mathbabe

His review at NY Times Book Review is pitch perfect, and shows that in the past decade cognitive psychologists have finally caught up with the cognitive sociologists.

THE KNOWLEDGE ILLUSION : Why We Never Think Alone
By Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach
Illustrated. 296 pp. Riverhead Books. $28.

In “The Knowledge Illusion,” the cognitive scientists Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach hammer another nail into the coffin of the rational individual. From the 17th century to the 20th century, Western thought depicted individual human beings as independent rational agents, and consequently made these mythical creatures the basis of modern society. Democracy is founded on the idea that the voter knows best, free market capitalism believes the customer is always right, and modern education tries to teach students to think for themselves.

BUT Over the last few decades, the ideal of the rational individual has been attacked from all sides. Postcolonial and feminist thinkers challenged it as a chauvinistic Western fantasy, glorifying the autonomy and power of white men. Behavioral economists and evolutionary psychologists have demonstrated that most human decisions are based on emotional reactions and heuristic shortcuts rather than rational analysis, and that while our emotions and heuristics were perhaps suitable for dealing with the African savanna in the Stone Age, they are woefully inadequate for dealing with the urban jungle of the silicon age. ….

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I’m much more worried about the merger of humans with humans which so far, in it’s long history, does not seem to have produced more than a handful of intelligent beings.

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