Knowledge Resistance: How We Avoid Insight From Others by Mikael Klintman

Author:Mikael Klintman [Klintman, Mikael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Ancient Mysteries, Body; Mind & Spirit, Business, Controversial Knowledge, Economics, Epistemology, Non-Fiction, Philosophy, Popular Culture, Psychology, Social Psychology, Social Science, Sociology
ISBN: 9781526135209
Google: dnS5DwAAQBAJ
Amazon: 1526135205
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: 2019-06-18T23:00:00+00:00

The rich think that it’s in their interests to become richer and richer, so that’s their rationality. They think they’re acting rationally in doing that. And they don’t see that they’re actually undermining their own basis of living, their own businesses so to speak, and that’s an example. It’s irrational. They are short-term. They are very ideological.²⁵

Each incarnation, if the individual has a so-called myopic bias, overemphasises his or her current self’s preferences and underestimates the preferences of his or her future selves. Thus, that person will prefer to resist knowledge that could be used by future incarnations at the cost of not taking the optimal current decision.

What should we make of this understanding of what it means to be human? Are you a series of selves over time? Is each of your selves best defined by its stable preferences (within a specific time period)? Do such stable preferences entail a rational resistance of knowledge that goes against the explicit and substantive goal within a specified time period? It makes sense that there are conflicts between a person’s different selves when he or she, for instance, ignores knowledge about the risks of living in material abundance using a lot of fossil fuels today. This knowledge would be of interest to the person’s future selves. However, are all of an individual’s preferences – current or future ones – about substantive, explicit things? Are all our preferences connected with material comfort, monetary optimisation, environmental quality, or even health? Is everything about Apollonian issues, or are there other interests that are missing here? Perhaps there are additional interests that are at least as motivating to us. Such interests might drive us more in how we choose what knowledge to believe and act upon and what to resist or ignore altogether.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.