Comment on Open Thread: May 2010, Part 2

Fri, 21 May 2010 15:26:24 GMT

I suspect that you live in a community where most people are politically more liberal than you. I have the impression that nostalgia is a harder-to-detect bias than progress, probably because I live in a community where most people are politically more conservative than I. For many, many people, change is almost always suspicious, and appealing to the past is rhetorically more effective than appealing to progress. Hence, most of their false beliefs are justified with nostalgia, if only because most beliefs, true or false, are justified with nostalgia.

That's a valid point when it comes to issues that are a matter of ongoing controversies, or where the present consensus was settled within living memory, so that there are still people who remember different times with severe nostalgia. However, I had in mind a much wider class of topics, including those where the present consensus was settled in more remote past so that there isn't anyone left alive to be nostalgic about the former state of affairs. (An exception could be the small number of people who develop romantic fantasies from novels and history books, but I don't think they're numerous enough to be very relevant.)

Moreover, there is also the question of which bias affects what kinds of people more. I am more interested in biases that affect people who are on the whole smarter and more knowledgeable and rational. It seems to me that among such people, the nostalgic biases are less widespread, for a number of reasons. For example, scientists will be more likely than the general population to appreciate the extent of the scientific progress and the crudity of the past superstitions it has displaced in many areas of human knowledge, so I would expect that when it comes to issues outside their area of expertise, they would be -- on average -- biased in favor of contemporary consensus views when someone argues that they've become more remote from reality relative to some point in the past.

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