…there’s a metacognition deficit. Very few in public life habitually step back and think about the weakness in their own thinking and what they should do to compensate…
Of the problems that afflict the country, this is the underlying one.
David Brooks, (“A Case of Mental Courage”, New York Times)
Brooks begins with the story of how Fanny Burney mustered the courage to set in writing (hence remember and relive) the experience of her mastectomy — the cutting of flesh, the scraping of bone, and more. There was, in her day, no surgical anesthesia.
In reaching his diagnosis of modern American culture, Brooks describes the decline of cultural expectations regarding metacognition, a process that feeds the flames of confirmation bias on the internet.
There’s a market for confirmation, and with interactive media, supply amplifies both supply and demand.
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It’s not that I disagree. Politics these days is not welcoming to people who like to think hard.
But commentary on this topic is usually stories instead of systems, and regularly implies that human nature (or the way we embody it) has changed in the recent past.
The problem isn’t a metacognition deficit that causes knee-jerk tribal thinking that then festers on the internet. The problem is that the internet makes it easier to form tribes. Tribal thinking, having evolved over 150k years to avoid death by ostracism, is either outside our conscious awareness or predates it. We wanted a digital society where people could cooperate more easily. It turns out that the increased odds of beating other groups of people are a primary reason why people like cooperating. In retrospect, we shouldn’t have been surprised by this.
But there’s an upside to this (besides iPods and better aircraft and being able to kibbitz at one of your childhood heroes, I mean). Orwell might have said that an internet argument looks more like duckspeak — unthinking, mechanical, adopted uncritically from others — than the equivalent argument held face to face. In other words, the internet pushes us to think about others’ ideas in more causal terms — why do they think this way? what prevents them from acknowledging the facts that are obvious to me? — instead of stories about agency, responsibility, and black-box preferences worthy of respect. This is bad for public discourse, but in light of AI’s 50 year history of hoping that simple machines will “wake up” and start acting like “real people,” it might be good for deterministic models of human behavior. Maybe low-empathy media like the internet can help enable AI in the same way industrialization and systems engineering enabled Darwin’s theory of evolution.
John, I like comment contrasting systems and stories. Someone remarked that “The world is made of systems, but people understand stories”, and I’d like to track down the source. (Allan Kay?)
I do think that changes in styles of human thinking, particularly at the higher levels of cognition, shouldn’t be surprising. They seem to be products of culture acting on latent cognitive potential, and cultures change.
The internet does make it easier to form tribes, and a decline in self-critical thinking is both a cause and effect of the growth of tribes that don’t think. (Here’s the latest specimen of reality slippage, noted by Science magazine: “Counterexamples to Relativity”.)
Interesting how Brooks fails to see how his insight could be applied to his own metacognition deficit:
“Many liberals would never ask themselves why they were so wrong about the surge in Iraq while George Bush was so right. The question is too uncomfortable.”
Brooks seems to forget that the american occupation of Iraq presently has the same duration of the american occupation of Japan, the difference being the poor outcomes of the second.
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