Third millennium thinking

 

We are living in a miraculous but paradoxically perilously fissured world. So, on the one side we have such amazing technological development, access to information and connection to the world that was inconceivable even few decades back, we live incredible time that seems a miracle if you trace two hundred thousand years of homo sapiens evolution. Access to the world is no longer controlled by few, every voice has an opportunity to express and be heard -a qualitative leap from past, they can learn and organize and assert. Traditional forms of authorities and feudal control is getting diluted as virtual world have progressive ramifications on real world. World has become much aware in the last one decade than ever before. Well, people could have taken this path to make world a better place, and really did take some firm steps towards progressive values systems and nurturing inclusive institutions facilitated by technology. What we see however is consolidation of worst expressions of technology tapping primal values and atavistic concerns that bypass progress humanity made in last many centuries and hard-won humanistic values. Primed in extractive systems neoliberal capitalism and values extrapolated from fantastical religions and juvenile faiths we are being pushed into perilously fissured world. Bad players use these latest technology and access to vitiate the situation for greed and control. They viciously nurture extractive systems to trap people and spread misery. Possibilities of awareness is reduced to targeted disinformation and reality obfuscating misinformation, apathy and irresponsible ways. Life threatening conspiracy theories are spread with earnestness and cunning logical reasoning that impress many. As the world gets polarized, we find on the one side liberal posing dark empath sociopaths and on the other self-assured god ordained psychopaths. We see this template replicated all across the world in varying degree. Psychopaths deem themselves as born to lead hence aren’t really bothered about people or nuances, they use latest technologies as opportunity to access to blatantly control by whatever means -an Orwellian world if you will. While dark empaths are sociopaths who consider themselves as blessed exceptional people but have to relentlessly pose to gain trust and capitalize opportunity, they work to nurture extractive system for benefits -a kind of Huxleyian world that lull us into complacency since we assume they are here to uphold cherished values and humanistic concerns. They playact with semantics but are least involved, and as people loose trust in dark empath sociopaths – who see themselves as savior in increasingly chaotic world they unleash as liberal while systematically diluting existential concerns of vulnerable people, they feel insecure hence give way to authority figure -the psychopaths consolidate feudal and regressive forces. The shift can be debilitating if the democratic institutions are not resilient which ofcourse is crucially hinged to democratic ideals and liberal thoughts percolating to common people and their interaction to the world. The reason why transactional neoliberal value system deeply violate progressive society so does fantastical ways of religions that isolate from surrounding reality. An unthinking mind sentimentally connected to feudal institutions seeks associations in ascriptive association and is insecure, incapable to assimilate challenges of progressive world hence will find solace in authoritarian patriarchal leaders. Rise of authoritarian is on primal need for safety and not to be mistaken for progressive evolved values of seeking authority of facts to decipher reality for better possibility. The need for authority is to protect their fantasy world, an evolutionary mismatch trapped in thousands of years of brutal hunter gatherer life that seek ‘strong father figure’ leader to sought out problems and take control. Primitives like to wallow in the muck while simultaneously constructing fantasy of spectacular past and nostalgia for this self-consuming myth -very likely genetic imprint traces reminiscing exhilaration of chasing wild pigs or grand celebration of bringing down a mammoth. These evolutionary juveniles haven’t gained sophistication to become aware of enlightened world and possibilities of present.  

Extractive systems dilute facts and subjectify its connection to our awareness of reality. The chaos they create is to seek authority. Critical thinking is seen as threat as it easily exposes them. Science is targeted, and ironically technology is manipulated to question the same. Common people are reduced to herd despite the immense possibility that technology presents to extricate themselves to better ways. Herds are manipulated to be distracted and busied in infighting while the system extracts benefits for few to consolidate control that has now become an existential threat. Even people who attempt to extricate themselves from this overwhelming morass find it difficult to negotiate the perilous journey of seeking what is true. Most of the times their life is hinged on this need for truth to survive. So how do we go about seeking what is true without falling into traps of greedy people, feudal forces of control, our own authority bias, regressive values, overwhelmingly primitive forces that infect democratic institutions and reduce possibilities of better future? Clearly if we don’t have a shared common reality, it is impossible to solve global challenges as a collective. Third Millennium Thinking is a timely book that I ordered online after listening to a talk on Youtube (something inconceivable a decade back, and likely not available in any nearby bookstore hence would have missed the insight while few will be in control of latest knowledge). Written by three authors with wide background as physicist, psychologist, and philosopher this book is sincere attempt to help us negotiate challenges of assimilating information, to ‘create sense in a world of nonsense’. How to navigate better, as an individual and as a society, in this age of information overwhelm? How to make sense of the extraordinary amount of complex, often contradictory information? The book explores scientific thinking and methodology as a means of understanding the world so that we can make efficacious decisions based on this understanding.      

Science is an effective intellectual tool that helped humanity make breathtaking progress and dramatic conceptual understanding in past century, but in recent times these itself are questioned and have become ‘totem of polarization’. The authors try to clarify scientific methodology and attempt to create framework of understanding for common people in tackling and deciphering the challenges in daily life. It is a meticulous work of distinguishing measuring tool from thinking tool, creating parameters for evaluating information on what we know and what we believe. This thinking tool of science is an asset that helped us to make immense progress and hence can help in creating inquiring inquisitive mind to decipher the reality. I recall when we studied science in school we didn’t study ‘thinking tool of science’ that would have helped us to extend this brilliant progress of thinking into everyday understanding of realities of life. This book therefore is also an important document for creating new insight into scientific thinking in formative years. Vibrant societies should be able to capitalize on these to create progressive young minds. Meanwhile the concern now is urgent nature of polarized manipulated world we live in and how systematic sincere dealing of issue with progressive tool will create understanding. This is third millennium thinking.

The book is quite readable and in easy-to-understand language with not much jargons. Neatly divided into five chapters, it deals with science as a tool in building trust in shared understanding of reality hence can guide us in our daily decision making. Good decision making depends on accurate information from reliable experts, a careful consideration of values, and a structure that places the authority to make decisions in the hands of those who will be affected. Science doesn’t work by magic; it works by design. Authority of science comes from relentless self-questioning thus science essentially is a social phenomenon, but a truth hunting collaborative social phenomenon, not a coercive one. It helps us identify shared reality out there in the world. Finding out causation by looking at correlation under the condition of an experiment, standardizing factors. An experiment is when you come from outside the whole system and interfere with to see what happens. Science is not about certainty nor brittle binary views but probabilistic thinking.  Probabilistic thinking helps us to be honest about our knowledge and keep us open minded to productively use knowledge that is uncertain. Probabilistic stance reflects the relationship between our imperfect human understanding and the actual shared reality (well wasn’t it Wittgenstein who said scientific truths could never have absolute validity). In a world of inherent uncertainty scientists are calibrated. We want our experts to be 100percent correct but that is not possible, but we can and should seek experts close to 100percent calibrated. In an uncertain world, we should prize experts who are calibrated. Experts needs to calibrated enough to be trustworthy, but specific enough to be informative. Honest and realistic assessment of confidence can preserve trust in expertise. There is a chapter on how we are fooled by a pattern in random noise, or sieving more data to up the odds that random noise will show some hunted data. Probabilistic thinking, statistically significant, improving predictive/forecasting tools so on are path to understanding. Statistical uncertainty and systematic uncertainty are something most of us are aware of and helps us to identify biases in our decision making.

The world needs scientific optimism -the can-do spirit that the problem at hand is going to be solvable, tempered with measured healthy skepticism. It is to keep alert, alive, and motivated despite setbacks, a cultural antidote to cynicism. I found ‘order of understanding’ quite interesting, not all causal factors in real world problem are equally important -the classification of ‘first order’, ‘second order’, factor so on, while framing an issue. ‘Fermi approximation’ process, a quick and easy on the spot estimation approach, a random estimation based on familiar easier to do as an anchor to probe. An approach to intelligent approximation is a valuable insight. If unsure you can atleast create upper and lower bound estimation, a band of possibility. There is an interesting chapter on what prevents learning from experience, indeed experience is a weak predictor of job performance. The psychological factors -habits, biases-the one that makes systemic error/ingroup/dispositional/confirmation, available heuristic, can be overcome with scientific methods that includes debiasing techniques like consider the opposite/alternative so on. How science is misused provides important perspective on growing distrust among common populace. From science not done well to pathological science to pseudo-science (uses language of science -the terminology, great sounding words, but not the activity -based in India we see these charlatans all the time!) to fraudulent science. Of these, pathological science is particularly worrisome as it invests in exciting result ignoring data that suggests otherwise. Trying out different analysis until you get the result you want (p hacking, it is not cherry picking) adds to the problem. There are examples cold fusion claims (or recent superconductivity claim -not mentioned in the book but I recall being excited about it) so on.

The stimulating part of the book is the discussion on science methodologies -mental hygiene techniques, that are quite new (and have not even spread to different field of science) so the ‘readers of the book have a chance to get ahead of science world’. ‘Ignorance is bliss solution’ or blind analysis removes biases and remain honest. Blinding is now tried in workplace to reduce discriminations. Blind analysis based expert opinion in court proceeding is suggested. Next, we have ‘open science movement’ to improve credibility and integrity in scientific practice. Preregistration, multilab investigation, open science badges so on are safeguard against confirmation bias. The book move to collective, the groupthink and mob behavior, resonation from social media to real life implication. There are two different kinds of influence in groups, informational influence (strength in argument -ability to merge collective knowledge of the group and use it to reason to a solution) and normative influence (strength in numbers -deference to large block or faction, hence amplify shared bias -which can be removed by diversity). For argument to work there is a need for some kind of shared conceptual system for identifying strong and weak argument and a shared way of assessing. Maths, logic, common knowledge etc. are shared conceptual systems. Good scientific theories can serve as shared conceptual system, provided they have strong internal logic and support of external evidence. Shared conceptual systems can help build trust and platform for interaction. Another is the issue of emotions or extraneous factors that influence; decisions are not based on getting facts of the world alone. The book discusses with example on separating fact from values. Facts are important but claims of fact (fact stories) can be shaped by societal forces making it difficult to separate fact from values. Self-affirmation in case of value conflict is an interesting study, and has been implemented in schools to help students absorb new information. Reflective equilibrium between our judgement about particular case and our judgment of general rules/principles and prioritizing helps in value conflict resolution. There is a role for iterative deliberation concerning values just as there is iterative deliberation to adjudicate among different sources of evidence and expertise when determining facts. Ofcourse deliberation is an important challenge of our time. We have become aware of dangerous potential of the internet to polarize and confuse public conversation; but not yet taken advantage of opportunities for better collective thinking that it might present. Our collective challenge, indeed grand challenge of the times we live in, is to invent new tools that enables to think together productively and make us successful collectively. Productive collective thinking is the immediate need to tackle global challenges we face, importantly to create productive collective thinking environment. Deliberative Polling (developed in Stanford ‘Deliberative Democracy Lab’ by JimFishkin) is a transformative tool for productive collective thinking. So is Scenario Planning, to develop a range of possible futures so that we can test how robust decisions are in these contexts, identifying pending important decisions that need to be made, a useful tool for stimulating careful thinking and planning for future -a frequent goal for collective thinking and decision making. Good Judgement Project (GJP) -a statistical method distilling ‘wisdom of crowd’, is a forecasting technique that is effective collective thinking in action. Collective thinking experiments are now extended to online, DebateCafe is a demonstrative system encouraging people to enter best arguments on both side of the issue to win place in leaderboard. Another is to decompose elements of discussion in, say, news article into small testable part. Does this sentence show evidence of clear probabilistic thinking or is it a probabilistic thinking mental trap like p hacking? Does it have capacity to think the opposite or is it a classical confirmation bias selection of evidence? These could be important addition to education curriculum. Citizen-Scientist are set up to share these kinds of analysis. We want science to not only increase our understanding but also solve problem that is not confined to scientific field but ones with social ramifications.

Managing with continuous adjustment, an iterative solution in an experimenting society that isn’t a static structure but ongoing process, a shift from factual to probabilistic thinking, multilevel nuanced views of emergent problems through constant reality tracking rather than appearing smart expert, zero sum to increase the pie for win-win, involving and trying new innovative collective thinking tool taking advantage of latest technologies, building and rebuilding of trust network, not attention (seeking) economy but trust (building) economy that nurtures new ways to reward open minded collective thinking, experiment with incentives and penalties to reform the pollution of cognitive commons. This is new millennium thinking. A new kind of enlightenment for a new millennium in which we advance global human family.

A brilliant much needed book. Buy it. Read it. Think about it. Try to apply it.