Tuesday, December 14, 2021

We often oversimplify a moral situation by attributing to one party agency without feelings and to another party feelings without agency.

From Non-fiction Books 12/12 by Arnold Kling.  My emphasis added.  

The Mind Club, recommended to me by one of my readers, is a must-read. If nothing else, check out my essay about it. The book, by Daniel M. Wegner and Kurt Gray, was published several years ago, but to no fanfare, perhaps because Wegner had died. One very important insight of the book is that we often oversimplify a moral situation by attributing to one party agency without feelings and to another party feelings without agency. So someone will describe “the market” as if it were an evil robot, with a consumer or worker regarded as a helpless victim.

He also lists 

The Constitution of Knowledge is irritating, because in describing the decline of social sense-making Jonathan Rauch assigns too much agency to Mr. Trump and too little agency to the educated elites. But it is a must-read book, because it emphasizes that the key to overcoming the inevitable biases and blind spots of individuals is to pursue truth through social norms and institutions.  

I also have found it irritating.  I purchased it based on the enthusiasm of a number of thinkers whom I respect but have found it so far shockingly ill-considered.  I have made three separate assaults and have reached perhaps page 80.  I am hopeful that at some point I will get to some fresh thinking and insight.  So far, though, the thin conceptual framework being advanced is always being subverted by an obsession with Trump.  There is no doubt that there is plenty to work with in terms of truth and Trump (as with any politician) but Rauch's obsession so far makes it clear that this is an ideologue's rant against a politician rather than a thinker's meditation on the constitution of knowledge. 

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