Why do so many people think they know things they obviously don't?

The NYTimes has started a blog series on this topic, titled: "The Anosognosic's Dilemma: Something's Wrong but You'll Never Know What It Is (Part 1): A ludicrously botched bank robbery leads to the question, Can you be too incompetent to understand just how incompetent you are?"

I said:

350 comments so far--many from obviously intelligent people--yet not one (nor the blog authors) seem to realize the four biological facts that are crucial to this issue:

1. evolution is totally blind. It's a mechanism, not a purpose.

2. evolution does not select for the fittest individual. It selects for the most reproductively successful GENE POOL.

3. we evolved to succeed as hunter/gatherers in the Kenyan highlands, with minor adaptations to other hunting-gathering environments.

On the macro level, however, we stopped evolving for the most part once we learned how to evolve our environment to suit ourselves, instead of vice-versa.

So we're still optimized to be hunter/gatherers living in tribes of a few dozen people (i.e. no more than can find food in one place in one day). Biologically speaking, you could say that modern society blindsides our inner nomadic forager every day.

4. the human race has a high degree of genetic plasticity--that is, we breed every whichway, like dogs, and unlike cats. Meaning that nature keeps trying stuff.

This probably stems from our evolving during unstable circumstances, forcing us to be highly adaptable, not just as individuals, but, evolutionarily speaking, not \"knowing\" just what's going to work. In highly stable circumstances evolution produces highly specialized life forms. Think koalas, which only eat one thing and have the brains of a turnip.

So--sociobiologically, the bell-shaped intelligence curve stems from the fact that (1) most people have enough intelligence to learn what to eat, how to acquire stuff to eat, how to avoid what wants to eat or kill you, in a particular environment; and (2) a tribe can't have all chiefs and no indians.

But this blog wasn't about the prevalence of stupidity. Nor is it really about ignorance of ignorance. It's about unwarranted confidence.

To understand why we have that, consider this situation: it's 100,000 years ago. Your band of a few dozen people is walking through the veldt. You don't even know about bows and arrows--all you have is rocks and clubs. Maybe some spears--sharpened sticks, really. Now here comes a lion.

If everyone were completely rational and only lived for self-advantage, the alpha male would toss the lion babies and children until it was satiated and went away. Or everyone would try to hide behind everyone else, with the strongest pushing the weakest in front of them--with similar results.

But they weren't rational. The alpha male would be full of rage at the lion trying to take his possessions--the other tribe members--and he'd also be full of self-sacrificing protective urges for his own females and his children. And he and his beta males would stand shoulder to shoulder confronting the lion with their rocks and clubs etc.

And within each of they psyches they'd figure the lion may get the guy beside me but he won't get me. I'll succeed. I'll pull this off. Because...well, because I'm ME.

That's where this all comes from, and it's found to varying degrees in most of us, both smart and stupid. It's just more easily seen in the hapless American Idol loo-hooser contestants. But the BP CEO wanting his life back or Bernie Madoff have this same trait.

Those of us who are somewhat self-aware can realize the power of this build-in heuristic in our minds, and try to compensate for it. But it's really, really hard.

Worth trying, though. I wish everyone the best of luck in trying to perceive reality accurately in the midst of the hormonal hurricane that is the human mind.

And of course, just because you may understand the origins of some aspect of human behavior--such as overconfidence--doesn't free you from its grip. It just makes you more morally culpable. "Responsibility" factors into response-ability, after all.

So those who see sociobiology as excuse-making need not fear. It's anything but.

OTOH if you think understanding how we came to be what we are is irrelevant--well, the best way to be controlled by the adaptive heuristics buried in our DNA is to deny their existence. Plus, one of the commonest forms of overconfidence is the persistent human belief that we invented ourselves, free of any kind influence by society, family, language, propaganda...and biological heritage.

Tea Parties

Most Tea Party types will tell you that the ideas they express are their own, derived from getting the news, thinking about it, and by the sheerest coincidence arriving at the exact set of conclusions that the Republican Party leadership and its patrons want them to adopt.

This isn't necessarily stupidity. For example, I have one Republican friend with a very high IQ who believes most GOP talking points and tells me I've been brainwashed by the "MSM" (a Republican curse word meaning any news outlet to the left of Fox TV).

No, it's tribalism plus the peculiar human trait of believing that we aren't influenced by marketing, while anyone who doesn't think the same as us is the other side's sock puppet.

The stupid think this, and are easily led, of course, but intelligent people like my friend can be led as well, given sufficiently adroit propaganda, soaring eternally on the wings of vast wealth.

Also, women are generally more conservative than men (I don't mean they're Conservatives--just that they're more cautious; remember, if the tribe loses one fertile woman there will be fewer children next year, while the tribe could lose most of its men and still have as many babies next year). So when fear is instilled in them, their first impulse is to cling to the status quo and resist anything they perceive as changes.

Meanwhile, men are generally more aggressive than women, so when you scare them their first impulse is to attack what they think is their enemy, rather than engage in self-examination, or in considering and weighing alternatives. They're most likely to attack when they feel emasculated. Many men have died for their countries--but even more have died for their, um, male organs, once you strip away the layers of rhetoric and rationalization.

Put both atavistic responses together and you get the average Tea Party get-together, egged on by demagogues like Congressman Michelle Bachman, who called the Obama administration "gangsters."

And as I said in a previous post, we Democrats have pushed them into the Republican leadership's eager arms.

To boil down that post:

Tea Party person: We white working-class people have been shafted, and we're angry.

Democrat response: You're racists.
Republican response: You're right, and it's the Democrats who've shafted you. They've taken what's yours and redistributed it to foreigners and bums and blacks and Mexican illegal immigrants--everyone but you.

Tea Party person: Great. Now I know who the enemy is.

Democrat: But the enemy is the Republicans and their big business patrons--and you racist Tea Party types.
Republican: See, the Democrats hate you, so they're lying. And they're in cahoots with big business. [followed by factual warpage, such as the fact that Wall Street donates to Democrats whenever they think Democrats might win an election--and to Republicans as well, in hopes that they'll win, so that whoever wins they'll have their hooks into them; but the Republicans don't mention all that stuff of course].

Tea Party person: Right. Down with the Democrats and their bailouts of big business (and all those unwhite unAmericans)!

I'm not certain whether democracy itself can survive the use of state of the art psychology and sociology in the service of the richest--and most amoral--of the rich.

In defense of Tea Party types

As people heap abuse on the Tea Party types--mostly cranky old white guys--let me say something in their defense.

The Tea Party folks think they've been shafted. Well, they have been. Wages for working stiffs have stagnated since the 1970s, while those of the corporate elites and Wall Street types have soared into low orbit.

Boomers with a high school education, decent on-the-job training and a good work ethic could support a wife at home, buy that home, buy a Chevy or a Ford, and raise a family.

And now their retirement is threatened, and their kids have worse prospects than they do.

Moreover, the society they lived in is being taken away from them. They didn't have to lock their doors. Now they do. Signs on stores were in a language they could understand. The people around them generally shared their values.

Of course all these things happened to American Indians, and liberals never stop bemoaning that. But it's happening to American Anglos now, and liberals shower contempt and namecalling on them.

How is it not OK for American Indians to have their culture taken from them, but just swell to have exactly the same thing happen to Anglo Americans? Exactly what makes it racist to love your own culture and want to preserve it?

If a million Anglo Americans moved to, say, Veracruz, and edged out the locals, and put signs only in English on their stores, liberals would decry it as cultural imperialism and argue that Mexican culture was being disrespected.

This isn't a problem for me personally, by and large. I live in Silicon Valley, one of the most multicultural places on Earth. Last Saturday we showed a couple from Belarus to San Francisco for the first time (they got here a month ago) and took them to a Burmese restaurant for dinner--their first experience with Burmese food.

Our last vacation was in Bali. I've traveled in 17 countries. I speak Spanish. I've lived in Mexico and studied at the University of Mexico summer school. I'm educated. I speak a tiny smattering of half a dozen languages. I have a degree in Sociology.

But I'm not your standard Anglo American working stiff. Why should I expect them to not go into culture shock if the demographic composition of their town is changed radically--by immigration policies that the American people never voted on and would reject if they were given the opportunity to do so?

So they're suffering economically and culturally.

Meanwhile the Democratic Party tells them they're racists if they object to their wages being driven down by competition from a flood of illegal immigrants. And then they open their ballot and it's in 15 languages to accommodate immigrants who haven't bothered to learn our common language.

And if the Anglo American is in civil service somewhere, maybe he sees a black guy with lower scores get promoted ahead of him because the white guy's great-great-great-grandfather had slaves. Or was a sharecropper whose landlord had slaves. And the Anglo American knows this has happened because the Democratic Party decided to make it so.

So our Anglo American guy turns to the Republicans. He doesn't realize that it's the Republicans who are robbing him blind, because they do their financial manipulations out of public view, while the Democrats' are out in the open.

So although the Tea Party types are completely wrong about the source of the economic situation they're in; although they're fiercely opposing the guy--our prez--who's trying to save them--and although much of what they're saying and doing is clearly racist and hateful--

We should admit that the Democrats did everything in their power to shove them into the Republicans' greedy arms, and that these Tea Party folks have gotten the short end of the stick. They just don't realize who did it to them.

The American People are angry--and that understandable anger has been shaped and aimed

Liberal commentators have one thing in common with their conservative counterparts: while everyone talks about how angry "the American people" are--nobody talks about the tidal wave of right wing propaganda that has shaped and molded this anger--and directed it at the very people who are trying to save them, however imperfectly.

It helps the manipulators that today's economic issues are too complex for most voters to understand. That's the simple truth. No amount of "common sense" is going help Joe Lunchbox make sense of default credit swaps and the things hedge fund managers do to "earn" their hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars incomes (taxed lower than their secretaries, natch).

This propaganda campaign employs dozens of fake populists with daily talk shows that dominate AM radio, plus a "news" station whose tag line should read "What the foreign cullud man in the White House did wrong today." That includes Fox's faux straight news programs, by the way--not just the O'Reillys and Hannitys et al.

And it includes not just general-purpose denunciation & ridicule of everything any Democrat ever said and did (often accusing them of exactly what Republicans are doing)--we also have the spectacle of the healthcare denial industry spending $1.4 million a day to defeat any kind of healthcare reform.

Commentators talk about the Massachusetts Miracle and the Tea Parties and every other sign of public distress as if people just sat in their homes poring over the Senate healthcare bill, reading annotated copies of the Constitution, and studying the findings of www.politifact.com and www.factcheck.org (two reputable factchecking organizations)...all before forming their personal opinions.

If only.

In reality, opinions are formed before any facts are found. Then people look for "facts" to support their conclusions, and for ways to dismiss or downplay countervailing facts. What really affects them are media figures who look and talk like them--only better-looking, more nicely dressed versions of them--and ads and whisper campaigns that inflame their fears and angers and appeal to their inner 10 year old.

The people engineering this, like Karl Rove, are brilliant and amoral. (Does anything think Karl Rove is religious? Or shares any of the tastes of the Republican rank and file?)

They have achieved with words and images the subjugation of a people that once required militias with weapons to achieve.

It is irrational to assume that people are rational. Countless times I've seen smart people tie themselves in knots trying to reason with ranting bigots who are obviously innumerate and incapable of rigorous analytic thought. All you can tell such people is "go to a community college for a couple of years. Take statistics and basic science courses that teach scientific method before you write another opinion."

Rational people are fooled by these coached questioners--like the ones you find on newspaper website comment threads--because they've learned to parrot worthwhile terms like "junk science." Only they define "junk science" as any science whose conclusions they don't like.

At least half of the American people have been tricked by right wing propaganda. I concede that there's left wing propaganda out there as well--wielded especially well by public employee unions and organizations advancing some socioethnic group at public expense (such as the racist organization self-named "The Race"--only they translate that into Spanish so English speakers won't notice the racism).

But the left wing propaganda doesn't have the giant bullhorn provided by America's Angry Billionaire's Club, financed by people whose names you wouldn't recognize, but whose companies you would--entities like Walmart and Mars Candy, and major developers, and the people behind the Chamber of Commerce (which purports to represent small business but doesn't--just the biggest ones). There are dozens of lobbyists for every Congressman, and only a relative handful of them represent liberal causes. The rest--usually retired Congressmen--command humongous salaries paid for by the Angry Billionaire's Club.

So, yes, the American people are mad at Obama, and the Democrats, and Congress in general.

Now look behind the curtain. Please?

Sympathy for the Tea Party people

The Tea Party rank and file have every right to be angry. The problem is that our problems are so much more complex than the tribal issues people faced for our first, oh, 50,000 years on Earth.

Our problems now are so complex that Tea Partiers can't understand how they've been shafted--and by who. Worse yet, they can't understand why they can't understand. It's a Catch-22.

The Democratic Party has cast itself as standing up for the little guy from the word go. But it has created a credibility gap with working-class whites through its incessant trolling for votes from special interest groups like Hispanics and public employee unions (and for campaign contributions from the latter as well). From a Tea Partiers' point of view the Democratic Party seems to have forgotten all those blue-collar whites who aren't public employee union members.

So the Glenn Becks and Sarah Palins and whatnot--and those who fund them--have provided Tea Partiers with a simple, plausible narrative the average working stiff can follow.

Whereas the truth isn't. For example, try explaining to a working stiff the Byzantine financial instruments, offshore tax hiding, and "free marketing" that insources profits while outsourcing costs and liabilities to taxpayers. Their eyes will glaze over...then they'll get mad at you, since if they can't understand you it automatically means that you're an elite snob talking down to them. Few will agree to the alternative explanation, because (especially for the men) the real answer is emasculating.

Thus anti-intellectualism, which de Tocqueville observed early in our 19th century, makes our blue-collar folks especially susceptible to all the nouveau Elmer Gantries eager to prey on them.

And even when reasoned voices appear, the demagogues urge their followers to shout them down. We saw it happen time and again at the healthcare town hall meeting debacles.

Even in newsaper article comment threads like this you'll have to wade through dozens and dozens of ranting by semiliterates to get at the on-topic comments that actually show thought. That's their way of shouting down anyone reasonable, Republican or Democrat or Indie. It's how people who feel helpless individuall gain a sense of power--by joining a mob.

It's not the late stages of the Weimar Republic, but there's a whiff of that in the air.

www.blogzu.blogspot.com

David Brooks--the right wing's smiley face

New York Times' conservative columnist David Brooks knows how to obscure underlying truth with shallow truths. That is, Brooks’ sins are sins of omission.

In this case (a column on the Tea Party movement) he has omitted the financial interests that profit from promoting the anti-intellectual redneck populism of the Tea Party movement--and which have propelled and shaped it.

That would be America's hyper-rich, eager to hang onto the vast change they’ve wrought over the last several decades.

Back in the 1950s America's wealth distribution resembled that of other advanced nations. Back then a hardworking guy with a little education could buy a house and a car and support a family.

Today none of that is true. Our income distribution resembles that of Mexico, Russia, and Brazil, all with very small hyper rich classes, a hollowed-out middle class, and millions of working poor who play by the rules but still can't get ahead.

That didn't happen by chance. Key elements included a 40 year campaign that used anti-Communism and Ronald Reagan's faux populism to make ordinary Americans fear and distrust government. The hyper-rich don't need government services, after all, and they certainly don't want government regulation that might limit their limitless greed and sense of entitlement.

It was a master stroke to co-opt populism to make the little guy vote against what they imagined to be the Big Guy (big government), when that was the only force strong enough to protect them against the real Big Guys.

Lyndon Johnson helped by committing the Democratic Party to helping Blacks achieve legal equality. That guaranteed a White Southern anti-Federal government block vote that persists to this day, and shows up in the character of the nonstop attacks on Obama's citzenship, inteligence, family, etc.

The most telling was a poster imitating the famous "Yes we can" poster, only showing Obama uplifted chin, looking down on us, captioned "Snob: It's an elitist thing. You wouldn't understand." This combines Southern Whites' bete noir, the uppity Black, with general-purpose anti-intellectualism.

Because above all else the hyper-rich need Obama and the Democratic Congress to accomplish nothing. It's not that they love Republicans. They have nothing but contempt for the average Tea Partier, and treat Republican Congressmen as their house servants. Our ruling class isn't fundamentalist or ignorant. Just self-absorbed and brimming with a sense of entitlement that would make Paris Hilton envious.

These people like to stay out of the light, but I've seen interviews of some of the ones who are CEOs. They look upon the rest of us like you'd look at bugs.

Of course there are fellow travelers who don’t share the hyper-rich class’s narrow focus on its money and privileges and freedom from government interference.

The Christianists made a Devil’s Bargain with these people in the Reagan era, and it has served them well, even as it has corrupted them more and more.

And every right wing talk show host and think tank pundit is an entrepreneur out for himself ultimately, but more often than not it also serves their interests to play footsie with those who can bankroll them and hand them a megaphone. And make things very hard for them if they don’t play ball.

The hyper rich have spent a fortune in marketing aimed at making Americans reject government (this doesn’t excuse government’s failings, but this campaign goes on regardless of whether government serves the people or not).

Then, building on this foundation campaign, we get more specialized multimillion dollar campaigns designed to thwart reform of particular sources of the hyper-rich class’s riches.

Hence the anti-healthcare reform campaign that’s in full song now, swamping the cable news channels with advertising (against a dribble of pro-reform ads), along with much greasing of palms behind the scenes, along with whisper campaigns and chain email campaigns that say things that would be challenged in court if they were said in ads.

And rank and file Republicans and Independents fall for all of this because they’ve had no training in spotting manipulative political campaigns. They sure don’t get it in school. The Far Right wants nothing but the 3Rs taught in school, after all. And it has been remarkably successful in reducing the education system to vacuous pablum (aided by liberal demagogues who do the same pablum-ification in their areas of concern, in the name of Political Correctness).

So when David Brooks talks about public opinion swinging against healthcare reform and the burgeoning Tea Party movement, it’s telling that he leaves out all of this. Public opinion isn’t formed in a vacuum. It’s shaped by experts working for people with big fortunes and no scruples. None.

How could Brooks ignore all of this? Unless he’s the genteel, smiley face of this operation…the Good Cop.

[This comment--#169--was a New York Times editor's choice and got 120 reader recommendations]