filters.

http://www.garretthardinsociety.org/books/rev_filters_bajema.html

an experpt from filters agains folly by garrett hardin.


Our increasingly complex and interdependent society requires the development of more effective problem solving strategies. Garret Hardin asks, "How are we laymen to survive in a world increasingly dominated by experts?" We need lay defenses to protect ourselves against the assumptions (conscious and unconscious), the biases, the prejudices and ignorance of experts so that we can evaluate the claims of experts as we citizens try to identify the most appropriate course of action. Hardin contends that the greatest folly citizens can commit when confronted with expert testimony is to accept expert statements uncritically. The statement that "The authority of a scholar is measured by how long he/she can delay progress in his/her field" applies equally to experts in engineering and government as well as in science and theology.
Experts, be they economists, ecologists or linguists, have been aptly described as individuals who know more and more about less and less. Since the world is too complex for our minds to remember every detail and to easily encompass the whole, experts employ filters to set aside certain dimensions of reality as trivial or as something to be dealt with by another expert. Since different filters alter the total picture of reality in different ways, we need to know the characteristics of the intellectual filters used by experts as well as by ourselves in solving problems. Professor Hardin identifies three major filters against folly that we citizens can use against the blindness, short sightedness, and sheer idiocy that so often comes disguised as eloquence or expertise.

i have read this book several times and recommend it highly to those who want to be able to think clearly as opposed to finding a cause to get behind or just repeat expert opinion as fact.

the greeks called it reason.

our laws are based on the actions of the reasonable man.

unfortunately the reasonable man has become victim of the expert, so we are being judged by the values of whichever expert has the podium currently.

we are hurriedly entering into the era of the environmental scientist, wherby pretty soon all of our resources will be consumed by solving what these "experts" are calling a man-made disaster. so........as our taxes are winched up to solve the problem we have less money in our pockets.

hmm. sounds like socialist politics to me. more taxes = more government. the question nobody in the environmental cult seems to be asking is how the dollars will be spent.

but they are the experts though. we couldn`t possibly understand.


The first filter is literacy - "the ability to understand what words really mean." The second is numeracy - "the ability not only to quantify information, but also to interpret it intelligently." Hardin calls the last filter ecolacy - the ability to take into account the effects of complex interactions of systems over time.