(Ep. 8) The Analysis of Reasoning - Inert Information, Activated Ignorance, & Activated Knowledge

hello I'm Linda Elder I'm the president of the foundation for critical thinking I'm here with my colleague Dr Gerald nosich hello Gerald hi Linda good to see you again good to talk with you Gerald is a senior fellow at the foundation for critical thinking which is a 501c3 nonprofit organization in California today is April the 17 2022 we are focused in this series on the analysis of reasoning going deeper and in this particular series we're focused on information so the role of information and and reasoning and today in this particular session we're going to focus

on three concepts that help us organize information if you will and uh so I'm just going to name them I'm going to say a little bit about them and then we're going to start exploring them and coming up with some examples of each one so the first one or they don't come in any order but one is inert information so one type of information that we have in our minds is an inner information it's in it's information we're carrying around but that is not doing us really any good so to speak it's not it's not

we're not acting upon it in any way so um that's one type and we'll come back to that in a few minutes then we have activated ignorance another type of information so activated ignorance is means that we are acting upon information that is in accurate but of course we believe it is accurate so we're acting upon this information then we have activated knowledge and this is what we want to achieve and this is what critical thinking helps us achieve activated knowledge means that we are acting upon information that is accurate and not only that is

accurate but it's also very useful in context so it's a it's it's it's the activated knowledge gives us power in in in a situation so to speak so let's go back then to iner information and then we're going to burrow in briefly to each one of these and again come up see if we can come up with some examples so let's talk about then iner information which is again information that's we're just carrying around in our heads that we're not using Gerald would you like like to comment on that I can I can give a

few examples uh um there's this thing that happens in elementary middle and high school and that uh to a lot of people and that many teachers are teaching you stuff stuff that uh that're they kind of justify by saying oh later on in your life you're going to see how valuable it was to learn trigonometry or algebra or how to diagram sentences and uh and and many of the time many times it's not true that those will help you I I often ask teachers at Workshop or or or uh higher education instructors at workshops um

okay so those of you who are not in a math related field how many of you have ever how many of you could could uh understand what a quadratic equation is and virtually no one raises their hand right and so I I can say well if I ask you now when would you use a quadratic equation there's absolutely no hand going up and I and I say you know even even if you can say you can give the formula for a quadratic equation you can write out what the equation mean it still doesn't help you

you don't have any idea what to do with it and yet uh algebra teachers and trigonometry teachers maybe with some truth in it say this is very helpful it gives you a it gives you a quantitative sense of the world and helps you helps you reason through mathematical problems and there may be truth in that but I want but my feeling is it's a very far removed truth I don't want to be picking on math here because it it goes all the way through many fields I can I can say here's something I learned I'm

embarrass to say it I and in elementary school or middle school I learned the prepositions so I'm going to tell you the prepositions now about above across after against among around at before beside between by down except for from in of off on over through to up with now I want you to get the feeling that this has been we're duly impressed cluttering up my brain so the last six years I mean it's in there it's it's ineradicable taking up space from other things that I could know and it's of no use whatsoever it's not

as if I find a something a sentence a word in a sentence and I say I wonder if it's a preposition let me consult my list I mean I would never do English doesn't work that way it's so um it just seems It's inert knowledge it's knowledge that that kind of by its nature could not do me any good um and um I don't want to stress the by by by its nature because I'm imagining certain linguists might find Value in no being able to listen the prepositions and certainly there's valuable value in trigonometry and

algebra and I've used both of them um but a gr deal of what we learn in school is inert knowledge and I could also say it could be inert knowledge for various reasons that is it could have a very great use but I just never happen to have a chance to use it in that way right I I might learn accounting principles but have no relationship to accounting whatsoever so it's it's not the fault of the of the content all the time or maybe even very often it can be a it can be the fault

of or the result of many other circumstances in life but uh yeah so those are some examples I have and I and uh Trivial Pursuit is a is a good example of inner knowledge right playing Trivial Pursuit where you have this Arcane uh set of facts or you could win on quiz shows um but if you happen not to have been called to a quiz show you'll never get to you you never win that million dollars yeah those are good examples and I want to remind us that when we the way that these distinctions are

labeled we have inert information versus activated ignorance and activated knowledge or inert information versus activated knowledge so in terms of innert information the idea is that we don't really have you you were you were approaching that right we don't really we have the information that's in some cases the information could actually be useful but we don't actually use it so that's one form of inner information so it doesn't become knowledge for us because we don't know it deeply and therefore because to know something is to act upon it is um the idea if you really

have the know it's like when people say I know that I shouldn't smoke but I smoke anyway you don't really know that you shouldn't smoke yeah know it is to act upon it yeah to at least to accept it deeply so that it affects your behavior in some major way that's that's right uh yeah you can kind of even if it's just causing cognitive dissonance right right it's got to do something it's got to get you it's got to make you feel uncomfortable yeah you could kind of there's a way which I I think you

can kind of know something with one part of your brain or one part of your mind and you just never let it connect to other parts of your mind like the ones about about actually smoking or not um and it can sit in there kind of as a fact yes cigarette smoking causes cancer um so uh and so I think you're right that it's not it doesn't count as knowledge well this is one of the uh points that Richard brings up in his original Anthology and I I I hope that people understand the importance of

this work the seminal work that was really being developed in the early 1980s and he in in one of the chapters Richard focuses on Bloom's taxonomy and in this article Bloom's taxonomy and critical think instruction recall is not knowledge he's making the point that to know something is to act upon it to know something is to to to have it move you and otherwise it's it's a watered down version of knowledge and then what is that you see so I know it but I don't act upon it right I know it but I don't what

believe it you see so it's a good it's a very important discussion yeah to have so that we we're faced with that so if I if I say that I know something then I need to be willing to act upon that I think that's the move right I have to hold myself to and and I like you're bringing in dissonance or cognitive dissonance so that so that at a bare minimum if I know something that is disturbing it ought to cause me some uh tension inside I mean that's that's a minimal amount to make it

into knowledge um it may not make it all the way into my actual Behavior but as a step in that direction at least causes me tension or to feel dissonance um and uh if it doesn't do even that much then there's a sense in which it's not the that idea isn't in me at all what I have instead of the idea is the words for the idea um yeah yeah I think that I've always thought that the term the concept of cognitive dissonance is very powerful because it represents the tension you could say between in

many if not most cases the rational and the irrational but there is also tension between the tension that you feel let say when you're facing a true dilemma uhuh uhuh so you but but usually with I when I think of cognitive dissonance I think uh there's some self-deception involved right and there's something I'm not willing to face about my situation or myself yeah and just having that realization that there is that tension right for me is very important because it I may not act upon it as soon as I should but usually I do act

upon it in the end yeah and when I do then I wish I had done so sooner usually right uh um and uh Co just as a side issue about cognitive distance for a moment um I think in the purest cases that say festinger investigated first of all it's it's uh it's it's kind of completely unconscious meaning the dissonance there is not a felt dissonance at all it's that um I uh I see uh somebody begging for money and uh and uh I have this belief in of myself that I help people who are in

need and I don't give this person any money so I walk away and then afterwards how do I reconcile those two that activity that action and that belief that I'm really a good person who gives money to those who are in need and I say well he's probably drinking uh he's probably using drugs and so I I get rid of that of the dissonance of those two beliefs but good but much of the time like a lot of our irrationality and the and the egocentricity and sooc centricity it's operating in US unconsciously and um and

it takes work to bring it to the surface this The Well of course we are reminded that whenever we are um deceiving ourselves there's a there's some it's there's some unconscious yeah parts of our thinking but just looking at a quick definition online right now the term the term cognitive dissonance is used to describe the mental discomfort that results from holding to conflicting beliefs values or attitudes so I think that this concept has been expanded and in any case I think of that mental discomfort piece of it to me that's the powerful part of the

term and so if we're you see typically we figure out see the example that you gave to me is an example of someone who doesn't really feel cognitive dissonance they actually just justify it in their minds you see if there's not some kind of tension then which is I think what normally happens in other words without cognitive distance without that mental discomfort Comfort it's very easy to be selfish it's very easy to ignore the needs of others right so I think that's not the classical definition of Co of cognitive dissonance that is I think the

classical definition emphasizes cognitive not emotive dis dissonance not a feeling of tension it's I have two beliefs I'm a good person and this person is in need and three beliefs and I don't give them any money so those are three cognitive beliefs and I reconcile them I get rid of that cognitive dissonance by rejecting one and the reject one I can reject is that person is in need uh he's not really in need he's going to use it for drugs so I think that's a that's a later rendition of cognitive dissonance and it speaks to

it speaks to something really important but I think it's different from what the original cognitive dissonance theory was uh intended to intending to address that's eron Carl Tavis finger and those those people but um well I think we should leave that yeah me too focus on uh the the the power in that that that tension and then um back to inert information to sort of wrap that up so the idea so we we talked about the type of inert information that could could be powerful but we're not acting upon it right so for example um

we know that we need to do certain things to help the health of the planet right are we acting upon that so we we may have a lot of information about it but are we doing anything with it so there's this there's this whole positive Arena of information that's could be could be acting on that we're not acting on and then there is also information that we're carrying around of the other type that you were mentioning which is just you know like the prototypical way I think about this is the way we used to teach

history and still some is sometimes done is teaching just dates and places and names remember that was and that's that was been the history tradition traditional history of traditional schooling it is the idea that you can cram this into the student mmhm for use later you you mentioned that as well but I wanted to just circle back upon that because that is very important and it's not only um true that we we we cram a lot of things into the head of the students that they can't use but then so then we're while doing that

we're also so miss teaching what learning entails yeah and we're wasting their time so we're doing all of those things at once so they're not learning anything of value in this in this case that I'm giving um their time is being wasted and they're misar what it means to learn so that's a big that's that's a lot in one huge mistake right so by the way that leads to maybe the next move we can make is to talk about then activated ignorance because that's an example of activated ignorance it is right the idea that you

can teach in that way and this will work and that students will learn something of value or or much of value not just something of value because we we need to they need to learn in accordance with the time that they that they're giving to the learning and so in other words we have a we have to teach a lot because we have a lot of time but we're not we're teaching very little so a lot of our educational traditional educational theories that have come down to us are based in activated ignorance that's right that's

right that's a very nice inside Linda that that that just seems right to me yeah yeah there's a a joke I saw sometimes say at workshops about uh instructors who lecture and you kind of have to listen all the way to the end of the joke so it's that uh teachers who say I've told them a hundred times and they still don't get it are slow Learners that is once you've told them 99 times and they haven't gotten it why would you tell them one more time to make it an even yes right so it's

a good example of it seems to me activated ignorance in that right you just the the whole Theory the whole idea all the information you have is all incorrect about telling them as a way of making it work for them um yeah yes yes so then so so therefore people come out of schools colleges and universities without having the knowledge to continue learning as let's say a scholar would continue learning and as Scholars do learn within their fields right right yeah so the the the the way in which Scholars approach their fields are the way

that we should also approach our minds because we want to continue to develop our minds not just in one area but in all the important parts right and and you you see it often in uh the way learning manifests itself later because a lot of what we're going to learn in school has got to be generalized for it to to take effect so if you're in an area where you deal with helping people medicine or nursing or social work or um a whole range of things where you're involved in helping people what you've learned in

school to prepare you for that are things like pretty good generalizations pretty good rules of thumb about how you deal with those situations but you now have to approach it as if that knowledge that you have is really got a lot of ignorance in it about specific cases um um here and it's and it can be it can be among very sophisticated people I had a I had a pinch nerve in my neck last year and uh and I was taking a lot of napasin and you're supposed to only take one every 12 hours but

the prescription dose is three uh twice a day and and I was taking massively more than that and I've done that for pains and arthritis and things like that for years and years and years so I went to this doctor and to this physical therapist and he's very good and uh I told him they I'm taking too much naison and he said well you've got to stop doing that and I told him how much and he would he kind of gasped and he said that's that's very that you're you're harming Yourself by doing that and

I said well you know I just had the blood test downstairs and they're fine right I mean I just had was just tested this last week and youve got the results in front of you and he said yeah but you're you're poisoning yourself you know it really does damage to you and I said well you know I think you're paying a lot of attention to the data but not to the evidence I'm 75 years old and I've been doing this for 30 years and I've just had blood tests so all the evidence points to it's

not harming me the data shows that there's a curve of harm that gets done and clearly I'm on one end of that curve the wrong end of that curve so the generalization doesn't quite apply to me so my judgment is he he would fine with that but my judgment is that he's paying attention to the statistical case which I want him to do which is quite relevant but he also needs to see how the ignorance that's involved in where this individual fall in that statistical case right we do that all the time I you EMP

often emphasize outliers for instance how important I was just thinking of that right so that's the outliers we usually ignore when we talk about data and so that and they outliers bother us because we just want everything to be simple right and so that's part of activated yeah and uh there's a way in which teaching I don't want to say you have to but teaching strongly lends itself to that because you're wanting to prepare person people for a whole range of things and you can't teach all the specifics in a classroom of 30 students um

but it would help to emphasize how how you need to have I'll say activated knowledge about your individual patient or your individual client in addition to the generalization based on the data or the statistical distribution so this we're focusing as a reminder to all of us we're focusing on information here so we're thinking about information moving to again active moving from iner information to activated ignorance so we're we're we're focusing on examples of information that lead us to do things that um do not make sense in the context that can cause harm that can lead

us in the wrong direction and there are just so many examples we can think of example the Mi misinformation right that is occurring across the world with the internet and that is a new uh phenomenon in human history relatively new that we can so easily spread misinformation we've always had it of course but the spreading of it and the propagating of it by for example countries by politicians by political groups this and the fact that people will believe more or less anything and when you add the sociocentric dimension to it right so that we're people

are believing because other people believe so people will of say well you know there are lots of people on Facebook talking about this well right people on Facebook talking about something does not prove that it's worthy of your consideration yeah and doesn't even give evidence for it um I mean it's just not not even that that It Go doesn't go all the way toward proving it but it's not evidence at all that people are talking about it yeah and it's also it's it's also what happens with Behavior it's the same kind of thing just going

along with the crowd so then we have as a result of of misinformation we have the what is now U referred to as the January 6 Insurrection in the United States when our Capital was breached by the by the people who were um disgruntled right and people were killed and people are harmed now there's a lot of poster traumatic stress disorder on the part of the police many of the police have not recovered from this and this is these are consequences of activated ignorance and many I'm sure many of the people who entered the capital

on that day regret it right realize now that they were LED astray and there are people who are saying that I was I was led astray I was told information that wasn't true and I believed it and that's so then this leads to the fact that when you are a vulner vulnerable person intellectually you can be led in many wrong directions and many of these people were professionals many of the military people and so it's it's good to find that that's actually a a and unfortunately it's a very good example of misinformation leading to great

harm and then you have another current U example which is the war that is occurring right now where Russia is in Ukraine and all of the um all of the people being killed there and I I don't want to talk about events leading up to that event because there's um there's a it's very complicated that that part I want to set aside for a moment what I'm talking about here is the slaughtering of innocent people by the soldiers and the the horrifying things that are being done in you know 20022 it's it's it's unbelievable that

that you can see this kind of torture and suffering that we're seeing uh just the attacking of innocent people on bus and things like this now what would lead such a person to do such a thing that's uh when you answer that you will have an example of activated ignorance yeah and of course it is propaganda it is misinformation and um on the part of the government toward the soldiers it's easy to whip up your soldiers in a country in any country and especially in a a country like Russia so then you have massive suffering

and this is just one example um of of a war that's going on here there are many other examples right and um let me bring up what a a theoretical point a point related to theory has but it uh is exemplified in in everything we've been in all the actual examples we've just been giving given and it's that when we talk about activated ignorance um and that is acting on the basis of of information that's incorrect inaccurate um what we're always presupposing I think is that the information the information is a inaccurate and B we

have some way of accessing the inaccuracy of that information that is if it's information that no one knows M that's not that's not the same as activated ignorance right so when Columbus thought uh China was only 5,000 miles to the to the east uh to the West he uh that was just kind of generally believed figured out on the basis of globes and everything like that that's not activated ignorance though it was he was doing the best he could with the amount of knowledge there was in the world and there was no way to access

the largess of the globe and there are abundant examples of that activated ignorance I think comes from a place like uh the Ukraine example you just gave I have full knowled if I'm a Russian soldier I have full knowledge that these are human beings who are innocent human beings and that information is obtainable by me in a direct and straightforward way and so my act so that seems to me to be what's going on with activated ignorance um similar that's a good point point the similarly with the teaching examples it's it's very straightforward that teaching

history as names dates kings queens and so forth is not the same as learning history and it's not useful and it's not meaningful to to most students at all that's it's as it's as if that stares me in the face and and then I don't but then I don't act that's activated ignorance so I think that's an an important distinction to make that is very that that is that is very powerful so the information the accurate information is available we could right we it's it's known to someone and it may not be known you see

if you if you're grow if you grow up in an area let's say where you're taught to be uh prejudice against people because their skin color and that's the way everyone around you thinks and let's just say you've never you've never been exposed to anything else you have no other way of knowing anything because that's all the things that the thing that you've ever been taught the thing you know that's what you've been always you've always been taught I'm just trying to think of an example where you never had access to um the knowledge and

you were overwhelmingly pulled into this other very negative way of thinking from a child you see I'm trying to give it you know kind of a paradigm case of how a person might do the right thing in the if given if if giving access to the knowledge but because they're raised in an in uh where there's so much ignorance prevailing right that they are pulled in this other direction it's a it's a difficult thing because then also you brought up the soldiers you said they the sold ERS know that this is a person that is

that is a feeling person and they have access to that knowledge but that raises for me the question of Ethics or the concept of Ethics which is a later discussion but ethics is something you see we're not really taught in human societies we're taught we're taught ethics couch within let's say religion or couch within some ideologies but not in and of itself uh except in narrow uh philosophical groups usually right so ethics is something we're not really even discussing but when it but the the the most fundamental um understanding in e in in in ethics

in terms of how I should treat another person as far as I understand ethics is that I should that that I have the because I am human I have the capacity to understand that another person also has feelings and and feels and has Sensations so that if I hurt that person then I I I should be aware that that's that's not the right thing to do you see how that's it's so basic it's so simple it's like yeah but how do you know that well that's sort of the bottom to me you you don't get

that then you don't have the basis for ethics well there really yeah I think you're right but there there's this other Factor that's relevant to what we're saying and that is that uh the the knowledge the information that this is a full human being who's innocent who hasn't done anything wrong and who's going to suffer if I do X Y and Z to this person uh that's inert that's inert uh inert uh information inert knowledge inert information right that is it's not acting in me so there's the ethical question which is one a big question

but there's also just the straightforward inert information that I've got right staring me in the face and and I'm just not I'm just not admitting it I'm just not accepting that that's that that so there's so many ways we can go with activated ignorance so for example take the the the all D the Dynamics that occurred in the 1960s and the 1970s not just in the US but across the world right and the all the re you know the the quote revolutions and then ask yourself well what what was the result of that like what

what came out of that by implication and by by consequence and unfortunately although there were some good things that did come out of the movement um unfortunately as with most if not all uh Revol so-called revolutions that have occurred in human history what has been lacking is critical thinking so there had been parts of critical thinking but there has never been a a rich concept of fair-minded critical thinking at the heart of these revolutions and that's why they fail so you have one great idea one great idea is not going to solve the problem so

the idea of you know uh the slogans that we use that um you know just say no to drugs uh and those sorts of slogans and um so forth these so we can we can think that we are really making progress but there there can be something missing and that missing is usually critical that thing missing is usually critical thinking when you're talking about human problems solving human problems right so there is a lot there let me read a few examples if I could on just very quickly a few more examples on activated ignorance and

I'm reading now from my book entitled liberating the mind just a few examples now this is focusing on entric and sociocentric thinking but these some of these examples are helpful so there uh is a doctor Jer Jerome grman who's written a book entitled how doctors think and he details problems in the medical profession as he as he understands them and so I'm just going to read a few of the uh points that he makes in his book so he's and I'm summing up here so he says Physicians tend to overly rely on classification schemes and

algorithms when treating patients and this I want to read a little more of this because this relates a little bit to what you were saying about your medical example such an approach often fails to take into account the course of a specific person's disease and the individual characteristics of the patients patient sometimes leading to dire consequences so um he says scoring schemes are proliferating in all branches of medicine and these schemes suit the hectic pace of today's clinical care so that's just one example so a doctor using schemes and algorithms when treating patients and that's

what your physical therapist was basically doing in the example that you gave I guess that's right yes right and these others relate very quickly these most of these are interrelated Physicians often stick with traditional approaches to medical problems even when such approaches are ineffective then number three doctors do not generally tend to focus on their mistakes yeah so what's the activated ignorance there I don't make mistakes I'm perfect and um yeah I I I think I've told you before that I I've sometimes work with the University of Arizona medical school and they have this program

on medical ignorance well and uh the first uh first conference I attended uh I gave a I gave some talk on critical thinking but almost everybody there was a physician and uh this panel of doctors got up on the stage and discussed what they did not know which is a very unusual thing for doctors and they we and the audience went away terrified um because they were talking not about what they don't know about obscure um diseases of only a few people but they were talking about breast cancer and prostate cancer this is in the

'90s so it may be outdated information now um and this was the head of the AMA the the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine the the head of Yale medical school so these were not just the the doctors on the corner these are the persons who specialize in it and we found out that that the people in the audience went away just kind of shaken more and the W the women said well I'm never going to have a amram again they don't know what to do with the information and the men said I'm

never going to have a prostate exam again they don't know what to do with the information again you can't vouch I'm not vouching for the validity of this now that that gets revealed by these doctors doctors are far more in my experience much more comfortable talking about what they do know rather than about do not know much less the mistakes that they make yes and again that's true in every field so we don't want to be implying that it's only doctors so we don't tend to see our professors starting out lectures with or discussions with

but first let me tell you all the ways in which I've I was wrong the last time we met oh yeah let me tell you how I was wrong when I started F you know studying this years ago let me tell you when I was wrong anytime let me just tell you when I was wrong because that's that's that's that we think of as a sign of weakness so intellectual arrogance has been embraced Academia and it's been embraced in the profession so you don't you don't say and you don't say when you're wrong and if

you think about the way business is run on a on a the business model focusing on making money then we're not going to tell you our mistakes we're only gonna tell you and we're going to not only tell you the good things that we do but we're going to sometimes exaggerate that right well in that spirit let me let me tell you a big mistake I made with relation to critical thinking and teaching in that I taught my classes and I was a philosophy professor and so for several years my students would give in turn

in essay exams on ethics or in philosophy of science or something like that and they'd write these wonderful essays really nice reasoning in them and everything and they would get good grades and I'd get very positive evaluations and it took me years like five years to realize that the good reasoning they were showing was my reasoning that is that's the way I had explained to them and so I tried giving them another question that was that we had not addressed in class specifically but was like the question we addressed in class and they were not

all of them but most of them were no better at reasoning through this new question than they had been at the beginning of the course in fact they went back to their old ways of thinking and that's how I got started in critical thinking what can I do to help them reason things through but I want you to hear it took five years to register in me so there's it's a just a good example of inner information in that it's it's I'm going to say it should have been apparent to me that this was not

the student's own reasoning but it wasn't apparent to me at all um so in the spirit of of owning up to to that's a good ex thank you for that Gerald I I'll I don't know if I'm going to share um accordingly but maybe I'll think of one for my myself that would be parallel but that that's that's the kind of thing that we want to be comfortable with we want to be comfortable saying you know that was really a mistake because this is this is this is directly connected with the development of intellectual virtues

and having confidence in reason so often having confidence in reason means that we have to admit that we've been wrong when we're faced with new reasoning and sometimes that means admitting that you've been doing something sometimes all of your life right yeah so so in other words you can say well I've been living all of these many years and I've been doing this wrong and I have to be say okay then I'm changing right now not well I'm holding on to that then which is what we tend to do then that because that's connected to

my identity so is this is the this way of talking and thinking is really antithetical to almost all of schooling today because we don't bring this um intellectual kind of intellectual humility into our classrooms right typically so then just a few other quick examples um then um on the still focusing on what Dr grman says in his book he says doctors often ignore information that contradicts a fixed way of diagnosing or treating patients that's related to the other points um and then there's another example I want to mention it's a case of Barry Marshall an

Australian Doctor Who in 1981 traced both ulcers and stomach cancer to a gut infection and at that time we thought that ulcers were caused by stress um this suggested that both might be treatable by antibiotics for many years mainstream gastroenterologist dismissed his theory holding fast to the established view that ulcers were caused by stress Marshall who presented his views to the annual meeting of the Royal australasian College of physician said to gastroenterologist the concept of a germ causing ulcers was like saying that the Earth is flat [Music] they were using the old model basing their

thinking on basically ignorance Marshall tried to get funding for his work from Far pharmaceutical companies all of which initially refused him this is not surprising given that these companies were making billions of dollars a year selling Zantac and tagat to treat ulcers as consequences of stress so this brings in the motivating part of activated ignorance so I'm I'm motivated to not know that information if I'm a pharmaceutical company because they were not willing to give up these billions of dollars and so so what Marshall did is he infected himself finally after years of trying to

get people to listen he infected himself with the ulcer causing bacteria obtained from one of his patients who had an ulcer to prove the cause of the ulcers and then treated himself with the antibiotics to prove the Cure and it worked so this is an example of activated ignorance and one other final example from this book I want to mention in 1974 the American Psychiatric association removed homosexuality from its official list of mental disorders in 1974 um this reclassification came about as a result of a poll taking of the asso of the association's general membership

and psychiatrist Lee Coleman describes the manner in which the official list changed what particularly struck many observers was the obviously political rather than scientific basis for the change under growing pressure from the homosexual Community the trustees of the APA declared by a majority vote in December 1973 homosexual to be no longer a mental disorder so much controversy resulted from this that a referendum was called to enable the entire APA membership to vote of the total votes cast 5,854 called for elimination 3,810 for retention and 367 abstained what he's pointing out is that they voted yeah

on this concept rather than taking into account the scientific information about it and this is an another example of all of of of in of activated ignorance causing so much pain and suffering so it we can be reminded of the way many homosexuals were treated with shock treatment and horrifying procedures that they went through to cause them to regurgitate while watching it this awful things that we did to these people because the idea was that they were um Freaks and they had to be changed and so and then so there you are that's another example

and it just goes on and on so we'll let's move on to our last concept if we could unless you want to say anything else about activated ignorance I want to add one piece and that is the people at University of Arizona medical school that I told you about have told me that uh doctors many doctors still mention stress for ulcers and they say well of course caused by a bacteria but stress also plays important Ro and um notice it's a it's a way of kind of retaining it while rejecting it at the same time

I don't want to be picking on doctors because as you said this obtains in all areas but it's kind of striking that even when we find out we still can have remnants of that belief which stay in us um that's a good example because I actually heard that recently really and so before this discussion I looked this up again to make sure that this was still correct and there there's nothing there on stress causing ulcers so but stress can cause so many things it's it's a fallback right so that's that's an easy move well it's

stress is causing it yeah though though you know it's made me in the past occasionally doubt that the uh um the uh universality of what's what stress causes it may very it's made me think May maybe many of these other things that are allegedly caused by stress are caused by something else maybe bacterium but something else yeah um so true and so we we know that stress plays a role in our lives but what is that role right and um we I think the best way to figure that out is to try to be aware

of when you're under stress and how you're handling it again it goes back to thinking and critical thinking so there's a lot to be said about activated ignorance we could go on and on but we're getting we're getting a uh we we get a lot of messages as we go through life from groups from parents from teachers from the Societies in which we live that lead us to behave in ways that cause problems for ourselves and others and we um we in talking about schools for example we haven't even mentioned all of the bad things

that students learn about each like the bad habits that they leave our schools with based on just the social interactions that they've had that have not been guided that have not been disciplined in in a in a critical thinking sense yeah so we we are getting ignorance from many angles in as humans right and these this gets in the way of our ability to achieve our own capacities so let's move to activated ignorance and now activated ignorance knowledge you mean I'm sorry yeah activated knowledge so activate let's move to activated knowledge so activated knowledge means

that we are using information in our thinking that is accurate and we're acting upon that information and it is uh helpful useful powerful in a given set of circumstances yeah now I would like to just read if I could as an opener here from John Henry Newman in 1851 in 1851 John Henry Newman wrote his famous set of lectures discourses on the scope and nature of University education which in 1852 became the idea of a university so for those of you who are interested in following up on this discussion you can get the book entitled

the idea of the university and you're going to see one section focusing on education and one section focusing on religion so we are focusing on the education side here so this is he he John Henry Newman wrote very eloquently about the concept of education so let me read a little of his writing uh read a little of this to you truth of whatever kind is the proper object of the intellect so that directly relates to activated knowledge knowledge its cultivation then lies in fitting it to apprehend and contemplate truth the intellect in its present state

does not discern truth intuitively or as a whole we know not by direct and simple Vision not at a glance but as it were by peace meal and accumulation by a mental process by going round an object by the comparison the combination the mutual correction the continual adaptation of many partial Notions by the employment concentration and Joint action of many faculties and exercises of mind I'm smiling because that's one sentence in addition to so I know I know so you see if you stopped with by peace meal then teachers could say well that's what we're

doing oh right right peace meal but you have to go further you can't just stop there and accumulation by a mental process and then again all of these things that he's saying interrelated so activated knowledge to me is not some not a like one idea or one piece of information that I know like but it could be it could be I know that I shouldn't smoke so I don't smoke as the example switching you know turning over the example we were using before but actually activated knowledge is much more complicated than that because it means

that we have a web of understandings that are based in truth right and that we've worked into our thinking over time so for example the theory of critical thinking represents if used effectively activated knowledge and the theory of critical thinking is interconnected it's not one sentence it's not one principle so anyway this is a way in as we think about activated knowledge let me just read a little more such a union and concert of the intellectual Powers such an enlargement and development such a comprehensiveness is necessarily a matter of training and again such a training

is a matter of rule It Is Not Mere application however exemplary which introduces the mind to truth nor the reading of many books nor the getting up of many subjects nor the witnessing many experiments nor attending many lectures all this is short of enough a man may have done it all yet be lingering in the vestibule of knowledge he may not realize what his mouth utters he may not see what his mental eye with his mental eye what confronts him he may have no grasp of things as they are or at least he may have

no power at all of advancing one step forward of himself in consequence of what he has already acquired no power of discriminating between truth and falsehood of sifting out the grains of truth from the mass of arranging things according to their real value such a power is an acquired faculty of Judgment of Clear Sight of wisdom and of intellectual self-possession and Repose the eye of the mind of which the object is truth is the work of discipline and habit now I can go on and on reading in John Henry Newman and I will pull up

multiple paragraphs that are going to be coming at the same point from different eloquent positions right right so you see if if people who if if people just could understand this then they would realize a lot that see the intellectual virtues are embedded in this and we could talk about how you know this relates to the theory of critical thinking so activated knowledge presupposes that we think about knowledge in a deep sense and that we take knowledge seriously and it's also of course directly again as I've said related to intellectual humility so and remember remember

the professor who came to the conference years ago who started out his keynote address by making us say it was damer I'm probably wrong so he said he had students at the beginning of his class every semester before they did anything else he said I want you to all repeat after me I'm probably wrong remember he had everybody in the audience repeating after him I'm probably wrong before before you know we were all I'm probably wrong I'm probably wrong I'm probably wrong and so that's at the heart of this now Richard corrected that and said

I may be wrong so but Ed was saying you know no you've got to get a little further out there because you're you're you know you didn't say your ego but so you I get the point that if I start with saying you know I'm probably wrong here I'm probably missing something here I'm likely I likely don't know everything here start out there if we start out there then we can think at a much higher level [Music] well uh let me let me address a different aspect I I said last time I'm a little embarrassed

about it that information was my least favorite of of the elements of reasoning or the one I found least interesting and uh and I'm gonna say in much the in something of The Same Spirit but still with embarrassment that I have the same reaction to one of the standards and that is accuracy I of course realiz I that accuracy is absolutely essential of course I realiz but but um my judgment is that teachers for instance who teach didactically just lecture and lecture or just give out facts and facts the one standard that they're attuned to

is accuracy that is giving out accurate information if they give you all these dates from history they're accurate dates and um activated knowledge is acting in such a way that it's based on accurate information okay and the based on is is very very important and that brings in all the other standards or most of the other standards to say to say I act based on the information means and you you said it also you said um it's uh we have the information and we use it for something useful and helpful well that means it's relevant

it's directly relevant to that situation and it's significant meaning it's important so it's not just a trivial piece and it's precise enough so one of the things that that the physical therapist I mentioned didn't do was he wasn't precise about applying the statistical information to this individual patient and so all those other standards come in and often they're we're we're we're kind of not aware of those because the concept of accuracy or truth for that matter sweeps things under the rug so I'm fully confident that that that John Henry Newman meant not just truth but

relevant truth deep truth of course right and you can see that implied right his words when Berard Russell says we need to follow the facts in his peculiar wavery tone of voice he doesn't just mean facts he means facts that are relevant to this situation that are sufficiently precise and all the other standards and so uh that fills out activated knowledge for me in a way that accuracy doesn't quite capture by itself does that does that does that make sense to you yeah I do understand what you're saying and I do think it's something that

we have to think about and I that you can be stating information that is accurate but it may not be useful and that's why why I think the to me the a powerful term in this is the term activate so you don't just have accurate information you're using it right you're you're acting upon it yeah right and that's what that that's what many people lack the developed ability to do in other words we have the capacity to act upon knowledge that we have but do we act upon it so for example if I want to

let's say uh I'm I'm just wanting to do something interesting that's different and I decide well I'll just try art why not I'll just try it and let's say that in the back of my mind I'm thinking you're not an artist you can't do that you can't do art you never done that that's how old old you are you can't start something like that now so that's that's the voice that basically is holding us back right whereas the other voice was not saying I want to be brilliant I want to be great I want to

be the best in the world I want everyone to you know bow down to me it just means I want to see if I can try it right right so this so when I so let's say I'm such a person I say well why don't I just try it I mean I'm able to you know do something I I've done this and I've done that and why not try it and if it doesn't work out well I tried it you the idea of just trying something that if you try that you'll get better you may

not achieve your goal but very frequently you will achieve your goal and very frequently you will achieve it when it looked like there was no way that you could achieve it and so um let's say and you can see this in a lot of for example writers some very good writers who never did actually believe in themselves right so George Orwell is such a person so he never believed that he could achieve while he was achieving and so that's that was not true that he couldn't achieve right so you when you have a certain level

of capacity that is developed you need to recognize that that and acknowledge it and you don't have to you know salute it and bow down to it but just say you know I've I've I've had these successes so that means when I start this next book I have a good chance of achieving maybe I won't maybe I've written the one that everyone will remember me by and that's all right because as Albert ell say Albert Ellis says you know forget about writing the Great American novel it's already been written you know just just just do

what you are capable of doing and do that as well as you can and don't worry about anything you know else that might pull you back from that so that's one example of activated knowledge yeah and it's a very powerful and it has to do with the way we think about ourselves the principles upon which we live and whether we live in accordance to the way other people think we should live or in the way that we think that we um should live at our highest level and by the way that's related if I could

to just a very couple of lines from letters from A stoic cica um he says here is another saying of epicurus it's interesting he was not um cica was a stoic but he often quotes from epicurus because he says well we're you know people say bad things about what epicurus says but actually he makes some good points and he says here's another saying of epicurus if you shape your life according to Nature you will never be poor if according to people's opinions you will never be rich see how simple that is Nature's wants are small

while those of of opinion are Limitless so you see that we've heard that in many other ways but that's just one that's another example um so if you if I let's say I'm a person who is just chasing after money and I realize that I'm not happy and so I read this so somebody says you know you really need to read cica so I I I remember how to read and I sit down and I read and I read this and then I'm moved by it right and that does happen right yeah the root of

thisal thinking I remember the old I guess joke or I don't know um about uh probably the money figure is outdated but how how much money is enough answer is $20,000 a year more than I make now that is whatever you make you need this increment yes right um so maybe the number is off but it speaks to that Limitless quality of of opinion yeah well going going deeper with money or thinking more about that you see we don't tend in human socities to think about how much we are affected by money right right that

how much it permeates our thinking right no matter what your level of income this is part of what you're saying in other words we don't realize how much we take human societies we overlay money and the way the role that many roles that money plays in our lives if we just study that and people do but we all need to do more of that not just Scholars so scholars study this and of course marxian Scholars have been studying this for many years and there are others that do but we all of us need to recognize

how money is affecting us right and that's activated knowledge yes it is right yeah and and and anything else that is permeating our lives so if if I'm being influenced by someone in my family negatively then I need to know that and that and I need to act upon that if possible maybe that means to remove myself and so taking information that we know to be true seriously is what I'm getting at here yes yeah that's right yeah and not hiding from it so that's just another type of activated knowledge this I just very brief

uh very brief reading from Eric from I'm reading from man for himself an inquiry into the psychology of and I just open this up to something I underlined some time ago now in this section he's talking about love and if those of you who are um Scholars of from will know that he wrote a book entitled The Art of Loving which is going Beyond this but he's giving a little bit of his thinking here to love a person productively implies to care and to feel responsible for his life not only for his physical existence but

for the growth and development of all his human powers so that's um if we were to adopt that sort of concept of love and we were to actually love our neighbors then there would be no war um to love productively he says is incompatible with being passive so that's related to opposite of being active active activated knowledge the opposite of active uh to love productively is incompatible with being passive with being an onlooker at the loved person's life it implies labor and care and the responsibility for his growth uh to love one person productively means

to be related to his human core to him as represent ing mankind that's an interesting move isn't it um all men are in need of help and depend on one another human solidarity is the necessary condition for the unfolding of any one [Music] individual we don't really talk about human solidarity in our cultures we talk about National [Music] solidar yeah yeah human solid and then we should bring in sensient creatures to that right so these are examples of activated knowledge and we again could just go on with many examples but H do you want to

comment any further on activated knowledge or anything else that we've been discussing yeah in a way I would just like to uh emphasize and partly reiterate something that you were saying in that uh we've talked about iner information activated ignorance and activated knowledge and but but there is something else having to do with information and it's uh it's kind of uh acting with a full knowledge of what it is I don't know or a full awareness of what it I don't know um and How Deeply that goes in us how how many mistakes I could

be making at this Mo very moment and just these gaps in my knowledge that I'm just I'm only partly aware of or dimly aware of or aware of but I've shunt it off to the side and you can almost call it activated intellectual humility to go along with the other three categories and put it into activated and uh and there's a way in which um Ed D's statement uh I'm I'm probably wrong I'm probably wrong um doesn't I I thought it was brilliant when he did it but it doesn't quite capture it for me because

I would like there to be a preliminary statement ahead of time I believe X Y and Z fully but I may be wrong yes yes you wanted that that caveat the way that Richard did yes no I see that so um I do think there are other ways to think about this these concepts of course and but I think of the example that you gave as activated knowledge in other words if I realize that I often Heir right right and I'm have limited knowledge in any particular area no matter how much knowledge I have and

if I act upon that then every time I come into a discussion right and I'm embodying intellectual empathy right to the degree that any of us can or do because we're not perfect then that would be an example of activated knowledge to me but I do see and it's important to you know weave together these con or weave you know these Concepts weave in and out of them and interconnect them where it makes sense to right so and I think to for me to just wrap this up in terms of activated knowledge I think it's

important to Circle back to teaching and learning um if we are teaching with a robust conception of critical a fair-minded critical thinking then we will teach the tools as well as we can to students who will then act upon those tools including the intellectual virtue so if we place let's just say intellectual virtues at the heart of teaching and learning and we have students acting upon their intellectual humility acting upon their intellectual courage acting upon their intellectual Integrity acting upon intellectual perseverance act upon those then we have a powerful set of tools for guiding instruction

of any type right right and that's um it's unfortunate that we're not yet able to embrace that across human societies right right but we do have the tools right yeah that the activation is built into the to the virtues to the traits of mind um yes it's it's not and that's what distinguishes it distinguishes it's one of the things that distinguishes them from skill um intellectual perseverance is not an ability it's not the ability it's not the ability to stick with an intellectual task all the way through it's sticking with an intellectual task all the

way through it yes actually doing it yeah actually doing it yeah so it goes back to Newman's point about it's not passive um yeah and yeah well I think that we have um at least a beginning place for thinking about ined information activated ignorance and activated knowledge hopefully those who are with us in this session will be able to come up with their own examples because we were just trying to give an idea of how these could be applied and how information connects with those so um I'll say goodbye to you for now Gerald thank

you to you and to everyone who's joined us bye Linda and bye everyone yeah take care we'll see you next time