Andrew Gelman has a post on the benefits of negative criticism, where he talks about the careful methodological demolitions he has done of others’ research that he has found to be slipshod.
if you want to go against the grain you have to work harder to convince people. My point is that this is the exact opposite of Cowen’s claim that following his advice “Avoid criticizing other public intellectuals. In fact, avoid the negative as much as possible” will force you to keep on thinking harder.
I’m in favor of a strong culture of criticism, but for a quite different reason: because serious criticism is probably the most valuable contribution we can make to the cognitive division of labour. There’s a possibly mistaken understanding of a truly excellent social science book behind this argument.
The book, which I’ve mentioned previously, is Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber’s The Enigma of Reason. I should note that Hugo is a co-author on work in progress, but is absolved of any mistakes I make in interpreting his ideas. I should also note that his book with Sperber is at the least a ground breaking work. In my opinion, it’s a straightforward classic.
Mercier and Sperber’s basic argument is, as I understand it, as follows. First – that reasoning has not evolved in the ways that we think it has – as a process of ratiocination that is intended independently to figure out the world. Instead, it has evolved as a social capacity – as a means to justify ourselves to others. We want something to be so, and we use our reasoning capacity to figure out plausible seeming reasons to convince others that it should be so. However (and this is the main topic of a more recent book by Hugo), together with our capacity to generate plausible sounding rationales, we have a decent capacity to detect when others are bullshitting us. In combination, these mean that we are more likely to be closer to the truth when we are trying to figure out why others may be wrong, than when we are trying to figure out why we ourselves are right.
Read the full article at Crooked Timber.