Jan 20, 2015 06:25 AM
Cass Sunstein and the modern regulatory state
http://harvardmagazine.com/2015/01/the-legal-olympian
EXCERPT: [...] Believers in conspiracy theories, [Cass] Sunstein emphasizes, are often ill informed: they believe what they hear—and they hear only from people with extreme views. The scholar Russell Hardin named this problem “a crippled epistemology,” the kind of two-word moniker that Sunstein favors. People who move in and out of such groups make the problem worse. Those who leave tend to be skeptics: when they go, so does their moderating influence. Those who join and stay tend to become fanatics. When a theory attracts fanatics who act on their views, like terrorists, one possible governmental response could be what Sunstein calls “cognitive infiltration”: i.e., challenging the theory’s counterfactual foundations. Some civil libertarians ignored the “cognitive,” read “infiltration” literally, and went crazy denouncing the idea.
The dangerous ideas that most concern him are errors in thinking akin to crippled epistemology that lead to foolish or damaging behavior. They include misfearing, “when people are afraid of trivial risks and neglectful of serious ones,” so public funding is misallocated to combat the former instead of the latter, and the availability heuristic, a mental shortcut in thinking about risk that is influenced by heavily publicized events (floods, forest fires) so people worry about the wrong perils....
http://harvardmagazine.com/2015/01/the-legal-olympian
EXCERPT: [...] Believers in conspiracy theories, [Cass] Sunstein emphasizes, are often ill informed: they believe what they hear—and they hear only from people with extreme views. The scholar Russell Hardin named this problem “a crippled epistemology,” the kind of two-word moniker that Sunstein favors. People who move in and out of such groups make the problem worse. Those who leave tend to be skeptics: when they go, so does their moderating influence. Those who join and stay tend to become fanatics. When a theory attracts fanatics who act on their views, like terrorists, one possible governmental response could be what Sunstein calls “cognitive infiltration”: i.e., challenging the theory’s counterfactual foundations. Some civil libertarians ignored the “cognitive,” read “infiltration” literally, and went crazy denouncing the idea.
The dangerous ideas that most concern him are errors in thinking akin to crippled epistemology that lead to foolish or damaging behavior. They include misfearing, “when people are afraid of trivial risks and neglectful of serious ones,” so public funding is misallocated to combat the former instead of the latter, and the availability heuristic, a mental shortcut in thinking about risk that is influenced by heavily publicized events (floods, forest fires) so people worry about the wrong perils....