On second thoughts…
…tell me something I don’t know
What’s your star sign? I bet you’re a Capricorn, or a Scorpio. Those are the cool ones, aren’t they? And Leo, of course. Anyway, whatever your sign, at some point you have probably read an astrology-based personality profile. Notice anything strange about it? “Yes”, I hear you cry, “it was a load of pseudo-scientific nonsense.” OK, yes, that’s true, but let’s assume for the sake of argument it’s not. Let’s also ignore the claim of astrologists that such personality descriptions are a crude misrepresentation of their art. Even then, there is still something strange about them, three things in fact. And it’s not just astrology, this applies equally to the character categorisations beloved by corporate HR departments, such as Myers-Briggs, or those found in glossy magazines based on your colour preferences.
First of all, they are generally nice. Sure, they might include something about you being “disorganised” or similar, that will allow you to admit “Well, I guess I am a bit of a ditz” in a charmingly self-deprecating way. But they never suggest that you might be a droning bore, whom people cross the street to avoid, despite the fact such people empirically exist. Secondly, there is the Barnum effect: they rely on you only reading the profile assigned to you. If you take the trouble to read the others, you will find that they apply to you equally well, especially the more flattering parts.
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However, it is the third oddity that is the most interesting. Whether you accept the validity of astrology or Myers-Briggs or similar axiomatically, and are deducing your own characteristics as a result, or you have inductively concluded it contains genuine predictive power based on its uncanny identification of your traits, then logically speaking you should give the same credence to the things you don’t recognise as to those you do. You must accept that it is accurate in all aspects, not only the parts you agree with. It can’t be partially right, especially in a way that is curiously congruent with your self-image. Instead, to be consistent you must admit you are wrong about yourself.
But who does this? Typically, we tick off the various points that seem correct to us and dismiss the others. As a result, it tells us nothing we don’t already know. We are not learning about ourselves, we are merely confirming. We move on, assured in our self-knowledge, and beyond the wasted opportunity for self-discovery perhaps this doesn’t matter too much. However, our imperviousness to correction is symptomatic of a broader problem in how we learn, even what we mean by learning.
Learning is an unalloyed good. As children it comes naturally; we realise we know little and there is a lot to learn. During our teenage years we enjoy a brief period of omniscience, then as adults we are again open to learning new things and exploring new topics. But this is only one kind of learning: Rumelhart and Norman’s accretion mode, where we know a certain amount of stuff and find out more stuff. It is a rewarding and pleasant experience; the glow of self-improvement as our mastery increases.
But what about our astrology example above? What happens when we are confronted with something that challenges what we think we know? The internet is replete with performative curiosity; people boasting of their insatiable inquisitiveness, their lust for knowledge, their renaissance breadth. What it is less replete with is people admitting they were wrong and changing their minds. This is a much harder process which our minds resist. Knowing something, or thinking you do, involves such certainty that it is difficult to conceive otherwise. To be clear, we are not talking about factual errors like thinking New York is the capital of the United States, or opinions such as believing Noah Kahan is the new Bob Dylan, but rather mental models with a whole scaffolding which must be disassembled should they prove to be incorrect. These are worldviews such as the belief that the gold standard is the only guarantee of sound money, or that the problems of the developing world are primarily the responsibility of the western nations, or that the attack on the Twin Towers was an inside job.
Of course this is a personalised version of the social and generational process encapsulated in Kuhn’s famous, and abused, concept of paradigm change. Indeed, Kuhn’s formulation in group terms points to the difficulty of achieving it as an individual. It is much easier for change to occur slowly as luddites die off to be replaced by evangelists for innovation, rather than converting the incumbents. When presented with a theory, how often do any of us attempt an open-minded assessment of its validity, rather than simply judging its accuracy? We treat the world like we treat astrology, by grading it against our existing beliefs. We look at news, politics and economics, hearing what we want to hear and disregarding the rest, as Paul Simon observed. Lie la lie, indeed.
The mental effort to do otherwise, and the vacuum which it creates can be painful to confront, creating a mental vertigo and often literal nausea as our intellectual architecture disintegrates. But at the same time, we can’t all be right. It is as good as certain that at least one of our cherished beliefs is wrong, no matter how rationally we think we arrived at it. It is interesting, and perhaps sobering, to ask ourselves what our most dubious conviction is, and when the last time we really changed our mind was, discarding an entire mental conception in the process. Well?
