Networked zealotry | Critical Thinking Applied

Networked zealotry | Critical Thinking Applied

The dramatic drop in communication costs, and explosion in ability to connect, that the information technology revolution represents means that the like-minded can associate together far more easily. This can be liberating and reassuring. It can also lead to intensification of beliefs as people reinforce each other and divergent information is excluded or discredited. An ironic effect of massively increased access to information is to make the crippled epistemology (pdf) which is so much a part of zealotry and fanaticism easier to maintain.

Established groupthinkThe established information institutions have (more than) done their bit to create the basis for these patterns. While critical thinking is allegedly an ideal of post-Enlightenment education (particularly universities), what educations systems have generally actually been teaching and practising (particularly universities) has been groupthink. (Scott Sumner, for example, regularly bewails the current groupthink among macroeconomists–all the more remarkable since it fails to conform to previous accepted analysis.)

This is V-Bi and Y-Ro thinking where teams develop normalized ideas and deviant information is discredited as potential deception or wrong Iv-B and Oy-R.