Actually a truism, I think. There is an amazing amount of information that we don't know and don't even know about. The challenge for all of us is to see our abilities and our knowledge in some context. This fascinating article on a phenomenon where people don't even know they are paralyzed expands to ask how people can operate in a certain amount of cluelessness. Does a truly inept person, for example, know they are inept? Is it possible that they are oblivious to even that?
I think this speaks to a lot of our blind spots. Reading this, I thought of a lot of things. I thought of people like Sarah Palin, who seem to be oblivious to their mental inadequacy. I thought about biases, including the confirmation bias. I thought about modern conservatism seeming to embrace the mid level performer and bad mouthing someone who exhibits excellence. And I thought about my own limitations as a thinker, historian, and teacher. What do I miss clearly because it is just outside my vision? What do I not know, and not realize that I don't know it?
I will say this about my graduate experience. I think many people with a Phd end up as arrogant asses. I am not exactly sure how that happens, in all honesty. I don't know how you can study and focus on one area and then on one small aspect of that one area, and clearly know that you have not read all or seen even close to all of the information on that specialized area. How do you do that and become arrogant? With each exploration, you find a wealth of information that you cannot help but gain some perspective. Of course, that isn't true, as we all know.
Anyway, an interesting series.
5 comments:
Streak, I dropped out of my doctoral program with a terminal master's, but my guess would be that the Ph.D god complex comes from spending so much time in contexts where the only topic on the table is your own particular narrow specialty. When you're an Expert (TM) in 80% or 90% of your social interactions, that confidence can have a tendency to bleed into everything else. I obviously have no idea what it's like outside math and (to an extent) the hard sciences, but I think a good way to help fix that in the areas I'm familiar with is to relax the workload expectation below 80 hours a week so people actually have time to go experience things they don't know much about.
In conservative Christian circles, at least the ones I'm familiar with, there's sometimes a similar requirement to avoid too much contact with people outside the fold, or at least outside their accepted range of political views. It's on principle rather than a workload requirement, but the effect of putting social blinders on people is very similar.
Leighton, I think you are right on both counts. I think academics are often wrongly pilloried with the "ivory tower" argument, but in this case, there is something to it. Those people who spend all their time in one particular subfield and have students and even colleagues defer to them as that expert, can (and I stress, *can*) become deluded that their expertise extends into other areas. To be fair, those who spend a lot of time analyzing information might be a little better than the average voter at reading politics and history. Or maybe not. I am struck by how many engineer types show up as the academics who disbelieve climate change and evolution.
On the Christian evangelical circles, I think that is certainly a tendency among some--to circle the wagons and never really experience the world out of that sub group. That speaks to that issue of empathy, I think, or the lack of empathy.
I am struck by how many engineer types show up as the academics who disbelieve climate change and evolution.
Computer scientists too, though I'm not sure how much information engineers and computer scientists handle outside their field. Nearly everything they touch in their jobs is seen from the perspective of "How is this designed directly by its designer(s)," and viewed through a matrix of simple causes. (The effects are the complicated part. It's a lot easier to describe the physics of air flow than to predict how the air will flow over time, for instance.) It's uncommon for either field to make use of stochastic (that's math-ese for "random," as in "unpredictable or only partly predictable ahead of time") effects. So it makes sense that workaholics or people who insist that truth, causes and human motivations should be simple, black-and-white affairs would want biologists and climate scientists to abandon their methods in favor of hard-and-fast techniques better suited to construction and programming.
In support of your thesis, I'm not aware of any statisticians or historians who have made a habit of opposing climate change or evolution, though I haven't really been keeping up with it for a few years.
Yeah, I agree that Christian insularity, when it shows up, is definitely a failure of empathy. I think it's easier for people in that mindset to cope with the belief that they're hated (no matter what the facts show) than with the sneaking suspicion that they're irrelevant.
I think it's easier for people in that mindset to cope with the belief that they're hated (no matter what the facts show) than with the sneaking suspicion that they're irrelevant.
OUCH!!
Man that was good.
Yeah, pretty apt line.
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