Thursday, April 10, 2014

Very Useful Message Here: "How Politics Makes Context Pigeons Stupid"

(Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)




More on the "K-topic" - about people who can't discern the forest from the trees. Carrying on with the "Deficit Dove" theme, let's call such people "Context Pigeons" because they get fixated on random tactics, and lose track of what the class war is all about, or how to actually win it.

How do you convince 99 dogs to put down the 98 tactical bones they're practicing lock-jaw with, and instead look at the bigger picture that they're fully capable of perceiving & addressing with indirect agility, but are over-trained to avoid grasping?

How politics makes us stupid

(Too bad this article fixates mostly on global warming. The reasoning applies to all tactical/strategic spreads.)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Kahan calls this theory Identity-Protective Cognition: "As a way of avoiding dissonance and estrangement from valued groups, individuals subconsciously resist factual information that threatens their defining values."

Sounds very familiar. Once people get emotionally involved with a campaign, abstract framework, intellectual paradigm or parti pris to which they have developed a quasi-religious devotion, they become extraordinarily resistant to statistics, discordant facts, stubborn institutional details, political realities, scientific results or even ordinary critical and logical reasoning which disturbs the purity of their grand vision or the authority of their prophets.

Matt Franko said...

"Information" is "knowledge communicated".... so there has to be a communication for information to exist...

We just dont see the successful communication so hence no information exists ... while the knowledge is still there, we have it, they dont...

So Klein asserts we BECOME "stupid" or "moron" if we are presented with 'information' but do not act upon it, but I think he conflates 'data' or perhaps 'facts' with 'information'...

There is often no evidence that a successful communication has taken place so the other party has no information in reality... they have been presented with data/facts but until we can prove that knowledge has been communicated, there is no information

So we have this knowledge that we want to communicate, ie we want to 'provide information' and we just fail with those who REMAIN "stupid" or "morons" ie "tasteless" or "insipid" ie "lacking a key ingredient" (they continue to lack the knowledge) they dont "turn into morons" as Klein asserts here, they 'remain morons' as there is never any evidence that we have witnessed a successful 'communication of knowledge'....

Mikes last appearance on the Glen Beck channel here is imo the best example of this process failure in action:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Ou7WbNiXjA

Mike has knowledge, he attempts to provide information (knowledge communication), he fails, they remain stupid they dont become stupid....

rsp