How meanings get words and social sciences get broken (with Literal Banana)

May 25, 2022 1h 20m 21 insights Episode Page ↗
Spencer Greenberg speaks with Eric Schwitzgabel about the surprising lack of empirical evidence that studying ethics makes people more ethical, exploring concepts like hypocrisy, moral mediocrity, and his "theory of jerks." They also discuss the challenges and skepticism in social science research.
Actionable Insights

1. Check for “Jerk Goggles”

Regularly ask yourself if you are seeing the world through “jerk goggles” by perceiving others as fools, tools, or negative social categories, and instead strive to see their humanity, value, and individuality. This self-correction can improve daily interactions and self-awareness.

2. Bundle Valued Activities

Arrange your life to bundle multiple valued activities and goals into a single action, making it easier to consistently pursue them and achieve more “bang for your buck.” This strategy helps advance various personal values simultaneously.

3. Make Ethics Enjoyable

To sustain ethical behavior, find ways to bundle doing good with activities that make you feel good, as making ethical actions unpleasant will likely lead to doing them less over time. This approach enhances motivation and behavioral consistency.

4. Prefer Honesty Over Rationalization

When failing to meet moral demands, it is more intellectually honest to acknowledge the stringent norm you’re not meeting (hypocrisy) rather than rationalizing your way into undemanding norms with excuses. This fosters intellectual integrity and self-awareness.

5. Strive for Ethical Growth

Aim for ethical reflection and thought to make you a better person and help you live up to your stated moral norms, rather than just casually accepting moral failings. This sets a fundamental goal for continuous personal improvement.

6. Cultivate Motivating Beliefs

Recognize that beliefs vary in their motivational power; strive to cultivate types of beliefs that concretely connect with your actions and drive behavioral change, rather than just abstract intellectual assent. This helps ensure your beliefs translate into desired behaviors.

7. Prioritize Deeds Over Claims

When assessing belief, especially moral belief, prioritize how someone acts and reacts in the world over their intellectual self-attributions and verbal claims, as this offers a more useful and value-aligned understanding. This provides a pragmatic framework for evaluating true conviction.

8. Read Ethical Philosophy

Reading philosophical works, such as those by Peter Singer or Jeremy Bentham, can profoundly shift one’s ethical stance and lead to significant behavioral changes, like becoming vegetarian. This is a direct action for fundamental ethical re-evaluation.

9. Strengthen Moral Convictions

If you want to change your behavior, strengthen your moral view on the topic, as a stronger conviction about something being morally bad correlates with a reduced likelihood of engaging in that behavior. This provides a mechanism for driving personal behavioral change.

10. Adopt Skeptical Paper Reading

When reading scientific papers, adopt a highly skeptical mindset, assuming findings are likely flawed or “fake” until thoroughly scrutinized, rather than trusting claims at face value. This critical approach helps in discerning reliable information.

11. Adopt Truth-Seeking Research

Approach research with a truth-seeking attitude, focusing on designing experiments that will provide clear updates to your beliefs, regardless of the outcome. This mindset is crucial for generating genuine knowledge and avoiding confirmation bias.

12. Design Bayesian Experiments

When conducting social science research, design experiments that yield strong Bayesian evidence, where the probability of observed evidence is significantly higher if your hypothesis is true than if it’s false, to effectively update beliefs. This method enhances the rigor and informativeness of studies.

13. Engage in Adversarial Collaboration

Actively seek out and participate in adversarial collaborations where researchers with differing viewpoints work together on papers or studies to clearly delineate areas of agreement and disagreement. This practice can lead to more robust and nuanced scientific conclusions.

14. Learn from Adversarial Debates

To gain deeper understanding, read not just individual papers or literature reviews, but also the adversarial debates and arguments between different researchers, as this reveals concessions and points of contention. This approach provides a richer, more critical perspective on complex topics.

15. Concrete Social Science

To improve social science, be extremely concrete about research goals and target populations, then design and implement interventions to empirically test if they achieve their intended outcomes. This practical approach focuses on measurable impact and effectiveness.

16. Learn from Pseudoscience

Study pseudoscience and its communication methods to understand common ways of being wrong, identify patterns of flawed reasoning, and learn how claims resonate with people. This unconventional learning strategy can sharpen critical thinking skills.

17. Interpret Anecdotes Contextually

Understand that contradictory anecdotes can both be true in different contexts; use them to learn that opposite things can be valid in varying situations and to appreciate the richness of individual experiences. This helps in extracting nuanced insights from personal stories.

18. Value Anecdote Context

When evaluating anecdotes, prioritize those with full context (who, what, where, when) as information divorced from its context carries significantly less value and reliability. This filter helps in discerning credible and informative anecdotes.

19. Utilize ClearerThinking.org Tools

Visit clearerthinking.org to use free interactive tools and programs that integrate psychology and economics insights to help you make better decisions, create new habits, and achieve goals. This resource offers practical applications for self-improvement.

20. Take Gender Continuum Test

Visit clearerthinking.org to take the free Gender Continuum Test, which provides a personalized analysis of your personality based on data from over 15,000 people, helping you learn about gender and personality. This tool offers self-discovery through data-driven insights.

21. Use ThoughtSaver for Retention

Utilize ThoughtSaver, a free tool that sends daily flashcard quizzes, to help you remember valuable information learned from podcasts, books, and articles. This habit-forming tool addresses the problem of forgetting consumed information.