[HN Gopher] The Cynical Genius Illusion (2018)
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The Cynical Genius Illusion (2018)
Author : sebg
Score : 26 points
Date : 2023-08-31 19:45 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (journals.sagepub.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (journals.sagepub.com)
| grug_htmx_dev wrote:
| I'm too cynical to take seriously social studies research. Most
| of it doesn't replicate.
| dang wrote:
| " _Please don 't post shallow dismissals, especially of other
| people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something._"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| [deleted]
| safgasCVS wrote:
| Adjusted R^2 of 0.14. Call me a cynic
| lapcat wrote:
| (2018)
| dang wrote:
| Added. Thanks!
| andrewmutz wrote:
| > Four studies showed that laypeople tend to believe in cynical
| individuals' cognitive superiority.
|
| Consistent with my experience on social media (including this
| website): cynical perspectives always get the most upvotes
| aaron695 wrote:
| [dead]
| twic wrote:
| _twic 's eyeball twitches as he tries to decide whether he
| should upvote this comment or not_
| yamazakiwi wrote:
| It depends on the topic or place. Cynical views on family or
| children are generally met with negativity for example.
| 1MachineElf wrote:
| >Cross-cultural analyses showed that competent individuals held
| contingent attitudes and endorsed cynicism only if it was
| warranted in a given sociocultural environment. Less competent
| individuals embraced cynicism unconditionally, suggesting that--
| at low levels of competence--holding a cynical worldview might
| represent an adaptive default strategy to avoid the potential
| costs of falling prey to others' cunning.
|
| One might argue that incompetent people are cynical because,
| without the insulation and support structures that foster
| education, they are more attuned with the one true cynical
| reality of the world.
|
| Another might argue that incompetent people are cynical because,
| without sufficient intellectual capacity, they are susceptible to
| false ideas concerning the one true non-cynical reality of the
| world.
|
| The hopelessness and hopefulness of reality can be endlessly
| debated, but ultimately, it's up to the individual to choose
| which of these to put their faith in. I agree that that an
| overall cynical view could be an adaptation to defend against the
| threat of being taken advantage of. One should weigh this against
| whether or not such a worldview truly works in your favor.
| Amazing advances have been made in this world over the past few
| centuries, and I can't accept the notion that these come about
| through cynicism rather than hope for the future.
|
| Holding a position that rejects human progress requires one to
| believe that good is ultimately insignificant. Judging by the
| increasing suicide rates of young people, this seems to be a
| modern problem, and so perhaps the solution can be found if we
| look towards the traditions that have unified humanity in the
| past.
| crabmusket wrote:
| > incompetent people ... without the insulation and support
| structures that foster education
|
| I haven't read the study yet, but - does it make the link
| between education and competence, or is that a cultural
| assumption?
|
| I won't deny that education increases competence in specific
| ways. But I also think there is plenty of disparaged competence
| even in the uneducated.
| nothing2say wrote:
| [flagged]
| Nevermark wrote:
| Just because your paranoid, doesn't mean you are paranoid
| enough.
|
| In fact, given every credible story science suggests,
| regarding how the universe ends, involves us or our
| successors ending disappearing into some thermodynamic hell
| in extremely unpleasant ways, ... oh look, ice cream!
| photochemsyn wrote:
| The success or failure (in terms of an individual's outcome) of
| what could also be called rational actor theory seems very
| context-dependent. Cynicism as described in this article, i.e.
| extreme selfishness, is an understandable response to societal
| breakdown of various kinds.
|
| For example, people might resist paying taxes in the context of
| high levels of governmental corruption, as evidenced by a
| governmental failure to deal with widespread problems like poor
| roads, endemic homelessness, etc. In contrast, if the government
| used tax revenues wisely and efficiently to improve citizen's
| quality of life, rational actors would be happy to pay a higher
| percentage of their income as taxes, as the benefit to themselves
| would be greater (as even if they paid no taxes, they still
| wouldn't have the resources needed to address societal-scale
| problems).
|
| Take Prisoner's Dilemma as another case. In a stable society,
| players develop reputations as cooperators or betrayers. Two
| people with long-standing reputations of cooperation would be
| much more likely to trust one another, while in an unstable
| society without any reputational basis, the opposite would be
| true (and damage to one's reputation wouldn't have any persistent
| negative effect). This can be treated as Repeated Prisoner's
| Dilemma (pdf):
|
| https://www.u.arizona.edu/~mwalker/10_GameTheory/RepeatedPri...
|
| Of course humans aren't rational logical actors, which is why
| advertising often works, and those who try the hardest to achieve
| that status don't seem to be very happy people.
| DryLabRebel wrote:
| > competent individuals held contingent attitudes and endorsed
| cynicism only if it was warranted in a given sociocultural
| environment.
|
| The paper doesn't speculate on how many cultural environments
| cynicism is warranted. Is it statistically signficantly different
| from unconditionally embraced cynicism!?
| hirundo wrote:
| > Cynicism refers to a negative appraisal of human nature--a
| belief that self-interest is the ultimate motive guiding human
| behavior.
|
| This is a poor starting point, since there are also neutral and
| positive appraisals of self-interest as the ultimate motive. That
| includes biologists from Darwin to Dawkins and economists from
| Smith to Hayek. It is not from the benevolence of
| the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner,
| but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address
| ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never
| talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages.
|
| If you agree with Smith's famous dictum, self-interest is not by
| itself a negative appraisal. Most moral views can be interpreted
| as compatible with self-interest, if that is defined in a
| sufficiently long term. Can someone who has a neutral or positive
| appraisal of natural human self-interest in general be cynical?
| If not, and if human nature is actually driven by self-interest,
| then a non-negative attitude toward it is healthier.
| Animats wrote:
| _" Less competent individuals embraced cynicism unconditionally,
| suggesting that--at low levels of competence--holding a cynical
| worldview might represent an adaptive default strategy to avoid
| the potential costs of falling prey to others' cunning."_
|
| That's rational behavior when the rate of incoming scams is
| several per hour or worse. The processing load imposed by today's
| sheer quantity of scam input is huge.
| fallingknife wrote:
| It's really quite minimal for that exact reason. The volume of
| scans is high enough that very optimized pattern matching for
| them is developed by the brain. Most scams take less than 1s to
| identify.
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