September 14, 2019
Barbara Tversky was a guest on the Sam Harris podcast this week. Some thoughts come to mind.
First, I’m going to buy her book Mind In Motion: How Action Shapes Thought. (It’s a book, so I tried to underline it, but that would make it a hyperlink, wouldn’t it? Therefore not a button on the toolbar. But I digress.) Fascinating topic and looks/smells/seems like a probably right take. More on this some other time.
Second, the comments below the podcast, always a minefield since Sam gets political, were particularly appalling in that multiple trolls found fit to opine that they could not follow Barbara’s reasoning because of her voice. Could not finish the podcast, so annoying was it. The specific issue was “up-talking,” which I take to mean a lift on last syllables. Apparently some people read this as turning statements into questions. In a Valley Girl way. And it drives them crazy.
Didn’t really notice this myself, and I don’t think it would have dampened my interest in what the woman, a recognized world-class source on the subject, was saying. I think the real issue, truth be told, is that the commenters in question can’t process, or perhaps even recognize as such, non-trivial information coming from a woman’s mouth. The sound of it interferes with their acceptance of the content as even potentially meaningful. And this woman graduated from college in 1963, so there are multiple levels of potential prejudice. They need to look inside their own minds on that and ask themselves if they have been discounting good information all their lives only because of the sound with which it was delivered.
Like me, they could of course simply go out and buy the book. Which brings up case in point/example-from-life one.
Example One. It may have been Molly Ivins who said something to the effect that, when people hear your Texas accent, they immediately knock twenty points off their estimate of your IQ. Conditioned at a northern boarding school that routinely attracted scions of southern families, I recall the occasional snickers in class when the suchlike scions answered questions out loud. You had to teach yourself to fight this urge because, after reading what they wrote and seeing the grade on it, you came to realize that Gomer Pyle was probably smarter than you were. This brings us to case in point two, further up the road, where someone gonna do you like they done me.
Example Two. In a large lecture hall at a famous university on a huge blackboard an eminent professor was writing out a giant formula which explained every little thing about something or other. We scribbled it down as received truth. A hand went up.
Picture two hundred eyes turning sneeringly toward an idiot. And these were piercing eyes, mostly male, the sneers privileged and haughty. This was, after all, the place where the likes of Einstein and Von Neumann took walks and smoked pipes together. Who you? Who you, …..girl?
It did not help that the raised arm was attached to someone academically cursed with the outward appearance of a full-size Barbie doll. True California. Aphrodite in the bloom of freshman youth. Legally Blond, the movie, but in real life. And, no, this was not the cab-driving, hands-in-her-back-pockets-Betty-Davis-style supermodel who recently won a Nobel. Back in those days that one was similarly incognito; just John Wheeler’s assistant – match you pitcher for pitcher at the pub.
Sneers widened to grins of anticipation. What idiocy might possibly emanate from Barbie’s lips? How harshly, or better yet condescendingly and knowingly, but still harshly, will it be dealt with? What emanated follows.
According to Barbie, the third term in the lengthy equation appeared to have been incorrectly stated. Visible grins turned to audible snickers. All eyes, and the professor, turned toward the blackboard. Oops. Heads turned back to scribbling received truth, but now knowing that all or parts of it might have been incorrectly stated. This brings us to case in point/example three, which is more maxim than example.
Example Three. In a boiler room the steamfitter-philosopher Ten-Ply held court daily. His most famous maxim? Consider the source. Ten-Ply never commented on any issue brought before him until he had considered the source. This cuts in two directions. If we do the same, we filter out nonsense from sources such as Alex Jones and we avoid discounting valid information simply because we have a prejudice against the delivery vehicle. Either way, it’s a necessary first step.
This brings us full circle back to the Sam Harris podcast (no it doesn’t, but gotta wrap up somewhere). It never ceases to amaze that Sam’s comments section, which I read as one of several barometers of the national level of vitriol and for no other good reason, always seems to contain a few calls for the podcast to include video. (Much in the way ASMR has been turning into soft-core porn. The “A” stands for Audio, people. Audio can convey little information about cleavage. I think I just answered my own question.) Sam, are you unaware, they seem to ask, that we now have moving pictures? The better and more quickly to tune out the content, I suppose. Gray hair? Hit the dislike button. Wrong color skin? Hit the dislike button. Wrong gender? You get the picture. Or maybe you don’t. Since it’s not a picture.
information intolerance – the great crippler of would-be-modern societies – motion toward an inverse relationship between the purity of information and the ability of many to accept it. A poison refined in advertising. How do I know the product is great? Why, they say it is. And they couldn’t say it if it weren’t true. Could they? I mean, somebody would stop them. Right? Surely they would. As in how come they can put a man on the Moon but they can’t make a decaffeinated coffee that tastes good?
Consider the source. Consider Complexity. Not everything can be dumbed down. The medium is not always the message.
MOE
M.I.C.H. – Modernity, Intelligence, Complexity, Humanity
