Confirmation Bias, Cherry-Picking, and Echo Chambers by Ed Latimore

This post by Ed Latimore offers a good description of common errors people make when forming their opinions and how to combat them.

Learn to Think with the Best of Them

This is the title of a section in Peter T. Coleman’s The Way Out: How To Overcome Toxic Polarization. Coleman’s book strives to show ways to deal with the strident difference of opinion we see all around us. I’ve chosen to put on long quote that I like. It relates to my July 29 post, Favorite Twitter Follows/Examples of Objective Thinkers. I believe many of the names in the table of that post present good examples of people with whom I don’t necessarily agree with but feel they strive to be objective. Prime examples would be Scott Adams, Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald.

As creatures of habit in a highly polarized era, most of us tend to follow the rule, “move toward similar others and away from different.” We are automatically inclined to surround ourselves with and therefore think with similar others who share “congenial information” versus “uncongenial information” – simply because it is easier and more comforting.

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Most of us tend to close ranks and prefer to listen to those we mostly agree with during such tense times (it just feels so good!). This tendency to move toward the similar is intensified by the internet sorting algorithms employed today by many of the major technology platforms that automatically direct us to news, information, and opinion content that is complimentary to our own. This all serves to significantly reduce the nuance and accuracy of our understanding of complicated issues.

One check on this echo-chamber effect is to actively choose to think and learn with different people; that is, intentionally choose to hear from people across the divide. No, it does not mean that you need to tune into the nut jobs on talk radio and cable TV that spout nonsense and conspiracy theories. But it does suggest that there is much to gain from seeking out the best representatives of people you disagree with and thinking through complex issues (although not necessarily agreeing) with them.

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So, if you are interested in gaining a more accurate understanding of a particular issue, learn to seek out the best thought leaders on the other side. [Emphasis added.]

I’d say there is another reason to do this: to test our beliefs. Someone who disagrees with you might present information we hadn’t considered when reaching our position or they might reveal a potential weakness in our argument. It doesn’t mean we have to ditch our position; it might mean acknowledging that we need to tweak it.

'Loserthink' by Scott Adams - Narrative Corrections

'Loserthink' by Scott Adams - Narrative Corrections

One of the people I follow on Twitter and locals.com is Scott Adams, the creator of the cartoon Dilbert and trained hypnotist who specializes in persuasion. Adams runs a daily video blog where he offers his unique perspective on current events. He is one of the few people who predicted that Trump would win the 2016 presidential election based on what Adams saw in Trump’s methods of persuasion.

I’ve been meaning to review his most recent book, Loserthink: How Untrained Brains Are Ruining America, but the post by Joseph Caskey in the link above does a nice job covering the key points.

What exactly is Loserthink? Per Adams, “Loserthink isn’t about being dumb, and it isn’t about being underinformed. Loserthink is about unproductive ways of thinking.” An example of Loserthink: mind-reading where we claim to know what another person is thinking then “refuting” that thought or intention.

Caskey’s review mentions a couple others such as the slippery slope argument but doesn’t mention one that I see all the time: using analogies to make predictions. Adams gives an example in this interview with Sharyl Attkisson.

I highly recommend Caskey’s review as well as Adams’ Loserthink and his other books. Check out Scott’s Twitter feed (@ScottAdamsSays) and his locals.com community (https://scottadams.locals.com/).

Why Can't People Hear What Jordan Peterson Is Actually Saying? - The Atlantic

Why Can't People Hear What Jordan Peterson Is Actually Saying? - The Atlantic

This article in The Atlantic does an admirable job dissecting an "interview" of Jordan Peterson, a University of Toronto clinical psychologist, by British journalist Cathy Newman. I put the word interview in quotes because it actually would be better to describe the exchange as a debate because it was clear that Newman had an agenda she wanted to push by persistently distorting what Peterson said. He handled this admirably! I admire his patience.

This interview runs about 30 minutes. Be sure to catch Newman's reaction at about the 23 minute mark when she tries to box Peterson with the question about whether people have the right not to be offended. Peterson's reply leaves her speechless, not because she was offended but because she couldn't think of a rebuttal.

Review of How To Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds by Alan Jacobs

I’ve read a number of books in the last few years that tell us how we think we’re being objective but we’re actually hostage to a laundry list of various biases, many of which influence us subconsciously. Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow probably is the most influential of these books based on how frequently it is cited in the other books. While Jacobs’ How To Think tills some of the same ground there is a difference. Jacobs’ personal background helps him see how biases influence how different groups of people perceive the world and think about it. Why do I say this? Because he straddles two worlds. He is an academic (teaches in the Honors Program at Baylor University) while also being a Christian. This gives Jacobs a unique perspective where he can see how different groups perceive each other.

When I hear academics talk about Christians, I typically think, That’s not quite right. I don’t believe you understand the people you think you’re disagreeing with. And when I listen to Christians talk about academics I have precisely the same thought.

Jacobs differs from Kahneman and others by saying that thinking involves much more than recognizing and fighting our inherent bias. He believes:

[W]e suffer from a settled determination to avoid thinking. Relatively few people want to think. Thinking troubles us; thinking tires us. Thinking can force us out of familiar, comforting habits; thinking can complicate our lives; thinking can set us at odds, or at least complicate our relationships, with those we admire or love or follow. Who needs thinking?

Here is Jacobs’ suggested first step how to address this taken from his Can Evangelicals and Academics Talk to Each Other? in The Wall Street Journal.

[T]here is a first step that all of us can take in resisting the hold of our Inner Rings and the reflex to push away our “repugnant cultural others.”

The Inner Ring that Jabobs refers to is from a C. S. Lewis talk titled “The Inner Rings” which describes our fear of being left out of our preferred social group, of being considered an outsider to the ingroup that we want to belong to. Jacobs’ discussion uses his term “repugnant cultural other” (or RCO) throughout his book. RCO captures how we tend to be repelled by those who disagree with us in politics, religion, or issues such as gun control.

Or another way to summarize his approach is:

The person who genuinely wants to think will have to develop strategies for recognizing the subtlest of social pressures, confronting the pull of the ingroup and disgust for the outgroup. The person who wants to think will have to practice patience and master fear.

I do disagree somewhat with Jacobs’ explanation why some people cast those who disagree with them as enemies worthy of being demonized and even disposed of.

When you believe that the brokenness of this world can be not just ameliorated but fixed, once and for all, then people who don’t share your optimism, or who do share it but invest in a different system, are adversaries of Utopia. … Whole classes of people can by this logic become expendable – indeed, it can become the optimist’s perceived duty to eliminate the adversaries.

I wouldn’t label people who think this way necessarily as optimists. I’d say they’re sadly lacking in objectivity. They’re not asking themselves why people who disagree with them could possibly take that position. I’ve seen this especially rampant here in Massachusetts among my liberal friends, where I’ve chosen in some cases not to get into arguments. I know a couple people who have quit talking to me simply because I disagreed with their support for Hillary Clinton as president. Having said that, I’ve also seen conservative, libertarian and Objectivist friends treat people who disagree with them in a less than civil manner.

Jacobs describes how each group creates their own keywords so that allies can easily understand each other while judging other people by their use of these keywords. (It reminds me of Arnold Kling’s Three Languages of Politics in which liberals talk in terms of oppressors and the oppressed, conservatives cast debates in terms of barbarism versus civilization and libertarians judge whether acts impede our freedom or coerce us.) As Jacobs correctly says, “keywords have a tendency to become parasitic: they enter the mind and displace thought.” After all, it’s easier to slap labels onto ideas we agree or disagree with than it is to objectively consider them.

Jacobs disagrees with the idealistic image of us as independent thinkers who reach our conclusions unencumbered by the influence of what others think.  “Thinking is necessarily, thoroughly, and wonderfully social. Everything you think is a response to what someone else has thought and said.” I’m sure we can find examples of people who indeed did heroically work out their ideas in isolation. Based on the summaries of the abundant psychological research I’ve read in the books on how we think, I do believe we are swayed by how our friends think and we tend to surround ourselves with people who tend to agree with us. I agree with Jacobs and others (like Jonathan Haidt, author of The Righteous Mind) that despite our advancement from our caveman days we still are tribal in nature. However, I also believe that we can strive for objectivity if we follow Jacobs’s advice such as “when faced with provocation to respond to what someone has said, give it five minutes.” Or “value learning over debating. Don’t ‘talk for victory.’ ”

Before I close let me say that Jacobs doesn’t say we should never come to firm conclusions. “You simply can’t thrive in a state of constant daily evaluation of the truth-conduciveness of your social world, any more than a flowering plant can flourish if its owner digs up its root every morning to see how it’s doing.”

I believe if you take the steps Jacobs puts in his final chapter, The Thinking Person’s Checklist, you can still firmly hold and defend your opinions while also accepting that people can disagree with you. You can be secure in your beliefs without demonizing the other person.

At the beginning I said that I’ve read many books, not just on how biases can affect us. For a number of these books after I finish them I sarcastically ask, “Gee, how did the author shoehorn the contents of a three page article into a 300 page book.” By that I mean the author took an idea that made a good magazine article then expanded it into a book by adding filler and stories but not much else. Jacobs’ book sets an example of how to do the opposite: how to pack many ideas into a slim 156-page volume. His book could have been titled How To Think -- and Write.

Further thoughts on the Fragile Generation

In my earlier post on the fragile generation the interview has this quote from Jonathan Haidt.

In his forthcoming book Misguided Minds: How Three Bad Ideas Are Leading Young People, Universities, and Democracies Toward Failure, Haidt claims that certain ideas are impairing students’ chances of success. Those ideas being: your feelings are always right; what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker; and the world is divided into good people and bad people. ‘If we can teach those three ideas to college students’, he says, ‘we cannot guarantee they will fail, but we will minimise their odds at success’.

I agree with Haidt about the first two ideas that the current generation seems to believe. To me the first idea, that feelings are always right, stems from the lack of teaching kids the ability to think critically. Way back in the mid 1980s a friend and I designed and taught an adult continuing education course on critical thinking. At that time we could see that our adult students had never been exposed to thinking in a methodical, logical way. It makes sense that if people don’t have even a rudimentary grasp of logic and arguments they are subject to subconscious biases and to the push of emotional reactions.

I’ve read a number of books over the last ten years that explore how we form opinions and how we are unconsciously influenced by many biases. I recall reading about one study in which some of the participants read a series of words related to being elderly. When they were later given a series of physical tasks to perform they completed them more slowly than the control group that had not been exposed to those words!

As I explain it to people we like to think we’re being detectives when we’re really lawyers. By that I mean a detective tries to find out who committed a crime by objectively collecting and piecing together the evidence. A lawyer, on the other hand, tries to build a case, either to defend their client or to prosecute the defendant. The studies I’ve read about show that we often come to a conclusion about an issue then go looking for confirming data. We tend to ignore or discount data that doesn’t fit our conclusion.

I agree with Haidt with his identifying the second prevalent idea that what doesn’t kill us makes us weaker. This idea seems to be rampant among what some call the derisively call the “snowflake” generation. I think this is tied to the first premise. That is, if you don’t have the tools to think critically then we’re threatened by ideas with which we disagree.

My main objective is to touch on his third point: that the world is divided into good people and bad people. I’m sure Haidt will explain this more in his upcoming book and that he isn’t saying there are no evil people. Being familiar with Haidt’s work, I believe he is saying that people are too quick to lump those who disagree with them into the evil camp. I’ve seen it happen many times where you’re demonized if you disagree with someone politically. Liberals think conservatives are evil and vice versa. I’m not saying everyone does this but a lot do. It has happened to me during the 2016 presidential election. A couple people have quit talking to my wife and me when we disagreed with them.

I’m assuming Haidt would agree that there are some evil people. The clearly obvious examples would be Hitler, Mao and Stalin or murderous sociopaths. But these are extreme examples. In our daily lives we rarely deal with people who are truly evil. They might buy into ideas or policies that we believe ultimately hurt people. For instance, conservatives and libertarians believe gun control disarms the poor who might live in high crime areas. Liberals believe gun control protects us from those who, in the liberal’s eyes, can too easily obtain guns. Conservatives and libertarians think welfare benefits eat away at the incentive for people to find work while liberals think welfare is needed to compensate for the victims of an economy rigged in favor of the rich and powerful. Neither side in these debates are necessarily evil. But I’ve seen it happen too often where you get slapped with the evil label for disagreeing! I assume Haidt’s book will delve into this in much more detail.

Before closing I’d recommend using something called steel manning and taking the ideological Turing test. Steel manning is opposite of a straw man argument which involves distorting what an opponent is saying then refuting it while the original argument wasn’t really addressed. Steel manning means we take the opposite approach of the straw man argument: you try to strengthen the argument of the other side before trying to refute it. To do this means applying what has been called the Turing ideological test where you try to state the argument of the other side as fairly as possible, as if you actually are taking that stand, then addressing it. I think if more people tried to do this we would have more civil and productive disagreements.

Both steel manning and the ideological Turing test take a lot of work! It means trying to think like your opponent then coming up with your response. Unfortunately, we tend to take the easy way out. Haidt has said in his earlier work that humans are still fundamentally tribal in nature. Once we form an allegiance to a tribe we talk the language of our tribe (see Arnold Kling’s The Three Languages of Politics) and look at the other tribe as the “enemy.”

Critical Thinking: More Than Finding Fallacies

I like this article by Neo-neocon in which she shows how an article in the Washington Post is written to create the impression of Obama suffering from events that have hurt him.

The article goes on to describe the precipitous decline in Obama’s standing in approval polls this year:

His position is all the more striking when compared with his standing a year ago, as he was preparing for his second inauguration after a solid reelection victory. That high note proved fleeting as the president faced a series of setbacks, culminating in the botched rollout of his Affordable Care Act two months ago.

I offer the above as another demonstration of the care with which these things are written. Some may think reporters and editors are simply clumsy or indifferent writers, and sometimes they are. But much of the time they choose their words (and photos) with exquisite and subtle care. They also realize that most people only look at the headlines and photos of most articles, and that those are therefore the most important, and that even people who do read the article often read only the first few paragraphs.

In this article, the headline and photo have been chosen to suggest that Obama is a suffering victim—in fact, the greatest victim—of a series of unfortunate circumstances that have befallen him. Nearly a martyr. And the copy (the paragraph I’ve quoted here is the second one in the piece) reinforces that idea by this phrase, “faced a series of setbacks.” Passive voice; no actor.

I know not everyone will agree with Neo-neocon's analysis, especially if you're an Obama supporter. I offer this example because critical thinking doesn't rely just on finding fallacies. Critical thinking isn't just about analyzing arguments. It also involves identifying premises buried in choice of words that are chosen (consciously or unconsciously) to influence us.

Years ago I taught a course on critical thinking with a friend. While we did cover logical fallacies we also used articles from weekly news magazines to show how the stories were crafted to get the reader to buy into their hidden and not-so-hidden agenda. We had absolutely no problem finding examples for our class. Actually we could have picked any page at random from the typical news magazines or newspapers.