edelsont | Entries tagged with critical thinking

Okay, here's the long-promised continuation of my so-called "holiday newsletter." First, a follow-up note to the first section, "computer programming," of the previous post: I finished several improvements to the Clojure code which calculates my income taxes, and got my federal and North Carolina returns filed.

What I promised for the continuation was some information about social interaction.

Background: I lead a pretty solitary life. Not a surprise: computer programming and writing are both mostly solitary activities, and I spend so much time on them, by choice, that there's relatively little left for real-time interaction with other humans.

Too little, in fact. And I am making that judgment, not on the basis of any general belief about how people "ought" to live, but on observation of myself. Sometimes I "go with the flow" for an extended period while programming and/or writing, and end up in a tense state, all tied up in knots.

It took me a long time to realize that I was (often) getting tense because I had been solitary for too long. But eventually I noticed something: not infrequently, if something led me to take "time out" from my "work," and spend an hour or two chatting informally with someone, I felt better—specifically, less tense—afterwards. In fact, it finally sunk in, that would often enable me to go back to "work" more cheerfully … and do better at it.

Once I became conscious of this, I did something about it. Actually, I became more consistent in something I was already doing … without consciously realizing why. Since I saw that I didn't spontaneously devote enough time to social interaction, I started planning it.

This has evolved to the point where, currently, there are three people with whom I have scheduled weekly conversations. The nature of the conversations is not so very different from ones that might occur without prearrangement. But when two people agree in advance to talk at a particular time, then it happens more often. For me, and these three friends, at least.

I am very grateful to these people. With their help, I like to say, I have managed to turn myself from a "ridiculously extreme introvert" into a [merely] "extreme introvert."

There's room for improvement. Not necessarily more of the same modality, though I don't rule that out. I've been thinking about my use of Internet "social media" (such as Dreamwidth itself).

There are some limitations, pretty much built in, as to how personally meaningful—how deep, if you will—such interactions tend to be. But perhaps, if folks figure out how, those limitations can be largely overcome. I hope to say more about this, soon, in another journal entry.

Current Mood: gregarious

In my last post I described a situation, then asked, in effect, "If you find yourself in this situation, what should you do?" Then I told you to stay tuned for the answer. So now it's high time to end the suspense, right?

Yes, but first, I need to clarify the situation, as I presented it last time. So here goes.

The hypothesis is that you're worried about some terrible thing that might happen. Your "rational mind" has told you that it probably won't happen—indeed, that it's so unlikely that it isn't worth worrying about. And yet, you find that you can't stop (worrying, that is).

That's an abstract outline of the situation. But the imagined situation that I presented was more concrete: I did specify the nature of that "terrible thing that might happen," which was the occasion of your worry. Namely, you were concerned about the possibility that Donald Trump might become president again.

And not that he might do so just any old way; I was more specific still. I raised the possibility that it might happen, in the 2024 election cycle, and after the votes were cast, because some state legislature didn't accept their voters' choice for president, and substituted their own preferred slate of presidential electors.

And that, I asked you to imagine, was the possibility you couldn't stop worrying about.

If you found yourself in that predicament, then what, indeed, would I advise you to do?

After all that buildup, I'm not going to give you "the" answer. I'm going to give you an answer: something that might be worth considering. Might be worth it, at least, if you're open to the possibility that your self-knowledge is not perfect. (For what it's worth, I don't believe that anyone's is, most certainly including my own.)

So: despite careful consideration, you cannot shake the cognitive dissonance between your rational estimation of the likelihood of the terrible event in question, and the emotional distress that proceeds from the thought of it. If that's the case, consider the possibility that the real cause of your distress is not … not exactly, not entirely … what you've been telling yourself it is.

What else might it be? Perhaps our recent experience with Trump has reminded you of something that's been true for a much longer time: that the USA has relatively weak social welfare programs, compared to most other highly developed (i.e. rich) countries. In matters of health care, education, retirement, unemployment insurance, and on and on … we have greater inequality: more specifically, Americans are more vulnerable. Even those of us who seem fairly secure can, as a result of some bad luck, become, rather suddenly, much less so.

And of course, dear reader, I am simply assuming, in what I write, that you think it should be otherwise: you think that government, in the USA, should be providing more of a safety net.

But wait. As I said, this deficiency in our social welfare programs is nothing new. That being the case, isn't it far-fetched to suppose that, when you think you are worrying specifically about Donald Trump's regaining the presidency (by fair means or foul), the real underlying cause of your anxiety is this longstanding difference between the USA and most other rich countries?

Perhaps not quite so far-fetched, if you consider a couple of things that are new—or at least, more obvious than they used to be. Consider, for one, the large numbers of people who are not just indifferent to social welfare programs: they are actively hostile to them. And in particular, the fact that a great many of those people are not rich: they are, themselves, among the more economically vulnerable folks in this nation.

And here's something else that also seems to me to make my hypothesis more plausible: our experiences in the Time of Trump could be causing us to see old problems, like the shortcomings of American social welfare programs, in a new light. Namely: perhaps it has relatively recently come to your attention that a great many Americans are willing and able to believe things that are, in your view [and mine], patently false. (It is one of my working assumptions that there is a distinction, even if not always clear-cut, between "matters of fact" and "matters of opinion". And I am talking about patently false beliefs about matters that, in my view, rightly belong in the former category.)

If I'm right about that, then is this latest point—that many Americans are surprisingly willing to believe utter nonsense—itself something new, or just something that's become more obvious? I readily admit that I don't know, but I suspect that it's some of both. There have been changes in how people communicate with another, and specifically in how people get (what they accept as) news. Let me put it like this: the potential for people to be awfully credulous has always been there, but it does seem plausible that recent developments have caused that potential to be more fully developed.

Here's a relatively succinct, somewhat less formal, statement of at least part of my point. We have millions of people in this country who profess the belief that Donald Trump won the 2020 election. I don't fully understand how they can believe that, but still: if they do believe that, then is it so surprising that they can also believe, for example, that Obamacare (especially if you call it by that name) is a very bad thing—for the country, and specifically for themselves?

So there you have it. We have this relatively new issue: the claim that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. And we have this much older issue: the belief, by those who are politically left of center, that American social welfare programs are insufficient. And finally, we have my claim: that the emergence of the former issue—and, in particular, what that emergence says about the mental faculties of many of the American poeple—has affected the outlook of many of us left-of-center people. In particular, and perhaps more than we realize, it has tended to undermine our confidence in how quickly and easily "public opinion" about the older-bread-and-butter issues can be changed.

And thus I say: it's not far-fetched to suppose that, if you are feeling anxiety which, on the surface, is tied to Trumpy issues like the "stolen" election, that anxiety may be masking another one: an anxiety about what the emergence of the new, Trumpy issues may portend about the prospects for progress on the old, bread-and-butter ones.

So. Am I done? I made a sort of promise to you—my hypothetical reader with anxieties curiously like my own. I said that I would give you some guidance. Have I done that?

I guess that depends on what sort of guidance you were expecting. I certainly haven't told you what petition to sign, or what meeting to attend. But I don't really believe that you thought I would.

I am certain of one thing: that I have helped, at least, myself. I have written myself into an improved state of mind. I am less in the thrall of an obsessive emotional hangover, from which I have been suffering since January 20 or so. I refer, of course, to the obession with the possibility of Trump's regaining the presidency, particularly by non-democratic means.

How did I do that? It wasn't by some feat of logic: I haven't proven anything, not even to myself. You could say, instead, that I have distracted myself; I have successfully widened my attention to a larger set of concerns. By shifting my attention, even for a short time, I managed to obtain a more lasting effect: I restarted the process of thinking, actively, about these other issues, which had been mostly forgotten during the emergency. And once restarted, that process took on, again, a momentum of its own.

It wasn't simply a matter of distraction, though; if it were, the replacement concerns could have been entirely unrelated, in their subject matter, to the original obsession. I am sure that the transition was helped by my noticing, along the way, the connections between the issues. I found that I better understood the older, "bread and butter" issues by seeing them in the light of the mentally grotesque "issues" that were brought to us by Trump. And vice versa.

Sometimes this kind of mental reorientation works, and sometimes it doesn't. It's not entirely a conscious thing, and certainly not something that can be accomplished by sheer force of will.

But who knows? If you actually have been suffering from anxieties like mine, then it just might work for you, too.

Pencils down, boys and girls. I asked you for your opinions on whether it is useful to call attention to threats of violence by Trump supporters. I held back on expressing my own opinion on the subject, so as not to bias yours. But that grace period has now ended.

So, do I think it is useful? A little. Not as much so as I thought as recently as yesterday.

The small amount of usefulness that I still perceive comes from this: if these threats of violence ever do turn into real violence, on a large scale, I think most people will find it easier to cope with this if it isn't a complete surprise. But that is, at most, a good reason to bring it up occasionally; to keep harping on it would be counterproductive.

I had another kind of alleged usefulness in mind, when I made the original journal entry which contained samples of threats. I thought that the existence of these threats was relevant, somehow, to a question currently facing us: whether to begin impeachment proceedings against President Trump.

I've changed my mind about that. I no longer think it is relevant, one way or the other.

If you disagree, I would [still] welcome your input on the subject. But otherwise ....

We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.

Current Mood: relieved
Current Music: Sondheim, "Not While I'm Around"

In my last journal entry, I told you what various sorts of people thought President Trump meant by the phase "totally destroy North Korea." Then I raised a question as to "what it all meant." (The question itself wasn't very specific. I had in mind something like this: from perusing this "data set" about people's interpretations, what -- if anything -- can we learn about how people's minds work, when they think about politics, in general?)

And then I offered an answer to that question ... though I told you at the time that it wasn't an answer that I actually believed. In summary, that answer (and my supposed justification for it) was:

different groups of Trump supporters believed different things about what he meant;
but the groups had something in common: what each group believed (about what Trump meant) matched up with what that same group would want him to do;
so -- since the two groups couldn't both be right about what he meant -- they were not being honest with themselves.

So now, my job is to tell you why I don't really think that.

Even if that argument did support the conclusion that some people were not being honest with themselves, it would certainly not support the conclusion that all of the Trump supporters were guilty of that. At the very least, it would leave open the possibility that some of them were, and some of them weren't.

Here's an example. You will recall that my own original interpretation of Trump's phrase was: the United States would, " ... if forced to defend itself and its allies ...", drop lots of nuclear bombs on North Korea. Or, as I later crudely put it, would "nuke the NoKies until they glow." So now -- just supposing that we still consider that to be the correct interpretation -- what would follow from that?

Well ... you may also recall that one group of Trump supporters (namely, most of the people leaving comments on Breitbart News) interpreted those words of his in exactly the same way that I did. So were those people failing to be honest with themselves? Meaning that I believed something because the evidence supported it, while they believed the same thing for a completely different reason, namely, because they wanted to believe it?

That could be so. But "could be" isn't good enough here. The more appropriate question is: would I have rational justification for claiming, on the basis of what we've seen, that this (I and they believing the same thing, but for a completely different reason) actually is the case?

I think not. I think it would be more plausible (and more fair-minded) to suppose that, if I have good reasons for believing something, and they believe the same thing, then they believe it for good reasons as well.

I do recall that there's one important difference between me and that group of people: while we both think that Trump (was saying that he) would drop a lot of nuclear bombs on North Korea, they also approve of his doing so. And I don't; I find the prospect utterly abhorrent.

But, for present purposes, so what? So their value judgment is wrong (in my eyes). Does it necessarily follow, even from my perspective, that they cannot be rational about a related, but still distinct, matter, namely, about what their president means by what he says? I don't see why.

If I'm right about that, then we're left, at most, with this: the other group of Trump supporters are not being honest with themselves. That would be the group who have a different belief as to what Trump was talking about; they believe that he was threatening, at most, some form of military action with more limited goals, and less devastating effects. Like "mere" regime change, for instance.

So let's look a little more at that group of people. And let's continue, for now, simply to assume that my original understanding of what Trump meant to say (namely, that he was prepared to drop lots of nukes on the NoKies) was correct.

If my interpretation is [assumed to be] right, and they have a different interpretation, then their interpretation is wrong. That, for once, is pretty straightforward. But does it follow that they are not being honest with themselves?

Not necessarily. It doesn't even necessarily follow that they are deficient in logic. It could be (and, indeed, it seems more likely) that they reach a different conclusion because they start with different premises.

If they and I are getting news from different sources, then they and I have different sets of facts of which we are aware. This doesn't necessarily mean that they or I are victims of "fake news," believing things that are factually false (although that could also be the case). If each "side" knows things that the other simply doesn't know, then they can come to different conclusions, with each being completely rational about it.

How does that apply to the present case: to the question of what Donald Trump meant by "totally destroy North Korea"? Here's a simple example. The following are three utterances by Mr. Trump:

"The United States has great strength and patience, but if it is forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea."
"Rocket Man is on a suicide mission for himself and for his regime."
"North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States. They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen."

Now imagine two people; call them X and Y. Both of them are aware of the first quote above. X is aware of the second quote, but Y is not. Conversely, Y is aware of the third quote, but X is not.

Other things being equal, I would expect X, who knows about " ... a suicide mission for himself and for his regime", to be more likely to think that Trump, in the "totally destroy" sentence, was talking about regime change. More likely, that is, than Y, who knows, instead, about "fire and fury."; Y would be more likely to think that Trump was talking about dropping multiple nuclear bombs.

In that example, the quotes are all real, but you might reasonably think that the suppositions about what the two people know are not realistic. You might think, in other words, that almost anyone who was aware of the first quote would also be at least vaguely aware of both the second and third, as well.

Fair enough. But now imagine this, instead. X vividly remembers many times when Trump has seemed to threaten (or favor, or suggest) violence in various forms. Y, who gets her news from different sources, has never heard about most of those. Wouldn't you think, in this case, that X would be readier than Y to hear a great deal of violence in the words "totally destroy North Korea"? (Once again, would be readier ... other things being equal.)

That does seem like a plausible example, doesn't it? I mean, there at least could be news sources which report extensively on Trump, but which (for example) focus almost entirely on his more serious utterances on matters of policy, rather than his off-the-cuff remarks about punching protesters in the face. So someone who got her Trump news from sources like that would simply, and rationally, have a different picture of the man.

And thus, there would be no need to suppose that she was failing to be honest with herself.

And all this, mind you, is without even considering the possibility that my [original] interpretation of Trump's infamous remark might actually be ... gasp ... wrong. Please, don't get me started on that. Not today, anyway.

In parting, let me go all meta on you for a bit. What is this journal entry about? About North Korea? Donald Trump? Well, yes, both. But also ....

Even more fundamentally, I think, it's about two other things. One of them is generally referred to as "critical thinking." The other is civility in political discourse: the ability to express disagreement without impugning the motives of those with whom you disagree.

And if I had to narrow it down to just one topic, I'd go with critical thinking. I think that is the foundation which makes civil discourse possible. If that isn't obvious, consider this: your ability to do critical thinking is woefully incomplete unless it includes, in particular, the self-critical kind.