J.D. Trout & Michael Bishop, the protagonists of the previous post, have written a book Epistemology and the Psychology of Human Judgment.

Book Description

Strategic Reliabilism, claims that epistemic excellence consists in the efficient allocation of cognitive resources to reliable reasoning strategies, applied to significant problems. The last third of the book develops the implications of this view for standard analytic epistemology; for resolving normative disputes in psychology; and for offering practical, concrete advice on how this theory can improve real people's reasoning. This is a truly distinctive and controversial work that spans many disciplines and will speak to an unusually diverse group, including people in epistemology, philosophy of science, decision theory, cognitive and clinical psychology, and ethics and public policy.

An Excerpt:

It is time for epistemology to take its rightful place alongside ethics as a discipline that offers practical, real-world recommendations for living. In our society, the powerful are at least sometimes asked to provide a moral justification for their actions. And there is at least sometimes a heavy price to be paid when a person, particularly an elected official, is caught engaging in immoral actions or defending clearly immoral policies. But our society hands out few sanctions to those who promote and defend policies supported by appallingly weak reasoning. Too often, condemnation is meted out only after the policies have been implemented and have led to horrible results: irresponsible war and spilt blood or the needless ruin of people’s prospects and opportunities. Epistemology is a serious business for at least two reasons. First, epistemology guides reasoning, and we reason about everything. If one embraces a defective morality, one’s ability to act ethically is compromised. But if one embraces a defective epistemology, one’s ability to act effectively in all areas of life is compromised. Second, people don’t fully appreciate the risks and dangers of poor reasoning. Everyone knows the danger of intentional evil; but few fully appreciate the real risks and untold damage wrought by apparently upstanding folk who embrace and act on bad epistemological principles. Such people don’t look dangerous. But they are. An example of the costs of upstanding people reasoning poorly is the surprisingly strong opposition in the United States to policies that would provide opportunities and services to the disadvantaged (e.g., in terms of education and basic needs such as health care). Much of this opposition is not based on the rejection of a moral principle of equal opportunity, but instead on poorly-arrived-at empirical views. Some people reject redistributive social policies on the grounds that they are inevitably ineffective; others rely on clearly mistaken views about what percentage of the federal budget actually goes to pay for such programs. That’s not to say that there aren’t good arguments against some redistributive policies. Some can backfire, and others (particularly those that benefit the non-poor) can be very expensive. But sound comparative policy analysis provides no support to a principled opposition to redistributive social policies. People who defend appalling social policies often do so on the basis of weak reasoning about factual matters rather than on the basis of backward moral precepts.

It sounds good but they seem to do some poor reasoning. Brad DeLong's review of Ben Friedman's The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth explains:

Benjamin M. Friedman ’66, Jf ’71, Ph.D. ’71, Maier professor of political economy . . . makes a powerful argument that—politically and sociologically—modern society is a bicycle, with economic growth being the forward momentum that keeps the wheels spinning. As long as the wheels of a bicycle are spinning rapidly, it is a very stable vehicle indeed. But, he argues, when the wheels stop—even as the result of economic stagnation, rather than a downturn or a depression—political democracy, individual liberty, and social tolerance are then greatly at risk even in countries where the absolute level of material prosperity remains high....

Consider just one of his examples—a calculation he picks up from his colleague Alberto Alesina, Ropes professor of political economy, and others: in an average country in the late twentieth century, real per capita income is falling by 1.4 percent in the year in which a military coup occurs; it is rising by 1.4 percent in the year in which there is a legitimate constitutional transfer of political power; and it is rising by 2.7 percent in the year in which no major transfer of political power takes place. If you want all kinds of non-economic good things, Friedman says—like openness of opportunity, tolerance, economic and social mobility, fairness, and democracy—rapid economic growth makes it much, much easier to get them; and economic stagnation makes getting and maintaining them nearly impossible.

Though Trout and Bishop make a valid argument about how to reason well they fail to do so. In addition to good tools for reasoning you need good evidence to reason from if you are to reach useful conclusions. Intelligence matters too. I would extend Strategic Reliabilism in this way: epistemic excellence consists in the efficient allocation of cognitive resources to reliable reasoning strategies, based on good evidence, and applied to significant problems.

The discussion following Timothy Burke's post, The Consequences of Representation, analyzes the behavior of "Bruce Wilkinson, an American preacher determined to create a huge village of orphans in Swaziland, through his “Dream for Africa” project, extending existing endeavors like the “Never-Ending Garden”." Timothy argues that:

If he was concerned about white Americans, he wouldn’t be reaching for that whole apparatus. Let me be clear: I have no reason to think that’s anything but unconscious bias. But it’s still a differentiated reaction. The failure to recognize that is moral turpitude.

I think Julius Nyerere was also a very sincere and honorable person, and clearly morally preferable to many of his nationalist contemporaries, but at the same time, his personal ambitions and ideologies at the time of Tanzanian independence deformed the futures of many of his citizens in very serious ways. The consequences were severe: why should I not read his failure to consider consequences (or to listen to clear warnings about those consequences) as a kind of morally lamentable arrogance? Why don’t you see moral significance in Wilkinson’s very similar errors?

Alan Jacobs argues:

A more likely explanation, I believe, is that he wouldn’t be reaching for that apparatus if he wanted to save white Americans — or black Americans, or Western Europeans, or Japanese — because he knows that in those countries that apparatus is already in the hands of others. The administrative infrastructure in the “developed” nations is more fully, shall we say, developed than it is in most African nations. You think Wilkinson made the choices he did because cultural imperialism is in his bones; I think it’s more because entrepreneurial ambition is in his bones.

Channeling Trout and Bishop one might argue that Wilkinson suffers from appallingly weak reasoning rather than either moral turpitude or entrepreneurial ambition. But they seem to side with Timothy in the need to sanction people for the consequences of poorly reasoned policies.

I'm reminded of the Bernard DeVoto essay, The Ex-Communists, referenced in Actively Stupid.

Embracing communism, like religious conversion, is an act of the total personality. It is packed with private and even unconscious as well as rational and objective reasons, with emotion as well as intelligence. What the apostates have been saying shows that frequently intelligence played only a small part in it. Yet it played some part and they are eager to show that it was decisive in their apostasy, their repudiation of communism. I propose to discuss only their intelligence. We will agree that the American intellectual who became a Communist was, typically, a generous, warmhearted man, an idealist deeply disturbed by the catastrophe of the modern world and deeply concerned for the betterment of mankind. But how good was his thinking? . . .

Communism made its American converts not as a system of thought but as an eschatology, a millennial faith. . .

In all of these cases the consequences of poor thinking were dire: war or "the needless ruin of people’s prospects and opportunities." Trout and Bishop focus on a very important issue and make a useful contribution. Though they seem to lack some information, and so reach some silly conclusions in their examples, the method they advocate is worth our attention.