Microsteps towards better connected and collaborative arguments

In Real critical thinking and and what passes for it in university, I mentioned that

With blogs and twitter and the internet and social media, we are getting more and more connectivity among people and their ideas. This is broadly a good thing even though there is all sorts of heat arising from absence of good manners. But the dearth of knowledge (context) and the scarcity of critical thinking are really big contributors to the noise in the system. Hopefully this is simply a way station on the journey of systemic evolution. That greater connectivity will ultimately lead to people displaying better manners, seeking more complete knowledge before opining and exercising greater real critical thinking (rather than what they mistook for critical thinking in college).

And in What does it mean to think?, I quoted Steven Pinker to the effect that thinking entails

organizing one’s thoughts so that they may be communicated clearly to others, breaking a complex problem into its components, applying general principles to specific cases, discerning cause and effect, and negotiating tradeoffs between competing values.

Connectivity and communication which have expanded exponentially in the past couple of decades represent a step change in human society and epistemological evolution. We have not yet adapted to the new circumstances nor yet even identified some common agreement as to what it means. And everywhere, we too commonly default to the intolerant and aggressive "othering" of anyone who might have a different interpretation of facts, a different set of goals or even simply a different priority of goals.

But for all those noisy examples of motivated reasoning out there (War on Women, Gender Pay Gap, Rape Culture, Climate Change, White Privilege, Implicit Bias, Stereotype Threat, etc.), I am hopeful that increased connectivity will indeed lead to better reasoning and decision making. A couple of articles this morning are the type of ephemeral evidence from which I take hope.

China's Military Gets More Bang for the Buck by Noah Smith looks at the bromide that the US spends more on defense than all of our opponents combined. It delves it the meaning of that statement, what are the testable assumptions, what are the definitions, what is the context. Rich epistemological stuff. Cleaning off the cognitive pollution to reach a clearer understanding of what we are talking about is the sort of microstep towards progress that we ought to be heralding.

The Truth About Truthiness by Megan McArdle is an article length exploration of the bell I keep banging - focus on the argument and the evidence, not on the preferences, emotions, and motivations.