The Knowledge Pit

I very much believe that perception is reality. If I go around believing someone is out to get me, no matter how mistaken I am, everything that person does will seem like an attack. The list of how perceptions manifest as realities in everyday life is exhaustive. Politics, of course, is a stark example. In fact, as we have seen with President Obama, politics can be an extrapolation of the particular manifestation I mentioned above.

What happens though, when perceptions are not reality? After all, our opinions and biases color our lenses, but they don't change hard data. Suppose you think that human activity doesn't contribute to climate change, and that therefore there is no need for us to change our habits and energy sources because the earth is just in one of its "cycles," and inevitably that will change and all will be well. It's interesting to accept that aspect of historical science, that the earth is old and has undergone periodic and extended periods of hot/cold extremes, but not to accept the current metrics of science used to warn us of the microwave we're building for ourselves. What are the consequences when those perceptions and realities don't align? Will that knowledge gap doom us? How do we address our problems if we don't even know what they are or understand them?

In February of this year the results of 2012 survey by the National Science Foundation were released. According to the data 26% of Americans thought the sun orbited the Earth. Digest that for a moment. Just over 1/4 of Americans think the sun revolves around the Earth. Somewhere the ghost of Copernicus is pinching himself to see if he's still dead in 2014 or has awoken six centuries ago. If our perceptions are not rooted in fact, the realities they become will turn out very poorly. Like doctors of yore we will be treating patients with leeches, an appealing thought, I know.

Climate change is a glaring example of the knowledge pit, and has serious implications, but according to a recent study "Perils of Perception" it isn't the only thing we get wrong. If you'd like, try taking the 9-question, multiple-choice quiz yourself…I scored 6/9. When you answer a question, right or wrong, it tells you what the average guess was for your country. In America, the average guess for unemployment rate was 32% and for teen pregnancy rate of 24%!! In reality those %s are around 6% (currently) and 3% respectively. If you think we're screwed now, imagine how godawful things would be if 30% of us were out of work and 1/4 of the nation's teenage girls were reproducing! Societal collapse is nigh!

The disconcerting fear is that our lack of knowledge will harden our resolve to see things our way, to make our perceptions into realities, and that therefore our serious issues will be addressed based on prescriptions for the wrong ailments. It's one thing to think the president is Kenyan, Muslim socialist. It's another thing entirely to think the earth is 6000 years old or that people walked alongside dinosaurs. How those manifest politically is important if we are to solve our world's problems.

I find two important and inextricably linked takeaways in all this. First of all, the knowledge pit separating perceptions and realities is a disaster for our society regardless of your political stripes. Take the 32% unemployment figure. Too far in one direction and you think we should torpedo the budget with welfare payments; too far in the other and you probably don't think we should spend that much money on anything.

Which brings me to my second takeaway: whatever the argument, whatever the issue, there is no way we are resolving it unless we bridge the knowledge pit between perception and reality. The world and our ability to understand it have changed. To think that the unemployment rate is 32% is a tragic bit of misinformation that may alter policy. It is important that our civic discourse and media provide us with accurate, unbiased information about what is happening in the world. But thinking that the sun orbits the Earth is a fundamental misunderstanding of how the laws of nature work. That bodes poorly for the future of the individual and all of us.

If America truly wants to be a nation committed to a nation governed by its people, our society must ensure that we, the people, are up to the task of governing. The knowledge pit that can separate our perception from the realities of the world around us is a dangerous trap. If we delude ourselves into addressing imagined or exacerbated problems there is a good chance the real ones will catch up to us.