I totally agree with you.*

It really bothers me when people decide to just close their minds to discussion. I'll probably post about that soon, myself.

One of the complicating factors, though, is that people have different capacities for analytical and critical thought, and we need to have ways for people who have low-quality consciences to still be able to function ethically. Among other things, this issue makes democracy a hard problem.

*Standard caveat: "inasmuch as total agreement is even possible, given that this is a terribly complex subject that requires a lot of careful thought. Actually, it's most likely that I just mean that this is a really good point that I want to express approval for, at least on first reflection, and that I'll be considering it in further depth." Yeah, you know what I mean.

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I also agree with your post a lot. dr_tectonic, I am somwhat perturbed by your comment that having a low capacity for analytical and critical thought means that said person would have a low-quality conscience. I'm not sure I can put into words precisely why it bothers me, but I thought I'd say that it does :-) Perhaps it is because I have always pictured conscience to be located in the heart, rather than in the head. For one, I think children sometimes have a better "conscience" than adults do, and analytical and critical thought does not begin to develop until late childhood/early adolescence.

Perhaps a working definition of conscience is needed?

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Yeah, we're probably using the word in different senses. Or rather, maybe what I mean is that there's a couple of different ways that someone's conscience can be... insufficient? in figuring out what's the right thing to do in a particular situation.

Let's see, if we use as a provisional definition of conscience something like "an instinct for doing the right thing", then I think you are right that many children have a stronger conscience than many adults do. How much people listen to their conscience is an individual variation; I don't know how or if it correlates with thinking skills.

The other thing, though, is that there are thorny problems where it's really hard to decide exactly what the right thing to do is. And in those situations, I think it's appropriate to allow for people wanting to delegate the decision of "what's right" to people who are more knowledgeable or informed, or who reason better, or are just generally more capable at figuring out what "the right thing" is. Heck, I think that I have a pretty good conscience, and there are plenty of arenas that I would rather delegate than try to work out what's right myself.

So that's what I was trying to say, and I think I phrased it poorly. "Conscience" is better applied to a person's impulse to do the right thing, and the quality I was referring to is the ability to effectively act on that impulse. Maybe it should be called something like "applied conscience"?

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Question for further research: how do people who say "$AUTHORITY_FIGURE said it, I believe it, that settles it" actually make their decisions, and how are they persuaded to change their minds? If $AUTHORITY_FIGURE is alive (e.g., Rush Limbaugh), how do people choose their $AUTHORITY_FIGURE and what circumstances cause them to switch to a new one? If $AUTHORITY_FIGURE is deadnot in a position to personally offer a running commentary on the events of the day (e.g., Jesus), how are people persuaded to modify the way they interpret the doctrines of $AUTHORITY_FIGURE?

Case in point: A few generations ago, it was S.O.P. for Christian evangelicals to not get involved in the sordid world of politics, and concentrate their efforts on convincing other people to become evangelical Christians. Obviously, that changed at some point. How did that happen?

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There's a lot of research being done on the psychology of influence. I stumbled across this page five or six years ago primarily because Brad Sagarin (a crufty old TEP I knew in college) was involved with it; haven't reread it and dunno if it's still at all relevant to anything but thought it might interest you.

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What is one's conscience, if not an ability to (often subconsciously and intuitively) judge whether an act meets some set of standards as to what is "right?"

What makes your vague set of standards that you've derived over thirty-some-odd years of individual personal experience better than the teachings of a religion that has developed over 2,000 years in the hands of thousands of scholars and hundreds of millions of individuals, and played a key role in establishing some of the most powerful and most free civilizations on earth?

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Nu, because you've experienced it.

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Hm. It's an interesting question. Some unrelated off-the-cuff responses:

• You're setting up the wrong comparison.
  It's not "my interpretations of life vs. the church's teachings", although we sloppily refer to it that way.
  It's "my interpretations of life vs. my interpretations of the church's teachings"... or possibly "my interpretations of life vs. your interpretations of the church's teachings" in the case of someone who isn't even reading the text, but just listening to a preacher... or "my interpretations of life vs. your interpretations of life" in the analogous secular case.
  Which still doesn't answer your question of why pick one over the other, but at least removes a misleading factor from the inequality.
  
• You're illegitimately creating a forced-choice situation.
  I'm not drawing a distinction between, on the one hand, discarding all external input and going with your gut, and on the other hand ignoring your own judgement and becoming a pure vessel for someone else's teachings.
  I'm drawing a distinction between becoming a pure vessel for someone else's teachings, and relying on your judgement as informed by, among other things, those teachings.
  The teachings can be actively involved either way. It's not an AorB, it's an Aor(A,B, ...).
  Which still doesn't answer your question, but removes further gunk from its formulation.
  
• I'm not saying it's "better" personally.
  That is, I'm not saying that someone who becomes a pure vessel blah blah is a worse human being than one who relies on judgement as informed by blah blah.
  That's not to say I don't think it's true... merely that I'm not saying it, and it isn't necessary to my point (positing that I have a point, which I'm somewhat uncertain about). Whether I think it's true might be the subject of another post.
  

All of which is, admittedly, mere sophistry.

I think the interesting answer is that I believe the right to vote implies a responsibility to make up your own damned mind about things. I can't easily justify this belief; I'll have to think harder about it, but it seems to derive from an only-partially-articulable model of how voting within populations works as a reasonable decision-making dynamic.
Come to think of it, I've stumbled across this belief before in other forms -- most recently with respect to the electoral college -- and have never quite been able to articulate it.
It's the same kind of vague systems intuition I often get at work that leads to statements like "I can't prove it, but I suspect doing this will foul up our tax calculation in situations where there are a lot of different types of taxable charges at once".

Anyway, defensible or not it's the judgement underlying why I draw such a distinction between personal and political action in this thread.
If I choose to ignore my personal judgement about what's true and false, right and wrong, etc., that's a personal choice and I live with the consequences. If I go out and vote while doing so, though... I dunno. It seems like I'm doing damage to the system there, but I have a very hard time defending or even articulating what damage to which system.

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Ooo, I think you're getting near a subject that I've been pondering recently!

I agree that a right to participate in the decision-making process (that is, voting) is (or rather, should be) tied to a reponsibility to be informed about the issues being decided, and that it's bothersome when people vote based not on their own understanding, but based on the positions advocated by other, highly-visible/popular people.

Separately, it's important that people whose lives are impacted by the decision get their interests fairly represented in the decision-making process. So, in a democracy, we try to do that by involving them directly in the process.

The problem is that I think it's too hard for everyone to become sufficiently informed about all the issues they are asked to weigh in on. Not only is it burdensome, I think that there will always be some people who, for whatever reason (innate capacity, circumstance, external influence, etc.) are incapable of being well-informed participants. But they still need to have their interests and desires represented fairly.

So we need to figure out better systems for dealing with that problem, because I don't think that representative democracy (as it is practiced) does a good enough job.

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I'm drawing a distinction between becoming a pure vessel for someone else's teachings, and relying on your judgement as informed by, among other things, those teachings.

Nobody is a "pure vessel for someone else's teachings." Even the most snowed under cult member is making a choice to continue to follow the leader's teachings. (And this is true even if, say, the cult leader has blocked them from having enough information to make an informed choice.)

This means that it's a matter of degree. Some people have learned that deference to the opinions of others is a good idea; either because this way they get along better in society, or alternatively, because they think they are bad reasoners and choose to rely on the reasoning of others. (Still not pure vessels though.) Sounds like you dislike the first of these.

But wait: the first of these reduces to the second if you think about it.

So why is this not just "bad reasoners scare me"?

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Worth noting, I think, is that in a republic (which is what the US is, NOT a democracy) we don't actually vote on issues - we vote for the people to whom we will delegate the responsibility of making decisions about the issues.

Tangentially: Does your position imply an obligation to run for office oneself rather than delegating that responsibility to other people by electing them?

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It's hard to know where to insert this into the conversation. :)

I disagree with the bright line you are drawing between being informed (relying on your own judgement) and believing someone else (relying on someone else's judgement).

In most aspects of politics, I have no good way of getting information which does not involve relying on other people's judgement. The best I can do in first-hand judgement is watch politicians on TV and think to myself about whether I like how they look, and that's hardly a way to make a decision. What they say, how that matches "real life", all of that is filtered to me through other people's decisions as to what to edit and what to annotate.

When I decide to read the Economist or the Weekly World News, that's all making a choice about believing someone else's judgement. And when I ask tirinian who to vote for Registrar of Probate (or whatever), I'm trusting someone else's judgement more explicitly, because I know he's spent more time paying attention to it than I want to.

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What makes your vague set of standards that you've derived over thirty-some-odd years of individual personal experience better...

That's actually a very important (and tough) question.

I would say: first, "heritage" (long dev time, many developers, lots of beta-testers) cannot be regarded as an indicator of quality in an ethical system, because there are many different systems that have roughly equal weight of heritage, but are totally incompatible with one another. And they can't all be correct. So to some extent, you have to use your own vague set of standards, if for no other reason than to pick between sets of religious teachings.

Furthermore, I am more informed about the current state of my particular piece of the world than anyone else, so my standards are far more topical. (Which I think is teddywolf's point.) Plus, rapidly-changing world means that the religious teachings are, in general, perpetually out of date on important issues.

Finally, since I'm the one who has to deal with the outcomes generated by my decisions, regardless of which set of standards I'm using, it makes sense to use my own judgment and not someone else's. Because, y'know, I don't really have any other option.

Ooo, and there's the hybrid vigor argument, too! Doesn't it make sense that by constructing my standards from the best of the various existing systems, that the result will be better than any of the individual contributors? (Okay, it totally depends on quality of the selection process, and it's by no means guaranteed, but it's at least theoretically sensible, right?)

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Is it ridiculously inconsistent of me to disagree with you here?

Agreed about heritage, though somewhat disagreed about your reasons.

Disagreed about having to use your own vague standards to pick between sets of teachings; many (most?) people don't really pick between sets of teachings at all, they go with what they were born into.

Kinda agreed about you having more topical judgements (temporal, spatial, organizational) but not sure how relevant that is... I often find that focus on local phenomena leads to worse judgements than a vaguer-but-larger picture.

Agreed that "who bears the consequences" is a relevant factor; disagreed that it's a conclusive one; REALLY disagreed that you don't have another option. You really can just listen to whoever happens to fascinate you and believe/do whatever they say without ever bringing your critical thinking skills to bear on the problem... it's actually an incredibly seductive temptation in many, many contexts. (Or is that just me?)

The hybrid vigor thing I have more complicated reactions to; ref'ed in another comment.

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(I won't be participating in this thread much, but...)

I don't agree that religious teachings are perpetually out of date on important issues. Such teachings derive from people's interpretations of text or precedent (which change over time). As such, they are no more perpetually out of date than legal decisions or constitutional scholarship.

And, indeed, 200+ years of constitutional scholarship in the US shows that a single document can change dramatically over time, while changing in text rather little.

(Or, quoting the Supreme Court of Canada's decision yesterday, which admittedly interprets a document only 22 years old, but still... " our Constitution is a living tree which, by way of progressive interpretation, accommodates and addresses the realities of modern life." I don't see any way in which the texts or ideas of religion lack this interpretive possibility.)

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So, for example, the guy with the bumper sticker reading "Jesus said it. I believe it. That settles it" frustrates me as an individual, and scares me as a representative of a political movement.

FWIW, anybody who stuck to what Jesus actually said would have a tough time being any sort of political animal. Nothing to use against a scapegoat minority; only things that would make virtually every middle-class American squirm.

or where his preacher claims that the Gospels are properly interpreted to support a position about X

Ah, there's the rub, all right...

"The Gospels say it. I take it seriously. Real life is complicated." makes a piss-poor bumper sticker

But I'd buy it. The Bible is as complicated, weird, and sometimes unpleasant as life itself is.

Somewhere I have my grumble about bumper-sticker politics and bumper-sticker religion. I'll comment with a link if I find it.

Has there ever been a time when democracy didn't run largely on unexamined assertions and catchy slogans? Is that why American history isn't half as unstained as a read-through of the Constitution would have you hope?

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If I substitute "what the Gospels quote Jesus as saying" for "what Jesus actually said" I agree with everything you say here.

Relatedly, gringoddess said something shortly after I met her that has stuck with me, and in many ways served as the barb that's gotten me wrestling with a lot of these issues the last few weeks, to the effect that she entered the ministry out of a sense of obligation to confuse people, because she felt Christianity really ought to be confusing and the number of unconfused Christians was a problem. (I am paraphrasing wildly here.)

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It's hard to imagine what she could have said that could beat your wild paraphrase.

"You're only unconfused because you don't understand. Once you understand, you'll be confused."

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A really interesting post. It ties into some thoughts I've been having over on my blog, where I've been positing that one of the greatest challenges facing this country is teaching people how to evaluate alternative sources of information. Teaching them critical thinking skills, essentially. Given the vast flood of information available via TV or Google or Slashdot or pick-your-favorite media, you can always find multiple viewpoints on any given subject. How do you choose?

I tend to believe that all viewpoints are not necessarily equally valid. I think you can choose between them. I choose by taking advantage of what I consider to be trusted sources, by applying consistency checks, etc. Of course, one could argue that an evangelical is doing the same thing (trusted source being the Bible, consistent with the church, etc.). It's a tough question.

But I think the first step is being able to recognize that there are multiple viewpoints. Understanding that ideas don't stand in isolation, but in a frame (to use Lakoff's term) or context (in postmodernist thought) or have a story associated with them (stories are my current obsession). Once you can look outside your own frame, and see things from somebody else's point of view, it becomes a lot easier to have a meaningful dialogue.

Yikes, I'm rambling. And I don't think I have a point. But I wanted to play.

P.S. Hi Dave! You probably don't remember me, but after I kept seeing dr_tectonic's references to the interesting discussions happening over here, I added you as a friend so I could keep up. -- Perlick

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Hey perlick! Of course I remember you. Welcome!
Yay, critical thinking! Yay, broader contexts! Yay, rambling!

Vaguely relatedly; one of the things I'm trying to get away from in these threads (and I stress "trying") is the reflex of equating religious thought with various kinds of bad thought.

This is related to thomb's continual question of why I even want to make statements about religious thought, which is a good question to which the answer seems to be far more personal/psychological/political than academic/theological.

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A good point. "Bad" thought is prevalent in all walks of life. I've gotten myself in all sorts of trouble at work for having the temerity to challenge the org chart, and valuing my own opinion over that of the VP. You just don't do that. The way people in my company adhere to the "process" as if it were scripture has a similar feel.

The same is true in politics. I went to a political campaign training session, and about halfway through, one of the session leaders started asking people in the audience "Why are you a Democrat?" Nobody could answer. Nobody had even really thought about the question. They just were. It actually made me take some time to think about why I support liberal policies in general, which was an interesting process (my current soundbite answer: "I'm a liberal because I believe in equal rights for all, equal opportunity for all, and because being a citizen is more than a right, it's a responsibility.")

I'm about to leave work, but I'll point to a post I wrote last year, about the importance of questioning the assumptions in an issue, which I think ties into some of the "bad" thought that you're discussing.

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I read a very interesting paper for our discussion group here at work a couple months back that talked about the fact that people actually have two different reasoning systems that they use to make decisions.

The paper went out of its way to use neutral language about them, and I think it called them "type A" and "type B". Basically, we can think about things using rationality, which is logical, systematic, reproducible, consistent, and enormously resource-intensive (very tiring and slow). Or we can think about them using, let's call it "apprehensional" thinking, which is the kind of reasoning that lets you look at two piles of cookies and decide that the one on the left has more. Apprehension is super-fast and ultra-low effort, but it's not terribly precise.

The thing is, these are both valid ways of thinking about things. Neither kind of reasoning is bad, they're just optimized differently. This was a really startling thing for me to realize, because the scientific community puts such a premium on rationality. But you really need both kinds of reasoning, depending on the context.

Apprehension is terrible for evaluating statistical risk. But there's no way you can catch a ball using rationality.

There are a billion everyday situations that we use apprehension to decide. (Is it safe to shift lanes? What kind of chips should I buy? Get gas now or later?) You couldn't function if you used rationality for everything. And apprehension is really the best way of thinking about problems where the return on mental investment is low.

We use rationality for harder problems where we need to be right, or problems that just aren't tractable by apprehension. (Where is the bug in my code?) Rationality is hard, but it gets easier with practice. But it doesn't come completely naturally.

Problems arise not when people use type B thinking (that is, "being irrational"), but when they apply either type in an inappropriate context.

Perhaps that is relevant to the religious thought problem?

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My brain is starting to run down, and I have to go home in a few minutes, but I'm going to try and throw a few unorganized ideas out there so that when we get back to this, they're still loitering around the table.

First, ditto the stuff Perlick said about expertise and the effort involved in being informed.

The best decision-making is done by experts. Just because a million people believe X doesn't make it true. But on the other hand, to make sure that we don't do injustice to people, we need to involve the people that are affected by the decision, because that's the best (and often only) way to make sure that their interests and desires are adequately addressed. So there we have a conflict.

Another issue is the fact that the real world is imperfect. We have to make all decisions under varying levels of uncertainty. Rational thinking really works best with known quantities. Once you get into uncertainty, you have to start bringing in the other, snap-judgement kind of thinking in order to collapse the combinatoric explosion of possibilities into something manageable.

Plus, we all have limited resources. We can't be as informed and involved on all the issues that affect our daily lives as we really ought to be to make good, rational, high-quality decisions on all of them. There are so many! At some point, you have to draw the line and do what you can. So we are forced by circumstance to delegate. And figuring out where to draw the line is hard.

Self-awareness figures prominently into all of this as well. Our knowledge of our own knowledge is imperfect. You mentioned the negative correlation between perceived self-competence and objective competence measures. I'm not sure how to address that, but it's part of it.

Then there's practicality issues. Even if we figure out what the right way, theoretically speaking, of making these kinds of decisions is, how do we translate that into action with an imperfect voting system where your choices are limited?

The upshot of all this, I guess, is that what I think I'm saying is that you shouldn't vote just to make yourself heard. What you should do is make yourself heard. Voting is one way to do that, but as things currently stand, it may not be the best way. And the problem isn't so much people voting someone else's opinion instead of their own conscience as people not doing a good job of figuring out what the best match between their own conscience and available options for propagating it outwards are. Plus there's not enough self-checking and evaluation of people's own positions against the perceived world (which is probably synonymous with the "critical thinking" Perlick laments our lack of).

What we really REALLY need are better systems (both in general and ad-hoc, until we get there) for evaluating what 'the will of the people' is, translating that into terms that are well-matched to the decision issues, and channelling it through expert decision-making capacity such that the outcome generates the thing that is closest to what people really want and consistent with all the other constraints on the system. (Justice, sustainability, resources available, context, etc.) Approximating that as best we can is the actual "right thing to do".

Argh! This is all so hard to articulate! This was all written in a terrible hurry, so go easy on me and give me the benefit of the doubt until we can explore things further, okay?

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Hm.

What you seem to be describing is a system where there's "the will of the people" available, and there are experts in various things available, and the system is designed in such a way that the decision of what to do is made by the former and the decision of how to do it (or whether we can do it) is made by the latter. Yes?

I will refer to these as "goals" and "tactics" hereafter. So, "the people" set goals, "the experts" decide tactics. I think this approximately describes the system we do have... and I think you agree, and your concern here is mostly with improving its efficiency, which is a lovely thing. And I have no problem with that.

So, OK. In that context, I think I can restate my concern as follows: to the extent that significant numbers of people delegate their responsibility for participating in choosing goals to those they consider smarter or more conscientious or otherwise more qualified, we replace the system above with one where there are simply experts of various sorts, and they decide on both goals and tactics.

So, why is that a concern? Well, again, I'm not sure.

Take it to an extreme -- suppose we eliminate the whole mechanism of representative democracy altogether. Suppose we put in place instead a group of carefully selected and trained national strategists, who are experts in working out our national goals. Suppose there are enough of these experts around that they can set up review boards internally, to minimize the potential for simply bribing a small body of experts into saying whatever the hell you want. Suppose one of the things these strategic experts are trained in is how to set up and interpret polling data, both among the population at large and various important minorities, to minimize the potential for their choosing goals so out-of-whack with popular or strongly-held minority beliefs that they cause civil unrest.

Is there anything wrong with that picture?
I want to say yes, but I have a very hard time articulating what, exactly, is wrong with it.

Now, of course, I'm jumping over such a huge quantitative difference as to be a qualitative one. I'm not trying to suggest that this kind of oligarchy is actually what we're heading into, merely bringing it out as an extreme picture to try and clarify my concerns... it may be that the thing I think is wrong with oligarchy has nothing at all to do with the thing I think is wrong with delegating votes in a republic... but they do feel related. (Of course, as firstfrost points out, it is also entirely possible that no significant number of people do, in fact, delegate their votes the way I'm afraid of here.)

I find myself wanting to introduce some kind of constitution that says "We will never choose goals that conflict with X, Y, and Z, even if the consensus of goal-setting experts says we should."
But... well... what the heck does that mean? It seems to mean that there's something about our national character that is more available to the constitution-writers of today than it will be to the expert goal-setters of tomorrow. I want to call them national values, or some such thing.
But if I believe that there are such things, and they aren't available to these hypothetical experts, then I'm back to positing that there is some mysterious property that "the will of the people" has that is different from the kind of thing that it takes to fix your car, and that for the people to delegate their votes is to ignore that mysterious property in favor of mere expertise.
Which is just the kind of superstitious special pleading that annoys me about the worst examples of bad thinking in history.

So, I don't know. Maybe I have it all backwards... maybe it's people like me, who cling senselessly to this romantic notion of "the will of the people" having some useful properties that cannot be improved upon by delegating to experts, who are really screwing things up... maybe if we could all be educated to appreciate that no, we really don't know enough to set national goals and we should leave it to the experts, the government would improve significantly.

I can't quite bring myself to believe that, but I can't effectively argue against it either.

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I think that treating "the will of the people" as a monolithic set of goals is problematic. One of the really hard things about any government of any group of people is that people have differing goals. Sometimes your goals and my goals align, and sometimes they don't. No expert can decide which of those goals is "right", which is why I like your distinction between goals and tactics. If the goal is a better education system, then I think there are ways we can define metrics for "better" and figure out ways to improve education. I don't agree with the metrics currently being used (e.g. No child left behind standardized testing), but that's an issue of tactics rather than goals.

I think that one of the things that may be bothering you is that there are some fundamental principles that should not be contravened _regardless_ of "the will of the people". If there was a law passed by the majority of the people saying that all people named "Dave" should be made into slaves, that would be ludicrous. Sometimes the majority is wrong. And I think it can be especially led astray in matters of the monkey mind, where our moral instincts are led astray because we are wired to treat people we don't know as "other" and not worthy of consideration. This is why American casualties matter, but not Iraqis.

I tend to have a pretty low opinion of the will of the people. However, I think that part of that is because by the time a decision is presented to "the people", the choices have been distorted and simplified into such cartoonish opposites (e.g. no contraception, sex only in marriage vs. free love and abortions on every street corner) that it trivializes the deliberation and makes it so there's no "reasonable" choice, so voters choose the one that vaguely resembles their actual beliefs. Part of that is that in a mass democracy (analogous to mass media), government has to appeal to the lowest common denominator to get votes. However, I think that if people are given the opportunity to express themselves in more nuanced ways than a single yes/no vote, we might start to reach compromises on several issues that plague us.

Maybe.

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