The Future of Mankind
I wrote a post on the psychological limits of human beings in which I referred to another website’s article on ten famous experiments in psychology. Another website has put a different spin on several of them, suggesting five experiments that show that mankind is doomed.
The Psychological Limits of Human Beings
PsyBlog has a post that ties together ten famous experiments in psychology, each with it’s own unique lesson to be learned. I find the one on cognitive dissonance the most interesting.
Prophetic Texts
I want to put some thoughts down on the concept of prophecy in the sense of predictions made about future events. I had written several paragraphs before I discovered the term ‘postdiction’ and its accompanying Wikipedia entry. It sums up well the concepts I had previously written so I’ve integrated its content into my article.
The problems I have with the candidates that I have seen put forward as examples of ‘prophecy’ can be summarised as:
- Vagueness: The predictions contain language that is vague, meaning that reasonable people can come to divergent conclusions on whether the prophecy has come true. Independent observers should be able to agree in advance what constitutes the fulfilment of the prophecy. The most important elements I can think of are time and place.
- Unlikelihood: The predictions describe events that, when fully considered, are not as unlikely as they seem. The fall of a city in a time and place where war is common is one example.
- Hit-to-miss ratio: A text that is said to be prophetic should successfully predict future events at a greater rate than other non-prophetic documents. This requires that predictions and non-predictions be clearly identified and their success or failure readily determined at the time of assessment.
The Wikipedia article adds several other frequent features of prophetic statements. They are: open ended, recycled, catch-all, shotgunning, unfalsifiable, unavailable until after the fact, allegory and moving the goalposts.
Information Transfer Efficiency
I would like to draw an analogy between compression technologies (such as MP3, MPEG2(DVD), .zip Files) and human communication. The analogous element is the compression. Thoughts are compressed into words that are then sent to the recipient who decompresses them. This can be ‘lossy’ or ‘lossless’. I go into further detail below.
This above diagram shows a form of communication that is analogous to a lossy compression scheme. I have presented two claims with co-premises as ‘A + B’ and ‘X + Y’. Only A and X are communicated and it is expected that the recipient will determine the relevant co-premises from the context of the conversation and the content of claims. In an argument, the recipient may not ‘fill in’ the correct co-premises and this will lead to errors. No person will communicate every relevant premise because it would be too time consuming to do so. However, I believe that when an argument is important, it is essentially that either the claimant communicate the important or contentious premises or the recipient coax them out of the claimant through dialogue.
In theory, where all words are capable of precise definition, the form of communication in the diagram above would not result in any information being lost. In that sense it is analogous to a lossless compression scheme. In reality many (most?) words are ambiguous to some extent. In the diagram ‘A’ = 1, 2, 3 and ‘B’ = 4, 5, 6. Only A and B need to be communicated because the recipient of the information has access to the definitions of A and B. They would determine the relevant definitions by looking at the context and content of the conversation. In an argument, the fidelity of the information can be maximised by ensuring that the participants clearly define the words they have used so that confusion can be avoided.
NOTE: Unfortunately the images for this post have been lost. I apologise for that, but I hope you can get the gist of what I was saying even without the images.
Worldviews
A great summary of the tests of world-view validity.
The Scope of Reason
I here describe a model of argumentation that places arguments at various points along a continuum rather in one of two categories: right or wrong. An argument is assessed to determine how close it lies to the middle of a one dimensional representation of reasonableness. If it is close then it is considered reasonable. If it is outside the middle area then it is considered unreasonable. The diagram immediately below shows the scope of reason. The diagram immediately below that shows an argument (represented as a blue circle) that lies within the scope of reason. The third diagram shows a less reasonable argument and the final one shows an unreasonable argument.
Sometimes several inconsistent arguments lie within the scope of reason. Given the human intolerance for cognitive dissonance, the inconsistent arguments are either reconciled in some manner or one or more arguments are chosen over the others.
It’s also possible that we process ideas in two phases: a low resolution phase that is simple and less detailed and a high resolution and more detailed phase. Using the aforementioned concept of argument, the first phase would be a ‘blurry’ categorisation based upon quick reasoning that involves stereotyping and appeals to consequences. Those arguments that pass this phase then move to a second and more detailed one. I am not sure how to visually represent this so I will leave that for a later post.
