Seth Godin rants on faux science and irrationality

"The news here is not that people are irrational, giving too much credence to the dramatic and the local and the short-term (that's not news), but that people have added a veneer of scientific rationality to their irrational decisions." Seth Godin rants on the growing use of phony sciencey-sounding arguments to validate irrational decisions. Like "truthiness," for science.

• [Nadreck]

  We have only ourselves to blame by labeling things like “Star Trek” Science Fiction instead of Science Fantasy. People get conditioned to accepting techno-babble as real science.

  • [Brainspore]

    I never thought I’d hear Gene Roddenberry get the blame for the anti-vaccination movement.

• [danlalan]

  My instinct, which comes from a subconscious assimilation of the knowledge available in the electromagnetic waves that permeate the zeitgeist, tells me this is spot on…

• [Dave Rattigan]

  Is relying on intuition really as irrational as Godin thinks? While “hunches” might bypass the usual rational process, isn’t there scientific research to suggest it can be reliable? Like tacit knowledge?

  Having said that, he’s right on most of the examples he gives.

  • [phisrow]

    Hunches can be(and often are, for the set of situations that we’ve evolved for) accurate, even more accurate than attempts at rational cogitation. Just imagine trying to catch a baseball using your knowledge of physics and calculating in your head.

    The danger, though, is that there are areas where we know that hunches fall absolutely flat, and they include important ones. Worse, given that we have a fair idea of the common styles of error in gut response, it is practical for malicious actors to craft inputs that specifically exploit those weaknesses(See “advertising” and “Goebbels” among others).

• [Anonymous]

  The audiophile claim is spurious–while many things (including highly pure copper wiring) may not have any effect that will pass a double blind test, the pure wiring is being promoted for the _audio_ path and _maybe_ from the (heavily regulated) power supply to the other components, not the power path from the wall to the amplifier.

• [jessemoya]

  I was fully expecting this to be about Evolutionary Psychology.

• [Sethum]

  So did I, jessemoya.

  @Dave Rattigan,
  I don’t think that Godin is saying that hunches are inherently bad (personally, I think hunches are often good initial preferences). His argument appears to be more about how people are often treating their irrationality as if it was based on a rationale decision. Just because we’ve been exposed to more information doesn’t mean we’ve acted rationally in our decision.

  A rational decision requires objective evaluation. An unbiased weighing of facts, if you will. Godin is saying that people take some of those same facts, and instead of considering them rationally, react to them instinctual or emotionally. And then people feel satisfied with their decision because they believe they’ve acted rationally, even though they never applied any logical process to the decision, or gave the more visceral facts more weight.

  I can agree with that argument, from a gut reaction…

  • [Anonymous]

    A rational decision requires objective evaluation. An unbiased weighing of facts, if you will.

    An unbiased, rational and objective weighing of facts will show you that this is not possible to achieve. Humans are irrational, biased and subjective at all times, particularly when they think they are not (because that’s when they tend to get blindly self-righteous about it).

• [EH]

  I sense a Godin/Gladwell debate in the offing. Tickets will be $40 reserved at Ticketmaster.

• [Dave Rattigan]

  #8 How is “science fiction” more culpable than “science fantasy”? To state the obvious: fiction is basically, um, pretend. Like fantasy.

  If your point has any validity, I think it’s the word “science” that’s the issue.

• [andyhavens]

  Until Godin allows comments on his blog, I call “malarkey” on any pronouncements of his. All of his arguments against it are nonsense, especially in the light of how many huge, successful blogs (like this one) allow for them.

  If he wants to talk about conversations from inside an airtight container… I don’t buy it.

  As far as this topic goes, I’m not sure how (to quote Godin), “This gut-instinct approach served people well for hundreds of thousands of years.”

  Really? It did? People’s gut instincts about how plague spread “served them well?” Or, on the other side of the coin, were people were able to engage in highly complex (albeit scientifically less sophisticated) activities like flint napping, animal husbandry, music composition, painting, map making and hunting using “gut-instinct” approaches? No. They were not. And saying something like that about how people in the past dealt–either well or badly–with many of their challenges is, well… a kind of gut instinct anthropology.

  Seth Godin, amateur anthropologist, helping us amateur scientists to see the error of our ways.