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.

Open-Minded

Here's an entertaining 10-minute video on open-mindedness, science, and paranormal beliefs.


I like the definition of open-mindedness offered by this video: it is being open to new evidence. This brings with it a willingness to change your mind... but only if new evidence warrants such a change.

Changing your mind has gotten a bum rap lately: flip-flopping can kill a political career. But willingness to change your mind is an important intellectual virtue that is valued by scientists.

No, You're Not

One of my favorite topics is I'M-SPECIAL-ism. Psychological research has repeatedly shown that most Americans overestimate their own abilities. This is one of the biggest hurdles to proper reasoning: the natural tendency to think that we're smarter--or more powerful, or prettier, or whatever--than we really are.

You've probably noticed that one of my favorite blogs is Overcoming Bias. Their mission statement is sublimely anti-I'M-SPECIAL-ist:

"How can we better believe what is true? While it is of course useful to seek and study relevant information, our minds are full of natural tendencies to bias our beliefs via overconfidence, wishful thinking, and so on. Worse, our minds seem to have a natural tendency to convince us that we are aware of and have adequately corrected for such biases, when we have done no such thing."

This may sound insulting, but one of the goals of this class is getting us to recognize that we're not as smart as we think we are. All of us. You. Me! That one. You again. Me again!

(By the way, this is especially true for the actually smart people among us: the more experienced you are, the more overconfident you're likely to become.)

So I hope you'll join the campaign to end I'M-SPECIAL-ism.

We Don't Know What Makes Us Happy

Here's psychologist Dan Gilbert's (we've mentioned him before) great TED talk on his happiness research:


I'd like to teach a class devoted entirely to TED talks.

Fight the Bias

How can we counteract these cognitive biases we're learning about? As Sam mentioned in class, one big point is to own our fallibility. Awareness of our limits and biases should lead us to lower our degree of confidence in our beliefs. Simply put, we should admit (and sincerely believe) that there's a real chance that we're wrong.

Here are two other big, simple points I think are important:

1. Actively seek out sources that you disagree with. We tend to surround ourselves with like-minded people and consume like-minded media. This hurts our chances of discovering that we've made a mistake. In effect, it puts up a wall of rationalization around our preexisting beliefs to protect them from any countervailing evidence.
2. When we do check out our opponents, it tends to be the obviously fallacious straw men rather than sophisticated sources that could legitimately challenge our beliefs. But this is bad! We should focus on the best points in the arguments against what you believe. Our opponents' good points are worth more attention than their obviously bad points. Yet we sometimes naturally focus on their mistakes rather than the reasons that hurt our case the most.

More to Forget

Here's more on the less of memory:

• Here's an overview on the way our memory is faulty by psychologist Gary Marcus. He's written a book called Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind.
  
• Even strong "flashbulb memories" like what you were doing on 9/11 are not very accurate.
• One leading expert on memory is psychologist Elizabeth Loftus. Here is a pair of articles that summarize her research on false memories, and here's a video of her presenting on it.

Direct Experience

Here's two videos on stuff we've been talking about in class lately. First, watch this:


Next, watch this:


Finally, here's an article on this issue. Still trust your direct experience?

Ask Friends... Old Friends

Here's a case for more deference in our lives from one of my favorite websites:

• Often times, our friends know more about us than we do.
• While talking to your friends, you might want to ask more about them. It turns out that they're less like us than we might think.
• Also, consider listening to advice from older people. We're not as different from them as we think.
  

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.