“I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other,” Rilke wrote in his meditation on freedom, togetherness, and the secret to a good marriage. But how do two people protect this sacred necessity of the bond from the daily proximity of cohabitation, which now presses their closely neighboring solitudes into inevitable frictions, now pushes them apart into neighboring lonelinesses?
That is what Margaret Atwood explores in a short, stunning poem originally published in her 1970 collection Procedures for Underground, later included in her altogether wondrous Selected Poems: 1965–1975 (public library), and read here by musician, poetry-lover, and my dear friend Amanda Palmer to the serendipitous sound of church bells in the winter-quieted streets of Portugal.
HABITATION by Margaret Atwood
Marriage is not
a house or even a tent it is before that, and colder: the edge of the forest, the edge
of the desert
the unpainted stairs
at the back where we squat
outside, eating popcorn the edge of the receding glacier where painfully and with wonder
So why can’t we stop such views from spreading? My opinion is that we have failed to understand their root causes, often assuming it is down to ignorance. But new research, published in my book, Knowledge Resistance: How We Avoid Insight from Others, shows that the capacity to ignore valid facts has most likely had adaptive value throughout human evolution. Therefore, this capacity is in our genes today. Ultimately, realising this is our best bet to tackle the problem.
So far, public intellectuals have roughly made two core arguments about our post-truth world. The physician Hans Rosling and the psychologist Steven Pinker argue it has come about due to deficits in facts and reasoned thinking – and can therefore be sufficiently tackled with education.
Meanwhile, Nobel Prize winner Richard Thaler and other behavioural economists have shown how the mere provision of more and better facts often lead already polarised groups to become even more polarised in their beliefs.
The conclusion of Thaler is that humans are deeply irrational, operating with harmful biases. The best way to tackle it is therefore nudging – tricking our irrational brains – for instance by changing measles vaccination from an opt-in to a less burdensome opt-out choice.
Such arguments have often resonated well with frustrated climate scientists, public health experts and agri-scientists (complaining about GMO-opposers). Still, their solutions clearly remain insufficient for dealing with a fact-resisting, polarised society.
Evolutionary pressures
In my comprehensive study, I interviewed numerous eminent academics at the University of Oxford, London School of Economics and King’s College London, about their views. They were experts on social, economic and evolutionary sciences. I analysed their comments in the context of the latest findings on topics raging from the origin of humanity, climate change and vaccination to religion and gender differences.
It became evident that much of knowledge resistance is better understood as a manifestation of social rationality. Essentially, humans are social animals; fitting into a group is what’s most important to us. Often, objective knowledge-seeking can help strengthen group bonding – such as when you prepare a well-researched action plan for your colleagues at work.
But when knowledge and group bonding don’t converge, we often prioritise fitting in over pursuing the most valid knowledge. In one large experiment, it turned out that both liberals and conservatives actively avoided having conversations with people of the other side on issues of drug policy, death penalty and gun ownership. This was the case even when they were offered a chance of winning money if they discussed with the other group. Avoiding the insights from opposing groups helped people dodge having to criticise the view of their own community.
Similarly, if your community strongly opposes what an overwhelming part of science concludes about vaccination or climate change, you often unconsciously prioritise avoiding getting into conflicts about it.
This is further backed up by research showing that the climate deniers who score the highest on scientific literacy tests are more confident than the average in that group that climate change isn’t happening – despite the evidence showing this is the case. And those among the climate concerned who score the highest on the same tests are more confident than the average in that group that climate change is happening.
This logic of prioritising the means that get us accepted and secured in a group we respect is deep. Those among the earliest humans who weren’t prepared to share the beliefs of their community ran the risk of being distrusted and even excluded.
And social exclusion was an enormous increased threat against survival – making them vulnerable to being killed by other groups, animals or by having no one to cooperate with. These early humans therefore had much lower chances of reproducing. It therefore seems fair to conclude that being prepared to resist knowledge and facts is an evolutionary, genetic adaptation of humans to the socially challenging life in hunter-gatherer societies.
Today, we are part of many groups and internet networks, to be sure, and can in some sense “shop around” for new alliances if our old groups don’t like us. Still, humanity today shares the same binary mindset and strong drive to avoid being socially excluded as our ancestors who only knew about a few groups. The groups we are part of also help shape our identity, which can make it hard to change groups. Individuals who change groups and opinions constantly may also be less trusted, even among their new peers.
In my research, I show how this matters when it comes to dealing with fact resistance. Ultimately, we need to take social aspects into account when communicating facts and arguments with various groups. This could be through using role models, new ways of framing problems, new rules and routines in our organisations and new types of scientific narratives that resonate with the intuitions and interests of more groups than our own.
There are no quick fixes, of course. But if climate change were reframed from the liberal/leftist moral perspective of the need for global fairness to conservative perspectives of respect for the authority of the father land, the sacredness of God’s creation and the individual’s right not to have their life project jeopardised by climate change, this might resonate better with conservatives.
If we take social factors into account, this would help us create new and more powerful ways to fight belief in conspiracy theories and fake news. I hope my approach will stimulate joint efforts of moving beyond disputes disguised as controversies over facts and into conversations about what often matters more deeply to us as social beings.
Mikael Klintman receives funding from The Swedish Research Council (VR), Riksbankens Jubileumsfond for the advancement of the humanities and social sciences (RJ), and The Swedish foundation for strategic environmental research (MISTRA).
Translators: Mike Zonta, Melissa Goodnight, Richard Branam, Hanz Bolen
SENSE TESTIMONY: People who espouse spiritual knowledge are especially responsible to embody those values.
5th Step Conclusions:
1) People is the embodiment of one true identity, the reward of one true identity, the joy of one true identity.
2) The Radiant Self Evident Value and Ability of Rightly Used Principle is everpresent in each and every individuation, experience, and expression of All One Mind Truth I Am. Radiant Righteous-ness is the essence and expression of all there is.
3) To come.
4) To come.
All Translators are welcome to join this group. See Weekly Groups page/tab.
(Going to be a very complex and delicate series of operations; five-year target for repairs and renovation looks like it will be fairly hard to attain…)
This post is part of TED’s “How to Be a Better Human” series, each of which contains a piece of helpful advice from people in the TED community; browse through all the posts here.
“Have you ever had this experience?” asks physicist Dominic Walliman in a TEDxEastVan Talk. “You’re having a chat with someone, and they’re telling you something about a subject they’re very interested in or they know a lot about, and you’re following along. Then, at some stage you realize you kind of lost the thread of what they’re saying … You realize you have absolutely no idea what they’re talking about.”
When this has happened, you probably felt bad — like you just weren’t smart enough to understand what they were saying and you’ve wasted that person’s time.
Perhaps you’ve been on the other side, too. You were talking about something relatively complex and you could practically see the moment that your listener checked out. Not only is it uncomfortable but it’s also disheartening when what you’re saying is important, cool or valuable to the listener.
When you’re the speaker, “there are things you can do to improve this,” says Walliman. All you need to do is find a better way to explain your subject.
Walliman has made this a speciality — he writes children’s books and makes YouTube videos about quantum physics, nanotechnology, relativity, rocket science and other traditionally dense topics — and he’scome up with four principles that can help you effectively communicate complex concepts.
What’s more, he believes that more effective communication isn’t limited to the sciences. In fact, it can help all of us talk about the ideas, concepts, inventions and people that interest us. “I’ve come to the conclusion,” he says, “that you can pretty much explain anything to anybody, as long as you go about it the right way.”
1. Start off in the right place.
“Everyone’s got a different background, everyone’s got a different set of knowledge, and it’s our job to explain the information in terms that they already understand, “ says Walliman. “It’s no good leaving a gap and starting from there because they’re not going to follow along.”
If you’re in doubt about what your listener already knows or comprehends, simply ask. As you start to explain, he suggests, ask questions like “Do you already get this?” or “Is this making any sense?”
What if you’re talking to people who come from backgrounds that you’re not familiar with? If you’re speaking to a large group, “you have to make your best guess and a show of hands can be useful, too,” says Walliman. “It’s always better to err on the side of caution.”
Don’t worry too much about whether you’re telling the audience something they’ve already heard before. “People generally don’t mind,” says Waliman.
2. Don’t go too far down the rabbit hole.
Most of us love to learn — but we can absorb only so much at a time. Avoid bombarding people with too much knowledge at once. “It’s better to explain, say, three things that someone will understand … rather than barrage them with a whole load of information that kind of undoes all of your good work to begin with,” Walliman says.
Let’s say you and a friend are in an art museum. You see a painting you love — and one that you studied in college — but you can see that your friend doesn’t quite know what to make of it. You may feel tempted to explain every single thing you know about this particular work, telling her about the artist’s life and career, the materials and techniques used, the movement that the artist is part of, and so on.
Instead, try to focus on the bigger picture (pun intended). This can help your friend start to appreciate it. As an example, take Helen Frankenthaler’s Cool Summer (1962). Mention how, much like Jackson Pollock would drip paint, Frankenthaler would stain her canvases. Like Pollock’s dripping, staining was another cutting-edge technique of the time. Then, ask your friend to look at the painting as if it were a landscape. What kind of natural scene could be conveyed with those colors in those configurations?
3. Go for clarity over accuracy.
When we’re speaking about a subject we’re very knowledgeable about, we may tend to be carried away with the impulse to get everything “right.” Sometimes, though, an emphasis on the facts can occur at the expense of comprehension.
“It’s better to come up with a simpler explanation that maybe isn’t completely technically correct but it gets the point across,” Walliman says. Settle for establishing a basic understanding in them. If they want to know more, you can build upon that knowledge and create a more complete — and accurate — picture.
4. Explain why you think your subject is so cool.
“If you’re taking the time to explain something to someone, there’s probably a reason you’re doing it — either you think it’s super-important or very, very interesting,” says Walliman. And if it’s the latter, he adds, “the more you can convey that to someone, the more likely they are to remember it and get some value from it.”
So, ask yourself: “Why do I think this subject is so cool?”
The more you can communicate your enthusiasm to others, the more likely they are to feel that way too. One way to do this is give examples that demonstrate how the subject is relevant to their lives can bring it to life for them.
Figuring out how to best explain your subject may take trial and error, so don’t get discouraged about sharing what you know. Remember: Learning isn’t limited to understanding a subject, it can also be about grasping what you already know and understanding it in a way that will allow you to share it with those around you.
Watch his TEDxEastVan talk now:
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jake Amorelli is the communications coordinator for TEDx.
If you were to travel back in time to kill your grandparents — let’s ignore the ‘why’ here, for the sake of argument — you would never have been born. Which means there was nobody to kill your grandparents. Which means you were actually born after all, which… hold up, what’s going on here?!
These kinds of brain-breaking paradoxes have been puzzling us forever, inspiring stories ranging from “Back to the Future” to “Hot Tub Time Machine.”
Now, New Scientist reports that physicists Barak Shoshany and Jacob Hauser from the Perimeter Institute in Canada have come up with an apparent solution to these types of paradoxes that requires a very large — but not necessarily infinite — number of parallel universes.
They uploaded a paper of their research to the preprint archive arXiv last month. It describes a model in which a person could theoretically travel from one timeline to another by stepping through a hole in space-time, or wormhole, in a way that they claim is “mathematically possible.”
“The parallel universes approach that we suggest says there are different parallel universes where things are roughly the same, and each one is mathematically on a separate space-time manifold,” Shoshany told New Scientist. “You can go between those manifolds when you travel back in time.”
Multiple timelines would allow you to travel to a different timeline and kill your grandparents without causing a paradox. But the number of timelines doesn’t have to be infinite for this to work, the researchers calculated.
The model does have a major drawback, at least for narrative purposes: time travel won’t do any good for your own timeline.
“What time travel means here is stepping between those histories — that’s even freakier,” astrophysicist and dark matter expert Geraint Lewis at the University of Sydney, who was not involved in the research, told New Scientist. “At some level it doesn’t even feel like time travel anymore, because what’s the point of going back and killing Hitler if the second world war still plays out in the universe you’re from?”
Enlightenment is not something that can just be handed to you. The closest thing to it that you can receive are thoughts and questions that can lead you inward in the search for meaning. What Does That Mean? is full of thoughts and questions that do just that. Some insights you may have thought of and then forgotten, and others you may have experienced but simply haven’t appreciated.
An old saying asserts that the value of a book is not in what it says but rather in what it does.What Does That Mean? is one of those books that will have a lifetime impact on all who read it. The book squarely faces the many inconsistencies held in our systems of belief, from the sciences to psychic phenomena. Eldon Taylor is willing to speak out without reservation, and without avoiding any so-called sanctities. The result is absolutely thought-provoking at every level, as this work addresses the meaning of life and the ultimate “humanness” of the human being. If you have ever questioned the nature of life, the power of the mind, unexplained events, and other mysteries, you will find this book totally riveting.
Throughout these pages, Eldon shares life experiences that will lead you to revelations about your own life. Perhaps this book’s greatest value is that it assists you in remembering who you really are and thereby places you firmly back on the path to personal enlightenment. English writer and poet Joseph Addison, said, “Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.” If that is the case, then this book is the perfect workout to enrich your thinking. You may not always like what you read, but you will always find the depth of thought wholly provocative.
