Social Justice Fallacies, by Thomas Sowell, Chp 4 — Knowledge Fallacies
A review of all four fallacies, one by one
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Knowledge Fallacies
"For many social issues, the most important decision is who makes the decision."
Because different people have such different ideas about what constitutes knowledge, the person or persons making the decisions may come to vastly different conclusions about how to proceed when faced with issues to resolve.
Dr. Sowell’s first example differentiates the knowledge of a carpenter and a physicist. The carpenter may know how to build a fence and the physicist may understand E=MC2, and neither may know what the other knows. But the importance of each of their knowledge is very much context driven, even though we tend to see the physicist as being “more knowledgeable”. Although the physicist’s knowledge may be nearly useless when building a fence regardless of how important that fence may be to the benefit of any individual people.
Why?
Well, my first thought is that what defines and differentiates humans from the rest of the animal world is our ability for higher thinking. So it can be easy to assume that a more complicated concept or the ability to hold a more complicated, abstract concept in one's mind is akin to a higher level of humanity. I sympathize with that view, however most decisions in our lives don't necessarily require extremely complicated abstract abilities. Handing over daily, mundane and practical but consequential decisions to people with high levels of abstract thinking abilities may not be the best way to go.
CONSEQUENTIAL KNOWLEDGE
What we should be looking in assessing knowledge is not what is the most complicated, abstract idea, but what is the most pertinent - consequential - knowledge necessary for making the specific decision and who has it. Consequential meaning something that has consequences - something that matters.
"A fool can put on his coat better than a wise man can do it for him."
This old saying nicely captures the concept of how consequential knowledge takes shape. People making decisions and taking action on their own requires knowledge about the situation that a surrogate decision maker will never have for one person, much less a whole society of people.
Dr. Sowell uses F.A. Hayek's model of consequential knowledge, which differentiates articulated knowledge and unarticulated knowledge.
Unarticulated knowledge isn't necessarily written down in some book about human nature, but is "embodied in behavioral responses to known realities."
“Not all knowledge in this sense is part of our intellect, nor is our intellect the whole of our knowledge. Our habits and skills, our emotional attitudes, our tools, and our institutions - all are in this sense adaptations to past experience which have grown up by selective elimination of less suitable conduct. They are as much an indispensable foundation of successful action as is our conscious knowledge.” - F.A. Hayek
Using a more complete concept of knowledge combines not only articulated, but unarticulated knowledge, which together provides a more complete picture of how people will act based on the changing environment. Much like the chess pieces fallacy, it is ridiculous not to expect people to adjust their behavior in new environments. This combination of articulated and unarticulated knowledge attempts to take that into account.
F.A. Hayek was one of TS's teachers, as was Milton Friedman. You can see a more complete and detailed version of this idea of knowledge and how it is formed and used in what is likely Dr. Sowell’s most brilliant book, Knowledge and Decisions, in which Nobel prize winning economist F.A. Hayek writes the foreword.
A great modern example of this is what happened and still is happening with some COVID policies. On a recent episode of the Triggernometry Podcast, astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson made fun of the idea that masks don't stop the spread of Covid and the studies that claim there is no evidence for their efficacy. He claimed that the only way to know if they work is to place the mask material in a lab and see if the virus crosses the material from one side to another. If the mask keeps the virus on one side of the material, it works, if not, then it does not.
What he did, was take the articulated knowledge about the material properties of masks, and the literal size of the virus particles, and use that to formulate a decision on the efficacy of masks.
What he ignored is the unarticulated knowledge needed to understand the efficacy of mandating masks on flesh and blood human beings. How do human beings respond and behave, and how does that affect the efficacy of the physical intervention?
As brilliant as he is, his ability for assessing which type of knowledge is necessary and applicable for this very practical situation is lacking, but that has been common with people who we see as intellectually brilliant. Noam Chomsky has been passing out information outside of his scope of practice for decades, solely because his brilliance as a linguist made people assume everything he said would be brilliant.
Without understanding what specific type or types of knowledge are necessary for making decisions, we mistake intellectual capabilities with the ability to make decisions for real life, flesh and blood people operating in the world.
Godwin and Mill are great examples of the elite vision of intellect and the need for people to have brilliant surrogates in their decisions for how to direct societies. It reminds me of Plato's Republic. And it is always everyone who thinks this way that thinks they are the ones capable of being that type of person.
Nobody says, "Yes, we need great intellects to guide us, and it's definitely not me because I'm an idiot."