People mislead us with stories (2)

Tyler Cowen doesn't want us to be critical of stories, he wants us to mistrust them.

He feints in the direction of enlightenment rationality. That is the belief that there is a privileged view point from which we can actually see the truth and that it takes hard work and courage to get there. Relying on stories is, Tyler Cowen tells us, "A kind of mental laziness".

But, ultimately, Cowen clearly does not believe in enlightenment rationality. He concludes by telling us there is no way to get outside stories; that there is no privileged epistemological viewpoint. He is a little like the man who complains about the deceitfulness of women but keeps falling in love with them.

Along the way Cowen makes some funny moves. No one who really cared about the truth would tell us to lie to ourselves right? The cure for the ways stories mislead couldn't be to deliberately mislead ourselves?

Well, actually, yes it is:

As a general rule, we are too inclined to tell the good versus evil story*. As a rule of thumb, imagine that every time you telling yourself a good versus evil story, you are reducing your IQ by ten points.

We don't actually reduce our IQ. We just act as if we did sort of like the person who sets their watch ten minutes fast so they won't be late for anything. That's not a bad practice. My Serpentititious Friend deliberately sets her watch not fast but randomly wrong so that it undermines her sense of security about the time because that she always has to decipher the real time and that helps her be on time. (It also stimulates the little grey cells.) And I do the same thing myself: I tell myself that every time I go to a website such as Gawker, Huffington Post or The Frisky that I am making myself stupider.

The strategy is fine. The problem is that Tyler Cowen is making a move he shouldn't allow himself. Because what is it to say, "... imagine that every time you telling yourself a good versus evil story, you are reducing your IQ by ten points." Why it is to tell a story, a story you know to be false.


* There is not one "good versus evil story. We may be prone to tell too many good versus evil stories, we can't ever tell the good versus evil story because it does not exist.