{"id":1323,"date":"2012-04-01T22:07:24","date_gmt":"2012-04-02T06:07:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/?p=1323"},"modified":"2017-06-07T08:55:25","modified_gmt":"2017-06-07T16:55:25","slug":"review-the-righteous-mind","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/?p=1323","title":{"rendered":"Review: The Righteous Mind"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jonathan Haidt sets himself quite a task in The Righteous Mind<\/em> – explaining divisions between well-meaning and intelligent people.\u00a0 While he occasionally presents his work as practical information that will help one frame an argument, I think he sits firmly on the theoretical side.\u00a0 I came away with some new ideas about how the mind works, but not with a detailed playbook for handling it.<\/p>\n

Laying out a framework for understanding how minds reach moral conclusions and how those mechanisms formed is a formidable challenge.\u00a0 I am always amazed that people studying these ideas can make any kind of progress.\u00a0 Sorting the subjective from the objective always seems nigh impossible, especially when looking for brain function with respect to slippery topics like moral abstractions.\u00a0 Haidt does an excellent job of providing intuitions to help laymen play along as well as providing evidence for his positions when he has it. He also creates the clear impression that he is letting the reader in on an ongoing scientific conversation. None of this is settled, and one occasionally wonders how his ideas will stand the meticulous scrutiny he subjects others too.\u00a0 (That’s not to say Haidt is unfair, just thorough, and he knows confirmation bias better than I do.)<\/p>\n

Haidt does spend a fair amount of time laying out what the consensus is in his field and how his ideas buck those trends.\u00a0 On the one hand it all feels somewhat “inside baseball,” but the approach is also an important way to play fair with the reader.\u00a0 It would have been easy to lay his case out as being more strongly accepted in the community, knowing that most readers who agreed with him would never read deeply.\u00a0 His approach gives the impression of a lively area of inquiry in which his ideas are important, which seems fair.<\/p>\n

The ideas themselves are intuitive once they are explained and supported.\u00a0 Haidt has a nice gift for turning complex ideas into simple metaphors.\u00a0 He has clearly spent time honing them to be keenly accessible.\u00a0 The idea of the moral sense as a smart rider providing some input and making excuses for the elephant (s)he’s riding crisply captures his position.\u00a0 The idea is that most judgments are arrived at by intuitions that can only be\u00a0 modified slowly where those judgments\u00a0 are generally rationalized after the fact.\u00a0 That’s an elephant and a rider, all right.<\/p>\n

There are plenty of other ideas to chew on in here, including some that one could disagree with.\u00a0 The overall framework is a compelling way to frame the ideas and problems, and there is useful support for much of it. Well worth a look, but don’t expect to win any arguments from it.\u00a0 Unless they’re about moral psychology.<\/p>\n

Strongly recommended.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jonathan Haidt sets himself quite a task in The Righteous Mind – explaining divisions between well-meaning and intelligent people.\u00a0 While he occasionally presents his work as practical information that will help one frame an argument, I think he sits firmly on the theoretical side.\u00a0 I came away with some new ideas about how the mind […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1323","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1323","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1323"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1323\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2411,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1323\/revisions\/2411"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1323"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1323"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1323"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}