason or another, people are not satisfied with the facts and they change them. Then old knowledge becomes the foundation of new knowledge instead of being falsified. By the way, it can also happen that what once was false is made true: a teacher undeservedly thinks that some students in his class are better than other students and just because of his – often unconscious – behaviour the allegedly better students also become better, as psychological research has shown: false knowledge has turned into true knowledge. And in fact, the reversal of the bystander effect is also a case in point: the false knowledge that people tend to help in emergency situations even in case others are present, has become true when people became conscious of their behaviour. This interpretative effect (called “double hermeneutics”) does not exist in the natural sciences. However, also there it can happen that knowledge becomes outdated and has to be replaced by new knowledge without being falsified. Old medical knowledge is often replaced by new knowledge, not because it has been falsified, but because now we know better. But in a certain sense the medical science is a social science. The latter is not the case for biology and for the biological world, for instance. Nature is in continuous development and what once was true about it, is not valid anymore many years or ages later. Even if our knowledge isn’t true, it needn’t be false. There are many ways that it can appear to be wrong. -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org
