The Three Great Illiteracys
I thought I might channel Chairman Mao fully aware of the gross incompetence and ineptitude of this leader, possibly history's only leader more Trumpy than Trump.
Obviously the world is unlikely to ever consist of renaissance people, with the average person being a foremost expert in virtually every field of knowledge. Even one person accomplishing that has probably become a door that has closed behind Leonardo Da Vinci, simply because it is now incredibly hard to be an expert in any one domain.
But recently I've been thinking about three particularly consequential illiteracys that are widespread. In no particular order:
1. Economic Illiteracy
2. Psychological Illiteracy
3. Rational Illiteracy
The other two could be considered just a subset of Psychology, but they are large enough I feel to warrant their own attention and focus. I do want to flag, I'm not an expert in any of these fields, nor am I talking about expertise, just basic literacy. In the same way that I can speak Japanese, and even read and write some, but could not defend a doctoral thesis in Japanese. So when I say 'illiterate' I am appealing to behavior that substantiates people not understanding at all.
Economic Illiteracy
I've been aware of this for the longest, because economics is really really consequential.
Monetary policy, Fiscal policy, Target Inflation, Money Multiplier, Full Employment, Externalities, Subsidies, Tariffs, Quotas, Labor markets, Wage Efficiency, Underemployment, Overemployment, Free Markets, Consumption Tax, Money Illusion, Tobin Tax, Speculation, Investment, Comparative advantage, Malthusian Trap, Surplus, Deficit, Current Account, GDP, GNP, Interest, Rent, Inflation, Money...
The perplexing thing is, I suspect a general survey of the public would prove that while they know how to use it, few would know what 'money' is and yet in my locale economic 'performance' is what people vote on. Debates can rage about the public sector debt, and I suspect beyond 'debt is bad' and 'well how are we going to pay for it?' little more is extracted.
My feeling is, well documented, functioning democracies are a relatively recent phenomena. With enough time for historians to put their hooks into the 20th and 21st century, what the public vote for will be hard to make sense of unless the sensemaking opens with 'the average voting citizen in the domain of economics was little more than a serf in the field.'
The illiteracy isn't so surprising, what is alarming is how consequential it is. Economics is a wretched science because of the propensity for those governing to lean in the Economists doorway and helpfully suggest 'you know if you could find a mathematical proof that we shouldn't tax corporations and should tax poor people that would be great!' or 'you know if you could find a way that the workers could control the means of production and we could seize the assets of the wealthy that would be fantastic!' So it's really good that Economic policy is something debated and voted on. You don't want to leave this stuff to backroom dealings. But given how long and how continuously some countries (like mine) have been debating economic policy, the illiteracy is alarming.
What comes to mind is an anecdote from my year 7 (freshman year junior high for Americanas) homeroom teacher that explained how bullies scammed him as a kid. It was probably not this currency but it works with our currency where the dollar coin is physically larger than the two-dollar coin, almost every currency I'm aware of has a bizarre analogy to this. Two big kids once pointed out that his coin was small, and their coin was big, and he wanted the big coin right? and these generous kids were willing to swap his small measly coin for their big shiny coin. Presumably he figured out at the milk bar the astonishing fact that the big coin bought far less lollies than his small coin.
I observe roughly the equivalent of this swindle going on all the time, and it's often no more sophisticated than the big kids telling people what to vote for, and the little people being like 'well, he's wearing a suit so seems legit.'
Understanding what you are voting for is important, and numerous examples come to mind. I want to focus here on the import of economic systems for what you believe in. Most of my friends are well-meaning and left-leaning. They want the environment protected, climate change addressed, reconciliation and a treaty, world peace and justice for all. Very few of my friends really go full tilt at doing their bit to achieve these objectives. This isn't even in the domain of basic hypocrisy, like tweeting about the melting of ice caps while you are away on the other side of the world to attend a formula one race and eating some delicious wurst.
I mean considering what you value vs the economic consequences for people dedicated to what you value. Where, even for the task of impeding unsustainable logging practices that have received special exemptions from environmental protection legislation, the people doing the logging are often paid and paid quite well to turn up and log the forest, with jobs secured through heavy tax subsidies or government funding. The protestors, just to have sufficient time to obstruct the logging, often far away from where they live generally have to be retired, unemployed or underemployed. Plus they have the commute.
The activists might actually enjoy broad public support, at least as far as lip-service, and they put the hours into $0 budget campaigns to try and raise public awareness of what is actually going on. This is getting up at 6 am to hang banners over the freeway overpasses to try and make commuters aware. They also, if their mission is to protect Native Forests, Old Growth Forests and Endangered species habitat tend to have to handcuff themselves to bulldozers, or live in trees for days, because forestry can't actually be reversed once the damage is done.
Bringing us to the arrests and legal fees. Saving the forests and the animals is generally laudible and anti-compensatory. It is in economic terms extremely costly for the people who do it. Furthermore, and this is foreshadowing, the people who are the activists are not insane. Their rationale for undertaking such huge personal costs is I believe generally sound. It may be predictive of high levels of anxiety, bouts of depression etc. But these people are not crazy, and while likely to know other dirty hippies willing to go to the bathroom in their pants while chained to a bulldozer, they will be generally commended for their efforts by their broader community.
While they are not earning money, often spending money, and at risk of fines and legal fees etc. They are also not saving money, nor investing money which the people not protecting the forests are doing. Due to the interest compounding, activists are probably foregoing hundreds of thousands of dollars over their lifetimes protecting trees and animals that most people actually want protected.
But we'll vote out our government because petrol is 12c higher per litre, as if they can control that, or vote in our government because they cut unemployment from 3.8% to 3.6% without realizing the 10,000 jobs created involve delivering take out food on a bicycle to people in the middle of winter.
The main beef I have with my actual activist friends, the ones supporting worthwhile causes backed by solid scientific investigation, is that they also often neglect the economic incentives. The price points of caged vs free-range is really just tip of the ice berg. Reducing Eco footprints through eating local seasonal produce, or using ground based transport at three times the price and 10 times the travel time result in real economic disadvantages.
My personal stance is that the economic incentives need to be right, I'm in the attitudes-follow behavior camp, my activist friends are in the behavior-follows-attitudes camp. Many of them are also economically illiterate. The general economic illiteracy also poses the largest obstacle to getting the economics right.
If you want an accessible example of having the economy based headlines blown open, I recommend starting here.
Psychological Illiteracy
It was when the Victorian Premier fronted the press to announce a 10-post-code lock down to try and contain the community transmission outbreak that the idea of psychological illiteracy really crystallized for me.
The mini-lock down plan to me was instantly an exercise in futility. If security at a quarantine hotel can't get it right, then tens of thousands of ordinary citizens had no chance. The moment it was announced there was a need for a Chief Psychology Officer to step forward and say, 'for this to have any chance of working I need to address the people that are already thinking maybe I can go stay at my cousin Terry's place for six weeks...'
I thought 'we just know too much about human psychology.' These types of issues do get addressed albeit in Op-Eds with hindsight bias, and people who write op-eds are frankly garbage people, just get a blog and be honest about how little insight you have. Comedians actually do the closest job to having official psychologists, the thing about comedy though is that it's disarming because whether you are supposed to take their observations about the human condition seriously is disarming.
The pandemic example is just something that makes it clear to me though. I actually need to make a mental note for my series on heuristics that 'any solution that requires voluntary compliance (people doing the right thing en mass) is no solution at all.'
There have been some public campaign successes that have employed psychology, most notably the 'if you drink and drive, you're a bloody idiot' which I'm told completely shifted public attitudes to drink driving.
I singled out these three illiteracys because I feel them to be genuine failings of public education. Kids need confirmation bias and prisoners dilemmas drilled into them so they understand what everyone is doing by the time they finish primary school.
Like anybody should notice immediately when someone has just gone and looked up evidence to support their claim, rather than actively disconfirm it. 'confirmation bias' should be taught in combination with pointing to kids much like 'stranger danger'.
The number of adults I've met (and for that matter, have been) that don't understand the grieving process when it hits them is concerning to me. The amount of time people waste not learning from a string of toxic relationships about attachment theory is alarming. Sex-ed appears to have gone backwards, given how popular it is with the kids these days to not wear condoms, but in certain regions where HIV is not the leading cause of death, teaching kids attachment theory, implicit memory and to avoid dating people who present behavior consistent with the dark triad would be good next priorities.
I'm aware of psychology's dark history. Even recently, it has been hit by the replication crisis. But things like the former soviet's symptom criteria for sluggish schizophrenia including being critical of the government and writing critical books. Then there's all the nastiness of gay-conversion therapy and having homosexuality and trans-identities in earlier Diagnostic and Statistical Manuals.
There's a degree to which I can appreciate that some groups will view an embrace of psychology like a marketing campaign for the new Ku Klux Klan, my personal experience is more in line however with people avoiding psychology because if you aren't diagnosed then your life is falling apart because people are just arseholes.
Like Economics, psychology has been prone to someone darkening the door of the researcher and saying 'could you declare my political opposition insane? great, thanks.' or 'I want to scape goat Timmy, could you come up with something like "Acute Timmy Disorder"? great, thanks.' But where Galileo was looking through a telescope observing the rings of Saturn in the 1600's and a century or so later bacteria was finally being observed through a microscope, the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technology has only emerged in the last 30 years or so and had little time to be used to draw robust conclusions about what is psychology and what is storytelling; sequencing DNA also for nature-nurture debates to actually enter robust territory are all very very recent.
Which means, many of us have lived through the period where alchemy transitioned to chemistry, and witchcraft transitioned to biology... just in this case it's the transition from storytelling of Freud and Jung to an actual empirical science.
We simply know too much to be enacting public policies that we do. But when I say 'we' it isn't the general public. In fields like development, teaching a remote community in an underdeveloped nation to wash their hands is a simple thing that can have a huge impact on community health, so too having a basic grasp on grandiose narcissism could spare organizations so much human suffering. 'We' is any collective where large numbers of the members assume they are normal and rational and everybody else thinks like they do, and just 'act irrationally' any group described by that stands to benefit from psychological literacy.
I once had a work colleague that I suspected of having near as I could guess, a histrionic personality disorder. She was so sexually aggressive, and so emotionally unstable I adopted my own Mike Pence like rules to just never ever be alone with her. I was possibly paranoid, but really I used to speculate on whether my employer actually had a duty-of-care to protect its employees from personality disorders. It is going to be much rarer that a histrionic type enters a workplace and files a string of trumped up allegations, and or forces a bunch of turnover through sexual liasons, but much more common will be a grandiose narcissist type talking their way into a management position and tanking the company, or an anti-social type singling out a vulnerable and isolated employee and bullying them mercilessly. That should be a duty of care I suspect, and literacy would help.
I would be clear that I am not calling for people with mental health issues, and personality disorders to soviet style be rendered outcasts from society. It's just that psychological illiteracy among other costs, mean that people can be trying to navigate life un-diagnosed and without treatment. This is often a situation in which everybody loses.
But psychological literacy is by no means confined to the extremes. The real payoff is avoiding bad solutions to social problems that disregard that what we are often working with are people. Ordinary psychology is not understood, hence people's frustration at non-compliance in a pandemic, a general inability to empathize with anyone we don't identify with already, confirmation bias, availability bias, substitution, motivated reasoning, personality, double standards, double binds, false dichotomies, irresponsibility, shame spirals, sexual harassment, de-individuation, risk-homeostasis, projection, transference, normalcy bias... all have been manifesting in extremely relevant ways under the global pandemic, and these are features, not bugs in human psychology.
What I would love is to be put out of work as an armchair psychologist. Where my rudimentary understanding that arise from a hobbyists interest in psychology are not the best understanding that has ever been conveyed to somebody. I believe like all professions I've encountered that professional clinical psychologists are going to be mostly mediocre to incompetent. But if the public is completely illiterate, it puts us in a really weak position to shop for good psychologists.
Rational Illiteracy
I myself am mostly illiterate in this department. I'm pretty sure I couldn't write a syllogism if my life depended on it. I am not a rigorous thinker but a slobbering dog of a thinker.
But again, when I think of the Premier's press briefings in our latest outbreak, fielding ho-hum questions from our ho-hum press, I actually admire his ability not to address those questions with 'look, we are dealing with a population that largely believe conspiracy theories, that the world is flat, that 9-11 is an inside job, that 5G spreads Coronavirus, we have people in our society that think Climate Change is a Hoax and that the President of the United States is the Absolute Monarch that rules over America. We have people that found "Inception" confusing, and people that think David Lynch movies make sense. We've had 50-60 years of good times for humanity, and in that time our market has encouraged the notion that it's basically okay to believe whatever you want. That's what we are dealing with, and if the first wave was small and we quashed it quickly, it was probably luck, not skill.'
I have it (not personally) from Jonathon Haidt that the education system is yet to succeed in teaching critical thinking. Daniel Kahneman stresses the point when discussing all the cognitive biases and fallacies that nobody rises above them.
But how would I put this, in terms of rational illiteracy... Okay let's hope you and I agree that slavery is wrong. Now, these days, the way most people impress me with their concept of rationality plays out like this. 'Is tossing a coin, a reasonable way to arrive at a conclusion?' and we say heads: slavery is a-ok, tails: slavery is bad.
We toss the coin, if it comes up heads then you and I agree that tossing a coin is not a reliable path to knowledge. But if it comes up tails, the methodology is sound.
The legitimacy of the methodology is often determined by it's ability to arrive at our pre-determined conclusions, and this is what passes for rationality to most people.
Like testimony of personal experience can be regarded by some as a reliable path to truth, provided that truth is the truth of the Risen Christ, and not the truth of Mohammed's encounter with Gabriel or vice versa, in which case obviously their testimony can't be trusted, but you should trust mine...
I have actually done quite a personal journey into new-age mysticism, and many of my dirty hippy friends are often surprised that I can converse with them about Tarot, the multiple Astrological Zodiacs, various mythologies and spiritual practices etc. I taught myself to speak woo. The sticking point is that I regard much of the new-age framework as irrational. Not useless, just irrational.
I feel that's a good aim for literacy, to just have people who hold irrational beliefs to concede they are irrational. For too many though, recognizing a belief is irrational is tantamount to not believing, so the irrational belief of primacy becomes their irrational belief that they are rational.
Again, a kid should not graduate from primary school without being able to tell an argument from an assertion, and to know that empiricism trumps rationalism, they should maybe know Carl Sagan's rule of 'extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence' and the clarifying addendum 'ordinary claims generally require no evidence', perhaps Hume's principle of 'A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence'
The evidence that overwhelms me is the Covid case numbers, now very much live in my neighborhood and very much defining this year. Regardless of who wins the US election Time's 'Person of the Year' is going to have to be patient 0, I digress. I see behavior that suggests that people who work in professions exempted from the lock down appear to have made the irrational inference that they are also exempt from catching the virus.
I had an argument with my mum about using my disposable mask more than once, that to give credit the irrationality is subtle. The irrationality was the fear that after going to the shops my mask would be coated with Covid, which my understanding of what has generally been said about masks all year is that they function to keep the covid on the inside of the mask, not on the outside of the mask. Rationally this makes sense, otherwise we should be worried about touching any patch of our skin and shaving our head down to the scalp when we arrive home. If pieces of fabric across our mouths got coated in the virus to such an extent as they posed a real risk of transmitting the virus to us when we touch them, then mask wearing would be a disastrous policy response. We all wear them to ensure the asymptomatic carriers don't cough or sneeze the virus out.
I guess the biggest evidence of widespread irrationality are conspiracy theories. People believing that the mask wearing is some attempt by the government to control the public. Well it is, I guess, an attempt to control the public from spreading the virus and overwhelming the healthcare system. But if the government was lying, and under no pressure to avoid removing civil liberties, rationally they would be better off to declare that masks were completely ineffective and that the virus was much deadlier than it is. That would arrest the spread and drive down case numbers much more quickly.
I guess the flipside of rational literacy might be emotional literacy, and generally there's much more enthusiasm for teaching our young about emotions. My inkling is that the characterization of emotions, and 'being emotional' is fixated heavily on an idea that boys in particular are taught to repress their emotions and live in an emotional straight jacket.
I have had to learn myself the hard way what emotional competence actually is. I'm not an expert and I'm not proficient, but for me in practice being in touch with my emotions is central to my ability to act rationally. Emotional competence is explicitly the ability to recognize and identify your own emotions as and when they arise. To realize I am angry, or upset, or afraid, or stressed, when I am.
Rationalization is often the illusion that we are rational when we are in fact acting upon our emotional state (our affect) that we are not aware of. My own journey lead me to noticing that many of the people who let their emotions out, as in, having very visual emotional displays are often completely out of touch with their emotions, and unable to process emotions as information.
Kids in the grips of sour grapes or sweet lemons provide transparent demonstrations of emotional incompetence leading to irrational beliefs, adults are less transparent but often not much improved.
here though, teaching primary school kids to point is less of the concern, we are generally much better at spotting irrational emotion driven behavior in others, like when Mike is jealous of the attention his assistant Dwight is getting as sales-person of the year. Where rational literacy comes in is pointing to the self and acknowledging that we are being irrational.
I feel like admitting we are/were irrational once in our lifetime is probably above the average.
Obviously the world is unlikely to ever consist of renaissance people, with the average person being a foremost expert in virtually every field of knowledge. Even one person accomplishing that has probably become a door that has closed behind Leonardo Da Vinci, simply because it is now incredibly hard to be an expert in any one domain.
But recently I've been thinking about three particularly consequential illiteracys that are widespread. In no particular order:
1. Economic Illiteracy
2. Psychological Illiteracy
3. Rational Illiteracy
The other two could be considered just a subset of Psychology, but they are large enough I feel to warrant their own attention and focus. I do want to flag, I'm not an expert in any of these fields, nor am I talking about expertise, just basic literacy. In the same way that I can speak Japanese, and even read and write some, but could not defend a doctoral thesis in Japanese. So when I say 'illiterate' I am appealing to behavior that substantiates people not understanding at all.
Economic Illiteracy
I've been aware of this for the longest, because economics is really really consequential.
Monetary policy, Fiscal policy, Target Inflation, Money Multiplier, Full Employment, Externalities, Subsidies, Tariffs, Quotas, Labor markets, Wage Efficiency, Underemployment, Overemployment, Free Markets, Consumption Tax, Money Illusion, Tobin Tax, Speculation, Investment, Comparative advantage, Malthusian Trap, Surplus, Deficit, Current Account, GDP, GNP, Interest, Rent, Inflation, Money...
The perplexing thing is, I suspect a general survey of the public would prove that while they know how to use it, few would know what 'money' is and yet in my locale economic 'performance' is what people vote on. Debates can rage about the public sector debt, and I suspect beyond 'debt is bad' and 'well how are we going to pay for it?' little more is extracted.
My feeling is, well documented, functioning democracies are a relatively recent phenomena. With enough time for historians to put their hooks into the 20th and 21st century, what the public vote for will be hard to make sense of unless the sensemaking opens with 'the average voting citizen in the domain of economics was little more than a serf in the field.'
The illiteracy isn't so surprising, what is alarming is how consequential it is. Economics is a wretched science because of the propensity for those governing to lean in the Economists doorway and helpfully suggest 'you know if you could find a mathematical proof that we shouldn't tax corporations and should tax poor people that would be great!' or 'you know if you could find a way that the workers could control the means of production and we could seize the assets of the wealthy that would be fantastic!' So it's really good that Economic policy is something debated and voted on. You don't want to leave this stuff to backroom dealings. But given how long and how continuously some countries (like mine) have been debating economic policy, the illiteracy is alarming.
What comes to mind is an anecdote from my year 7 (freshman year junior high for Americanas) homeroom teacher that explained how bullies scammed him as a kid. It was probably not this currency but it works with our currency where the dollar coin is physically larger than the two-dollar coin, almost every currency I'm aware of has a bizarre analogy to this. Two big kids once pointed out that his coin was small, and their coin was big, and he wanted the big coin right? and these generous kids were willing to swap his small measly coin for their big shiny coin. Presumably he figured out at the milk bar the astonishing fact that the big coin bought far less lollies than his small coin.
I observe roughly the equivalent of this swindle going on all the time, and it's often no more sophisticated than the big kids telling people what to vote for, and the little people being like 'well, he's wearing a suit so seems legit.'
Understanding what you are voting for is important, and numerous examples come to mind. I want to focus here on the import of economic systems for what you believe in. Most of my friends are well-meaning and left-leaning. They want the environment protected, climate change addressed, reconciliation and a treaty, world peace and justice for all. Very few of my friends really go full tilt at doing their bit to achieve these objectives. This isn't even in the domain of basic hypocrisy, like tweeting about the melting of ice caps while you are away on the other side of the world to attend a formula one race and eating some delicious wurst.
I mean considering what you value vs the economic consequences for people dedicated to what you value. Where, even for the task of impeding unsustainable logging practices that have received special exemptions from environmental protection legislation, the people doing the logging are often paid and paid quite well to turn up and log the forest, with jobs secured through heavy tax subsidies or government funding. The protestors, just to have sufficient time to obstruct the logging, often far away from where they live generally have to be retired, unemployed or underemployed. Plus they have the commute.
The activists might actually enjoy broad public support, at least as far as lip-service, and they put the hours into $0 budget campaigns to try and raise public awareness of what is actually going on. This is getting up at 6 am to hang banners over the freeway overpasses to try and make commuters aware. They also, if their mission is to protect Native Forests, Old Growth Forests and Endangered species habitat tend to have to handcuff themselves to bulldozers, or live in trees for days, because forestry can't actually be reversed once the damage is done.
Bringing us to the arrests and legal fees. Saving the forests and the animals is generally laudible and anti-compensatory. It is in economic terms extremely costly for the people who do it. Furthermore, and this is foreshadowing, the people who are the activists are not insane. Their rationale for undertaking such huge personal costs is I believe generally sound. It may be predictive of high levels of anxiety, bouts of depression etc. But these people are not crazy, and while likely to know other dirty hippies willing to go to the bathroom in their pants while chained to a bulldozer, they will be generally commended for their efforts by their broader community.
While they are not earning money, often spending money, and at risk of fines and legal fees etc. They are also not saving money, nor investing money which the people not protecting the forests are doing. Due to the interest compounding, activists are probably foregoing hundreds of thousands of dollars over their lifetimes protecting trees and animals that most people actually want protected.
But we'll vote out our government because petrol is 12c higher per litre, as if they can control that, or vote in our government because they cut unemployment from 3.8% to 3.6% without realizing the 10,000 jobs created involve delivering take out food on a bicycle to people in the middle of winter.
The main beef I have with my actual activist friends, the ones supporting worthwhile causes backed by solid scientific investigation, is that they also often neglect the economic incentives. The price points of caged vs free-range is really just tip of the ice berg. Reducing Eco footprints through eating local seasonal produce, or using ground based transport at three times the price and 10 times the travel time result in real economic disadvantages.
My personal stance is that the economic incentives need to be right, I'm in the attitudes-follow behavior camp, my activist friends are in the behavior-follows-attitudes camp. Many of them are also economically illiterate. The general economic illiteracy also poses the largest obstacle to getting the economics right.
If you want an accessible example of having the economy based headlines blown open, I recommend starting here.
Psychological Illiteracy
It was when the Victorian Premier fronted the press to announce a 10-post-code lock down to try and contain the community transmission outbreak that the idea of psychological illiteracy really crystallized for me.
The mini-lock down plan to me was instantly an exercise in futility. If security at a quarantine hotel can't get it right, then tens of thousands of ordinary citizens had no chance. The moment it was announced there was a need for a Chief Psychology Officer to step forward and say, 'for this to have any chance of working I need to address the people that are already thinking maybe I can go stay at my cousin Terry's place for six weeks...'
I thought 'we just know too much about human psychology.' These types of issues do get addressed albeit in Op-Eds with hindsight bias, and people who write op-eds are frankly garbage people, just get a blog and be honest about how little insight you have. Comedians actually do the closest job to having official psychologists, the thing about comedy though is that it's disarming because whether you are supposed to take their observations about the human condition seriously is disarming.
The pandemic example is just something that makes it clear to me though. I actually need to make a mental note for my series on heuristics that 'any solution that requires voluntary compliance (people doing the right thing en mass) is no solution at all.'
There have been some public campaign successes that have employed psychology, most notably the 'if you drink and drive, you're a bloody idiot' which I'm told completely shifted public attitudes to drink driving.
I singled out these three illiteracys because I feel them to be genuine failings of public education. Kids need confirmation bias and prisoners dilemmas drilled into them so they understand what everyone is doing by the time they finish primary school.
Like anybody should notice immediately when someone has just gone and looked up evidence to support their claim, rather than actively disconfirm it. 'confirmation bias' should be taught in combination with pointing to kids much like 'stranger danger'.
The number of adults I've met (and for that matter, have been) that don't understand the grieving process when it hits them is concerning to me. The amount of time people waste not learning from a string of toxic relationships about attachment theory is alarming. Sex-ed appears to have gone backwards, given how popular it is with the kids these days to not wear condoms, but in certain regions where HIV is not the leading cause of death, teaching kids attachment theory, implicit memory and to avoid dating people who present behavior consistent with the dark triad would be good next priorities.
I'm aware of psychology's dark history. Even recently, it has been hit by the replication crisis. But things like the former soviet's symptom criteria for sluggish schizophrenia including being critical of the government and writing critical books. Then there's all the nastiness of gay-conversion therapy and having homosexuality and trans-identities in earlier Diagnostic and Statistical Manuals.
There's a degree to which I can appreciate that some groups will view an embrace of psychology like a marketing campaign for the new Ku Klux Klan, my personal experience is more in line however with people avoiding psychology because if you aren't diagnosed then your life is falling apart because people are just arseholes.
Like Economics, psychology has been prone to someone darkening the door of the researcher and saying 'could you declare my political opposition insane? great, thanks.' or 'I want to scape goat Timmy, could you come up with something like "Acute Timmy Disorder"? great, thanks.' But where Galileo was looking through a telescope observing the rings of Saturn in the 1600's and a century or so later bacteria was finally being observed through a microscope, the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technology has only emerged in the last 30 years or so and had little time to be used to draw robust conclusions about what is psychology and what is storytelling; sequencing DNA also for nature-nurture debates to actually enter robust territory are all very very recent.
Which means, many of us have lived through the period where alchemy transitioned to chemistry, and witchcraft transitioned to biology... just in this case it's the transition from storytelling of Freud and Jung to an actual empirical science.
We simply know too much to be enacting public policies that we do. But when I say 'we' it isn't the general public. In fields like development, teaching a remote community in an underdeveloped nation to wash their hands is a simple thing that can have a huge impact on community health, so too having a basic grasp on grandiose narcissism could spare organizations so much human suffering. 'We' is any collective where large numbers of the members assume they are normal and rational and everybody else thinks like they do, and just 'act irrationally' any group described by that stands to benefit from psychological literacy.
I once had a work colleague that I suspected of having near as I could guess, a histrionic personality disorder. She was so sexually aggressive, and so emotionally unstable I adopted my own Mike Pence like rules to just never ever be alone with her. I was possibly paranoid, but really I used to speculate on whether my employer actually had a duty-of-care to protect its employees from personality disorders. It is going to be much rarer that a histrionic type enters a workplace and files a string of trumped up allegations, and or forces a bunch of turnover through sexual liasons, but much more common will be a grandiose narcissist type talking their way into a management position and tanking the company, or an anti-social type singling out a vulnerable and isolated employee and bullying them mercilessly. That should be a duty of care I suspect, and literacy would help.
I would be clear that I am not calling for people with mental health issues, and personality disorders to soviet style be rendered outcasts from society. It's just that psychological illiteracy among other costs, mean that people can be trying to navigate life un-diagnosed and without treatment. This is often a situation in which everybody loses.
But psychological literacy is by no means confined to the extremes. The real payoff is avoiding bad solutions to social problems that disregard that what we are often working with are people. Ordinary psychology is not understood, hence people's frustration at non-compliance in a pandemic, a general inability to empathize with anyone we don't identify with already, confirmation bias, availability bias, substitution, motivated reasoning, personality, double standards, double binds, false dichotomies, irresponsibility, shame spirals, sexual harassment, de-individuation, risk-homeostasis, projection, transference, normalcy bias... all have been manifesting in extremely relevant ways under the global pandemic, and these are features, not bugs in human psychology.
What I would love is to be put out of work as an armchair psychologist. Where my rudimentary understanding that arise from a hobbyists interest in psychology are not the best understanding that has ever been conveyed to somebody. I believe like all professions I've encountered that professional clinical psychologists are going to be mostly mediocre to incompetent. But if the public is completely illiterate, it puts us in a really weak position to shop for good psychologists.
Rational Illiteracy
I myself am mostly illiterate in this department. I'm pretty sure I couldn't write a syllogism if my life depended on it. I am not a rigorous thinker but a slobbering dog of a thinker.
But again, when I think of the Premier's press briefings in our latest outbreak, fielding ho-hum questions from our ho-hum press, I actually admire his ability not to address those questions with 'look, we are dealing with a population that largely believe conspiracy theories, that the world is flat, that 9-11 is an inside job, that 5G spreads Coronavirus, we have people in our society that think Climate Change is a Hoax and that the President of the United States is the Absolute Monarch that rules over America. We have people that found "Inception" confusing, and people that think David Lynch movies make sense. We've had 50-60 years of good times for humanity, and in that time our market has encouraged the notion that it's basically okay to believe whatever you want. That's what we are dealing with, and if the first wave was small and we quashed it quickly, it was probably luck, not skill.'
I have it (not personally) from Jonathon Haidt that the education system is yet to succeed in teaching critical thinking. Daniel Kahneman stresses the point when discussing all the cognitive biases and fallacies that nobody rises above them.
But how would I put this, in terms of rational illiteracy... Okay let's hope you and I agree that slavery is wrong. Now, these days, the way most people impress me with their concept of rationality plays out like this. 'Is tossing a coin, a reasonable way to arrive at a conclusion?' and we say heads: slavery is a-ok, tails: slavery is bad.
We toss the coin, if it comes up heads then you and I agree that tossing a coin is not a reliable path to knowledge. But if it comes up tails, the methodology is sound.
The legitimacy of the methodology is often determined by it's ability to arrive at our pre-determined conclusions, and this is what passes for rationality to most people.
Like testimony of personal experience can be regarded by some as a reliable path to truth, provided that truth is the truth of the Risen Christ, and not the truth of Mohammed's encounter with Gabriel or vice versa, in which case obviously their testimony can't be trusted, but you should trust mine...
I have actually done quite a personal journey into new-age mysticism, and many of my dirty hippy friends are often surprised that I can converse with them about Tarot, the multiple Astrological Zodiacs, various mythologies and spiritual practices etc. I taught myself to speak woo. The sticking point is that I regard much of the new-age framework as irrational. Not useless, just irrational.
I feel that's a good aim for literacy, to just have people who hold irrational beliefs to concede they are irrational. For too many though, recognizing a belief is irrational is tantamount to not believing, so the irrational belief of primacy becomes their irrational belief that they are rational.
Again, a kid should not graduate from primary school without being able to tell an argument from an assertion, and to know that empiricism trumps rationalism, they should maybe know Carl Sagan's rule of 'extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence' and the clarifying addendum 'ordinary claims generally require no evidence', perhaps Hume's principle of 'A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence'
The evidence that overwhelms me is the Covid case numbers, now very much live in my neighborhood and very much defining this year. Regardless of who wins the US election Time's 'Person of the Year' is going to have to be patient 0, I digress. I see behavior that suggests that people who work in professions exempted from the lock down appear to have made the irrational inference that they are also exempt from catching the virus.
I had an argument with my mum about using my disposable mask more than once, that to give credit the irrationality is subtle. The irrationality was the fear that after going to the shops my mask would be coated with Covid, which my understanding of what has generally been said about masks all year is that they function to keep the covid on the inside of the mask, not on the outside of the mask. Rationally this makes sense, otherwise we should be worried about touching any patch of our skin and shaving our head down to the scalp when we arrive home. If pieces of fabric across our mouths got coated in the virus to such an extent as they posed a real risk of transmitting the virus to us when we touch them, then mask wearing would be a disastrous policy response. We all wear them to ensure the asymptomatic carriers don't cough or sneeze the virus out.
I guess the biggest evidence of widespread irrationality are conspiracy theories. People believing that the mask wearing is some attempt by the government to control the public. Well it is, I guess, an attempt to control the public from spreading the virus and overwhelming the healthcare system. But if the government was lying, and under no pressure to avoid removing civil liberties, rationally they would be better off to declare that masks were completely ineffective and that the virus was much deadlier than it is. That would arrest the spread and drive down case numbers much more quickly.
I guess the flipside of rational literacy might be emotional literacy, and generally there's much more enthusiasm for teaching our young about emotions. My inkling is that the characterization of emotions, and 'being emotional' is fixated heavily on an idea that boys in particular are taught to repress their emotions and live in an emotional straight jacket.
I have had to learn myself the hard way what emotional competence actually is. I'm not an expert and I'm not proficient, but for me in practice being in touch with my emotions is central to my ability to act rationally. Emotional competence is explicitly the ability to recognize and identify your own emotions as and when they arise. To realize I am angry, or upset, or afraid, or stressed, when I am.
Rationalization is often the illusion that we are rational when we are in fact acting upon our emotional state (our affect) that we are not aware of. My own journey lead me to noticing that many of the people who let their emotions out, as in, having very visual emotional displays are often completely out of touch with their emotions, and unable to process emotions as information.
Kids in the grips of sour grapes or sweet lemons provide transparent demonstrations of emotional incompetence leading to irrational beliefs, adults are less transparent but often not much improved.
here though, teaching primary school kids to point is less of the concern, we are generally much better at spotting irrational emotion driven behavior in others, like when Mike is jealous of the attention his assistant Dwight is getting as sales-person of the year. Where rational literacy comes in is pointing to the self and acknowledging that we are being irrational.
I feel like admitting we are/were irrational once in our lifetime is probably above the average.
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