I’ve learned
over the years to avoid trying to have rational discussions with people with
agendas - religious, social, political or what have you. It doesn’t matter whether their agendas are kooky or reasonable. It doesn’t
matter whether they themselves are smart or not. It doesn’t matter whether they
are well-educate and well-read or not. Just the fact that they have an agenda
is enough to preclude reasonable, productive discussions, which I define as discussion
aimed at exploring alternative views, testing hypothesis against reality and
seeking truth.
People with
agendas display three common characteristics which generally make discussion
with them fruitless:
Everything
is interpreted through their agenda, as if that agenda is the only important or
significant thing in the world and everything is shaped by it,
They are absolutely
sure they are right, and anyone who doesn’t agree with them wholly is clearly wrong
and/or deluded, if not downright evil, and
They not
only ignore evidence that doesn’t support their position, they attack anyone
who dares to offers such evidence, however sound it might be.
I was recently
in a conversation with some people with a social justice agenda. The topic was
the new facial recognition software increasingly in use. I commented that the
algorithms were having more difficulty detecting and accurately identifying the
faces of dark-skinned people than of Caucasians. The immediate response was
that of course the algorithms were trained predominantly on white faces, reflecting
the usual white bias in the culture, which might or might not be true. No one
in the group, including me, had any actual knowledge of how the algorithms were
trained, but that didn’t affect the certainty of the conclusion. Still, it was
certainly a reasonable possibility.
But when I
suggested that another issue might be the lower contrast of the features in a
dark-skinned face, making it harder, especially with images from a low-resolution
surveillance camera, for the algorithms to make the necessary measurements,
this possibility was dismissed out of hand by those with an agenda. It didn’t fit
the white bias narrative to which these people were emotionally committed, so
it couldn’t possibly be a factor. And the fact that I alone of the group
actually knew something about the algorithms and the physics involved carried absolutely
no weight in the discussion. These were white, supposedly well-educated,
liberals, by the way.
Unfortunately
on most of the issues of real significance these days – issues which desperately
need rational discussion and debate because they affect all our futures - it
seems to me most people have an agenda.
Certainly most of the media reporters seem to, and that feeds and
reinforces the agendas of their listeners.
Perhaps this
has always been true of the majority of humans, a normal part of our (flawed)
reasoning process. But one might have hoped that good education would train at
least the intelligencia of the nation to learn to avoid these pitfalls. Looking
at college campuses these days, I’m not so sure that is what is happening.
Well, evolutionary processes will work their inexorable outcomes – if we as a
nation fall into such irrational behavior, we may well eventually succumb to
others who are wise enough (or lucky enough) not to make the same mistake.
Nature and reality are hard taskmasters, and really don’t care what our agendas
are.
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