From: Francois-Rene Rideau (fare@tunes.org)
Date: Mon Apr 23 2001 - 18:08:14 MDT
Dear extropians,
I'm new on the list, so please don't hesitate with (private or public)
remarks to make me a better list-member. [BTW, weird to meet here people
whom I know from armchair@gmu.edu or comp.lang.forth]
I've been told that some among you were experts in memetic engineering,
and I would like to know if you could teach me how to put this science
in good use to fight the fallacies with which associative thinkers are
bringing doom on the world and slowing down progress.
The questions that I wonder about are as follow:
* since, in democracies, most people seem to follow irrational arguments
in making important decisions about other people (including us), how can
we engineer discourse so as to disarm bad memes?
* It is rather easy to analyse the fallacies that people use,
and the mental associations that these fallacies are based upon;
but what about synthetizing anti-fallacies to fight them?
* are there meta-rational memes the use of which can encourage rationality?
* are there good models of (human or AI) minds that account for the use
of below-described rational and irrational thought patterns?
Below is a rant on irrationality that you may safely ignore;
it tries to summarize my current experience with discussing
with irrational people.
[ François-René ÐVB Rideau | Reflection&Cybernethics | http://fare.tunes.org ]
[ TUNES project for a Free Reflective Computing System | http://tunes.org ]
Advertising may be described as the science of arresting the human
intelligence long enough to get money from it.
-- Stephen Leacock.
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Rant on irrationality
I've recently tried to analyze the arguments by collectivists, luddites,
egalitarians, etc., during a number of rational discussions I tried to have
with them. I found that actually, these people weren't rational at all,
that their thought mechanism was based on irrational bilateral associative
process: "concepts" (or rather, targets for emotion) are linked to other by
symmetric linkers of either attraction or repulse, and gathered into big
categories. When making a choice, the irrational thinker will thus consider
the alternatives as opposing categories, and choose to side with whichever
category he associates his "I" with most strength. On the contrary, a
rational thinker will use assymmetric linkers between concepts, that express
directed causal constructs; the resulting structures are thus conceptual
graphs rather than emotional pools.
This phenomenon can be observed in that during a tentative rational
discussion, the irrational people will likely to respond to keywords
or short expressions, rather than to the overall meaning of a sentence,
thus often missing the point when a sentence is structured around
something not reducible to symmetric associations. They will be sensitive
to each other's "we or them" categorization and similar calls to take sides.
They develop opinions from a net of emotion-driven contacts, and are prone
to make blunt assertions on topics they completely ignore, based on
emotional analogy (e.g. "fascism is an individualistic ideology", deduced
from categorizing fascism as evil and collectivism as good).
Because of their associative thinking system, conversation topics
will leak and dilute instead of focusing on key arguments. Soon, any
opinion divergence will reorient toward emotional poles with which the
irrational thinker identifies most or that he hates most (hence the Godwin
Law about random usenet discussions eventually involving nazism,
and thus ending, since there's not much more to be said after having
associated someone with the category of Ultimate Evil(tm)).
When faced with a rational analysis of their own fallacies, these
people will miss the point, both invoking relativism to dismiss their
opponent's points and absolutism to defend their assumptions.
If I understand correctly the little brain anatomy I learnt, symmetric
associative behavior is typical of the "limbic" secondary area of the
neocortex where emotion and basic memory are said to reside, whereas
structured thinking is the fruit of the tertiary "associative" areas.
So this might mean that some of these tertiary areas are underdeveloped,
or wired in some bad way, or something (I admit I have but a primitive
model of the mind). Now, there are several reasons that lead me to think
it's probably more of a software problem than a hardware problem (although
a software problem in some critical area): firstly, reported pathologies
are very different from this kind of irrationality, so this must not be
about atrophy of some organs; second, said irrational people seem to be
able to acquire many proficiencies that depend on rational mechanisms
(sometimes even involving higher mathematics or formal logic), so this
is about selective irrationality, maybe size- and topic- selective with
respect to the problem set finally, it so happens that rational people
themselves use the same mechanisms as irrational people as part of their
own cognitive processes, except that they latter use reason as a filter
to eliminate fallacious associations, to requalify previous associations,
etc. The latter long-term requalification, as well as the sequentiality
involved in short-term filtering of "big" concepts, mean that rationality
has to do with the ability to dynamically modify the wiring of concepts
in the limbic memory/evaluation system, depending on new filtering results.
Often, the internal structure of natural phenomena can be better understood
by examining their failure patterns when placed in various situations.
Maybe this rant on irrationality can bring some insight on what rationality
is, and how an AI can or cannot develop human-like "intelligence".
Other side questions include the problem of the relationship between
rationality and "intelligence"; how much of rationality is inborn, how
much is acquired; how much rationality does use of human languages involve
(not much it seems); what's the relationship between rationality and the
builtin pattern-recognizers that give birth to our geometric, musical, or
other "intuitions"?
Are there books, articles, whatever, on this topic?
[Something terrible in egalitarian France is that so many irrational people
are raised, through the schooling system, to titles, diplomas, grades, etc,
that make them believe they are "intellectuals", and thus conferred
authority on questions upon which they have "as much of a right to" an
opinion as anyone else, like everyone. This matches very well the concept
of "democracy", whereby it is number, not reason, that should prevail;
which gets worse as political power of people (political majorities) over
other people (minorities) gives weight to emotional decisions that are not
corrected by the feedback exerted on decision-makers when they are
responsible for their decisions, and their self-interest leads them
to make good use of experience.]
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