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Laura Creighton's avatar

One thing that seems relevant is that a certain segment of the population believes that history has a 'preferred direction' or purpose ... there is a natural law of history, that means that we are all progressing, as we are supposed to, to the utopian future. If this teleological lens is how you see history then people in the past by definition must have less enlightened attitudes that we do in the present. The reverse of this, popular other places, is that rather than 'progressing' we have embarked on a path of terminal decline. People who believe this believe that those in the past must have had more enlightened attitudes than we do now. Sometimes the people on both sides believe exactly the same things about attitudes in the past -- they only disagree over what constitutes progress vs decline.

The teleological view is rather dangerous, from a governing point of view. It means that people are not free to propose a way to deal with a problem, try it, discover that it didn't work as imagined, conclude it was a bad idea and decide to not do this any more. Once you get started with a project, there is relentless pressure to double down on the measure when it first shows signs of not working out after all. Progress appears to not have a reverse gear. But can explicitly 'progress-neutral' or 'progress-irrelevant' measures grow sufficient popular backing?

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Chris Best's avatar

This critique is based purely on my squinting at the graphs not on any number crunching, but I was a less impressed by the under/over estimate charts than the strength of the conclusions here seem to imply. Many of them I look at and think that people got it basically right, or that the delta was pretty close but the absolute was off.

I’m saying that the standard for being right/unbiased is too exacting, and therefore saying “98% (!) of the questions” is a bit misleading. I would be very surprised if they all matched as closely as the ones that did match, and suspect those matches are more chance.

This makes me think the stronger claims of bias are exaggerated -- maybe we don’t need this much of an explanation! But the parts where we dig in to the ones we’re people are very very wrong are quite interesting.

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