Pragmatism and Wicked Problems

On the Ezra Klein podcast, he and Jon Haidt got into an interesting discussion about activism. Klein believes that it is important to talk about topics that make people uncomfortable in order to bring about change.

Klein says: “Confrontation is unpopular, and often necessary, in part to get people to see things they don’t want to see.”

Haidt believes that this tends to push people away and civility is more important. He talks about "wicked problems."

"The conditions for solving a wicked problem are: you have to have people who see it from multiple perspectives," Haidt says.

It reminded me of the Conflict vs. Mistake Theories post, in which Scott Alexander describes mistake theorists who view society as a diseased patient and we're all doctors trying to diagnose it, inviting different perspectives to solve the problem.

It also reminded me of the two political campaign strategies: double down on your base and turn out non voters vs. broaden your appeal and swing moderate voters.

Scott Alexander explores this in Part I of The Toxoplasma of Rage. PETA doubles down, makes people uncomfortable and, as a result, gets their message out at the cost of everyone hating them. On the other hand, Vegan Outreach is much more civil but no one has heard of them.

When Michael Collins negotiated the independence of Ireland, he conceded the territory of Northern Ireland to remain a British colony. He received backlash from De Valera who thought he should have dug his heels in and taken an all- or- nothing approach. Was he right?

All of these dichotomies can also be described as thus: self righteousness vs. pragmatism. The thing about pragmatists (or centrists or mistake theorists) is that they are never completely convinced they are right; always open to the possibility of changing their mind. That's why they believe in inviting multiple perspectives.

Activists like Klein have no patience for civility; they are so convinced they are right and anyone who isn't with them is ignorant and needs to be forcefully educated (made woke), or is evil and needs to be viciously fought.

For a while I believed that my way of thinking (pragmatism/mistake theory) was better. But I've come to realize it's a contradiction. I'm essentially telling the activists "I'm right and you're wrong for thinking 'I'm right and you're wrong.'" In this case, I'm actually not inviting their perspective and being open to changing my mind.

In all likelihood, there are instances in which digging in one's heels and refusing to engage with one's enemy is probably the better strategy.

My problem with our education system

After picking my son up from school, I asked him about one of his friends. He told me that his friend had the flu and was home sick. Then he began asking me about the flu, what it is, how flu shots work, and so on.

I tried to explain viruses, inoculation, and antifragility in six-year-old language and stopped after some stumbling in what I was sure made no sense. After a moment of silence Tyler said, "Daddy, keep talking about that."

I think about this whenever I hear him complain about going to school or having to do homework. I think about whether or not he ever tells his teacher, "Keep talking about that." Like most children, he has a natural curiosity about certain subjects. I don't blame his teacher, he simply cannot explore these curious impulses because it's not part of the curriculum.

Here's what worries me: I'm 36 and I'm still not sure what the end goal of K-12 education is.

Is it to get a job? Then why don't we teach job skills?

Is it to be a good citizen? Then why don't we teach virtue?

Is it to get kids into college? This seems closest but it circles back to the original question: what is the point of college education? is it to teach virtue or job skills? And why wouldn't we teach those in K-12. Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hour theory wasn't about 10,000 hours of classroom instruction, it was about 10,000 hours of empiricism.

Is it to teach resiliency? If so, then you could almost make the case that education is designed to make kids used to doing things they hate so they will be prepared for a job they abhor.

I think the current education system is designed to reward people who like learning for the sake of learning. It doesn't reward people who are inspired by learning for teleological means; someone who wants to build a rocket ship is motivated to learn the necessary science and mathematics even if they have no interest in learning about science and math for its own sake.

I understand that you need to know science if you want to discover cures to diseases. But my belief is that a kid who wants to learn how a flu shot works so he can get his friend healthy and playing cars with him again is not in a system that allows him to explore that. The systems tells him what he's allowed to learn about and when.

I know I'm not an educator and I'm probably oversimplifying things, but I believe that the goal of our education system should be to find what makes a kid say, "Keep talking about that" and to answer his questions instead of asking him yours. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

False Positives: when purple dots look blue

Here's a really interesting study about false positives. In short, participants were shown dots of various shades of blue and purple and asked to identify the blue dots. The less frequently they were shown blue dots, the more likely people were to misidentify purple dots as blue.

It reminds me of a quote about Amos Tversky and that he "merely studied in a systematic way things about behaviour that were already known to advertisers and used-car salesmen".

It seems that this group of researchers are studying the heuristic "If your only tool is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail." Invoking the Lindy Effect, the phrase seems to have a long history, although not well documented, giving it survival value.

[Now comes the dangerous part where we take some data about the color of dots and extrapolate it to explain human behavior.]

If you see the world as a conflict between oppressors and victims, you will eventually see blue dots that are actually purple as our society grows more just and prosperous and these instances become less common.

"Although modern societies have made extraordinary progress in solving a wide range of social problems, from poverty and illiteracy to violence and infant mortality, the majority of people believe that the world is getting worse. The fact that concepts grow larger when their instances grow smaller may be one source of that pessimism."