Two quick links

One of my themes here is that liberal establishment ideas are rooted in unexamined assumptions and privileges.  So, two relevant links:

1) From Quillette, an article arguing that the difference between Eastern and Western Europe on the issue of Muslims refugees is that Eastern Europeans have been the conquered rather than the conquerors. I personally support taking in refugees, but I think the mindset of those who disagree is worth understanding rather than dismissing.  However, I think the biggest error in this piece is exaggerating Western European openness to refugees.

2) Timothy Burke uses the example of Donald Trump to dispute Jonathan Haidt's claim that liberals don't have a sense of sacred vs. profane.  Burke argues that liberals simply hold sacred very different things than what conservatives hold sacred.  Here I strongly agree with Burke.  Liberalism has plenty of religious aspects.

Ethical knowledge is not ethical action

Claude Steele has stepped down as provost at Berkeley, and will return to the faculty. The administration at Berkeley has been under intense scrutiny over their handling of high-profile sexual harassment cases in the past year, and while the announcement of his resignation does not explicitly mention those controversies it is quite reasonable to guess that they were a factor.

I'm blogging about this because Steele is a famous psychologist, best known outside the field for his work on stereotype threat. I do not know enough about the details of those cases and the chain of events inside the administration to say for certain whether Steele deserves criticism, but the issue here is less about specific individual culpability and burdens, and more about assumptions that are "in the air" among academics.  Regardless of whether Steele himself made mistakes of sufficient gravity to merit losing his job according to whatever standard you might wish to apply, it seems clear that things could have been handled better than they were.  What matters here is that the handling was, at the least, sub-optimal, sitting somewhere along a spectrum that goes from "grossly negligent" to "typical bureaucratic response" to "probably well-intentioned but still not what we need."

In the modern zeitgeist there is a belief that raising awareness of research on bias--including but not limited to subconscious bias--will lead to better behavior, better decision-making, more sensitive people, etc.  Now, to my knowledge Steele himself does not explicitly study sexual harassment, but he does study stereotypes and their effects.  One can reasonably guess that he is thus more aware than the average academic about the wider literature on bias, sexism, etc.  If a raised consciousness were the key to getting people to respond promptly, appropriately, and effectively to acts of sexism, racism, etc. then putting a bias researcher into a position of power would be the surest path to reform.  Alas, it seems that bias researchers are as human as anyone else.  Having lots of "is" knowledge about how bias works does not lead them to act as they "ought" when faced with a professional challenge.

This should not be a surprise.  Jonathan Haidt noted in The Righteous Mind that academics who study ethics are no more ethical than anyone else.  I'm from a family full of health professionals, and some of them have all sorts of unhealthy habits.  I'm in a profession of educated people and some of them are anti-intellectual.

There's a separation between what we know intellectually and what we carry into practice.  That's certainly an indictment of my profession, including the traditionalists and the progressives alike, because studying something, even in-depth and for years, doesn't always transform people as you'd hope.  At the same time, I'd like to selfishly and shamelessly argue that it reflects even worse on the progressives than the traditionalists, because I think the traditionalists are more willing to treat problems as hard, whereas the progressives hold out hope for secret tricks and correct politics.  A traditionalist social scientist wants to understand people, while a reformer wants to fix them.  It's the difference between science and engineering. Most news articles about "According to a new study..." (including the one I linked to at the beginning of this post) are written to satisfy a curiosity about how to act, not merely to help the reader understand why people act as they do.

So, I don't claim to know anything about how things were handled (or mishandled) behind the scenes at Berkeley, but at the very least I am unsurprised that a bias researcher would not be any better than the rest of the world when it comes to responding to sexism.  All of the "is" statements in the world cannot change a person's "oughts."  Only "ought" statements can do that.  Social scientists cannot save us any more than priests can.  Only you can save your soul.  Priests and social scientists can advise you, but only you can decide your actions.

Haidt, final chapter

I haven't had a lot to say about Haidt's book because most of it hasn't touched on the themes that I want to explore in this blog.  I will just touch on two things from the last chapter:

1) Empirical work has shown that liberals have more misconceptions about conservatives than conservatives have about liberals.  This might sound suspicious, if you only think about the most fire-breathing conservative pundits that you have seen, but the world is mostly made up of normal people, not fire-breathing pundits.  He spends much of the book explaining the differences between the moral intuitions of the left and right, and shows that the left has a small set of eminently rational moral intuitions, while the right has basically the same intuitions but also supplements them with some notions that you either find defensible or don't find defensible.  Consequently, conservatives can (on average) liberals better than liberals can understand conservatives.

I am so, so, SOOOO tempted to extrapolate this to things that I observe in the faculty lounge, but I think that social class and a rather unusual set of professional experiences do more to explain the clueless attitudes of academics than their partisan biases.  That isn't to say that Haidt's findings on political psychology aren't relevant (I'm sure they are) but I doubt they're the only factor.

2) On page 336, Haidt makes a great comment about teaching: When he decided to start doing research on political psychology, he decided that the only way to learn the subject was to teach a class on it.  So true.  So, so true.

Haidt, page 153

I like the point made about innate human traits on page 153:  Innate traits are not unchanging or universally expressed in all cultural and environmental situations.  They are simply found in the first draft provided by Nature at birth.  Nurture and other environmental variables will determine the extent to which that first draft is altered or not.

Haidt, Chapter 3

Chapter 3 has many more examples of how people reach snap judgments.  The most interesting experiment, though, is the one at the end:  Instead of letting people respond to a moral dilemma (and an argument about the dilemma) right away, the experimenters forced people to wait 2 minutes before responding to the argument about the dilemma.  People actually changed their minds when they paused to think.  Besides being a hopeful statement about human nature in general, it's also a counter to the zeitgeist about the power of our subconscious.

Haidt, chapters 1 and 2

I don't have it in me to exhaustively recap, but Haidt's main point so far is that moral judgment comes from quick intuition, and then we slather reasoning on top of it.  Well, not you, of course.  You, dear reader, are the epitome of reason, and you have carefully thought through all of your moral and political stances.  But everyone else out there--you know, the people less thoughtful than you--they most certainly do proceed from moral intuition and hunches, and put their ethical reasoning in after the fact.

I find this to be useful outside of the moral domain, in terms of understanding persuasion.  Too often at work people want to treat the layers above us as some sort of deterministic machine, and they're looking for the consistency so that they can reliably turn the lever and get what they want.  But people don't work that way. They have their hot buttons, their emotions, and then also their cooler, calmer side.  Different things come into play at different times, and you have to gauge all of those before you can successfully engage in persuasion.

Next book: The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt

My next book will be The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt.  This book explores the psychology understanding political stances.