{"id":1905,"date":"2004-03-24T09:01:24","date_gmt":"2004-03-24T14:01:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2004\/03\/24\/1905.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:45:25","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:45:25","slug":"the-tipping-point-the-power-of","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2004\/03\/24\/the-tipping-point-the-power-of\/","title":{"rendered":"The Tipping Point: The Power of Context"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

It’s been a couple of weeks since Your Humble Blogger left off talking about Malcolm Gladwell’s<\/a> The Tipping Point<\/i>. We had talked about the Law of the Few and the Stickiness Factor<\/a>, so we’re up to the Power of Context.\n

The key to getting people to change their behaviour ... sometimes lies with the smallest details of their immediate situation. The Power of Context says that human beings are a lot more sensitive to their environment than they may seem.<\/blockquote>\nIn other words, the reasons we do things are not always the reasons we have for doing things. He uses a few examples of specifics, focusing on Broken Windows<\/a> and on the Rule of 150, but one of the most persuasive expressions of the power of context I’ve come across was in If You're an Egalitarian, How Come You're So Rich?<\/a>, by G.A. Cohen.\n

In the first chapter, “Paradoxes of Conviction”, he describes making the decision to study philosophy at Oxford, rather than Harvard, based primarily on the attractiveness of going overseas. Having made that decision, he hung out with very smart people, and discussed whether particular truths were synthetic or analytic. In Mr. Cohen’s second year at Oxford, Willard Van Orman Quine<\/a> published “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”<\/a>, which denied that there was such as thing as analytic truth. Dr. Cohen describes looking into the arguments, for and against, Quine’s thesis, and finally deciding against Quine.\n

He discovers, over time, that most of the people who studied philosophy at Oxford rejected Quine, and most of the people who studied philosophy at Harvard (where Quine resided) agreed with Quine. He can’t believe that it’s a coincidence, nor can he believe (having acquaintance with many of them) that everybody is just sticking with their buddies, or enthralled by their profs.\n

So, in some sense of “because” and in some sense of “Oxford,” I think I can say that I believe in the synthetic\/analytic distinction because I studied at Oxford. And that is disturbing. For the fact that I studied at Oxford is no reason for thinking that the distinction is sound. ... But I can’t comfortably believe that a belief of mine is ill-grounded.<\/blockquote>\nIt’s humbling to think that many things I believe I may believe, in large part, because I was where I was when I was with the other people who happened to be there at that time. That doesn’t make the beliefs wrong, as such, but it serves to remind me that I am in less control over my beliefs that I think I am.\n

Er, I’ve rambled too long in this note to talk about how the Power of Context could Tip the Vote. More later.\n

Redintegro Iraq,
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s been a couple of weeks since Your Humble Blogger left off talking about Malcolm Gladwell\u2019s The Tipping Point. We had talked about the Law of the Few and the Stickiness Factor, so we\u2019re up to the Power of Context….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[201],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1905","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-navel-gazing"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1905","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1905"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1905\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16967,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1905\/revisions\/16967"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1905"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1905"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1905"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}