on shifting views

A thoughtful comment from Dan on my last post raised an issue that I'd like to explore further. In fact I meant to get more into it during that rant, but I guess I lost track of it.

Dan wrote:

On top of that, we can't even rely on our own preferences and views to remain static. I can still remember with astonishing clarity the days when you used to argue with me that religion did more good than bad, fuck the earth because technology will always overcome and what do i care I'll be dead anyway, and that siding with one party of a 2-party system was probably good just because it's probably better than siding with the other party. It's been interesting seeing your viewpoints shift.

Dan wonders, as do I, how much I can be sure that my current perspective will last, given how much it has changed in the last few years. But another question would be are the changes random or are they moving in a certain direction? And I think there's a clear direction to my changes.

I did make the arguments Dan mentions, arguments that are somewhat embarrassing to me now. But I understand why I made them at the time, I understand why I make different arguements now, and I understand why I moved from one to the other. That same understanding makes me think I'm not likely to revert to the previous state, and relates to these career choices.

Recently I went back and reread some of my old blog posts, because I've been aware how much my views have changed on some subjects. This old post was particularly awkward for me to reread. But at the same time, I was somewhat proud of the reasonableness I displayed. The fatal flaw of my argument was that I was using reasonableness to defend an viewpoint I reached from a place of unreasonableness.

In a very general way I was arguing that Bush's warrantless wiretaps weren't so bad, not because I understood the issue, but because I simply made bad assumptions about the issue, and this was I think the basis of all of my argument:

"It seems likely to me that what the President did was not illegal either because it was suffiently in grey area or because it was explicitly legal."

In other words, I had no idea, but I just made an assumption rather than try to erase my own ignorance. I just figured that both sides of the political debate had their own partisan agendas (which they of course do) but I didn't realize that having a partisan agenda doesn't necessarily mean you're wrong.

In spite of my spirited argument from ignorance, I said some things I'm proud to have said, and that in some ways predicted my shift in stance:

• "the reason he cites for his objection is the reasonable idea that if you give someone a power with the understanding they'll use it for good, eventually they'll use it for bad."
• "Hopefully your point in 5 is that we should be wary of granting powers that we can't monitor for misuse. That is a good point. When we quickly grant powers in response to an immediate threat, and those powers might not be able to be monitored, we should weigh the benefits those powers provide against the potential negatives of their misuse, and also factor in that we can develop a way to monitor them while they are already in use."
• This entire list of 14 points, which now I would probably still use as a tool to argue the exact opposite side (actually not the exact opposite, since my argument wasn't really that warantless wiretaps were good. My point then was more like "people arguing warantless wiretaps are bad are just partisan anti-Bush people who'll jump on any cause to go against a Republican.")
• "You sell yourself short, calling it futile, after making a great point that it all boils down to a subjective worth of something."

Walt took most of the aversarial role in that conversation (I love you Walt), and I pounced on some of the less logical things he said, while simply conceding his better points, which had the effect of magnifying his more debateable points since I could devote more time to refuting them. Paradoxically, simply conceding his good points almost had the effect of dismissing them.

Anyway, the point of this whole flashback was to illustrate that many of my old views/ideas that are different than my current views/ideas were different because they were based on ignorance. I had preconcieved notions that I wanted to be true, and I argued fairly persuasively (at least persuasively enough for myself at the time) in favor of those preconceived notions. But somewhere along the way, something happened and I let go of a lot of those preconceived notions.

My progression of views follows a logical structure, when you look at it that way. At least some of my transitions from

math --> finance --> econ --> psychology --> philosophy --> anthropology

also make sense in this way. I started with math because I was good at it and liked it. I liked economics because it was based in math but it was a tool to try to understand how humans behave. Pyschology is a classic discipline devoted to understanding how humans behave, and the evolutionary psychology I was reading helped me to understand myself better. My interest in philosophy was specifically in philosophy of science, because I realized that the scientific method rigorously seeks to eliminate the biases that preconceived notions cause, a powerful idea to me at the time since I had just gone through a process of ridding myself of such biases.

And my latest focus on anthropology is again touching on my theme of interest in human nature. I also realize that part of my academic interest is in pursuing subjects that will help me understand myself. I also see Anthropology as giving me the freedom to pursue a very wide range of scholarly study of humanity, and also the option of a wide range of enviroments in which to study it. There are anthropologists in university classrooms, in corporate boardrooms, in government institutes, in jungles of South America, in African plains, on beautiful Islands, or in poverty-ravaged third world countries. They work with microscopes, or with fossils, or with chimps, or with college students. They're all studying human nature, but they're all doing it in very different ways, and presumably they gravitate towards locations and lifestyles that they personally enjoy, while trying to find an intellectually satisfying theme to their work.

Thanks to everyone who is responding to this stuff. It means a lot to me. But not enough that I'm going to run the spell checker.