Wooden-Headed

Here's a little rant on that favorite topic of mine: intellectual honesty. A simple goal of this class is to get us all to recognize what counts as good evidence and what counts as bad evidence for a claim. I think we're getting better at that. But this doesn't guarantee that we'll care about the difference once we figure it out.

Getting us to care is the real goal of this class. We should care about good evidence. We should care about evidence and arguments because they get us closer to the truth. When we judge an argument to be overall good, THE POWER OF LOGIC COMPELS US to believe the conclusion. If we are presented with decent evidence for some claim, but still stubbornly disagree with this claim, we are just being irrational. Worse, we're effectively saying that the truth doesn't matter to us.

This means we should be open-minded. We should be willing to challenge ourselves, and let new evidence change our current beliefs. We should be open to the possibility that we've currently gotten something wrong. This is how comedian Todd Glass puts it:


Here are the first two paragraphs of a great article I read last year on this:

Last week, I jokingly asked a health club acquaintance whether he would change his mind about his choice for president if presented with sufficient facts that contradicted his present beliefs. He responded with utter confidence. "Absolutely not," he said. "No new facts will change my mind because I know that these facts are correct."

I was floored. In his brief rebuttal, he blindly demonstrated overconfidence in his own ideas and the inability to consider how new facts might alter a presently cherished opinion. Worse, he seemed unaware of how irrational his response might appear to others. It's clear, I thought, that carefully constructed arguments and presentation of irrefutable evidence will not change this man's mind.

Ironically, having extreme confidence in oneself is often a sign of ignorance. Remember, in many cases, such stubborn certainty is unwarranted.

The Importance of Being Stochastic

Statistical reasoning is incredibly important. The vast majority of advancements in human knowledge (all sciences, social sciences, medicine, engineering...) is the result of using some kind of math. If I had to recommend one other course that could improve your ability to learn in general, it'd be Statistics.

Anyway, a few links:

• I brought up this article before, but I'll mention it again: most of us are pretty bad at statistical reasoning.
• That radio show I love recently devoted an entire episode to probability:
  
  
• Here's a review of a decent book (The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives) on our tendency to misinterpret randomness as if it's an intentional pattern.
• This ability to see patterns where there are none may explain why so many of us believe in god (see section 5 in particular).
• What was that infinite monkey typewriter thing we were talking about in class?
  
• Statistics in sports is all the rage lately. It can justify counterintuitive decisions, like going for it instead of punting on 4th down... though don't expect the fans to buy that fancy math learnin'.
  

Rationalizing Away from the Truth

A big worry that the confirmation and disconfirmation biases raise is the difficulty of figuring out what counts as successful, open-minded reasoning, versus what amounts to after-the-fact rationalization of preexisting beliefs. Here are some links on our tendency to rationalize rather than reason:

• Recent moral psychology suggests that we simply rationalize our snap moral judgments. (Or worse: we actually undercut our snap judgments to defend whatever we want to do.)
• The great public radio show Radio Lab devoted an entire show to the psychology of our moral decision-making:
  
  
• Humans' judge-first, rationalize-later approach stems in part from the two competing decision-making styles inside our heads.
• For more on the dual aspects of our minds, I strongly recommend reading one of the best philosophy papers of 2008: "Alief and Belief" by Tamar Gendler.
  
• Here's a video dialogue between Gendler and her colleague (psychologist Paul Bloom) on her work:

Learning From Mistaking

Based on our super-short no-power class, here's some audio of Jonah Lehrer on Open Source talking about the importance of figuring out your mistakes.

“How experts learn, they really learn by looking at their mistakes. And this can be an unpleasant way to live, because who wants to get home after a long day’s work and think about all the stuff you messed up that day. And yet that tends to be a very effective way to learn. As Beckett said: ‘Fail. Fail better. Fail. Fail better.’ It’s that process of realizing that we all make mistakes. We all fail.

“I talk about it in terms of a variety of domains. I talk about it in terms of a backgammon player. After every match, even matches he wins, he goes back and looks at all the moves he did badly.

“I talk about a soap opera director who, after a day of shooting–a 16-hour day–he goes home and puts in the raw tape from that day and forces himself to make a list of thirty things he did wrong. Thirty mistakes so minor that no one else would notice them.

“Tom Brady: when Tom Brady watches game tape for hours every week, he’s not looking for the passes he did well. He’s looking for the passes he missed, for the open men he didn’t find.

“We need to think about how we think about learning and see mistakes as the inevitable component of learning. You can’t learn at a very fundamental level unless you get stuff wrong. And so not to fear our mistakes. Not to loathe them. Not to be so scared of making them. But to realize that we have to, in a sense, celebrate them. That they are an inevitable component of learning and you can’t learn without them.”

If you like stuff like this, you'll probably like the "Owning Our Ignorance" club.