This is the January 10 2022 edition of the microphilosophy newsletter. Get microphilosophy direct to your inbox my signing up for my mailing list on this site’s sidebar.
Why do smart people believe stupid things? If there were a simple answer, smart people would have acted on it and we’d have stopped asking the question decades ago. Instead, more occasions to ask it arise with every passing day.
One of the latest is the conviction of Elizabeth Holmes for fraud. Although it is Holmes alone who has been found guilty of wrongdoing, there would have been no scandal if others had been able to see that the claim that her company, Theranos, had revolutionised blood testing was empty. A lot of clever people have been left with eggs on their faces, and less money in their pockets.
The Holmes case is on my mind because I’m just finishing up a book on critical thinking and I’ve been musing a lot about what helps and hinders rational thought. In the book I advocate the principle of charity: attributing the most reasonable explanation for someone’s beliefs or behaviours, not the least. So what happens when we apply this to Holmes?
It would be too charitable to doubt the jury’s conclusion that Holmes knowingly lied when she claimed Theranos’s devices could detect diseases with just a few drops of blood. But to assume that means the whole company was a cynical scam from beginning to end makes no sense. If she did not believe that she was onto something that would deliver on its promise eventually, she would have known that it was only a matter of time before she was found out. The explanation that makes psychological sense is that Holmes was covering up what she saw as teething problems in the belief that Theranos would ultimately come good.
If this is right, then Holmes is a classic case of self-deception. She was so emotionally, reputationally, professionally and financially invested in her product that she just could not believe it was fatally flawed. Her case may be extreme but the phenomenon is all-too common. People find it very difficult to see flaws in their own ideas that would seem obvious to them, if they were the ideas of others. The same can be said for the failings of people we love.
Critical thinking is often thought to be mainly about cleverness, the ability to process thoughts logically and so on. But bad thinking is very often a result of our psychological rather than our logical failings. To think well we don’t just need reasoning skills, we have to have the right attitudes. One of these is the ability to distance ourselves from whatever it is we are thinking about, to strip away any allegiances or prejudices we might have and to look at it for what it is. Holmes couldn’t do this. All the evidence suggests that she is exceptionally intelligent. Her downfall was that she was too proud.
Indeed, when our thinking becomes highly motivated, being very intelligent can actually be a problem. If you need to rationalise away an inconvenient truth, being a good ratiocinator is an extremely useful skill.
What about all the people Holmes took in? Wishful thinking surely played a huge part here too. Once someone had invested in her company, it would have taken incredible honesty to see that, actually, they had made a huge mistake.
But I think there is another cultural factor in play here. There is a certain West Coast cult of positivity which has become all too influential. We’re told to dream big, believe in ourselves, not to allow ‘impossible’ into our vocabulary. So when people come to us with their fanciful ideas, we’re primed to say ‘Amazing!’ not ‘That sounds pretty unbelievable to me.’
The idea that anyone can achieve anything has become an awful cliché. It was wheeled out again this week when Preet Chandi, a British army officer from Derby, became the first woman of colour to ski to the South Pole on a solo expedition. In her triumphant Instagram post she said that she wanted ‘to encourage people to push their boundaries and to believe in themselves’. She said ‘I have been told no on many occasions and told to “just do the normal thing”, but we create our own normal. You are capable of anything you want.’
It’s inspiring but it’s bullshit. There are infinite things I want that I am not capable of, from winning Wimbledon to being able to play bass like Stanley Clarke. Is it any wonder that in a culture that applauds rather than scoffs at empty slogans about anything being possible, even smart investors don’t ask the hard questions that they should?
It doesn’t help in the case of Theranos that hardly anyone understands the technology behind many of the things that have become big recently. Cryptocurrencies make as little sense to me as they make fortunes for others. It’s as though we have no benchmark for plausibility anymore.
Wishful thinking has always been a source of cognitive impairment. Our super-excited Generation Ted culture doesn’t challenge this, it encourages it. And the opacity of how the world works means few of us lack the abilities to conduct a proper reality check even if we tried. The importance of measured scepticism, without descending into crippling cynicism, has never been greater.
New at JulianBaggini.com
Last year I tried out Patreon but despite getting some wonderful support I cousins make it work the way I wanted to. So instead I now have a support-exclusive area of my website, which means both free and premium content is all in the same place. I’ve already put up more than 30 articles, videos and podcasts in this section of the website, including exclusive previews of a podcast mini-series in which I discuss why discussing trans rights is so difficult with two women on different sides of the debate, Catarina Dutilh Novaes and Mary Leng. It’s rare to have such a respectful measured discussion on this fraught topic. You can listen right now by becoming a supporter for as little as £5 a month or wait for it to be made public in due course.
Supporters also get invited to online Café Philosophiques, in which I facilitate an hour-long discussion of a subject suggested by the group. The next one is Sunday evening (UK time), so there is still time to sign up and come. (Send me an email if you do so I can give you the Zoom link.)
There are plenty of links to open access articles on the site, including this essay for New Humanist on the moral significance of animal sentience, which I fear will be disliked by vegans and most meat-eaters alike.
On my radar
The Netflix documentary Wild Wild Country (2018) is incredibly gripping. It tells the tale of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh relocating his ashram from India to Oregon in 1981 and pissing off the 40 residents of a small retirement town in the process. I’m three episodes in and what I find so fascinating is that it really isn’t clear who the good and bad guys are. There are sincere good intentions and remarkable prejudices on both sides.
I also recently listened to the podcast series Wind of Change, on the recommendation of a Patreon supporter. Its central question, ‘Did the CIA write a power ballad that ended the Cold War?’ sounds preposterous. But the series is written and presented by New Yorker writer Patrick Radden Keefe, whose book on the opioid crisis, Empire of Pain, was widely acclaimed. No spoilers, but this is one of those series where you want to know the conclusion but most of the interest comes from what you learn getting there.
In terms of my reading, I’ve reviewed a few books recently, including Rationality by Steven Pinker, Being You by Anil Seth, Henry Mance’s How to Love Animals in a Human-Shaped World, and Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism by Kathleen Stock. You can buy all these books and more including mine at my affiliate bookshop, powered by bookshop.org, which has distributed nearly £2million to independent bookshops in the UK since launch. The excuses for Amazon are wearing thin…
That’s it for this week. I can’t promise it will come out every week, but that is what I will try to do. Sadly, I cannot achieve everything I want…