[Link] The New Humanism

Many of our public policies are proposed by experts who are comfortable only with correlations that can be measured, appropriated and quantified, and ignore everything else.

I would love to live in this alternate reality where "our public policies" are driven by dispassionate experts who actually pay attention to real-world data.

I think you should have summarised or explained.

Interesting. This bit in particular seemed relevant (and might add to the LessWrong lexicon):

When we raise our kids, we focus on the traits measured by grades and SAT scores. [...] Yet while we are trapped within this amputated view of human nature, a richer and deeper view [...] is being brought to us by researchers across an array of diverse fields: neuroscience, psychology, sociology, behavioral economics and so on. [...] [T]he unconscious parts of the mind are most of the mind, where many of the most impressive feats of thinking take place. Second, emotion is not opposed to reason; our emotions assign value to things and are the basis of reason. Finally [...] [w]e are social animals, deeply interpenetrated with one another, who emerge out of relationships. [...]

When you synthesize this research, you get different perspectives on everything [...] You pay less attention to how people analyze the world but more to how they perceive and organize it in their minds. [...] You get a different view of, say, human capital. [...] [T]his research illuminates a range of deeper talents, which span reason and emotion [...]:

Attunement: the ability to enter other minds and learn what they have to offer.

Equipoise: the ability to serenely monitor the movements of one’s own mind and correct for biases and shortcomings.

Metis: the ability to see patterns in the world and derive a gist from complex situations.

Sympathy: the ability to fall into a rhythm with those around you and thrive in groups.

Limerence: This isn’t a talent as much as a motivation. The conscious mind hungers for money and success, but the unconscious mind hungers for those moments of transcendence [...]

I think that he makes some good points, but I'm not fond of the way he makes them. Interspersing the colloquial concepts of rationality and reason with the actual concepts makes the intention of the article unclear. In an editorial intended for broad, public consumption, clarity should be paramount, lest people walk away with misinterpretations.

Brooks: This growing, dispersed body of research reminds us of a few key insights. ... emotion is not opposed to reason; our emotions assign value to things and are the basis of reason.

David Hume probably would have mixed feelings about this. One the one hand, he probably applauds the idea that the emotions direct reason. On the other hand, he might cringe at the idea that this discovery was the result of modern research.

A TED talk by David Brooks was promoted on Facebook not long ago:

http://www.ted.com/talks/david_brooks_the_social_animal.html

Seems to me Brooks's thoughts are marred by a basic conflation of two points:

1) We should aim to be guided by emotion and not just reason in our dealings with others and our formulation of policy.

2) To predict how people are likely to behave, we need to avail ourselves of realistic psychological theories, and not model ourselves simply as rational agents.

The second proposition is true, the first at best only partially so. The partial truth of the first lies in the value of emotion/non-rational abilities in one-on-one and small scale human interactions - hence the social abilities referred to at the bottom of his piece. Insofar as it begins with a (quite improbable and completely undefended) comparison of large scale U.S. policy failures, however, this presumably is not to his basic point.

So humans are complex creatures that exhibit a simplified view of other humans? Isn't there some kind of psychological explanation for that?