Justifiably Paranoid

Let’s assume that you aspire to independent thought. That aspiration is not automatic; it presumes metacognition – thinking about your thought process.  And a willingness to put forth the effort necessary for independent thought in our culture that relentlessly assails you with propaganda and other forms of manipulation. Among the elements essential for independent thought, I offer two.  First consider your frame of reference.  What is it about you, the topic, and any potential receiver of your information that provide the contexts for your communication?  Among other things, those factors will determine the ideas that come into your mind, the words that you choose, and the conviction and passion with which you entertain and deliver your thoughts.   Second, what sources and other particulars of objective data guide you?   Have you gathered relevant base rate information?  That is, information which provides as much reasonably valid relevant i...

  “Are you sincere?” is a question that resonated deeply enough with the American public to have been the title and theme of a song recorded 14 times, and that reached number three on the Billboard chart. The song resonated, I believe, because it portrayed a fundamental. issue in all interpersonal experience. In my Questioning & Answering book, I coupled sincerity with reasonableness to address those essential features of human discourse. There I suggest that in all important discussions wherein we ask a question, are asked a question, provide an answer, or receive an answer, we should consciously consider its sincerity and reasonableness.   Among other considerations, sincerity and reasonableness must be contextualized for time, place, and person [That merely is one aspect of contextualizing for your internal context (body and mind) and your external context (everything outside your body and mind)]   Evaluate why the questions and answers are being presented now, w...

I accept your right to your conclusions. But I don’t necessarily accept the PROCESS by which you reach them.  That is the guiding belief that undergirds my discussions with other people. In this blog post I offer only a few of the many reasons for the PROCESS by which I came to my belief. First and foremost, if we each inform the other of our process, We can more objectively decide the specifics of what we do and do not agree with.  And that knowledge of process can enable us to adjust our opinions of the issue, and/or of each other.  That is, we can understand our extant messages and our extant dyadic relationship variables in ways that increase the chances for rational objective discussions and of mutually satisfying resolutions in the here and now. Second, we both do well to be aware of and sensitive to the personal identity factors that influence our capacity for rational discourse.  Some of the factors are relatively easy to infer. For instance, given the US...

 "I don't want to talk about it!" is an assertion that virtually everyone has delivered and/or received. Thinking about that assertion, I believe, is worth the effort. And, inspired by the ancient Dutch Aphorism, "Trust arrives on foot and leaves on horseback" I frame this blog post in terms of a trust-discuss nexus. Let's begin with the fact that talk has its evolutionary-physiological roots in a sensation-perception-action complex. The volitional actions of all mobile organisms usually are directed toward perceived life-sustaining targets and away from life-threatening ones. Our primate, non-human ancestors, like all mammals, typically would flee from or attack a perceived approaching dangerous agent; they were limited to such direct actions. But homo-sapiens evolved a language system that enabled them to mentally “decide,” however quickly, slowly, effectively, or ineffectively their response, and when the threatening agent was a language-possessing human,...

Of course, we CAN talk. But how?  And there are other equally important questions: what are the objectives of our talk? Do you primarily seek victory or open, honest dialogue? Or, more precisely, what exactly do YOU, I, and WE want?   Such questions are easily asked, but not so easily answered. I wrote two relevant books whose texts I now draw upon: Questioning & Answering: How, Who, When, Where , and Conversation: Striving, Surviving, and Thriving: Searching for Messages and Relationships. But, in the interest of brevity, I cannot in this posting explain sufficiently the details they provide.  So, I collapse all the important, complicated introductory questions into a deliberately simplified, format.   THE MODE OF LISTENING - Do you listen only with conscious or unconscious intent to rebut?   THE BALANCE OF LISTENING - Do you deliberately strive to keep yours and your interlocutor’s allocation of listening as equal as possible?   THE MODE OF TALK - Do...

  This month I received an invitation to submit an article to the Pennsylvania Psychologist magazine on the theme “Myths in Psychology.” Without hesitation, I knew both what I wanted to write and that the imagined article would never be published.  I would have entitled it “The Myth that Psychology Respects Open Scientific Discussion and Debate.” And before explaining why I chose the topic, I must say that although I believe psychologists have as much right as anyone else to take political positions, they have no right to flood the citizenry with biased or uncontested politically-one-sided propaganda. The simple truth is that Psychology is at least as interested—I would argue often MORE interested—in politics than in science.  As one example, today, August 29, 2023, I quote “From APA Journals Article Spotlight” (https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/amp): How psychologists can help achieve equity in health care: Advancing innovative partnerships and models of care delivery. P...

  Viral-Artificial Intelligence-Zombie Information. Sound frightening? It should. Let's consider each element of the hyphenated phrase in reverse order, using medical science as only one of many possible exemplars. Zombie medical information was decried in a recent Nature article (July 2023) entitled "Medicine’s problem with ‘zombie’ trials." The scary suggestion is that "... at least one-quarter, and perhaps up to one-third, of trials contain problematic data". Equally hair-raising is the authors' contention that such studies "...can be laundered into respectability when they are included in systematic reviews, which assess evidence across many studies and are often the basis for clinical guidelines." So, that's the Zombie element. What about the Artificial Intelligence element? Sticking with Nature, consider the 24 January 2023 paper entitled "Tools such as ChatGPT threaten transparent science; here are our ground rules for their use....