From Less Wrong:

we need to study the cognitive sciences, figure out the way our intuitions work and how we might correct for mistakes. Above all, we need to learn to always question the workings of our minds, for we need to understand that they are . . . → Read More: Your intuitions are not Magic]]>

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From Less Wrong:

we need to study the cognitive sciences, figure out the way our intuitions work and how we might correct for mistakes. Above all, we need to learn to always question the workings of our minds, for we need to understand that they are not magical.

While composing this post on No Agenda Forums, an interesting problem came up.  How can I show someone their own biases?  They are obvious to me, but (by definition) the other person’s entire system of thinking is arranged in such a way as to find their biases valid.

After coming to understand the limitations . . . → Read More: What sort of mirror?]]>

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While composing this post on No Agenda Forums, an interesting problem came up.  How can I show someone their own biases?  They are obvious to me, but (by definition) the other person’s entire system of thinking is arranged in such a way as to find their biases valid.

After coming to understand the limitations of our built-in processing, this problem really bugs me.  What kind of mirror can I use to show someone their errors?  How could they show me my errors?  Assuming my reasoning is faulty, would I be just as difficult to convince, or does my experience with fallacy and bias give me any advantage?

I guess this is what keeps a skeptic up at night.

Note: I addressed the following essay to the general population of the No Agenda Forums, a community that I cherish despite frequent frustration.  It is peopled by many conspiracy theorists and champions of various “alternative” things, such as alternative explanations, alternative medicine, etc.  In short, people I cannot really reach on a level . . . → Read More: You make and break your own religion]]>

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Note: I addressed the following essay to the general population of the No Agenda Forums, a community that I cherish despite frequent frustration.  It is peopled by many conspiracy theorists and champions of various “alternative” things, such as alternative explanations, alternative medicine, etc.  In short, people I cannot really reach on a level of reason.  What I say may not do any good, but if even one in a thousand of those readers can see the light, then I am proud to have played a small part in the emergence of a rational mind.

It’s funny to me that no one here agrees on what “the truth” is, even in broad strokes.  But, (most) everyone agrees that authorities or experts must be lying to them about that truth…er, whatever it might be.  And if an authority occasionally says something you accept as truthful, then it must be to distract from something more secret and sinister.  The circular reasoning and contradiction are so palpable I can scarcely believe you don’t trip over them.

Ponder for a minute what this says about your thought process and your own bias.  You begin with an infallible conclusion, only trusting whatever evidence you see that supports it.  Evidence to the contrary is dismissed as untrustworthy by the very fact that it contradicts what you believe.  You decide wholly based on your own internal compass, even embracing the idea of cognitive bias as a sort of meta-physical truth detector.

This is, essentially, a definition of religious devotion to an unassailable faith.  You act as though you have arrived at your belief system through a a rational process, but even a novice critical thinker such as myself can trivially destroy your claims.

When you choose not to be cognizant and critical of your own bias, you disown reason itself, and make it impossible to discern the plausibility, likelihood, or truth about anything (except perhaps stumbling upon it as a complete accident).

When you cry “wake up”, what do you mean by it?  You do not accept what you are told, but instead you accept what you have invented.  To be “awake” as you are, is to be trapped in a fever dream of conspiracy and unreason, with no light to guide you; only the ever-deepening rabbit hole of your own delusion.

There is a much higher level of awareness than the one you defend and so cherish.  You already possess the tools to attain it: intelligence and doubt.  Turn these faculties upon yourself.  Doubt not only “authority”; learn the ways your own mind has evolved to be a poor reasoning machine.  Learn what logical fallacies and cognitive bias are.

The grand collective endeavor of science and reason tell us that the most simple, parsimonious, and mundane explanations are usually (but not always) correct.  This is not a dogma, but rather a good default position from which to begin.  The more complicated a claim is, the more skeptical you should be; the more work the claimant needs to do in order to show it’s valid.  As Carl Sagan said, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”.  People untrained in science may not find it obvious why this should be the case–  If you have not had the benefit of truly understanding the methods of science, please find the time to read The Demon-Haunted World.

You can escape the wall of religion in which you have trapped your own mind.  From the inside, it’s an insidious, invisible wall that only tells you you’re right.  From the outside it’s an unassailable fortress of irrationality.  Learn how to be wrong.  Revel in your mistakes as you discover them.  Each time you find an error, you win the opportunity to correct it.

I subject myself to the same standard that I ask of you.  Also, the same criticisms.  We are all imperfect in our reason, in some ways irreparably so.  But we can be clever enough to design systems that give reliable results in spite of our bias (science), and modest enough to understand and work around our own limitations (awareness of fallacy and bias).  And as we continue down the road of reason, we find flaws in these systems and refine them as well.  Nothing is sacred, everything is subject to scrutiny.

I can argue against unsupported claims, and try to provide directions for understanding why they are likely wrong.  But there’s no way I know of to plant the seed of desire to reason.  If, like me, you managed to reach adulthood without learning these things, then I hope you too will choose to born again into reason, science, and skepticism.

Like most sports, I’m not much good at debate.  I say it’s a sport because it’s a competition with a winner and loser where the participants’ skills have the largest bearing on the outcome.

I think that most people casually lump debate and argument into the same mental bin; if not as exact synonyms, . . . → Read More: Argument > Debate]]>

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Debating

Like most sports, I’m not much good at debate.  I say it’s a sport because it’s a competition with a winner and loser where the participants’ skills have the largest bearing on the outcome.

I think that most people casually lump debate and argument into the same mental bin; if not as exact synonyms, then as different degrees of the same thing.  But they are really quite different!  A debate has almost nothing to do with logic or the correctness of stated facts, but these things are crucial to the outcome of an argument.

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Adversarial collaboration

In an argument, the two sides start with differing opinions or understandings about a topic.  Well-conducted arguments can get very pedantic and take a long time to conclude.  Sometimes the facts needed to decide an argument aren’t available.  Although they can get heated with emotion, at the end of a good argument both sides should depart with the same understanding, reached by applying logic to the available facts.

Arguments are a great way to battle cognitive bias!  It’s a system of informal collaboration: each participant tries to find the logical or factual flaws that the opposing side is laboring under, and point them out.  Unlike a debate, this process has nothing to do with ego, wit, or the invocation of clever but misleading fallacies.  The goal of an argument is not to win, but rather to be (or become) correct.  This is a subtle but extremely important distinction.

As a skeptic, I love to argue.  I love to be right and convince someone else of it, and I also love to be proven wrong and thereby learn.

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It’s a trap! (sometimes)

When you’re in an argument, you have to be vigilant for signs of “impedance mismatch”, i.e. an argument conducted in bad faith–  If only one side is interested in arguing but the other side moves into debating then the the progress and outcome of the discussion will be of undefined significance.  Just as if one person is figure skating and the opposing side suddenly switches to ice hockey.. nothing meaningful can be said about the results except it won’t end well.

If the debating party is clever, they can very easily prevail over the arguing party.  Attractive, unsupported claims can be made quickly so the debater stays on the offensive.  They can weave straw men and ask questions that don’t have snappy answers.  If the opponent is able to keep up, the debater can arbitrarily move the goalposts.  The arguer quickly gets mired down, spending time to refute or reason through even a small portion of the claims.

Citing that your opponent is not being truthful and flagging their fallacies doesn’t win debates.  This is why those with logically inconsistent (or unsupportable) viewpoints love to debate, especially against scientists and critical thinkers.  It gives them the chance to win without being right!  By selecting an opponent who is beholden to logic and really wants to change the other’s mind, the debater is practically assured victory.  Even if the quarry detects the trap and switches to debate tactics, the attacker can force a stalemate by pointing out the logician’s hypocrisy for using fallacies!

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What to do

If you are a critical thinker and you love to debate, then dive in, be ruthless, and take no prisoners!  Don’t go to the dark side, though; be ever vigilant in checking your cognitive bias.  Winning debates doesn’t make your position correct.

If you are like me, argumentative but more interested in truth than victory, then surround yourself with like-minded people.  If you find your positions challenged aggressively it can be an ego hit to defuse a debate instead of meeting it head on.  But it’s nothing like getting sucked into a trap when you’re unprepared; losing the debate despite being right.

We suck at thinking, all of us– humanity.  It’s poetically tragic given that we haven’t met any life forms who can do a better job of it yet.

We skeptics enjoy thinking of ourselves as rational and reasonable, smugly superior among a vast sea of credulous, closed-minded believers.  But we’re not nearly . . . → Read More: Closed-minded, all]]>

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We suck at thinking, all of us– humanity.  It’s poetically tragic given that we haven’t met any life forms who can do a better job of it yet.

We skeptics enjoy thinking of ourselves as rational and reasonable, smugly superior among a vast sea of credulous, closed-minded believers.  But we’re not nearly as clever as we think, nor are we very different from the true believers.

Our hardware

Humans didn’t evolve to think rationally, but rather expediently.  Our myriad cognitive biases probably came about because they were useful shortcuts to solve the kinds of problems hominids faced pre-historically.  Some may be primitive processes that worked well enough to avoid being bred out over the millenia.  Other biases probably serve as heuristics that can let us quickly reach the right answers even though our brains are not very fast or accurate processors.  I’m not qualified to make claims about the origins of cognitive bias; however it happened, here we are in modern times saddled with a lot of built-in dumb.

The work-around

Putting aside bias in order to think rationally is a learned behavior.  We can jury-rig our minds into a feedback loop of self-analysis and doubt to avoid or detect as much of our own bias as possible.  In some ways it will always be a Sisyphean effort since we are running this “rationality” program on top of an inherently biased system anyway.

When it’s really important to be fair, we have to make the human mind cancel out of the equation.  Studies have to be designed with blinds so the participants and experimenters can’t inadvertently affect the results.  Even then, the hypothesis or experiment can have an undetected bias baked in via unstated assumptions.  Even a flawless study will be subject to a gauntlet of human peer reviewers and publishers.  Finally, if a study fails to turn up something interesting (i.e. a “negative” finding), it is far less likely to even see publication.

Closed-minded

A fully rational analysis would consist of evaluating all relevant data without bias.  How is a casual human thinker to know what information can be relied upon, or where to find it?  It’s clearly impossible to become an expert in every field, and even learned experts may disagree among themselves or be proven wrong in time.  To be able to function, we must routinely discard the majority of information available to us.  What we accept and internalize, by default, tends to align with our existing notions.  See confirmation bias, expectation bias, selective perception, mere exposure, N.I.H., status quo bias, and wishful thinking.

Discarding possibly relevant information when deciding (or defending) a position is a pretty good definition of being closed-minded.  In the excellent Skeptoid program (#134) Brian Dunning points out that we tend to be automatically skeptical of some information based on our personal biases.  Conversely we are uncritical of information that resonates with our world view.

We are all skeptics.  We are all believers.

Believers, even atheists?  Scientists?  Absolutely.  I’m not propping up that old saw that science is some form of religion; it’s absolutely not.  What we all believe in is our current mental inventory of experience and information– we each believe that we are right, and that people who disagree with us are using flawed reasoning.

The kernel of progress

The preceding enlightenment was my main reward for listening to this week’s Skeptoid.  Brian also makes a related observation to pull focus back to rational thinking:

The real difference between skeptics and believers is that skeptics have a useful foundation of scientific knowledge and an aptitude for following the scientific method. These tools allow us to distinguish poor quality evidence from good quality evidence. And, importantly, they help restrain us from drawing poorly supported conclusions from the evidence that we do accept, no matter how strongly we want those conclusions to be justified.

The scientific endeavor

Science embodies the best approach we have to convert ideas and information into a robust understanding of the cosmos.  It’s a collective endeavor, because individual biases can be canceled out by getting a lot of different people to argue over the same stuff.  Properly applied, science will reward the mitigation of bias, and ruthlessly prefer theories that best explain the data.  Since it’s run by closed-minded, skeptical, credulous humans, science is not perfect.  But with each revision it gets a little better.

“In the study, participants could freely decide if they wanted to press a . . . → Read More: Hearts and minds]]> As we learn more about how brains work, traditional views can be called into question. Recent research indicates that (at least some) decision-making processes are “prepared” by the brain unconsciously several seconds before there is an awareness of having come to a decision.

“In the study, participants could freely decide if they wanted to press a button with their left or right hand. … The researchers found that it was possible to predict from brain signals which option participants would take already seven seconds before they consciously made their decision.”

I was somewhat surprised by this finding, and look forward to follow-up research as well as independent confirmation. But most of my surprise was not due to the study itself, but rather how the results were interpreted as evidence against the existence of free will.

There’s more than one in-vogue argument surrounding free will. This post is not meant to address the deterministic issue (i.e. is there such a thing as choice in the universe); I intend to treat that fascinating question in a future post.

Here we are faced with evidence that the “me”/conscious/”in charge” part of us may not even be in the loop at all until after a decision is reached. Certainly big news! But something to assail free will?

For those accustomed to thinking of themselves as having free will, the implications are far more unsettling than learning about the physiological basis of other brain functions. [wired:Brain Scanners Can See Your Decisions Before You Make Them]

But since I have no control over what I think, believe, or decide, so what? … The lack of free will levels the playing field and makes all humans equal. [skepchick:Free will as illusion]

To me, there is a huge chasm between finding consciousness plays a later role in (at least some) decisions and concluding that there is no free will. Consciousness is already known to be a slippery thing, see anosognosia (my favorite), blind sight, confabulation, déjà vu. Our self-awareness gets sort of an “executive summary” of our sensory experience. Why should it be so hard to swallow the idea that the brain follows a similar pattern for decisions?

So maybe the part of me that believes it is in charge is actually more of an oversight committee. This still casts no aspersion on free will– it just gives us new data on what mental machinery is involved in making a decision. It’s still my brain, synapses wired by my experience. If we find the seat of decision-making is largely pre-conscious, we need not conclude we’re any less free, aware, or in-charge. After all, the seat of emotion was long believed to be the heart. Knowing otherwise has not sapped the vibrance from love or softened the sting of jealousy. We are still emotional creatures. And we are also decision-making creatures.

I wonder: how could we actually test for free will? You’d have to be careful that you’re not just playing to cognitive bias.

And what use then, consciousness? I’m pretty far afield of my expertise, but I could spin just-so stories all day about how an oversight, evaluating sort of self-awareness could be adaptive.

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I spent rather a long time contemplating the creation of this site. There seem to be many good reasons not to bother, including but not limited to: