Do you all agree that people are massively flawed?
To say that something is “flawed” is to say that it doesn’t measure up to some standard. That is, “flawed” is at least a two-place predicate: X is flawed according to standard Y.
Consider: Humans sometimes make errors in arithmetic. When adding up long columns of numbers, we sometimes forget to carry a digit, and thus arrive at the wrong answer. I do not think that we would want to say that just because most people can’t add up a hundred numbers without error, that the correct sum is undefined. Rather, humans are not perfect at adding.
A human mind can construct a standard — addition without error — that an unaided human cannot reliably meet.
Few people, I suspect, would take this to be some huge indictment of our worth.
And yet we can imagine entities that are better at adding than an unaided human. And we do imagine them, and we make them, and we are better off for doing so. A clerk equipped with a comptometer is more effective than one who must add via pencil and paper.
Documenting those areas in which human cognition or intuition doesn’t reliably get the right answer — and particularly those where we do reliably make an intuitive leap to a wrong answer — is a step toward being more effective.
Good point. It is true that we say that humans are flawed we do this relative to a standard. I think one good way to think of this is in terms of our expectations. We can compare how flawed we thought that we are prior to reading up on cognitive psychology to how flawed we now think that we are (when doing this, it is of course important to try to avoid hindsight bias). I think that most people are surprised by cognitive psychology’s findings (I certainly was, and didn’t trust Tversky and Kahneman’s results from the start, but was eventually convinced). The reason is that our folk or naive theory of human mind says that we are much more rational than scientific psychology has shown. See:
Basically, my view is that the “Panglossians” (see lukeprog’s comments) refuse to give up on this pretheoretical image in the face of evidence. They are thus conservatives not only in the sense that they don’t think that human cognition can be radically improved, but also in the sense that they think that our “common sense” image of ourselves is largely right. There have of course been many other examples of such conservatism in the history of science—people have refused to believe “strange” doctrine such as relativity theory, Darwinism, and what-not. Non-naturalistic analytic philosophy is to a very large extent conservative in this sense (something which is pointed out by naturalistic critics such as Gellner—who criticized ordinary language philosophy’s defence of common sense in his Words and Things (1959) - Bishop and Trout (2004; attack on the conservatism of “standard analytic epistemology) - and Ladyman and Ross (2007; attack on the conservatism of “neo-scholastic metaphysics” which they claim is based on “A-level chemistry” rather than cutting-edge science).
Of course your pre-theoretical intuitions do have some value and should be used as a guide in science, but too often, people attach too much weight to them and too little to empirical evidence. I take it that this is an example of this.
To say that something is “flawed” is to say that it doesn’t measure up to some standard. That is, “flawed” is at least a two-place predicate: X is flawed according to standard Y.
Consider: Humans sometimes make errors in arithmetic. When adding up long columns of numbers, we sometimes forget to carry a digit, and thus arrive at the wrong answer. I do not think that we would want to say that just because most people can’t add up a hundred numbers without error, that the correct sum is undefined. Rather, humans are not perfect at adding.
A human mind can construct a standard — addition without error — that an unaided human cannot reliably meet.
Few people, I suspect, would take this to be some huge indictment of our worth.
And yet we can imagine entities that are better at adding than an unaided human. And we do imagine them, and we make them, and we are better off for doing so. A clerk equipped with a comptometer is more effective than one who must add via pencil and paper.
Documenting those areas in which human cognition or intuition doesn’t reliably get the right answer — and particularly those where we do reliably make an intuitive leap to a wrong answer — is a step toward being more effective.
Good point. It is true that we say that humans are flawed we do this relative to a standard. I think one good way to think of this is in terms of our expectations. We can compare how flawed we thought that we are prior to reading up on cognitive psychology to how flawed we now think that we are (when doing this, it is of course important to try to avoid hindsight bias). I think that most people are surprised by cognitive psychology’s findings (I certainly was, and didn’t trust Tversky and Kahneman’s results from the start, but was eventually convinced). The reason is that our folk or naive theory of human mind says that we are much more rational than scientific psychology has shown. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Na%C3%AFve_realism_(psychology)
Basically, my view is that the “Panglossians” (see lukeprog’s comments) refuse to give up on this pretheoretical image in the face of evidence. They are thus conservatives not only in the sense that they don’t think that human cognition can be radically improved, but also in the sense that they think that our “common sense” image of ourselves is largely right. There have of course been many other examples of such conservatism in the history of science—people have refused to believe “strange” doctrine such as relativity theory, Darwinism, and what-not. Non-naturalistic analytic philosophy is to a very large extent conservative in this sense (something which is pointed out by naturalistic critics such as Gellner—who criticized ordinary language philosophy’s defence of common sense in his Words and Things (1959) - Bishop and Trout (2004; attack on the conservatism of “standard analytic epistemology) - and Ladyman and Ross (2007; attack on the conservatism of “neo-scholastic metaphysics” which they claim is based on “A-level chemistry” rather than cutting-edge science).
Of course your pre-theoretical intuitions do have some value and should be used as a guide in science, but too often, people attach too much weight to them and too little to empirical evidence. I take it that this is an example of this.