The Scipionic Circle 81: Navigating the Complex Territory of Truth, Cultural Constructs of Success, and Plato's Theory of the Soul
The Scipionic Circle 81: Navigating the Complex Territory of Truth, Cultural Constructs of Success, and Plato's Theory of the Soul
"It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent."
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Welcome to another issue of The Scipionic Circle — I hope you find something of value.
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Food for Thought
I. Cognitive Perception and Biases: Navigating the Complex Territory of Truth and Fallacy in Human Thought
"Our chief cognitive concern is to perceive reality as clearly and accurately as possible. To develop a functional map which aligns as closely as possible to the territory it aims to portray.
"There may be some things you just know are true. If someone asked you how sure you are, you would answer one-hundred percent. But the truth is the feelings of absolute certainty we have about some things are completely independent of the actual property of truth. These feelings are experienced in entirely different brain regions from our rational faculties. We determine what we are sure of intuitively, and then we use reason to justify it.
"The territory represents what is real independent of our beliefs and interpretations. The territory is infinitely and incomprehensibly complex. In order to grapple with it, humans have to convert it to a form of lossy compression called concepts, and we organize these concepts into our belief system, or map.
"Just as a geographical map would be useless if it contained every single detail of the territory it portrays, our belief system must simplify the territory to be comprehensible or useful, compromising accuracy in the process. A child’s belief system is crude and pixelated compared to an adult’s.
"As we develop cognitively, we continually reassess our beliefs, sharpen our distinctions, and accumulate more refined and less pixelated concepts. But concepts and models, even the most sophisticated, are always inherently pixelated, and our beliefs are always incomplete. So it’s possible for us to develop models which more and more closely approximate the truth without ever reaching 'perfect truth.'
"The input is a starting premise or raw perception about the world. The output is a cognition - a thought or belief. These algorithms are triggered and run automatically, and the rules they follow are uniform. Sometimes that is perfectly fine, useful even. But many of these algorithms are fundamentally flawed and distorted, which can have consequences ranging from amusing to catastrophic.
"These bad algorithms are generally called biases, or systematic flaws in our thinking. Biases are reflexive inferences which invalidly flow from premises without our conscious awareness - hidden patterns which result in mistaken beliefs and faulty decisions and will continue to result in the same mistakes indefinitely unless they are identified and programmed out.
"Some of the simplest and easiest to recognize biases fall into the category of logical fallacies. Take this argument: All humans are mammals Ryan Seacrest is a mammal Therefore, Ryan Seacrest is a human. This is called the fallacy of the undistributed middle. Just because all humans are mammals doesn’t mean all mammals are humans, and just because we know a conclusion to be true does not mean it logically follows from its premises (belief bias). Given our premises, it is entirely possible that the beloved television personality could be another type of primate, or even a large rodent. And it has been found that 70% of university students get this type of problem wrong when challenged with it.
"An ad hominem fallacy, for example, attacks the character or authority of the person making an argument rather than the argument itself. An appeal to consequences distracts from the validity of an argument and focuses on whether the implications of that argument are desirable or not. And an appeal to emotion may use persuasive rhetoric and anecdotes to stir up fear, indignation, or sympathy in the listeners - glossing over bad logic or insufficient evidence.
"There are many other common logical fallacies. A slippery slope argument claims that a small step will inevitably lead to a whole chain of undesirable consequences, such as parents arguing that if they let their daughter learn a card trick, there will be no stopping her from pursuing a career as an illusionist. A false dichotomy claims that if one extreme is rejected (capitalism has no flaws), another extreme must be the only alternative (communism it is). And the post hoc fallacy causes us to assume that correlation equates to causation, such as the belief that the sun rising actually causes your drinking problem.
"Our view of the future is even more distorted, as we are also imperfect in our assessments of probability and prediction. We tend to think past events affect future odds when they don’t, such as believing a streak of flipping heads or scoring in basketball makes it more likely (hot hand fallacy) or less likely (gambler’s fallacy) that we will do so again in the future. And have you ever heard someone defend dangerous behaviors by making the argument that some people are killed because they were wearing seatbelts, or some smokers live to be 100? We sometimes neglect probability entirely and make decisions based only on anecdotal evidence.
"Our present evaluations, even the ones we reflect deeply on, are much less coherent than we tend to think. We overvalue information which is readily available (availability bias), presented first (primacy bias), frequently (frequency bias), or recently (recency bias). And various expressions of loss aversion, such as the endowment effect cause us to demand more to give something up than we would pay to acquire it." — From Designing the Mind: The Principles of Psychitecture by Ryan A. Bush.
II. Cultural Constructs of Success: A Comparison Between Western Ideals and the Hamar Community of Southwestern Ethiopia
"Wisdom is practical insight - knowing what is good for you - strategic self-interest. Wisdom is about taking the most rational and insightful beliefs and forming goals based on them. Our culture is highly goal-oriented in that it advocates setting and pursuing goals as effectively as possible. But it places much less emphasis on ensuring that one is setting the right goals. We naturally acquire beliefs about which goals are worth striving for from our culture just as we acquire beliefs about the world, and every culture has its own 'success' narrative. This narrative assigns arbitrary milestones that deem people 'successful' after they meet them. And we’ve all heard our culture’s success narrative a thousand times.
"You are born, given a name, and also given a cow name and a goat name. You are given head massages to elongate your skull to make you appear to be a strong warrior. From an early age, culture tells you to herd goats. You are told to plow the fields, learn to raise beehives, and steal livestock from other communities. If you are a man, you are told that in order to be 'successful,' you have to have your head partially shaved, get rubbed with sand to wash away your sins, and get smeared with cow dung. You are told to strip naked, jump onto the back of a cow, and then jump across the backs of a row of fifteen cows, which have also been smeared with dung. You must do this four times without falling, and are told that falling off will deem you a failure and a shame to your family. Success will allow you to marry a woman you have never met, but not before you accumulate 30 goats and 20 cattle in order to purchase the marriage from her family. The more wives you accumulate, the more you are deemed a 'success' by your culture. If you are a woman, you are expected to meet men who have gone through this process, and to beg them to brutally whip you, not showing any pain the whole time. Cultural narrative dictates that you marry a man twice your age who has been assigned without your vote. If your family fails to find you a husband, you have to watch all of your friends receive phallic-shaped necklaces, indicating their “success,” while you wear only an oval, metal plate on your head. If you become pregnant outside of marriage, your child will be considered cursed, and your peers will encourage you to abandon it. If you do get married, your husband will beat you routinely for no apparent reason until you have had two to three children. The more scars you receive, the more 'successful' you will be considered by your tribe.
“Not the story you were expecting? Oh, you must not be a member of the Hamar community of southwestern Ethiopia. I guess I just assumed. Yes, these are all very standard practices in the Hamar community, and they are not even the most bizarre traditions we see in cultures around the world. What is really hard to grasp is that the Hamar would likely view our culture’s definitions of success to be just as strange and arbitrary as we find theirs." — From Designing the Mind: The Principles of Psychitecture by Ryan A. Bush.
III. Plato's Tripartite Theory of the Soul: Reason, Spirit, and Appetite in the Republic and the Phaedrus
"In Book IV of the Republic a somewhat more elaborate theory of the soul is advanced. Here Plato says that the soul has three parts: reason, spirit and appetite. With the first we learn, and pursue truth by rational enquiry; with the second we feel emotions such as anger or determination, and this is the part of us that seeks honour; while the third focuses upon such bodily desires as food, wine and sex.
"In the Phaedrus Plato offers an account of the way we can sometimes be conflicted within ourselves because the different parts of the soul pull in different directions. He likens us to a flying chariot with a driver and two horses; the driver is reason, one of the horses is spirit, the other is appetite. Appetite tries to pull the chariot down to earth, while spirit seeks to obey reason’s aim of taking it to the heavens. The charioteer has to struggle with the opposing forces thus represented. Plato gives more practical examples of this in the Republic, one of which is of a man who desires to fulfil a certain appetite but is angry with himself for having that appetite." — From The History of Philosophy by A. C. Grayling.
Quotes to Ponder
I. Bertrand Russell on the barrier of dogmatism:
"Dogmatism is the greatest of mental obstacles to human happiness."
II. Charlie Munger on the value of avoiding stupidity:
"It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent."
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Thank you for reading,
Matthew Vere