True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society

[progressoid]

I posted this in GD http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x3128948
but below is a part of the interview that addresses the problems we have with the Woos, CTers etc.


Psychologists have long known that humans have a remarkable ability to tune out facts that don't jibe with pre-existing beliefs. Farhad Manjoo, author of True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society, says the natural draw toward "truthiness" has run amok in the modern media age.

The Convenient Untruths
...

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And when your beliefs are not borne out by the facts and you can't tune the facts out, you can engage in something else, which you call selective interpretation. And that's what a doomsday cult did in 1954 when the world didn't end on schedule.

FARHAD MANJOO: Right. When the world didn't end on schedule for this group, they decided that, well, maybe the message that they had been getting from this divine prophet actually suggested that their work to prevent the apocalypse worked. So selective interpretation means you see a set of facts and you fit the interpretation to your beliefs.

...

BROOKE GLADSTONE: How do we have an informed society if you can disbelieve anything you aren't likely to approve of?

FARHAD MANJOO: Well, in a number of areas I argue that we don't have an informed society; that one of the problems of this age is that we have people disagreeing over things that in the past I don't think they would have disagreed about – over the basic science behind global warming, for example, where you have huge numbers of Americans who simply dismiss the science.

And one of the difficulties about this situation is that the whole system sort of operates unconsciously. You can't really tell people that your truth is not true. They're not going to believe you.

It's possible with the Internet to go out and search for the well-researched documented truth of the situation. It's more possible now than it was ever before. I suppose I can suggest that people try to do that, but I don't know how well that's going to work.

The rest is here: http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2008/04/04/04

[realisticphish]

1. that book sounds good

i'm going to check it out;

nice article, as well

[mr blur]

2. Me too. By the way, 'phish,

what's your favourite bit of Yak Side of the Moon? Mine's "The Lunatic Is On The Grassy Knowle".

[TZ]

3. I happen to like

"Comfortably Numbskulled..."
Great pic, Realisticphish!!

[realisticphish]

14. "Brain Damage"

:D

I made it last night. I actually got to bed way too late, and was tired all day because of it

[moggie]

16. It's not their best yak-based album

[realisticphish]

17. lmao

[muriel_volestrangler]

18. Or there's "Careful With That Yak, Eugene"

But my favourite must be "Wish Yaks Were Here".

[realisticphish]

19. Another Yak in the Wall

Shine On You Crazy Yak

Any Yak You Like

[salvorhardin]

4. On The Media is one of my favorite programs

I missed that one though. Sounds like a good book.

[progressoid]

7. Our local affiliate just started playing On The Media about a year ago.

I don't always catch each broadcast but it's always good.

[Pale Blue Dot]

5. I read an excellent book that covers this same subject.

Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me) by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson. It uses the example cited above as a jumping off point to talk about cognitive dissonance theory. It explains a lot about what's going on in our country and on DU (particularly in GDP).

[progressoid]

6. Hmm...I'm going on an extended road trip in a couple months.

I might have to take that one along.

[salvorhardin]

8. That's another one I've been meaning to check out

Elliot Aronson's textbook The Social Animal had a large impact on me back in my college years. What's interesting I think is that in recent years neuropsychology has been starting to offer up some of the mechanisms behind the behavior Aronson has been writing about all these years; for instance, the neurological underpinnings of moral reasoning. We're starting to get both high level and low level understanding of human behavior and the interplay between our hardware and our software (so to speak).

[regularguy]

9. A post-sincerity society also.

I've been wondering if the constant barrage of advertising doesn't amplify or at least smooth the way for the type of thought process described in the link (thanks!) above. We hear/read things everyday that we not only have no expectation to true, but that we don't even expect to have any meaning at all. (Just do it. Coke adds life. Like a Rock. Army Strong.) Demanding sincerity might seem quaint, but at some point reason has to intersect with sincerity (Yeah, I'm looking at you, hipsters ;) ). Asking for clarification is often taken as impoliteness but at some point one just has to ask : "What the fuck does that even mean?!?!?".

So as a first step one can simply dismiss everything as Bullocks, then let a few selected, pre-approved ideas past the ramparts. I guess this is sort of a mirror image of the process described in the link, but the result is the same.

[salvorhardin]

10. I don't know

Have you read philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt's On Bullshit? The last couple of paragraphs of that essay has stuck with me ever since I first read it. Here they are from an edited extract that appeared in The Guardian:

One response to this loss of confidence has been a retreat from the discipline required by dedication to the ideal of correctness to a quite different sort of discipline, which is imposed by pursuit of an alternative ideal of sincerity. Rather than seeking primarily to arrive at accurate representations of a common world, the individual turns toward trying to provide honest representations of himself. Convinced that reality has no inherent nature, which he might hope to identify as the truth about things, he devotes himself to being true to his own nature. It is as though he decides that since it makes no sense to try to be true to the facts, he must therefore try instead to be true to himself.

But it is preposterous to imagine that we ourselves are determinate, and hence susceptible both to correct and to incorrect descriptions, while supposing that the ascription of determinacy to anything else has been exposed as a mistake. As conscious beings, we exist only in response to other things,and we cannot know ourselves at all without knowing them. Moreover, there is nothing in theory, and certainly nothing in experience, to support the extraordinary judgment that it is the truth about himself that is the easiest for a person to know. Facts about ourselves are not peculiarly solid and resistant to sceptical dissolution. Our natures are, indeed, elusively insubstantial - notoriously less stable and less inherent than the natures of other things. And insofar as this is the case, sincerity itself is bullshit.
http://books.guardian.co.uk/extracts/story/0,6761,1482213,00.html

I don't think that it's that we're living a post-sincerity society so much as we're living a society where sincerity has been redefined.

[regularguy]

12. Hmmmm.

Yeah, I think I'd like to read that based on the extract in the link. Hell, I'd like to read it just based on the title! I think he might have a larger definition there of sincerity than I? I was simply thinking of sincerity as making an honest effort to mean what you say, and to think of that effort as noble rather than corny or pointless (or blasphemous).

"I don't think that it's that we're living a post-sincerity society so much as we're living a society where sincerity has been redefined."

Ok, that's a good way to put it...

[progressoid]

11. That's the "beauty" of post -modernism

It's so ambiguous that you'll find beauty in it's ambiguity. And from beauty: truth! So you see, it doesn't have to mean anything - it means everything!
:crazy: Or something like that. I used to be good at Art-speak.

I remember thinking I wasn't interested in Post-modernism in the 80's but it's influence kept creeping in. The simplicity of it was alluring. Just throw some disparate crap together and somehow it will make art. Really see it a lot now in advertising.

This guy has a fun little song about it:

http://www.myspace.com/thebedroomphilosopher
The Bedroom Philosopher - I'm So Post Modern

[regularguy]

13. Heh.

Words that mean stuff is so century before last! Man, that post-modern song was pretty damn funny. "I'm a pocket myself!"

[onager]

15. I just waded thru a ton of that crap...

And I'm an old geezer who's not all that familiar with Po-Mo. Except as frequently dropped names by net-ranters who mostly appear to be college freshmen.

Oh, and a few years ago the L.A. TIMES ran an op-ed criticizing Po-Mo'ism, which drew howls of outrage in the Letters to the Editor. A couple of respondents played the elitist card and said Po-Mo wasn't for the rabble, but could only be understood by those who had deeply studied every obscure philosopher who ever scribbled graffiti on a wall in ancient Athens. Or something like that.

Anyway, I just read an otherwise interesting book by the Egyptian historian Khaled Fahmy, dealing with the reign of the 19th-century ruler Mohammed Ali in Egypt. (All The Pasha's Men.)

Good book, but Fahmy seemed to quote either Derrida or Foucault on every other page.

Especially Foucault's Discipline And Punish. Near as I can make out, the blindingly original finding of that book was: Governments, especially tyrannical ones, always punish troublemakers.

No shit! That would have never occurred to me!

:banghead:

I don't want to slag Fahmy's book. He wrote it to correct all the nationalist Egyptian BS written about Mohammed Ali as "the father of modern Egypt." As Fahmy points out, that ruler was also the father of military conscription, the secret police, an incredibly corrupt and inefficient bureaucracy loyal to himself alone, and some other "innovations" the country could have probably done witout.