The Anosognosic's Dilemma

[Ian Livingston]

Hey, that's a fancy new name. Interesting to see all this without a
single mention of Jung. Could be some denial involved, I suppose.

On Fri, Jun 25, 2010 at 4:47 AM, Robin Landseadel
<robinlandseadel at comcast.net> wrote:
> Started wandering over to the Op-Ed Blogs at the NYT, ran across this
> Perfectly Pynchonian analysis of Anosognosia or ". . . The apparent
> unawareness of or failure to recognize one's own functional defect  . . ."
> In the case of these blogs by Errol Morris, this is a blindness of one's
> intellectual limitations:
>
>        DAVID DUNNING:  People will often make the case, “We can’t
>        be that stupid, or we would have been evolutionarily wiped out
>        as a species a long time ago.”  I don’t agree. I find myself
>        saying, “Well, no.  Gee, all you need to do is be far enough
>        along to be able to get three square meals or to solve the
>        calorie problem long enough so that you can reproduce.  And
>        then, that’s it.  You don’t need a lot of smarts.  You don’t have to
>        do tensor calculus.  You don’t have to do quantum physics to be
>        able to survive to the point where you can reproduce.”  One
>        could argue that evolution suggests we’re not idiots, but I would
>        say, “Well, no. Evolution just makes sure we’re not blithering
>        idiots. But, we could be idiots in a lot of different ways and still
>
>        make it through the day.”
>
> http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/the-anosognosics-dilemma-1/
>
>        In one of his first e-mails, David Dunning wrote to me about the
>        mediocre detective who is unaware of significant clues littered
>        all around him.  A thousand unnoticed purloined letters easily
>        within reach.  Cluelessness could be just another way of
>        expressing our relationship to the unknown unknowns.  We
>        don’t know what questions to ask, let alone how to answer
>        them.  I sent an e-mail to Dunning:  “If you were to make a Venn
>        diagram of cluelessness, self-deception and denial, what would
>        it look like?”
>
>        Shortly afterwards, Dunning responded.
>
>        I’ve attached a PDF with how I see it.  Cluelessness is clearly
>        the biggest circle, in that there is so much knowledge and
>        expertise that lies outside everybody’s personal cognitive event
>        horizon.  People can be clueless in a million different ways,
>        even though they are largely trying to get things right in an
>        honest way. Deficits in knowledge, or in information the world is
>        giving them, just leads people toward false beliefs and holes in
>        their expertise.
>
>        That is not to dismiss or belittle self-deception.  A caveat to
>        begin:  The traditional academic definition of “self-deception” is
>        technical and a little stodgy.  It requires that, to self-deceive, a
>        person both know “X” and deceive himself or herself into
>        believing “not-X.”  But how can a person both believe and
>        disbelieve “X” at the same time?  This is for philosophers to
>        argue about (and they have, for centuries) and for experimental
>        nerds like me to try to figure out how to demonstrate decisively
>        in the lab (so far, we haven’t).
>
>        But if we imbue self-deception with a looser definition, we have
>        a lot to talk about. Psychologists over the past 50 years have
>        demonstrated the sheer genius people have at convincing
>        themselves of congenial conclusions while denying the truth of
>        inconvenient ones.  You can call it self-deception, but it also
>        goes by the names rationalization, wishful thinking, defensive
>        processing, self-delusion, and motivated reasoning. There is a
>        robust catalogue of strategies people follow to believe what
>        they want to, and we research psychologists are hardly done
>        describing the shape or the size of that catalogue.  All this
>        rationalization can lead people toward false beliefs, or perhaps
>        more commonly, to tenaciously hang on to false beliefs they
>        should really reconsider.
>
>
>        Denial, to a psychologist, is a somewhat knuckle-headed
>        technique in self-deception, and it is to merely deny the truth of
>        something someone does not want to confront.
>
> http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/24/the-anosognosics-dilemma-somethings-wrong-but-youll-never-know-what-it-is-part-5/



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