Let’s hold our identities up to the light. Rather than hold our identities lightly, let’s start by understanding them better. In any case, I have a counter-proposal for Galef: You may also come to decide that the belief warrants further consideration, or even updating. And then I weigh in on whether thats a rational attitude to take: Julia. You might also recognize how a difference in one answer to the chain of why s could impact the belief statement, and thereby appreciate the fallibility or incompleteness of your stance, thus gaining a greater appreciation for intellectual humility and the perspectives of others. marriage, monogamy, standard gender roles, having children, and so on. You should come to understand the root cause of this belief more clearly. Podcaster and author Julia Galef talks about her book The Scout Mindset with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. The Scout Mindset, by Galef, Julia, ISBN 9780593189269, available at The American Book Center. The next time you find yourself (or someone else) espousing an identity-laden belief, pause to ask yourself why. Thus, at the risk of taking a page right out of critlib, my identification as an epistemic populist seemingly has roots in the relationship I perceive between information and power, rather than merely in my perception of experts - which itself may be a symptom of what I perceive to be the power dynamics of information. Nevertheless, it is interesting that in this exercise (which I generated authentically while drafting this post - you’ll have to take my word for it, I guess!), I begin with the idea of populism and conclude with the idea of power. If you’ve given this a try yourself, you can probably tell that there are innumerable paths through the Five Whys an answer to one Why can impact all the answers downstream of it. An example related to epistemic identity might look like this:īecause I am more apt to trust independently-acting individuals than experts.īecause experts are generally operating at a level of abstraction from reality, while common people are dealing with reality.īecause experts do not bear the cost of being incorrect as directly as common people do.īecause the epistemic institutions that confer expert status protect experts through mechanisms like financial security, reputation management, and gatekeeping of the expert class.īecause gatekeeping expertise is a means of consolidating and conferring social power. The exercise is simple enough: one begins with a declarative statement, and seeks to understand the root-cause of the statement by iteratively asking Why? five times. I think it also has value in understanding the identity dimensions of belief-formation. Julia Galef is an American philosopher of science, writer, speaker and co-founder of the Center for Applied Rationality. The Five Whys (or 5Y), developed by Japanese industrialist Sakichi Toyoda in the 1930s, is best known for its application in cause-effect and root-cause analysis for problem solving.
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