Critical thinking as community value

Last month, I explored the idea that empiricism and critical thinking are (or should be) core values in social justice.

On the other hand… how good of an idea is that really? While we may agree that critical thinking is a good thing, just because a community values critical thinking does not mean they are good at it. In fact, communities that value critical thinking are often bad at it.

This is an easy observation to make, here, because I don’t need to argue for it, I just need to gesture at what we already know. In short, we are a community that’s been burned. The skeptical, atheist, and Rationalist communities all valued critical thinking in slightly different ways, and each has had its problems. All the praise of critical thinking did not save us.

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Social justice and empiricism

I’ve toyed with the idea that one of the major values of social justice is basically empiricism.  Social justice contains certain theories, but you can’t just rely on theories.  Theories live or die by the whims of empirical reality.  In order to figure out the best way to live in a diverse society, we need to rely on observations.  In other words, we have to actually listen to people, not just make assumptions.

Of course, I would think that empiricism is a social justice value.  I spent a decade involved in skeptical and atheist activism, then departed for more social-justice-oriented waters.  It’s natural for me to draw mental connections and decide that actually, both of these things that I have liked are founded upon similar values.  Call it a personal pop philosophy.  If we’re being serious, I think most skeptics would not have thought to apply empiricism in the particular way that I do; and most social justice advocates would not name empiricism as one of their core values.

But maybe they ought to?  I think social justice could benefit from more attentiveness to epistemology.

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Against fallacy-spotting

In spaces where people deliberately learn critical thinking, it’s common for people to learn a list of logical fallacies–in much the same way that one might learn a list of names of Pokémon. Then, to reinforce this knowledge, we start spotting the fallacies in the wild. It’s a good learning exercise. But once all is said and done, and you’ve successfully internalized the list, what then? Is fallacy-spotting a good way of engaging with arguments?

I don’t think so. I’ve long said that it’s obnoxious and unproductive to explicitly name fallacies in the course of an argument. But even if you keep it to yourself, I think fallacies are an extremely limited and misleading way of engaging with arguments.

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Risky heroics: Examples

Previously, I discussed the trope of heroes risking it all, and why I think it’s a bad moral value.  Now I want to discuss some case studies. I feel a bit embarrassed to talk about my examples, because arguably, if we want to talk about risky heroics we should be talking about popular movies. But I don’t watch those, and am unwilling to put up with one for a blog post. So instead you’re getting a couple obscure moments that happened to come to mind.

1. Yasna’s choice

The Invincible is a game based on Stanislaw Lem’s sci-fi novel of the same name, although it contains an original story that merely echoes the original novel. It follows Yasna, a scientist who is stranded on the planet Regis III, where she witnesses a series of strange events. (I think it is a decent game, if you like narrative walking sims like Firewatch, but I’m not here to offer a review.)

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Risky heroics

It’s fair to say that the Scouts are obsessed with the mythology of the heroic rescue. When I was a teenager, they would regularly circulate stories of scouts rescuing people with medical emergencies, or who fell in the water.

It is also fair to say that this obsession with heroics is shared by our culture at large. Most of our stories–not just the superhero stories–are about people taking huge risks to save everyone.

However, I think there’s a major difference between the true heroic narratives as told by Scouts vs those told in fiction. In fiction, a huge risk means nothing because the outcome is decided by the author, not by probability. In the real world, encouraging scouts to take huge risks is basically asking for tragedy.

The scouting way is not to take huge risks, it’s to be prepared. In particular, scouts take lots of emergency response training. Something the training will say over and over again: don’t put yourself in danger trying to save someone else. For example, the Lifesaving Merit Badge emphasizes avoiding direct contact with a drowning person, because they can pull you into the water. Above all else, avoid creating a situation where now two people need rescue. First, call for help, then try safe methods of rescue.

For all my negative experiences with Scouts (not getting into it), I think the emphasis on emergency preparedness and safe heroics is laudable. In contrast, I do not think our culture’s emphasis on risky heroics is very laudable at all. This is a perpetual source of moral dissonance for me.

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Laudatory categories

Theseus’ ship is a philosophical thought experiment that asks what happens if you take a ship, replace it piece by piece until none of the original pieces are left. Is it the same ship, or is it a different one?

Now imagine the following response: “It depends. Is the ship seaworthy?”

This response is a bit absurd, because clearly the question does not depend on whether the ship is seaworthy. A ship may still be the same ship while falling into disrepair, or perhaps the ship was never seaworthy in the first place. And on the other hand, you could have another ship which is also seaworthy but is nonetheless a different ship. We may disagree on how to answer the question about Theseus’ ship, but surely whether the ship is seaworthy is besides the point.

Nonetheless, this seems to be the way people think about many categories. A laudatory category is one whose definition has become intertwined with the question of “is it good?” A pejorative category is one whose definition has become intertwined with the question “is it bad?” Let’s talk about a few examples.

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Accuracy standards on the internet

A basic observation about the internet is that there are differing accuracy standards in different contexts. For example, the accuracy standards of a newspaper are supposed to be higher than that of a “hot take”. This here blog has standards somewhere in the middle. I’m not speaking extemporaneously, so I’m expected to do some fact checking. But I’m also not paid to do that for you, so reader beware.

Conflict can occur when content of certain accuracy standards get judged by different accuracy standards than was understood by the author. The classic example is when someone tweets out a casual thought they had while in the shower, and then it goes viral because it contains some error. A small indiscretion–a stupid thought like what we all have–gets turned into a large one.

Audience size has a lot to do with it. The price of an error is spreading misinformation, which is proportional to the size of the audience. The price of fact-checking is spending time to do your homework, which is unrelated to the size of the audience. So for a larger audience, the cost-benefit analysis leans more and more towards fact-checking. For a small audience, at some point it’s like, why bother? You can issue a correction later if you have to.

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