This post by Noah Millman is a good discussion of the role “flinching away” played in causing the Eurozone crisis, the Iraq War blunder, and the housing bubble. The examples might be too politically controversial for pedagogical use, but it is a worth reading, thought-provoking article. Excerpt:
What these situations have in common is not arrogance – the assumption that, of course, whatever we do will work out and, if it doesn’t, well, that’s a problem for the little people, not for us. It’s insecurity. Dissenters weren’t dismissed because they were upstarts and nobodies who weren’t worth listening to – they were dismissed because if they were right then what were we going to do? If Greece wasn’t really meeting the criteria for EU membership, then what on earth are we going to do about it? Better not to see what they are up to. If housing valuations are wildly out of line with fundamentals, then what are we supposed to do to keep consumption up? And what are we going to do about the mountain of new, unstable mortgage debt? Better not to countenance the possibility of a nationwide housing correction. If invading Iraq is only going to make us weaker, then how are we supposed to establish that we are in control of events in the region?
Larison thinks that ideological thinking is what causes a refusal to accept threatening facts. I think that has the arrow of causation backwards: threatening facts are what prompt a turn to ideological thinking as a way of getting said facts out of the mental frame. And it is an insecure mind – insecure of its own judgment, or its own expertise, or its own authority, or what-have-you – for whom facts are threatening things.
This post by Noah Millman is a good discussion of the role “flinching away” played in causing the Eurozone crisis, the Iraq War blunder, and the housing bubble. The examples might be too politically controversial for pedagogical use, but it is a worth reading, thought-provoking article. Excerpt:
“If a superintelligent AI is going to take over the world eventually, then what on Earth are we going to do about it?”