Public Opinions and Reasoned Arguments

If you've spent any time communicating online, it’s likely that you will have encountered one or two expressed opinions that led you to intervene with a contrasting view. You may even have been involved in a heated exchange or an outright argument. Such public disputes rarely end amicably and the chances that later discussions with the same person will be free of antipathy decrease in proportion to the level of derision and vitriol reached.

Human psychology is shaped by attitudes and dispositions that have evolved over millions of years, yet many modern forms of communication create new forms of interaction that demand new skills, new social norms and perhaps even new ethical standards. Adaptable as we are, it might be argued that of our social skills are much less informed by deliberative debate and rational analysis than they are by more direct forms of physical interaction. In a physical conflict for instance, it would almost never be wise to switch sides, especially in full view. Such a move would be practically suicidal. Perhaps this explains why online arguments so rarely result in anyone admitting they’re wrong. The impulse is always to defend your corner, to go on the offensive or to duck out altogether but almost never to say: "Oh, I see now that you're right and I have been wrong all along."

An important factor in many disagreements is known in psychology as the "Backfire Effect", which is what happens when people become entrenched in their position when confronted with evidence that conflicts with their beliefs. If the theory is correct then the prognosis is pretty dismal. When we develop beliefs we often invest significant amounts of time, energy and, on occasion even lost friendships in the process. No wonder then that people are loath to renounce their hard-won beliefs. How often do politicians or philosophers radically change their minds and shift their views? Very rarely, yet they can't all be right in their adopted positions. On the contrary, most must be wrong in some very significant ways.

Only scientific evidence seems to exert any substantial force in overturning false assumptions and even here people show astonishing resilience in the face of the facts placed before them. Take climate change denialism or creationism for just two prominent examples.

Until very recently I assumed that it should be possible to change people's minds through reasoned argument. I was under this misconception because it seemed to me that I had experienced several instances, even very recently, where my own opinions were radically altered by the force of reason. It strikes me now though, that this wasn't quite what happened at all. I was receptive to new ideas because my thinking wasn't yet settled on these issues. I was conducting my thoughts on certain subjects in a kind of hazy but workable uncertainty that was probably relatively easy to overturn, even though the reconfiguration was far from easy on my part. Now that my mind is made up, a much greater investment of evidence and argument would be required to persuade me that my thinking needs to change once again on these issues.

But what about the many experts whose theories are based upon false assumptions? What would it take to persuade them that there are better ways to explain the issues? As it turns out, trying to persuade experts is nothing more than a vain and hopeless fantasy. Expert beliefs are simply too entrenched, and confronting people with their errors, no matter how subtly or politely, is rarely, if ever, effective and never endearing. The more successful approach is to cultivate experts by other more ingratiating means, essentially by befriending them, in the hope that that they might at least acknowledge your alternative theory and perhaps discuss it with others or cite it in their own work. But getting them to change their mind, especially in a public context, will almost never occur by force of reason alone.

If however, an expert were to encounter a well reasoned theory in private, where the stakes are significantly lower, then perhaps there is a chance that this might find them receptive enough to begin the journey of reconstituting their ideas. But, of course, they would first need to be exposed to this well reasoned theory and to recognise that it's worthy of their close attention. The likelihood of such an eventuality is actually pretty slim.

So, if I am right in this analysis, and I should say that I'm not yet entirely certain, then the only reliably fruitful application of reasoned argument in a public context is in helping people to see the flaws in other theories before they commit themselves to them, before they make their minds up. Perhaps reasoned argument has its most important place, not in changing minds but in keeping minds open long enough that they might have an opportunity to recognise the most coherent ideas available.

As far as your own beliefs go, all you can hope is that none of your mistaken assumptions are so strongly held that you can never be persuaded to change them.

Intuition and Prejudice

“Assessments are based, not on whether the decisions made are any good, but on whether they were made in accordance with what is deemed to be an appropriate process. We assume, not only that good procedure will give rise to good outcome, but also that the ability to articulate the procedure is the key to good outcomes.” -John Kay

It could be argued that one of the principle differences between a novice and an expert is the degree to which experts are able to explain the reasons for any judgement made and to supply these retrospectively. But this begs a question: if experts make intuitive judgements – which they often do - then how can we be sure that these are not simply preferences dressed up in the trappings of deft argumentation?

A standard reply would go something like this: if the justification for an intuitive judgement stands up to rigourous debate or close scrutiny then we have no alternative than to accept the justification as valid. If such valid judgements are performed repeatedly then we need no further proof of expertise. Novices, on the other hand, are less competent in teasing out or debating their reasoning process and their judgements tend to be more inconsistent. So, even if a novice makes the same choice as an expert, we cannot say that they have exercised judgement, since judgement - in order to be judgement - needs to be justifiable.

But is this not simply an intellectual sleight of hand that surreptitiously places the quality of the justification above the quality of the decision? And whilst we may accept that instantaneous decisions are justifiable post-hoc, this still doesn’t answer the question of how such decisions can be made without calling upon resources that require far more time-consuming and considered deliberation. In other words: what is actually going on when judgements are made in an intuitive instant?

Dylan Wiliam writes of experts having what he calls “scripts” that allow them to make rapid decisions and improvise within their domain of expertise. He cites the work of Chase and Simon and their studies comparing expert and novice chess players. Chase and Simon found that expert chess players were significantly more accurate at quickly memorizing the positions of chess pieces placed in positions of actual games whereas they were significantly worse at memorizing the positions of randomly arranged chess pieces:

“Chase and Simon suggest that the much better performance of experts with ‘real’ chessboards stems from an ability to ‘read’ a chessboard in terms of a series of standard configurations of pieces that they have learnt through their experience as chess players.” 

Such expertise is the product of prolonged experience within a domain and cannot be acquired through shortcuts, formulae or crash-courses. Nonetheless we are all experts in the art of everyday life and the vast majority of the decisions we make are instantaneous and automatic. If pressed, we would have no difficulty in providing reasons for our having stopped at a red light. But can it be said that the background familiarity amassed by experts - us included - constitutes a form of criteria, or are criteria simply a means to externalize and make explicit what is essentially a tacit process that works in an entirely different way and therefore allows many decisions to be made intuitively rather than demanding deeper reflection?

"It is fairly clear that teachers acquire notions of ‘standards’ much more effectively when presented with actual samples of students’ work that exemplify the standards being promulgated than when given criterion-based descriptions of the standards. … I would like to suggest that the explanation of this phenomenon is that the grading of pieces of work with respect to a set of internal standards involves a far greater use of unconscious processing than has previously been acknowledged." -Dylan Wiliam

Psychologists, like Daniel Kahneman, distinguish between two kinds of decision making systems: System 1 and System 2. System 1 is roughly what we would think of as intuition. System 2 could be described as deliberative thinking:

“System 2 is the one who believes that it's making the decisions. But in reality, most of the time, System 1 is acting on its own, without your being aware of it. It's System 1 that decides whether you like a person, which thoughts or associations come to mind, and what you feel about something. All of this happens automatically. You can't help it, and yet you often base your decisions on it. […] System 2, on the other hand, is lazy and only becomes active when necessary. Slow, deliberate thinking is hard work. It consumes chemical resources in the brain, and people usually don't like that.” [my emphasis]

From the discussion so far it would seem that experts do not have sufficient time to formulate let alone deliberate over criteria in their intuitive judgements. This is not to say that they never pause to contemplate things more closely or even to reverse their initial judgements. They can and sometimes do. But what it does suggest is that criteria are not the primary tools of experts: experience is. By experience I mean the repertoire of exemplars that have been acquired through studying something closely – through comparing different instances and considering the relative merits of various examples, both good and bad. One nectarine alone would never be sufficient to furnish anyone with a clear idea of what constitutes a good nectarine. We need to experience a range of qualities of an experience in order to formulate an awareness of what might enhance it or detract from it, of whether the juice running down our chin is a sign of succulence or overripeness.

The point I’m making is that experts do not use criteria or deliberative thinking to form their initial judgements, instead they draw on experience and the more extensive this experience, the more well informed their judgements. However, an intuitive judgement, no matter how well informed, is not - strictly speaking - a judgement at all, but a pre-judgement; a pre-judice: an evaluation made without due consideration of the specific issues or circumstances at hand. It is a shortcut based on an unconscious repository of prior examples and is therefore limited to the known and familiar.

If the prevailing conditions in any situation that urgently demands judgement bear a close resemblance to previously encountered circumstances then it is obviously appropriate not to waste valuable time and energy logically weighing up the options.

“Intuitive intelligence is the ability to know directly, to perceive and appreciate whole or hidden patterns beyond (or faster than) logic.” -Tom Atlee (The Co-Intelligence Institute) 

But where there is no urgency, and especially where decisions impact on other people – students for instance – it seems prudent to be wary of the tendency to cut cognitive corners. As the research of Daniel Kahneman, Philip Tetlock and others increasingly shows (although it is not impossible to find exceptions), even the judgements of experts can be far from reliable, especially when making predictions about intrinsically complex and unpredictable domains. In the arts (which are well known for their unpredictability), as in other creative fields, intuition is frequently revered as a unique and often indispensable route to problem solving and discovery. But in arts education, where the judgements of teachers are directed not just towards artworks but towards individuals, too great a reliance upon intuitive judgement or gut-feeling risks undermining the putative integrity of academic assessment. And there’s the rub: what works for the production of art may well be at odds with its evaluation.

You might also be interested in the following article (Thanks to Tor for the link)

Obscurantism and Accessibility

It is well known that many people have no time for contemporary art because they perceive it as elitist nonsense. Many also dismiss philosophy for the same reason. There seems to be a general expectation, in the UK at least, that all forms of culture should be accessible to everyone and that any work that demands anything more than a cursory acknowledgement of skill or investment of thought is, by definition, a form of obscurantism: a deliberate attempt to conceal knowledge or prevent understanding.

It is widely accepted that quantum physics, higher mathematics, brain surgery and rocket science all involve levels of expert knowledge that are not readily accessible or easily explained but when it comes to art, - especially visual art – it is not uncommon for the works of artists, sometimes of the most prosaic kind, to be met with hostility and consternation.

During a tutorial a year ago, a student said to me:

“I want to make work that folk can understand.”

Fair enough I thought, but I asked him to elaborate a little, to which he said:

“I’d like to make work my mum or gran can understand. I went to the Art Gallery with them the other day I had to keep explaining all the artworks. I don’t want my art to be like that.”

I fumbled my way towards some kind of reply but in retrospect I wish I’d simply asked:

“Do your mum and gran like the music you listen to?”

I think it’s perfectly reasonable to wish to be understood, to strive to communicate clearly and to avoid willful obscurity. Nonetheless we need to take care that the impetus towards clarity, for its own sake, does not compromise the possible outcomes of high-level enquiry and expression, or the routes we might take to achieve these. If we limit our communications in the hope of making them accessible to all possible audiences then we will very quickly find ourselves speaking in the tongues of infants. We have no alternative than to assume a general level of conversance but this need not prevent us from at the same time modulating our communications in relation to the audience we are addressing. This latter point is surely a major factor in what distinguishes good communicators from poor ones.

There are many esoteric fields of enquiry in the world of expertise, requiring many elaborate and sophisticated theories and elements of jargon in order to engage with them at the highest levels. In spite this, it is frequently possible to make significant portions of complex thought and research accessible to a wider public. This fact is attested to by the plethora of popular science books and magazines available on the shelves of almost any bookshop. But the flipside of the esoteric is not the clear, the obvious or the common, as is so often mistakenly thought, but rather the dumbed-down and we shouldn't therefore be too hasty in requiring everything to be brought down to our level. If we wish to increase our understanding then we surely need to rise to the challenges of the new and the unfamiliar. Genuine learning of complex subject matter is rarely easy, in fact it is frequently arduous.

But what of mystification and obscurantism? And how might we distinguish the abstruse (ie: the difficult to understand) from the utterly impenetrable? These are not easy questions to answer – especially so because many falsehoods are not recognized as such even by their perpetrators, let alone the uninitiated. Indeed it is one of the defining features of mysticism in particular that it does not welcome analysis of its foundations, expecting its initiates to accept these as unquestionable articles of faith. I think it’s fair to say therefore that any field that willingly makes itself available for closer scrutiny cannot legitimately be labeled as either obscurantism or mysticism, no matter how esoteric its details. It might even be said that to the degree to which any form of knowledge is capable (and willing) of being reduced – through explanation - to first principles (perhaps even at the risk of dumbing down) it gains a right to our serious consideration. Ladders are ascended rung by rung and I see no risks in providing additional rungs at the lower levels of explanation in order to permit an opportunity of access for everyone willing to invest energy in making an ascent.

In the arts this process of providing a means of access to more complex ideas has traditionally been served by technical virtuosity and beauty. These help to reassure the uninitiated that the artist is in earnest and has trained to a high level and might therefore have something more substantial to offer than technical mastery alone. However, many contemporary artists reject this assumption as a flawed premise. Instead they argue for conceptual rigour and the critical integrity of artworks. They view traditional ideas of beauty and virtuosity as suspicious since these are commonly used to distract from or shore-up works of conceptual or poetic superficiality or incoherence.

However, viewers new to contemporary art and unfamiliar with such strategies are likely to find many contemporary artworks difficult to approach, and it is not surprising that this occasionally leads to accusations of elitism and obscurantism. In recent decades many public galleries and museums have attempted to bridge this gap through policies of interpretation, education and social inclusion that seek to explain contemporary art not by dumbing it down but by providing means and tools to understanding and appreciation (rungs on a ladder). Whilst these policies are frequently criticized by artists for compromising the integrity of contemporary art (indeed for dumbing it down) it seems likely, in conclusion, that this tension is more a reflection of an ongoing and perhaps irresolvable conflict between those who uncompromisingly seek work of the highest order and those who demand a right not to be excluded.

Doubtful Pedantry

Do we perform better in life when we are confident in our assumptions? Are we more likely to believe people who express certainty and is there a correlation between certainty and expertise?

It might be thought that certainty is a prerequisite of expert knowledge. Experts know their stuff and it is upon this foundation that the authority of their opinions is grounded. How otherwise can an expert ever claim to be – or be thought to be – an expert?

But it may not be quite so simple.

In a study undertaken last year by researchers at the Harvard Business School it was found that people are more likely to be persuaded by the opinions of experts who express a degree of uncertainty about their subject. The findings are explained by what the researchers have dubbed “expectancy violations” where people become alerted to unexpected evaluations in both expert and amateur testimonies. In the case of amateur testimony the phenomenon works in reverse: we are more likely to believe the opinions of amateurs when expressed with certainty (since we do not ‘expect’ amateurs to be confident in their knowledge).

There’s no guarantee that this phenomenon applies across the board but it certainly raises some interesting questions - and doubts even - about the assumption that expertise should always be presented authoritatively*.

“The authority of those who teach is very often an impediment to those who desire to learn.” –Cicero

This challenge to common sense assumptions about the value of authority and self-confidence has also been investigated by researchers at the University of Illinois and the University of Southern Mississippi who studied the effects of self-talk (I will fix it!). They asked half the participants in their study to write out “I will” 2o times whilst they asked the other half to write “will I” 20 times. They then asked all the participants to work on a series of anagrams. Surprisingly the participants who had been asked to write “will I” solved nearly twice as many anagrams as those who had written “I will”.

Most self-help gurus would tell us that affirmative statements like “I can do it!” are always better than questioning statements like “can I do it?” but it turns out that this little nugget of received wisdom may be completely wrong. Or as Bertrand Russell put it:

"One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision."

*Presumably there must come a point though where too frequent an expression of doubt by an expert would begin to erode their professional credibility, so it certainly wouldn’t seem advisable to take this as a licence to express every opinion with uncertainty. The whole point is that such expressions should be unexpected.

Expert Learning

What if we were to give up on the idea that what really distinguishes an expert is what they produce: what they do? But then what else might distinguish an expert? I would suggest that it is the criteria - frequently tacit - that they have gradually acquired and evolved through practice and experience - that are applied to what they do. And whilst the exercise of such criteria may be discerned within the things or circumstances that experts create, it invariably takes another expert eye to notice such details. Since these are often tacitly inscribed they are also often only tacitly registered.

Whilst we should certainly strive to unravel these ephemeral and priceless rules and guides in order that we might also benefit from them and share them more widely, we have no alternative other than to accept that some things cannot be so easily reduced to transmissible tokens of truth.

Experimental Art and Play

I've just attended and presented at a two-day conference in Sydney, Australia, on the subject of experimental art. My criticisms of this conference could run into several megabytes, but in this instance I'll simply express my disappointment that there was so little discussion and debate of the term "experiment” and almost no-one, at least amongst any of the presentations I attended, made even the slightest attempt to sharpen the terms used and consequently I have real doubts about the value of the conclusions that might be drawn from the conference.

One of the keynote speakers, Donald Brook, did make one or two salient contributions. Brook focused in particular on the idea of art as a meme which replicates itself with small variations in much the same way as genes do (I'd like, at some point, to explore this idea further in relation to some thoughts I've expressed recently on the nature of variation in art). Brook also made the assertion that all art is experimental, therefore the term “experimental art” is a tautology. It’s a compelling point but I believe we could take it a stage further which could certainly help us understand what might be meant by “experimental art” and therefore give us a deeper insight into how this might operate in the larger field of activities that we call art.

My contention would be that experimental art is not a tautology in the least and this can be exemplified by contrasting it with the idea of “playful art”. Playful art is indeed a tautology which is probably why the term is rarely, if ever, encountered.

The process of art production is playful in that it involves multiple variables and seeks neither to limit these nor to apply itself to systematic accumulative enquiry. This is not to say that art cannot, or does not, engage in processes more closely aligned with Scientific Method but when it does so, beyond simply establishing its techniques or the superficial appearance of “the lab”, it must necessarily be exactly what we might term “experimental art” since it uses experiment, in the strict and only useful sense, to arrive at its objectives.

Earlier this Summer Lesley and I conducted a number of video interviews with artists in Glasgow on the subject of art, experimentation and play. One of the interviewed artists made the claim that what distinguishes play is its purposelessness. This struck me as a powerful insight at the time but on reflection I've come to regard this as more of a common misconception which finds support in the fact that the results of play are so intangible. Play is not purposeless. We might say that play is activity directed towards stimulation and learning. I don't have any books here in Sydney to check any authorities on this subject, but I'm sure Piaget would agree - play is the first and foremost means by which we come to know the world, not experiment. You only have to watch a young child to see how true this statement actually is. Humans are inordinately gifted pattern recognisers and when expected patterns are contradicted we are drawn to them, presumably, because they hold the promise of expanding our understanding. As many philosophers from Alfred North Whitehead to Heidegger have noted, we come to know the world in the first instance not through proof but through use.

Play then, is the primary form of inquiry that artists are involved with and it's significant, I think, that experiments can form a part of play - can be a subspecies within play - but play cannot form a part of an experiment (other than by being its subject) since play would immediately threaten to undermine the necessary logic, objectivity and traceability of the process.

It’s important here not to confuse the play of artists with aimless fiddling (in fact the term “to fiddle” tells us a great deal about how the word “play” has become normalized within the discipline of music for example). The play of artists is tempered by their expertise (itself a kind of limiting of variables) which allows them to discriminate between unexpected outcomes that are merely odd, superfluous and insignificant and those that are genuinely worthy of attention.

Roman Signer No. I don’t want my art to be didactic. There is actually nothing to be learned from me. Beuys always lifted his didactic finger.

Armin Senser Are you sure there is nothing one can learn from you?

Roman Signer Learn to play more.

Ariely’s Origami

The following is a recent 5 minute video from behavioural economist Dan Ariely. It makes the case that we ascribe greater value to things we work to produce rather than things we simply buy or commission.

In a general sense he's probably right, we may well benefit from greater "surplus, utility and happiness" when surrounded by things made by our own hands rather than things made by other people. However, interesting as I find many of Ariely’s ideas and reassuring as it was to hear him making a convincing case for the fruits of our creative labours, the video left me with more questions than it provided answers.

In the video Ariely mentions a study he undertook where people were given instructions to make origami shapes. When these people were asked to put a value on their origami they attributed greater value to their own shapes than other people’s and they also believed that their own were more beautiful.

Backing up his claims with research certainly reinforces the point but I can’t help thinking that when you eliminate all the variables from a complex set of relationships, as this kind of research often does, then you need to be very careful with the extent of the conclusions you draw from the results gathered. Imagine for instance, an alternative experiment where you asked people to make origami shapes but you paid them a pittance to produce lots of identical ones. Or imagine you got an expert to guide people and show them some examples of really sophisticated origami to compare with their own. I think it’s likely that in both of these instances people would exhibit varying opinions about the value and relative beauty of their work. As the second of these examples suggests, a significant element that seems to be missing from Ariely’s account is expertise and it’s closely related dimension of skill. Following Ikea instructions or an origami diagram is one thing, but as tasks become more complex the level of skill necessary to complete them to a satisfactory standard increases accordingly. The risk of a botched job and the potential for additional costs in time and materials of having to repeat the process also increase and who wants to be constantly reminded of how poor their plastering skills are every time they look at the wall?