Director A3 Research Institute, A3 Society. Eagle Scout 1965 North Pole Expedition. Seeking ways to tell the world about discoveries to achieve true democracy.

Apr 4, 2016

What’s Going On With The Wild Debates?

I am participating in a number of forums on the internet. A common occurrence is having the discussion interrupted by TROLLS! How should we deal with this? One of the suggestions typically found in forum rules is “just ignore them. Pretend that their post just isn’t there.” While that may be OK for casual discussion, it presents a problem when the goal of the forum is knowledge gathering or political discussions in what are supposed to be “democratic” communities.

In this story, I’d like to explore just one element of this issue: DEBATES.

With the “circus” that is parading the airways with the U.S. Republican presidential debates, the following observations may help explain a lot of what we are seeing.

The word “DEBATE” is one of those flawed institutions society has adapted from the predatory competition humans carried over from our Neanderthal ancestors.

In a debate, one of the objectives is for one party or the other to be declared a “winner” by some panel. The winner selection structure is based on society’s governing view called “majority” vote. To fit this structure, someone has to “frame” the issues of the debate so they can be addressed with only two alternatives: pro or con. Ideally, “pro” can mean: being “in favor” of a proposed concept, “con” meaning “not in favor”. But “pro” can also mean approval or support of a proposal; “con” can also mean being against the proposal. These second set of meanings take a much stronger position.

Human nature, due to competitive survival drives, quickly leads most people to respond using “clan” behavior. People don’t usually present proposals that are against their own interests or beliefs. So, when a person presents a proposal, it is very natural for the proposal to be quickly associated with the associated personal beliefs. Once that happens, fight or flight instincts, which are more dominant than logic, quickly enter the process. When a person exhibits strong emotion in a discussion, it is a sure sign basic instincts are active.

When CLAN instincts are stirred up, it is very critical for the human subconscious to “label” others as friend or foe. The human subconscious very quickly labels people who present views you already know and accept as friend, and people with views that are foreign, or that you reject, as foe. I emphasized “people” because human clan instincts are too basic to understand complex logic. They deal with response behaviors by lumping all higher level issues into basic friend / foe results. This explains things we see a lot:

This is why we so often encounter “single issue voters”. Their clan instincts are driven by a single factor that they subconsciously believe to be the greatest threat to their survival.
Once another person is identified as an “opponent”, we can be sure the basic drives are alert!
Setting the stage for a debate automatically creates opponents.

While an opponent could be defeated with logical reasoning, human nature has also evolved a large array of physical and signaling defenses and offenses. In many people, these responses are not easily controlled.

A common expectation for debates and forum discussions is for people to resolve differences of opinion or different viewpoints using logical reasoning. But logical reasoning is not a primary human drive. People need to be taught how to reason logically, and how to use reason to analyze and resolve issues. To allow human reason, a secondary drive, to win out over primary drives, a person must be raised in an environment where logical reasoning and discussion have been taught, practiced and experienced to be more effective at gaining personal goals and security than inherited drives. Just as important, to use logical reasoning skills that have been learned, a person must have sufficient background in a subject area that they want to address so that they understand the subject well enough to use those skills.

This last criterion creates a huge problem for modern society. Society is very complex. No human is able to understand more than a small fraction of the issues that even critically affect their lives. At the same time, the human subconscious brain, in order to achieve inner peace, will often LIE to the conscious brain, telling it “you know everything you need to know for your own survival.” A developing brain, having both some logic about the extent of knowledge in the world, and a continuous message from the subconscious that it knows enough — a continuous battle between logic and the need for assurance — is what we know as the “teenager”.

Ironically, this battle never completely stops. In adults, it creates a range of mentality bounded by two extremes, based on how well the logical reasoning development succeeded. One group, the majority of humans, never escape the teenage brain battle. The subconscious middle brain wins out most of the time. They blurt out how brilliant they are. They pour out confidence. But, as soon as they are placed into confrontation in a subject they don’t know much about, or an area of a subject they are weak in, they slide back into basic, clan defenses. Trolls and politicians are extreme cases of this. The average example is the everyday person we see on TV that loves to argue about things they don’t know much about.

(An important side note. These mental extremes are not related to I.Q. Many trolls can rightly be called geniuses based on the quantity of knowledge they have memorized.)

The second type has harnessed the tools of logical reasoning, which they attempt to apply. But because of huge flaws in most social institutions, they can’t find logical explanations for what we see. So they mostly hide in academic trivia, except when they get pushed beyond their knowledge. Then they also revert to similar behaviors. But there is another characteristic of the “high” end of this scale. Once a person with good logical skills and a broad range of knowledge makes peace with the much greater extent of knowledge they can never know, they find the strength to give up the “clan drive” to be “RIGHT”. They are O.K. with ambiguity in many places. This gives them the ability to be supportive and constructive. It can include helping a colleague advance a new theory that challenges all we know. Or it can help a young child explore an idea they have, knowing that the quest will surely end in failure, but realizing that by clever steering, the child will gain exceptional insights along the way.

And then, there is one other type. This is what I call A3, which stands for Awareness level 3. (Both groups above were A2). There are a very small number of humans who have brain types that allow them to visualize the complexity of the world. They are able to combine the visualizations to make major strides forward for humanity. These were the “great thinkers” of history. They were the FIRST architect of agriculture, the first city, army, ship, pyramid, aqueduct; Aristotle, Plato, Di Vinci, Edison, Darwin, Einstein; the inventors of writing, alphabet, democracy, telephone, wheel. They are also supportive and constructive.