I generally approve of your post as far as your comparative advantage.
However,
"we can’t actually discover true positions with our emotions."
"Step 1: Set all emotion aside so you can figure out the truth of the matter."
There have been many of people who have tried to build objective systems of truth and morality from pure rationality. They've all flamed out pretty hard. If you are going to acknowledge our limitations, we ought to acknowledge the limitations of pure reason.
When you see a conflict between your reason and your intuition, you've got to take both seriously and approach it with humility.
Wish Caplan would set aside his heart (moralism) and study the effects of immigration to Western countries. Don't take the easy way out of looking only at American studies or ignoring later generations' fiscal impacts.
The intense view of these manifold contradictions and imperfections in human reason has so wrought upon me, and heated my brain, that I am ready to reject all belief and reasoning, and can look upon no opinion even as more probable or likely than another. Where am I, or what? From what causes do I derive my existence, and to what condition shall I return? Whose favour shall I court, and whose anger must I dread? What beings surround me? and on whom have, I any influence, or who have any influence on me? I am confounded with all these questions, and begin to fancy myself in the most deplorable condition imaginable, invironed with the deepest darkness, and utterly deprived of the use of every member and faculty.
> Set all emotion aside so you can figure out the truth of the matter.
I'm not so certain. Logically and materialistically speaking, we're simply configurations of matter and energy that have spontaneously generated in our present universe. Our lives have no meaning because matter and energy don't have meaning. In other words *pure* logic makes us the ultimate nihilist.
The fact that we aren't nihilists is proof enough that emotion is a vital part of our thinking processes no matter what stories we tell ourselves about how logical we are. The difference between a human and a pile of sand is not that we can reason and the sand cannot. It's that we have emotion that makes us believe that our ability to reason matters.
Which is not to say we shouldn't value logic. But let's not pretend that emotion isn't part of everything we think all the way down. To do otherwise is illogical.
I think you're confusing emotion with a desire for meaning. Emotions are psychological shortcuts. Instead of reasoning through the danger of a nearby tiger and drawing the inference that you should run the other way your fast brain does that thinking for you by filling you with fear.
You might feel a surge of emotion when you see a picture of someone you care about, but that surge of emotion isn't itself what it means to care about someone. I can value a person and find meaning in that even if my emotional apparatus doesn't consistently fire when I behold the person. Sometimes people will have a neurological event or be on a medication (e.g. an SSRI) that blunts their emotions, but that doesn't make their life meaningless.
What tends to trip people up about emotions re: truth is that emotions are in fact extremely valuable sources for understanding what's true *about ourselves,* but they are very bad at tracking what's true about *the world.*
So a lot of people get riled up when they hear rationalists or scientists refer to emotions in an anti-truth frame because their experience of their emotions are sacred guideposts to avoiding manipulation by others or pressure to conform or even just noticing what they like or dislike about the world.
But it's really, really important to be able to notice and flag what emotions do to our truth-seeking efforts and set aside their attempts to influence not just whether we believe some argument or not, but also whether we even seek out arguments or evidence in the first place.
Don is trying to be feminine, despite his highly masculine past. (I knew Don when Don was Don.) But maybe we all should try to be a bit more feminine in our thinking.
One way to combine the two positions is this, and it may even be what he was thinking of: poetry sometimes conveys reality better than prose. When something is hard enough to describe, emotion might get to the right answer better than reason.
Pascal, as rational as they come, said, "The hearts has reasons of which reason knows nothing."
What you seek, I believe, is lucidity. Setting aside emotion is much the same as setting aside your own perspective. Both seem admirable; neither is possible. Lucid emotional thinking is the best we can hope for.
Re head vs. heart, I was thinking today about your post about yellow fever, and Robin's "sacredness" explanation. I do think Robin is correct here.
And maybe that's the best reason to support traditional religion - even tho it's not true. Because traditional religion, with its holy books and fixed ideas, prevents people from inventing *even dumber* quasi-religious ideas like "health is so sacred we can't pay people to participate in studies".
And maybe deep down that's why believers have such disdain for atheists - they know that atheists, instead of believing in nothing, will make up their own stupid and crazy things to believe in.
"The genuine man of words himself can get along without faith in absolutes. He values the search for truth as much as truth itself. He delights in the clash of thought and in the give-and-take of controversy. If he formulates a philosophy and a doctrine, they are more an exhibition of brilliance and an exercise in dialectics than a program of action and the tenets of a faith. His vanity, it is true, often prompts him to defend his speculations with savagery and even venom; but his appeal is usually to reason and not to faith. The fanatics and the faith-hungry masses, however, are likely to invest such speculations with the certitude of holy writ, and make them the fountainhead of a new faith. Jesus was not a Christian, nor was Marx a Marxist."
Will we one day be writing that Caplan was not a Caplanite?
I would add the existence of this blog as evidence of Bryan's attempts at persuasion. Too many academics stick to producing books and papers that barely anyone will ever read, in part because they aren't serious about changing anyone's mind.
Regular, and good quality, public engagement to get the ideas out there displays a confidence in your ideas and the possibility of them changing people's minds.
Unfortunately, persuasion is driven primarily by emotion, particularly fear and hatred - see the evil mastermind minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels.
> You might have to relentlessly appeal to the heart to win
Im currently reading Bastiat's, "What Is Seen..." What you and other Pragmatists evade seeing is the blood-spattered, what is not seen, danger of encouraging emotion as a guide to decisions. This is dangerous even when a correct decision. Our current US culture is afflicted by mass shootings for seemingly anything that might anger anybody. America was created in one of the only two basically rational cultures. Now we have a mindless zero as President and another as last President. We need consistent rationality.
You should immediately update your Twitter bio to read, "Bryan Caplan - notorious and in some ways wonderful"
I generally approve of your post as far as your comparative advantage.
However,
"we can’t actually discover true positions with our emotions."
"Step 1: Set all emotion aside so you can figure out the truth of the matter."
There have been many of people who have tried to build objective systems of truth and morality from pure rationality. They've all flamed out pretty hard. If you are going to acknowledge our limitations, we ought to acknowledge the limitations of pure reason.
When you see a conflict between your reason and your intuition, you've got to take both seriously and approach it with humility.
Intuition is not an emotion. There's such a thing as rational intuition.
Wish Caplan would set aside his heart (moralism) and study the effects of immigration to Western countries. Don't take the easy way out of looking only at American studies or ignoring later generations' fiscal impacts.
Think of reason as a calm passion.
Perhaps of interest:
"David Hume on Reason as a Passion"
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2573995
In Hume, "reason" is polysemous—that's essential to A Treatise of Human Nature being a drama.
Where Hume says that reason is a passion, it is a calm passion—as opposed to a violent passion.
He says it more directly in Dissertation of the Passions (1757), which derives from Book II of THN.
The quotations are provided in the paper at the SSRN link above.
HUME
The intense view of these manifold contradictions and imperfections in human reason has so wrought upon me, and heated my brain, that I am ready to reject all belief and reasoning, and can look upon no opinion even as more probable or likely than another. Where am I, or what? From what causes do I derive my existence, and to what condition shall I return? Whose favour shall I court, and whose anger must I dread? What beings surround me? and on whom have, I any influence, or who have any influence on me? I am confounded with all these questions, and begin to fancy myself in the most deplorable condition imaginable, invironed with the deepest darkness, and utterly deprived of the use of every member and faculty.
-Davy Hume, pool hall lout
> Set all emotion aside so you can figure out the truth of the matter.
I'm not so certain. Logically and materialistically speaking, we're simply configurations of matter and energy that have spontaneously generated in our present universe. Our lives have no meaning because matter and energy don't have meaning. In other words *pure* logic makes us the ultimate nihilist.
The fact that we aren't nihilists is proof enough that emotion is a vital part of our thinking processes no matter what stories we tell ourselves about how logical we are. The difference between a human and a pile of sand is not that we can reason and the sand cannot. It's that we have emotion that makes us believe that our ability to reason matters.
Which is not to say we shouldn't value logic. But let's not pretend that emotion isn't part of everything we think all the way down. To do otherwise is illogical.
I think you're confusing emotion with a desire for meaning. Emotions are psychological shortcuts. Instead of reasoning through the danger of a nearby tiger and drawing the inference that you should run the other way your fast brain does that thinking for you by filling you with fear.
You might feel a surge of emotion when you see a picture of someone you care about, but that surge of emotion isn't itself what it means to care about someone. I can value a person and find meaning in that even if my emotional apparatus doesn't consistently fire when I behold the person. Sometimes people will have a neurological event or be on a medication (e.g. an SSRI) that blunts their emotions, but that doesn't make their life meaningless.
Setting aside emotion =\= embracing nihilism.
What tends to trip people up about emotions re: truth is that emotions are in fact extremely valuable sources for understanding what's true *about ourselves,* but they are very bad at tracking what's true about *the world.*
So a lot of people get riled up when they hear rationalists or scientists refer to emotions in an anti-truth frame because their experience of their emotions are sacred guideposts to avoiding manipulation by others or pressure to conform or even just noticing what they like or dislike about the world.
But it's really, really important to be able to notice and flag what emotions do to our truth-seeking efforts and set aside their attempts to influence not just whether we believe some argument or not, but also whether we even seek out arguments or evidence in the first place.
Don is trying to be feminine, despite his highly masculine past. (I knew Don when Don was Don.) But maybe we all should try to be a bit more feminine in our thinking.
One way to combine the two positions is this, and it may even be what he was thinking of: poetry sometimes conveys reality better than prose. When something is hard enough to describe, emotion might get to the right answer better than reason.
Pascal, as rational as they come, said, "The hearts has reasons of which reason knows nothing."
What you seek, I believe, is lucidity. Setting aside emotion is much the same as setting aside your own perspective. Both seem admirable; neither is possible. Lucid emotional thinking is the best we can hope for.
Re head vs. heart, I was thinking today about your post about yellow fever, and Robin's "sacredness" explanation. I do think Robin is correct here.
And maybe that's the best reason to support traditional religion - even tho it's not true. Because traditional religion, with its holy books and fixed ideas, prevents people from inventing *even dumber* quasi-religious ideas like "health is so sacred we can't pay people to participate in studies".
And maybe deep down that's why believers have such disdain for atheists - they know that atheists, instead of believing in nothing, will make up their own stupid and crazy things to believe in.
From Eric Hoffer's 'The True Believer':
"The genuine man of words himself can get along without faith in absolutes. He values the search for truth as much as truth itself. He delights in the clash of thought and in the give-and-take of controversy. If he formulates a philosophy and a doctrine, they are more an exhibition of brilliance and an exercise in dialectics than a program of action and the tenets of a faith. His vanity, it is true, often prompts him to defend his speculations with savagery and even venom; but his appeal is usually to reason and not to faith. The fanatics and the faith-hungry masses, however, are likely to invest such speculations with the certitude of holy writ, and make them the fountainhead of a new faith. Jesus was not a Christian, nor was Marx a Marxist."
Will we one day be writing that Caplan was not a Caplanite?
I would add the existence of this blog as evidence of Bryan's attempts at persuasion. Too many academics stick to producing books and papers that barely anyone will ever read, in part because they aren't serious about changing anyone's mind.
Regular, and good quality, public engagement to get the ideas out there displays a confidence in your ideas and the possibility of them changing people's minds.
Unfortunately, persuasion is driven primarily by emotion, particularly fear and hatred - see the evil mastermind minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels.
> You might have to relentlessly appeal to the heart to win
Im currently reading Bastiat's, "What Is Seen..." What you and other Pragmatists evade seeing is the blood-spattered, what is not seen, danger of encouraging emotion as a guide to decisions. This is dangerous even when a correct decision. Our current US culture is afflicted by mass shootings for seemingly anything that might anger anybody. America was created in one of the only two basically rational cultures. Now we have a mindless zero as President and another as last President. We need consistent rationality.
This does not include art. Exx