Perfect. The reference to Aeropagitcia is beautiful.

Thanks!

“(…how long did that take you?)”

A bit less than an hour, not counting re-reading most of Areopagitica. (I looked it up to check the context for the quote, and got caught up in it.)

#21,

Thank you, too. And I agree with what you say on past examples of biases being overcome.

But if we keep on agreeing, I might have to go elsewhere to find new opponents!

Seriously, the past few posts from Chris have moved up a gear, and have adapted somewhat to our past discussions, and I’ve found them significantly more challenging to think about. There’s more scope for us to agree on parts of them, and for the remaining differences to be discussed without so much rancor. It’s a hopeful development.

When someone gets our attention, however, we are able to back off and empty our own minds and offer our full attention. We can never “know” what is in another person’s mind, but we can at least learn to spot the stuff we are substituting for what we are hearing if we become more self-aware. Zen, yes, also mystics in all the world’s faiths, who are interested in finding out and learning. We first need to be persuaded that we don’t know.

Our world, however, with constant portable electronic input, is making this kind of intellectual silence harder and harder to attain.

Can’t we use better education to teach people to see past their own blinders?

Yet the plea for better education still persists. Frankly, I chalk the resistance up to that old “Enlightenment ethic” (if only we could make people better educated and get them better information) that is very very hard to dislodge, even when one is citing science to dislodge it.

I can only speak personally on this; I don’t know if anyone else shares this perspective. In the previous dialog on this topic several posts back, I realized that I was having a deeply emotional reaction to this question. I find it more than a bit disturbing that there may be innate limitations to reasoning that we could not overcome no matter what we do. We’ve been clawing our way up out of the rest of the animal kingdom for hundreds of thousands or even millions of years. Its been a struggle with plenty of ups and downs, but it would be a real damper if there are deep obstacles that we cannot eventually surmount.

On the other hand, there are plenty of examples of people changing their minds on big issues. Sometimes it takes many years, but it can happen. We’ve made progress—imperfect to be sure— but we’ve outlawed slavery, managed to cure diseases, etc. We’ve made good scientific progress, so we must be doing something right. Good scientists will look for a test or observations which falsify their own conclusions, and when they think nothing does, they present to the community for others to take a shot at falsifying, and thats worked for us, with all its bruises and scrapes. Somehow Galileo was able to convince people, with enough evidence, that objects don’t fall with a speed in proportion to their mass, Barry Marshall was able to convince the medical community that ulcers were caused by H. pylori infections when the established view was that bacteria couldn’t survive in stomach acid. What happened in those cases? Why were they successes? I’m sure there was emotional attachment by the old school to the ideas that were overturned.

Even if we can’t quite be perfect “Jedi” (I was actually thinking “Vulcan” myself—older generation!), that shouldn’t stop us from always trying to improve. To give up at some level guarantees an end to progress. You’ve been pointing out all this great research that shows the failings even in the most educated of us, but I’m sure this can be explored further. Maybe new approaches to presenting counter arguments can be studied under imaging etc. Maybe contests could somehow be devised to see who can be the least-biased as some sort of proof-of-principle of what we can achieve, and any results from those could be tried in experimental training. Probably a lot of feedback to students would be required, one-on-one, like in music or sports. (Just thinking out loud there).

Nullius:

But the best method against confirmation bias is to find people with different biases because of their different prior beliefs and test your ideas against them. It can result in noisy and emotional arguments. But if it has never been tested thoroughly, how can you know? We all have our biases; if we want to clear out our own errors (and it is a significant admission to claim that we don’t) we have to test our own beliefs. That requires listening to the best available arguments against them.

I agree very much with you there. The arena of open dialog is critical. A key point is to find fresh “opponents” outside one’s normal circles or schools. If I’m not mistaken, some Zen temples had or have a tradition of sending their students to monasteries of other lineages for advanced testing. More importantly, relevant to this blog, is to avoid the internet-fragmentation effect of only discussing in those groups who already more-or-less agree.

And in that regard: Kudos to you.

Now back to my comfort zone…Michael Brady, I think you are on to something here…

“Application of the scientific method, critical thinking, or skepticism are unnatural acts. Despite our best efforts not to succumb to the same cognitive biases as everyone else the discipline is best applied by others. Critical peer review does this. Books and articles written for popular consumption, and blogs, let alone talk radio, not so much. I KNOW I have perceptual and cognitive lenses, filters, blinders, and biases, but I don’t FEEL like I do.”

Very well put, as it draws the key distinction at work, that of the emotional versus rational root of our beliefs

I’ve been thinking about this whole question for some time…. of whether through the illumination/explanation/demonstration of the activity of motivated reasoning we might in some way “educate” folks on how they come to their beliefs, and therefore possibly give them the opportunity to both examine their own and others in a new light. I’m thinking about this question in the context of my role as the Director of a Science Center, nominally teaching young folks about science.

I have certainly not drawn any conclusions, but am fascinated by the question of whether in fact through some form of education, whether by formal (classroom) or informal (such as science centers) means we can have an impact. The nature of that impact is also open to debate on a number of levels.

I’ve begun a conversation on this topic with a number of researchers in this field, and clearly from above, the folks following Chris’ blogs have some interesting things to say on the question. If you’d like to join me in this conversation offline, feel free to get in touch with me via http://www.chabotspace.org.

Finally, Chris thanks for your efforts to keep this conversation on belief formation going…I think it is potentially very important work, with broad impacts and applications.

You can teach methods that make biased reasoning harder to do. All the formalities of science – systematically listing alternatives, taking copious notes during experiments, never ignoring, deleting, or “cleaning up” raw data, listing assumptions and explicitly and formally deriving the results from them, controls, double-blind experiments, randomised experiments, and holding firmly to methodological scepticism – the principle that everything is open to question, no matter how well-accepted, and that plausible problems and questions should be chased down out of principle. How do we know? In what ways could it conceivably be wrong?

But the best method against confirmation bias is to find people with different biases because of their different prior beliefs and test your ideas against them. It can result in noisy and emotional arguments. But if it has never been tested thoroughly, how can you know? We all have our biases; if we want to clear out our own errors (and it is a significant admission to claim that we don’t) we have to test our own beliefs. That requires listening to the best available arguments against them.

“I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather; that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary.”
Milton, Areopagitica.

Milton’s essay is a good one for this debate, discussing many of the issues being raised now. Objections are raised – it results in the spread of bad ideas, it wastes time that could be better used, uneducated people cannot be trusted to distinguish the good from the bad.

Milton replies to the first that their spread cannot be prevented, (“And he who were pleasantly disposed could not well avoid to liken it to the exploit of that gallant man who thought to pound up the crows by shutting his park gate.”) and error is needed to teach virtue (“Seeing, therefore, that those books, and those in great abundance, which are likeliest to taint both life and doctrine, cannot be suppressed without the fall of learning and of all ability in disputation”). Worse, not only doesn’t it work – trying to ban it only encourages its spread. (“Although their own late arguments and defences against the prelates might remember them, that this obstructing violence meets for the most part with an event utterly opposite to the end which it drives at: instead of suppressing sects and schisms, it raises them and invests them with a reputation. The punishing of wits enhances their authority, saith the Viscount St. Albans; and a forbidden writing is thought to be a certain spark of truth that flies up in the faces of them who seek to tread it out.”). To the second he replies with all the many other pastimes people waste time on, and says it is not a waste when the best arguments for the truth are constructed from the false ones. To the third, he says first that it is insulting and unjust, especially to those uneducated but enquiring spirits who love learning, and then that it makes no sense to assume the common people can be led astray by a single pamplet, and yet, without discernment, to be less influenced by the far more copious works of the consensus. (“This may have much reason to discourage the ministers when such a low conceit is had of all their exhortations, and the benefiting of their hearers, as that they are not thought fit to be turned loose to three sheets of paper without a licenser; that all the sermons, all the lectures preached, printed, vented in such numbers, and such volumes, as have now well nigh made all other books unsaleable, should not be armour enough against one single Enchiridion, without the castle of St. Angelo of an Imprimatur.”) To this last it may be objected that a pamplet could be more influential if it was such that people preferred to believe it – but his point is that it is a poor argument from poor teachers if it cannot defeat an opponent with the authority and resources available to the consensus.

It should be clear that Enlightenment thinkers understood that people were biased and irrational, had considered the problem, and had no illusions that open debate would end dispute and error. (Although one could aspire to it.) They didn’t think it a problem, though, they thought of it as a strength.

“Where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, many opinions; for opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making. Under these fantastic terrors of sect and schism, we wrong the earnest and zealous thirst after knowledge and understanding which God hath stirred up in this city. What some lament of, we rather should rejoice at, should rather praise this pious forwardness among men, to reassume the ill-deputed care of their religion into their own hands again.”
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/608/608-h/608-h.htm

It would be interesting to see if a scholar who grew up as a Buddhist (for example) exhibited the same blindness to their own fallibility.