Principle of Myopic Influence

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
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The Principle of Myopic Influence
or
The Death of the Fence-Sitter and the Renaissance Man

I’ve been toying with a couple ideas for a rather funny way of looking at philosophical and life issues using ‘equivalent’ engineering principles. The whole theory is in its infancy, but this is an idea I wanted to kick around here.

I’ll bet someone has come up with this principle before, but here’s my take on it:

The bank of knowledge available to modern humans is so large one can only expect to be an expert in a handful of fields (the Death of the Renaissance Man). However, the number of fields appears to be limited (if not as a finite amount, as an exponentially decreasing number of new fields arising in which to study), making the number of experts in each field rise over time.

Because of the large number of experts in each field of study, one of the few ways to really make a splash is to say something radically different from the norm. That’s why we see people reinventing the wheel all the time in different subjects.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with challenging the accepted. But there is a problem under two circumstances:

  1. When someone doesn’t want to make a radical change, but a very limited change. The change could be monumentally significant, but it’s ignored because it isn’t one of the polarized viewpoints. They are in the middle ground (the Death of the Fence-Sitter).

  2. People will vehemently defend a new theory even if they’re proven wrong because they must in order to survive. They put their neck on the line and they must at all costs remain true to their theory so they don’t go financially bankrupt and lose all credibility in their field. Therefore, incorrect theories still propagate.

I call this effect the “Principle of Myopic Influence” because it seems that in modern times, to generate any kind of interest in a theory it must be specialized and it must be defended at all costs. It is myopic both in scope and its inability to admit failure.

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As usual, someone a lot smarter than myself has beaten me to the punch. It’s just a matter of time until I find one or more of them.

To these guys, ‘conventional wisdom’ is somewhat derogatory, as it was meant when John Galbraith coined it.

It’s a great book, by the by. Definitely recommend it.

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There’s the opposite way of looking at this stuff as well - that if you hold some middle-sounding position on things, you sound smarter than you are. And you’ll often be wrong. For instance the Cassandras of the world are generally ignored.

I find the history of new world exploration kind of fascinating. There was no reason to tell the truth when an explorer sent news back home to Europe. The thing to do was to tell really great lies. That’s how they got more funding and gained more power of course. It can make practical, if highly immoral sense to make people believe in El Dorado or the Fountain of Youth. Though of course many if not all of the explorers searching for these places may have believed these stories more than anybody. Perhaps it’s mostly about deeply embedded cultural delusions, rather than specific opportunistic lies.

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Interesting…

Heh, that is about all I can say for now. Excellent, excellent food for thought. I may even have to look into that book you mentioned. Great post though, to both you fellas.

I was going to ask, though Anon may have addressed this – In regard to the appeal to public emotion, do you think this is commonly done by use of overzealous-promise or illusion/delusion (ex. the Fountain of Youth example that Anon noted)?

In other words, convincing people to believe that a theory, or particular ‘side’ of an argument, can potentially lead to far greater things than would be realistically possible. An appeal to people’s affinity for fairy tales and romanticized ideals I suppose?

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Sometimes I wonder if that’s what’s happening when it comes to some explanations of quantum theory. Take the “quantum suicide” thought experiment for instance. Just as Joe European had to take new world explorers’ words as not directly refutable, Joe never having set foot in the new world, likewise I have no way of assessing how much to understand quantum theory utilizing my own (lack of) understanding of physics. If quantum theory as explained by people like Max Tegmark is true, then my own understanding of things is not up to the task of trying to understand what he is saying. It would actually be dangerous of me to think I understand what he is saying. On the other hand, he might just be creating hype, in order to promote himself. It might be hype that has some grounding (i.e. as metaphor) for what quantum theory actually entails. In that case all the other experts may simply wink at each other and carry on with what they are doing - just as the various new world explorers understood each other. They understood the metaphors, and understood what they referred to. Some statements are fairy tales to one kind of listener, and at the same time accurate metaphors for another kind of listener.

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I would think so. I didn’t consider how an expert might gain support like they did in Freakonomics, just that the most recognizable experts are generally the most polarizing. The authors expand on that exact question in the very next sentence. Here’s the whole paragraph:

Potentially, I suppose, but isn’t it sad that it requires that to make a difference? What happened to level-headedness?

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The same thing that happened to dragons I think. They were fun for story time, but never found a place in reality.

That excerpt you posted is extremely intriguing to me. Perhaps I have just never considered things in this light before, but I can’t deny that the author is on to something.

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Boo. Smaug lives!

The book is pretty funny, and he finds some ridiculous correlations. Some people might think it leans a little left of center, but I tend to agree with it so I think it’s unbiased for the most part. There was one instance that I saw that the authors definitely didn’t explore the right side of the argument (assault gun prevalence in Switzerland and their low crime rate), but I think they’ve been more than fair most of the time.

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Haha, Smaug. I see you have knowledge of the classics my friend. Though i was thinking more along the lines of Pete’s Dragon…

I’ll have to check out that book and keep your forewarning in mind. Is it essentially just a criticism of economic policy and methodology, or is it meant to be funny as well?

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They take pains to say it’s not a commentary (although they do take a negative stance on the KKK, as one would expect). The economist, Levitt, isn’t a traditional economist and he would tell you he’s quite bad at the regular kind. The titles of the first three chapters are:

What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common?
How is the Ku Klux Klan like a group of real-estate agents?
Why do drug dealers still live with their moms?

You get the idea now, I’m sure.

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Haha! Excellent. Now I’m definitely giving this thing a look.

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Anthem, you know what you’ve just said is the effect of the Gobal Division of Labor. Adam Smith said it long ago. Rational ignorance, you specialize in something and others specialize in something else, and help each other.

This Reneissance Man stuff is a naive metaphor.

And I’m sure you’ll be defending your ‘Principle of Myopic Influence’ theory, instead of trying to falsify it. [-X

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Yes, the effect is the free time that allows subsidizing of experts.

I don’t see it as a naïve metaphor; the last well-known truly dazzling renaissance man was Leonardo da Vinci, though you might be able to make the case for some other people up until about 1600. Leonardo wasn’t just interested in lots of things, he was truly an expert. It’s not a bad thing that there aren’t any more–it’s just reality. Even the biggest brains can’t become an expert in a dozen fields because becoming and expert takes nearly a lifetime and a lot of ambition. There’s a handful of doctor/lawyers out there, but I bet you won’t find too many doctor/lawyer/biologist/engineer/concert pianist/painter/polyglots. And still, they probably wouldn’t be a cardiologist/brain surgeon, or a patent attorney/international lawyer. It was once possible even just a few hundred years ago to master many disciplines, but now, like you said, the division of labor and the subsequent specialization within a field has made it impossible.

Not really. First of all, I’m not saying anything radical and polarizing.

There’s lots of examples of moderate, common-sense ideas winning the day. That probably happens more so within a field of study among experts, but not exclusively. In fact, the general non-expert probably wouldn’t see these moderate debates because they wouldn’t get popularized/sensationalized beyond the field. I think you see radicalized ideas more with politics and movements…conservatives, liberals, environmentalism, communism, Black Power, White Power, feminism, pacifism, militarism…

You see scientists trying to push theories among themselves and to the public for money and notoriety…where a particular set of bones fits in the fossil record, what a different interpretation of this result means for cosmology…and then even after one of them has been proven wrong with carbon dating, logic, and/or math to within 99.9% of scientific accuracy, they still hang on to that .1%, finding loopholes or mistakes or claiming a scientific conspiracy against them.

Global warming! Global cooling! It took a long time before people started saying, “Most likely warming, but we might not be as huge an impact on that particular aspect as we thought…but maybe we shouldn’t dump our shit everywhere anyway?” While that sounds like a good, moderate answer to me, you still have nutjobs on either side spouting email conspiracies and undeniable trends.

Bird flu will kill us all!

…I mean…swine flu, swine flu will kill us all!!!

One of the examples from Freakonomics is American crime experts predicting an apocalyptic rise in crime throughout the nineties. It actually fell, then they covered their tracks by finding reasons for its fall. Steven Levitt seems to think the actual reason for the fall was the legalization of abortion…now there’s a radical idea that’s worth pursuing: actually looking at numbers with regards to the pro-choice/pro-life debate instead of arguing ideology because that’s getting us nowhere.

It’s not always a bad thing because sometimes there needs to be a radical shift…a certain way of practicing medicine, or relativity in physics…but everyone seems to think they can do it these days.

Is that too radical or one sided?

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Anthem- I don’t think I’ve ever said this before, but I believe you are exactly right in everything you said in your opening post. It’s especially true in Philosophy, and I suspect other fields as well. Very novelty-driven, is how I’ve put it.

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Wow. Thanks. If it means anything, I believe you are exactly right in everything you said in your last post :slight_smile:

Actually, to be completely honest, I don’t think it’s a very well-written post at all (my opener, not yours), but I’m glad it gets the idea across.

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Good points. I don’t think it’s a modern phenomenon, though; Milton was alleged to be the last (Western) homo universalis, at which point (western) knowledge overtook human capacity. And Hegel’s theory of synthesis is perhaps his only useful theory precisely because this is how things work. Philosophy has never been the sort of field that does things by halves, one argues oneself from corner to corner.

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Yeah, I don’t think so either, but I think it’s getting worse. Especially with politics.

Actually, maybe someone older than I could help me out with that. Is it just becoming more and more apparent as I get older and more conscious, or are the left and right getting increasingly farther apart in America?

I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t think I was conscious until I was about twenty. Seventeen, if I’m lucky.

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America’s a two-horse race, which leads to a polarisation. And it’s probably getting socially more diverse - or at the very least, more diverse sections of society are finally entering mainstream consciousness. But I suspect the former. In that case, it could well be the parties will move further apart, polarise themselves more.

Having said that, I’m a Brit, and the UK has a sort of two-and-a-half party system, that’s gradually homogenising into a one-and-a-quarter party system; everyone wants a centre-right party, so the left have moved right and the right left. Now the old centre is almost the left, the old left is centre-right and the right covers a spectrum of people from waaay right to left of the new left. If you follow. And the UK is far more diverse now than in the polarised post-war years, when left meant hardcore socialism and right meant privilege and Knowing Your Place, so it’s certainly not a historical inevitability.

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It is merely the principle of “Survival of the Fitted”.

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