I do not know how to refute an incredulous stare.
—David Lewis
The Danger of Simple Solutions
We live in an ever increasingly complex and interconnected world, where our capacity as toolmakers has enabled our species to alter the actual climate of the entire planet and even the degree of wobble of the axial tilt on which the earth rotates. Yet as discussed in my last posting, too many of us in our society are increasingly ignorant about this complexity—with the brain’s Dunning-Kruger Effect making things even worse as the degree of this ignorance contributes to how ignorant we are about our ignorance. As a result, we are witnessing a growth in uninformed populism that believes “that making policy and governing in technologically advanced, economically complex, and ethnically diverse societies isn’t all that hard, and therefore, anyone can do it” (p. xv).1
Or to put it another way, our collective ignorance about the complexity of modern life leads many of us to believe that common sense should be able to solve any problem we might find ourselves facing. Granted, it is a cynical cliché to say that so-called “common sense” isn’t very common, but the truth is that on a day-to-day basis, what we think of as “common sense” serves us just fine. I do not, for example, need to know or solve the formula for determining the force of friction between a tire and the road to know to slow down if it is raining while I am driving.
However, when it comes to complicated problems (e.g. designing a tire to maximize friction in the rain):
common sense is not sufficient. Cause and effect, the nature of evidence, and statistical frequency are far more intricate than common sense can handle. Many of the thorniest research problems often have counterintuitive answers that by their nature defy our common sense. (Simple observation, after all, told early humans that the sun revolved around the earth, not the other way around.) (p. 54)
We may look, then, at complex problems and want simple solutions; moreover, our common sense might even appear to provide them: if there are people starving somewhere, send them food. But if those starving people live in a politically destabilized country such as Yemen, where delivering the food would require the costs of military intervention and potential loss of life to do so, then suddenly, the solution is not so simple. Furthermore, when we strive for simple solutions to complex problems, the simple solution can often simply be dangerous—such as suggesting that the easily produced malarial medicine, hydroxychloroquine, protects someone from COVID-19.
Hence, when it comes to the increasingly complex world in which we find ourselves, we need to address the problems and challenges we uncover with lots of intelligence and informed expertise—something the current educational state of much of this country’s populace makes problematic. As Tom Nichols puts it: “the celebration of ignorance [in our society] cannot launch communications satellites, negotiate the rights of U.S. citizens overseas, or provide for effective medications, all of which are daunting tasks even the dimmest citizens now demand and take for granted” (p. 218). Therefore, if we are to endure as a society in the face of global pandemics, the dangers of climate change, etc., we must cure at least some of our country’s collective ignorance before it’s too late.
The Journey to Date
Cures, though, require understanding a condition’s underlying pathology, and so a logical question is: how did we get to this point in the first place? Here is where I want to revisit Tom Nichols general argument and dive a little more deeply into his work. He presents five factors—all of which are mutually reinforcing—which he believes have contributed to what he calls “the growth of willful ignorance,” and for those who would like a deeper dive into each of them, I strongly recommend his book. But for now, I want to explore the five factors briefly to see how understanding them might point us toward a cure.
One of the challenges to curing our ignorance is a biological one, which psychologists call “confirmation bias.” This is our brain’s tendency to “hear things the way we want to hear them” and to “reject facts we don’t like” (p. 39). It evolved to aid our survival because privileging any data that affirms or reinforces actions that have kept a person alive so far is likely to continue keeping said person alive into the future. To use my well-worn leopard example, if running from something brown and spotted kept an individual alive, any future data that suggests “brown and spotted” is harmless is information that person is simply going to ignore. Even if the majority of “brown and spotted” things in this world are, in fact, good for someone and this fact can be demonstrated, the tiny minority of “brown and spotted” that is dangerous is where the brain that survived the leopard focuses its attention. We all instinctively confirm what we already believe to be true about the world.
Which is fine when it comes to very pragmatic things such as hungry predators or food sources. But confirmation bias can get highly problematic when it comes to personal values, social constructs, and explanations about ultimate meanings. As Nichols puts it, “we can take being wrong about the kind of bird we saw in our backyard, or who the first person was to circumnavigate the globe, but we cannot tolerate being wrong about the concepts and facts that we rely upon to govern how we live our lives” (p. 67).
Furthermore, when facts conflict with values, values will win nearly every time. Indeed, so strong is the brain’s confirmation bias that not only will people reject the evidence right in front of them, they will even attack the source of that evidence. As a 2015 study at Ohio State University revealed, “when exposed to scientific research that challenged their views, both liberals and conservatives reacted by doubting the science, rather than themselves” (p. 69; original emphasis). Therefore, confirmation bias can cause us to resist even well-documented and confirmed realities about the world, rejecting these “inconvenient truths” even when they might aid our literal survival (as vaccine resistance and the COVID delta variant are making all too abundantly clear).
But an “inconvenient truth” is still a truth, right? So it should simply be a matter of finding effective ways to chip away at confirmation bias with enough persistence and evidence to combat people’s individual degrees of ignorance.
However, what if “truth” itself were up for sale? In our postmodern era, the very concept of truth has come under attack (see COVID-19, Climate Change, and Other Inconvenient Truths), and Nichols argues that the second impediment to curing our collective ignorance is the belief held by many today that “truth” is somehow at the discretion of each individual, that thoughts of any kind—whether personal belief, emotional response, or empirical data—are all equally true simply because they are an idea held by someone. “Inconvenient truths” can then become “fake news,” and when you combine this solipsistic narcissism with confirmation bias, you get as society where:
Americans no longer distinguish the phrase “you’re wrong” from the phrase “you’re stupid.” To disagree is to disrespect. To correct another is to insult. And to refuse to acknowledge all views as worthy of consideration, no matter how fantastic or inane they are, is to be close-minded” (p. 25).
Fueling such egotism is the fact that each of us today has unlimited access to a nearly infinite number and variety of thoughts of every kind. The Internet of Everything is Nichols’ third impediment, and it is on our devices 24/7. We are drowning in information, and because we keep our devices with us nearly 24/7—even disrupting our sleep to check in for fear of missing out—we are drowning in a cacophony of competing points of view, causing us to fall back on our confirmed biases even further.
What’s more, this sea of data triggers still another feature of our brain: choice-overload. It turns out that when the brain is confronted with too many choices—say brands of pasta on a grocery shelf—the mind will actively disengage and simply not make a choice—it just will not buy pasta at all. Marketers know this research and use it when designing things such as grocery stores or big box chains, and it is why you never find all 25 of the brands of toilet paper that a quick Google search can reveal in any one store: people’s brains just couldn’t choose.
It is also why “not only do people know less about the world around them [today], they are less interested in it” as well (p. 133). The availability of more information than humans have ever had access to leaves brains so overwhelmed that even where we could potentially cause individuals to learn “inconvenient truths” and successfully fight their tendency for confirmation bias, their brains will tend to shut down to what is still yet more choices of information. The result is that “alone in front of the keyboard but awash in websites, newsletters, and online groups dedicated to confirming any and every idea, the Internet has politically and intellectually mired millions of Americans in their own biases” (p. 132).
And awash we can remain because all this technology has collided with the realities of capitalism—where nearly unlimited media can become commodified. TikTok and Instagram exist because the sharing of information can be bought and sold; FOX News and MSNBC exist because people will pay to reinforce their own echo-chambers; even relatively balanced sources of information such as NPR exist because people like me (full disclosure) are willingly to be a sustaining member.
Yet when news and information are for sale, the result is “a chaotic mess that does not inform people so much as it creates the illusion of being informed” (p. 143). As Nichols nicely summarizes this fourth impediment to curing collective ignorance:
The problem is not that all these networks and celebrities exist, but that viewers pick and choose among them and then believe they’re informed. The modern media, with so many options tailored to particular views, is a huge exercise in confirmation bias. This means that American are not just poorly informed, they’re misinformed (p. 157; original emphasis).
Moreover (and the final of Nichols’ impediments), what was once a bulwark against all this misinformation and ignorance (with its insistence on simplistic solutions to life’s challenges) is no longer as functional in our society as it has been in the past. A college education in the liberal arts was once the hallmark of a culture that respected the complexity of the problems the modern world, and while Nichols argues that it is the commodification of higher education—treating students as customers—that has led to its dysfunctionality (something I don’t feel qualified to affirm or deny), the data he shares showing this dysfunctionality is very real. I have actually read the original University of Chicago study Nichols references (every confessedly dry word of it; it’s a slog!), and in it, Arum and Roksa tested over 100,000 undergraduates from hundreds of colleges and universities across the United states for changes in their critical thinking abilities during the time they earned their degrees. What they found is that a little over 80% of the undergraduates they tested as freshmen and then as seniors failed to demonstrate ANY improvement in their critical thinking skills. Nada. Four years of so-called education, and the quality of their thinking had not changed one iota from high school.
Again, Nichols wants to blame this state-of-affairs in higher education on the “customer knows best” approach which today’s excess supply of schools use to recruit an increasingly dwindling supply of students. He suggests that “the protective, swaddling environment of the modern university infantilizes students and thus dissolves their ability to conduct a logical and informed argument” (p. 99). But regardless of whether he’s correct or not about the causal mechanism (again, I don’t feel qualified to comment), the fundamental truth is that higher education in this country is no longer producing a critical mass of the kinds of minds which could successfully combat the confirmation bias, “fake news,” overwhelmed brains, and media commodification that are producing the collective ignorance endangering our country.
To quote Apollo XIII astronaut, Jim Lovell: “Houston, we have a problem.”
The Cure?
How do we tackle it? How do we combat the culture of collective ignorance that imperils democracy itself? As a citizen, a relatively obvious answer comes to mind: regulate the social media platforms that spew the dis- and misinformation and make the equivalent of our current laws for libel and slander part of Google’s, Apple’s, and other technology’s corporate reality. As an educator, an even more obvious answer comes to mind: mandatory classes in media literacy and civics throughout the K-12 years, with passing a course in both becoming a national high school graduation requirement—especially given that it took the political fights over the handling of the pandemic to increase the percentage of American adults who could name the three branches of government from a ridiculous 39% in 2019 to a still pitiful 51% in 2020!
But there is a larger solution that already exists to fight our society’s collective “willful ignorance” and one which all of us who teach in any capacity—pre-K through PhD; parent, coach, or formal classroom—have full access to: we can create opportunities for failure. Cognitive science has repeatedly shown that “learning seems to occur only if the learner pays attention, thinks, anticipates, and puts forth hypotheses at the risk of making mistakes” (Dehaene, p. 178; my emphasis). Therefore, if we want to fight ignorance of any kind, we need only create deliberately designed occasions for learners of all ages to screw up, to make the mistake, fail at the attempt, and then to grow from the immediate, constructive, nonjudgmental feedback we provide them. In other words, if we want someone to learn how to stand back up, we must carefully choose to trip them to fall. And do it again and again.
Yet too often, in settings both formal and informal, we have created “a culture of affirmation and self-actualization that forbids confronting children with failure” (p. 78). We have done so, I suspect, because we have so heavily associated intellectual effort with the act of grading, the assignment of grades, and the many other forms of judgmental, fixed-mindset feedback that when we say a child has failed, we risk calling said child a failure. And since most of us who work with children know the consequent inequities such a claim can cause, there is a strong desire to avoid causing children to make mistakes of any kind.
The science, though, is clear: failure is the key to learning and therefore the key to curing our culture’s current infatuation with anti-rationalism.2 The challenge, then, is: can we do it in time? That’s the real crisis facing us right now “because a a stable democracy in any culture relies on the public actually understanding the implications of its own choices” (p. 231). We have large segments of our population who can’t even seem to grasp the purpose of vaccines and mask wearing during a pandemic, let alone how their consumptions habits are undermining every ecosystem on the planet. Thus, we find ourselves with hospitals that are overrun and overwhelmed; with wildfires larger than some of our States; and with election laws in the majority of states actively hindering access to voting. These are not the conditions for a stable democracy, and unless a large enough swath of our population can learn to make better choices, we face a very shaky and uncertain future as a country.
That seems a rather grim way to end matters, and frankly, I wish I could say I can offer any solutions other than to keep helping my own individual students fail successfully and to fight the battle of the ballot box with my vote. But I do know one thing: failure of any kind always causes learning of somekind!…including what will be learned if we fail to confront the current world’s “inconvenient truths” in time.
1Author’s note: all quotations in this essay are from the Nichols’ book unless otherwise indicated.
2 Author’s note: since I elaborate the best-practices for how to achieve this kind of constructive failing in Chapter 6, I will leave any interested reader to turn there for more details on how we can be curing our country’s “willful ignorance.”
References
Annenberg Public Policy Center (Sept. 14, 2020) Amid Pandemic and Protests, Civics Survey Finds Americans Know More of Their Rights. The University of Pennsylvania. https://www.annenbergpublicpolicycenter.org/pandemic-protests-2020-civics-survey-americans-know-much-more-about-their-rights/.
Arum, R. & Roksa, J. (2011) Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Dehaene, S. (2020) How We Learn: Why Brains Learn Better Than Any Machine…for Now. New York: Penguin Books.
Iyengar, S. & Lepper, M. (2000) When Choice is Demotivating: Can One Desire Too Much of a Good Things? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Vol. 79, No. 6, pp. 995-1006. https://faculty.washington.edu/jdb/345/345%20Articles/Iyengar%20%26%20Lepper%20(2000).pdf.
Lewis, S. (March 2, 2021) Hydroxychloroquine, Once Touted by Trump, Should Not be Used to Prevent COVID-19, WHO Experts Say. CBS News. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hydroxychloroquine-not-effective-prevention-covid-19-world-health-organization-donald-trump/.
Nichols, T. (2017) The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters. New York: Oxford University Press.
Pappas, S. (Sept. 25, 2018) Humans Contribute to Earth’s Wobble, Scientists Say. Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/humans-contribute-to-earth-rsquo-s-wobble-scientists-say/.
Light a Candle 