Rob Beckers
19th October 2014, 19:43
Not the easiest book to read, but one that left an impression on me: "Enlightenment 2.0" by Joseph Heath. This was exceptional enough that I would like to share a review on this forum.
The subtitle of this book is "Restoring sanity to our politics, our economy, and our lives". I'm not sure it accomplishes that, but what it does very well is explain why our politics (in North America in particular), and to a lesser extend our lives, have become so dysfunctional, irrational, self-serving, and, well, plain crazy.
The book starts out explaining our current (best) understanding of how the human brain works, and it does a much better job at this than anything I've heard or read before. That alone makes this book worth reading, though there certainly is more. The premise is that we have the primitive part of our brains that mostly work through intuition. The "gut feeling" (a certain US president comes to mind who had this regarding is Russian counterpart). The intuitive part can't explain why it comes to a conclusion, it just does, and it's fast! It's also frequently wrong in its conclusions. The newer part of our brain is the logical/reasoning part, that is able to explain why it comes to a specific conclusion, it is articulate. It's also slow, sequential, doesn't have good working memory, and is easily overruled or distracted by our intuitive part of the brain (it's fragile). A very thorough explanation follows that concludes that the reasoning/logical part of the brain evolved as part of our speech, it's essentially a subroutine sitting on top of the primitive brain. The argument is actually very compelling, and in IMO the author may well have it right.
As mentioned, our intuitive part of the brain frequently gets things wrong. Especially in today's world, as it developed in a time when humans were tribal, living on the savanah, and didn't have soundbites, advertisements, Big Macs etc. The mechanisms that lead to those erroneous conclusions are well known by psychologists and are called "bias", and we all have a number of them (these are hard-wired into the brain): Our brain likes to take shortcuts, and we often jump to a conclusion based on initial evidence, then stick with it despite mounting evidence that we're wrong. That's "belief persistence" bias. Another one is "availability heuristic" bias. This is about our intuitive brain using a shortcut to determine the likelihood of an event based not on an actual count, but on how often we encounter or hear something. That worked fine on the savanah, where there were no TV and radio adds. It misfires utterly in today's world where we hear about all the terrible things happening (such as plane crashes) but nothing about those times nothing happens. We tend to greatly overestimate the dangers of events like that (child abduction is another one; we tend to think that today's world is much more dangerous for children than it was in the past, that is however utterly wrong and not at all backed up by the statistics).
Our brains have similar misfires when it comes to food. In the savanah days fat and sugar were hard to come by (and high-caloric), the same goes for salt to a lesser extend, so our brains are hard-wired to make us want to eat as much as we can when these foods are available. That worked great when we lived in caves, not so good in today's world where we see an explosion of obesity as a result. Another bias transpiring to make this worse is called "presentist bias", and it makes us want something right now instead of thinking about the future (our reasoning part of the brain has to consciously overrule these biases, something some can do better than others). Another one has to do with utensil size; we eat more if our plate or bowl is larger because our intuitive brain does a poor job at recognizing portion sizes, it's relative to the surroundings.
The list goes on. There's "confirmation bias" (another shortcut the intuitive brain takes, that leads to wrong conclusions), "optimism bias" (we think we'll be the one to win the lottery), "myside bias" (something seems more fair if there's a benefit to us), "framing and anchoring bias" (how a question is asked will determine the answer we give), "loss aversion bias" (we care more about losses than foregone gains, even though both have the exact same financial effect), "beliefs bias" (we judge arguments by how well they resonate with our own beliefs), and that brings us to "source amnesia" and the effect of repetition.
Source amnesia is something we have all experienced, when we remember some fact, but don't remember where this came from or what to attribute it to. Repetition is insidious (concerning our primitive brain). It turns out that the more time we hear something, the more we are included to believe that it is true. It just "feels right" after a while, and source amnesia makes us forget (and not question) its source.
Our rational side knows that these two mechanisms are much exploited by advertising, and lately more and more by politicians as well. It is no longer about rationally arguing a (political) position, it is now all about memorable soundbites, talking points, and getting your message out as often as possible. Even if your points are not rational at all. The author mentions an example that is familiar to Canadians, where 'question period' in politics was once intended to have the ruling party explain (rationally) why they were making the decisions that they took. Nowadays question period never answers any question, it is about pivoting as fast as possible to the talking points the party wants to get out and repeating them as often as possible. The unfortunate truth is that this works, because of the way our brains are wired.
A part of the book is spend discussion another phenomenon in politics that everyone knows well: A politician telling something that 'feels right' at the gut level, even if it is utterly wrong. This is done more and more, in particular by the right end of the political spectrum, and the author terms this "truthiness". It doesn't even matter that the next day a blog or newspaper points out just how wrong that politician is, just repeat it many more times and it actually sticks. Enough people will believe it, and quote this as gospel. Heck, it may well be that the politicians themselves believe it to be true after a while! It exploits our intuitive brain through repetition bias and source amnesia. Beliefs bias comes in as well, as your own fans tend to believe these "truthy" statements more than others. Those in North America will recognize several experts of truthiness; Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachman come to mind as master practitioners of this type of politics.
On the Canadian side the author shows how politics can and does bolster truthiness by taking away the resources to actually check up on their statements and decisions; by cutting funding to the governmental research institutions like the NRC to the bone (which has been happening over here). Several other examples are given.
The author continuous with his belief that this trend in politics is (or will soon be) the downfall of democracy. It exploits the shortcomings of democracy, which in his opinion is much more fragile than we take for granted. Possible solutions are discussed as well.
The book is far better framed than I can do it justice here. Everything said is backed up with references, and concepts are explained really, really well.
I read a lot of books. A whole lot, and most of them non-fiction. This book easily makes the top-10 of my list. I am even thinking of buying my own copy (the one I have is from the library)! In explaining how we are being misdirected in today's world, and maybe helping a little in recognizing this for what it is (and not accepting it), this book is well worth reading.
Very much recommended!
-RoB-
The subtitle of this book is "Restoring sanity to our politics, our economy, and our lives". I'm not sure it accomplishes that, but what it does very well is explain why our politics (in North America in particular), and to a lesser extend our lives, have become so dysfunctional, irrational, self-serving, and, well, plain crazy.
The book starts out explaining our current (best) understanding of how the human brain works, and it does a much better job at this than anything I've heard or read before. That alone makes this book worth reading, though there certainly is more. The premise is that we have the primitive part of our brains that mostly work through intuition. The "gut feeling" (a certain US president comes to mind who had this regarding is Russian counterpart). The intuitive part can't explain why it comes to a conclusion, it just does, and it's fast! It's also frequently wrong in its conclusions. The newer part of our brain is the logical/reasoning part, that is able to explain why it comes to a specific conclusion, it is articulate. It's also slow, sequential, doesn't have good working memory, and is easily overruled or distracted by our intuitive part of the brain (it's fragile). A very thorough explanation follows that concludes that the reasoning/logical part of the brain evolved as part of our speech, it's essentially a subroutine sitting on top of the primitive brain. The argument is actually very compelling, and in IMO the author may well have it right.
As mentioned, our intuitive part of the brain frequently gets things wrong. Especially in today's world, as it developed in a time when humans were tribal, living on the savanah, and didn't have soundbites, advertisements, Big Macs etc. The mechanisms that lead to those erroneous conclusions are well known by psychologists and are called "bias", and we all have a number of them (these are hard-wired into the brain): Our brain likes to take shortcuts, and we often jump to a conclusion based on initial evidence, then stick with it despite mounting evidence that we're wrong. That's "belief persistence" bias. Another one is "availability heuristic" bias. This is about our intuitive brain using a shortcut to determine the likelihood of an event based not on an actual count, but on how often we encounter or hear something. That worked fine on the savanah, where there were no TV and radio adds. It misfires utterly in today's world where we hear about all the terrible things happening (such as plane crashes) but nothing about those times nothing happens. We tend to greatly overestimate the dangers of events like that (child abduction is another one; we tend to think that today's world is much more dangerous for children than it was in the past, that is however utterly wrong and not at all backed up by the statistics).
Our brains have similar misfires when it comes to food. In the savanah days fat and sugar were hard to come by (and high-caloric), the same goes for salt to a lesser extend, so our brains are hard-wired to make us want to eat as much as we can when these foods are available. That worked great when we lived in caves, not so good in today's world where we see an explosion of obesity as a result. Another bias transpiring to make this worse is called "presentist bias", and it makes us want something right now instead of thinking about the future (our reasoning part of the brain has to consciously overrule these biases, something some can do better than others). Another one has to do with utensil size; we eat more if our plate or bowl is larger because our intuitive brain does a poor job at recognizing portion sizes, it's relative to the surroundings.
The list goes on. There's "confirmation bias" (another shortcut the intuitive brain takes, that leads to wrong conclusions), "optimism bias" (we think we'll be the one to win the lottery), "myside bias" (something seems more fair if there's a benefit to us), "framing and anchoring bias" (how a question is asked will determine the answer we give), "loss aversion bias" (we care more about losses than foregone gains, even though both have the exact same financial effect), "beliefs bias" (we judge arguments by how well they resonate with our own beliefs), and that brings us to "source amnesia" and the effect of repetition.
Source amnesia is something we have all experienced, when we remember some fact, but don't remember where this came from or what to attribute it to. Repetition is insidious (concerning our primitive brain). It turns out that the more time we hear something, the more we are included to believe that it is true. It just "feels right" after a while, and source amnesia makes us forget (and not question) its source.
Our rational side knows that these two mechanisms are much exploited by advertising, and lately more and more by politicians as well. It is no longer about rationally arguing a (political) position, it is now all about memorable soundbites, talking points, and getting your message out as often as possible. Even if your points are not rational at all. The author mentions an example that is familiar to Canadians, where 'question period' in politics was once intended to have the ruling party explain (rationally) why they were making the decisions that they took. Nowadays question period never answers any question, it is about pivoting as fast as possible to the talking points the party wants to get out and repeating them as often as possible. The unfortunate truth is that this works, because of the way our brains are wired.
A part of the book is spend discussion another phenomenon in politics that everyone knows well: A politician telling something that 'feels right' at the gut level, even if it is utterly wrong. This is done more and more, in particular by the right end of the political spectrum, and the author terms this "truthiness". It doesn't even matter that the next day a blog or newspaper points out just how wrong that politician is, just repeat it many more times and it actually sticks. Enough people will believe it, and quote this as gospel. Heck, it may well be that the politicians themselves believe it to be true after a while! It exploits our intuitive brain through repetition bias and source amnesia. Beliefs bias comes in as well, as your own fans tend to believe these "truthy" statements more than others. Those in North America will recognize several experts of truthiness; Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachman come to mind as master practitioners of this type of politics.
On the Canadian side the author shows how politics can and does bolster truthiness by taking away the resources to actually check up on their statements and decisions; by cutting funding to the governmental research institutions like the NRC to the bone (which has been happening over here). Several other examples are given.
The author continuous with his belief that this trend in politics is (or will soon be) the downfall of democracy. It exploits the shortcomings of democracy, which in his opinion is much more fragile than we take for granted. Possible solutions are discussed as well.
The book is far better framed than I can do it justice here. Everything said is backed up with references, and concepts are explained really, really well.
I read a lot of books. A whole lot, and most of them non-fiction. This book easily makes the top-10 of my list. I am even thinking of buying my own copy (the one I have is from the library)! In explaining how we are being misdirected in today's world, and maybe helping a little in recognizing this for what it is (and not accepting it), this book is well worth reading.
Very much recommended!
-RoB-