My take on this is that people need to realize that they are not an exception to this. _Everyone_ has an ideology that overrides logic for many topics.
I think the reason for this is that our brains just generally don't operate on a rational basis because it's not practical for humans. We have to rely on preformed perspectives when it comes to certain broad perspectives. Another reason is that it's almost necessary to adopt your group's perspectives in order to fit in socially. Or at least it's unlikely you will have a different perspective if much of your information comes from one group.
I believe the best ways to buck this weakness are:
1. Invest more energy into trying to falsify your favored beliefs than into confirming them.
2. Embrace humility, since we're always wrong sometimes. Humility to me means: you can have convictions, but you should never assume that people who disagree with you are stupid or evil.
All due respect I don't think the article proved or indicated that "everyone has an ideology which overrides logic on many topics."
The study found that people are less successful at spotting logical fallacies when the conclusions are supported by their politics.
This is itself an interesting finding, but (1) I don't think the "everyone has biases" argument is justified by this article and (2) that precise argument is often used by people to apologize for allying themselves with others who have abhorrent views but are otherwise inline with their political interests (e.g. White Evangelicals in Iowa who vote for Steve King). I'm 1000% not suggesting that you're doing this but I think it's an unfortunate conclusion many draw from your argument.
Yes everyone has some level of irrationality but not everyone has a sound ideology, many people often waiver between conclusions and human judgement is real, important, and helpful.
> our brains just generally don't operate on a rational basis because it's not practical for humans.
It goes way deeper than that. Reasoning being hard to do well would explain a high error rate, but not systematic biases. I think human reason mainly evolved for (as you said) getting ahead socially, and only secondarily for solving object-level problems. There's a good recent book, The elephant in the brain.
> I think the reason for this is that our brains just generally don't operate on a rational basis because it's not practical for humans. We have to rely on preformed perspectives when it comes to certain broad perspectives.
I think there is a more fundamental reason, ie, that there is no complete rational explanation of reality. What we do have is partial rational explanations which work well in some specific contexts, but are not absolute: they break down if you change context. See for example relativity/quantum mechanics; even the hardest of hard sciences doesn't have a unified, complete theory.
That's why AI based on logical reasoning didn't work, and will never work IMHO. Rationality is a tool that intelligent creatures can use - the most advanced tool, probably - but it's not enough to live in the real world. Some of the cognitive shortcuts we use are "only" necessary to cut decision time, but many are fundamentally necessary for adaptation to our environment.
> I think the reason for this is that our brains just generally don't operate on a rational basis because it's not practical for humans.
But that is an ideology! That isn't even wrong, what's wrong is to say that's the opposite of logic.
> We have to rely on preformed perspectives when it comes to certain broad perspectives.
That is generally true, but if the perspective is limited, we start speculating, making and testing assumptions. That's not an ideology per se. The thing with ideology is that long distance planning requires to stick with one theory to see it through. That's why discipline, form and idea are somewhat synonymous. Think about when somebody says someone had no clue. And corollary, different people might partially succeed with different attempts and reach different conclusions. These might be mutually exclusive, if leaning on probabilistic arguments, or just not evidently the same, if it's not obvious how to correlate the experiences. These are different meanings of ideology and the contradictory sense is rather euphemistic or derogatory.
> Another reason is that it's almost necessary to adopt your group's perspectives in order to fit in
That might be dogmatism and virtue signaling, which to a degree signals subordination. That's less than ideal, but the alternative fight to death is often farther from optimal.
_Everyone_ has an ideology that overrides logic for many topics.
Indeed. Both sides of the political spectrum have this! As a person who values truth and knowledge, let me warn my fellow people: Beware of jingoistic and tribalistic claims that reality has a [political-descriptor-here] bias. No human being is free of the need for a little self doubt and introspection. No ideology can act as an oracle, and ideologies which have made that claim throughout history have acted against the truth and even given rise to tragedy and atrocity. If you have reached the point where you believe your opponents are somehow lesser than you are, and that you no longer need to convince but instead must coerce their cooperation, you need to take a step back and beware. No belief system, philosophy, or intellectual movement is so clued into ultimate truth, that its adherents can afford to cease questioning themselves. It's precisely those groups of people who cease questioning themselves and suppress the questions from others who are most at risk of becoming history's villains.
(One of my most disilusioned days was when I saw fellow atheists wearing their atheism like an arm band, using it as a pretext to declare their superiority over fellow human beings, and intoning it like some sort of religious creed. Everyone was wasting time preaching to the choir, and as I was at a musical gathering and just wanted to play music, I called it out. Then I watched them turn on me.)
I'm certainly not an exception. I wouldn't say that I let ideology override reason, but I let it override argumentation and persuasion, which can easily masquerade as reason.
I think that a certain level of stubbornness may actually be a survival trait, because it protects a highly social animal from manipulation and deception.
In modern society, we are deluged with information with a very poor signal-to-noise ratio and many false leads. My approach is to let my short term decisions, such as voting, be influenced to a certain degree by ideology, but let my ideology be influenced over the long term by a preponderance of evidence. This allows me to function without being jerked back and forth by the best debater or hottest news du jour.
This hits the nail on the head, plenty of engineering and programming types think they are way too smart to fall prey to politics and ideology, and are all the more vulnerable due to it.
There is a reason that the majority of educated political extremists come from STEM backgrounds.
I see at work at work. There is someone who is bound by ideology and tries to manage by that (managerial) ideology.
It has lead this person to make decisions which do not fit the characteristics of their current company. They have taken the experience from other industries and from companies with other characteristics and have tried to apply them and shoehorn them. It has lead to some poor decisions, execution as well as inferior relationships with other key players in the company. Superficially something like Mr. Johnson when he went from Apple to JCPenney.
These studies were conducted along political axis lines, "liberal versus conservative". However, most arguments that are being employed in politics are not hard to invalidate in the strict sense by application of formal logic and counter examples. That being the case, it seems an obvious conclusion that one picks holes preferably in the opposition's arguments.
Politics is about vested self interest, not logic.
> My take on this is that people need to realize that they are not an exception to this. _Everyone_ has an ideology that overrides logic for many topics.
Is that what the paper actually says? Based on my personal experience I would think there's a lot of variance but I would be interested to see actual data.
I think it's often even simpler, where ideology just provides false premises. So people are acting in a mostly rational manner but starting from bad information.
(I get that acting on false information is not rational, I'm arguing that it is frequently the core of the irrationallity)
Is sound reasoning even needed all the time though. I have an environmental ideology that causes me to not use cars even when its much more convenient for me. Have I ignored logical reasoning and is that even a bad thing?
> My take on this is that people need to realize that they are not an exception to this. _Everyone_ has an ideology that overrides logic for many topics.
Agreed, but it's also worth pointing out that not everyone indulges in ideological reasoning to the same degree in general. I've heard people make related arguments that because everyone reasons ideologically at points, there can be no objective position on <topic>; of course this argument holds little water, and it seems designed to rationalize the conversant's belief to himself rather than to persuade his audience.
> I think the reason for this is that our brains just generally don't operate on a rational basis because it's not practical for humans.
Not meaning to pick on you, but this line of reasoning is ultimately self-refuting.
If we're not capable of operating on a rational basis, then the belief that "we're not capable of operating on a rational basis" is itself irrational and therefore shouldn't be believed.
Since this is self-refuting it must not be true and therefore we must be capable of operating rationally.
A few good books I'm reading / have read on the subject
The Righteous Mind
The Elephant In The Brain
In Defense of Troublemakers
The deck is stacked very far against us cognitively. We are a walking, talking political nightmare unto ourselves and others.
The worst part is it's excruciatingly difficult and extremely unlikely for you to find your own blind spots. So you need to hash things out with other people. As others mentioned the best thing you can do is hold defeasibility and corrigibility as some of your highest values and do your best to understand all the pitfalls in our thinking.
I'm currently reading _The Righteous Mind_. While I haven't finished it yet, so far a major theme has been that reason's major job is merely to justify what the gut instinct has already decided.
Taking that theory to its conclusion, that means that most people are approaching the question of rationality vs. emotion the wrong way by assuming that appeals to reason and logic are the way to convince the average person. Not so; one must convince their emotions first, and then they will reason together a logical framework to fit their emotion.
It's a bit distressing to think about, but unsurprising when one reflects on the course of history that humanity has taken, and is taking.
I am wrapping up The Righteous Mind and while I think there are a lot of intuitive ideas presented in the book, I have a lot of problems with Haidt's arguments, things he isn't addressing, and his approach to the field in general. It's been a great exercise of critical thinking skills for me.
yes, one of the reasons i believe we evolved to be social creatures is that we uncover better answers when we triangulate opinions and facts with others rather than solely relying on one’s own intuition or reasoning.
Often it comes down to trust, whether that's rational or not. Take climate change. The topic is too involved for most non-scientists to absorb enough to come to an informed decision on their own. Therefore, unless one invests boatloads of time, they must rely on expert opinion for much of their conclusion.
Therefore, climate-change deniers ask if one should trust scientists over their favorite political pundits or favorite CEO's. There are enough incidents of scientists being biased based on funding source to have some skepticism.
When I reply, "Don't pundits and CEO's have similar financial biases"?
Deniers typically respond something like, "Sure, so I have to rely on my gut, and my gut gives them more credit than it gives to scientists. Most scientists come from liberal-leaning universities."
In the spirit of making the best argument for an opposing viewpoint, I think the better argument that would be made is that climate science is the only scientific discipline that seems predisposed to a certain, predicted outcome.
The argument is made that facts are selected or engineered to support a negative outcome because those producing the science already deeply believe in a particular truth and inject that bias into their work. Any scientist seeking to prove otherwise is silenced or ridiculed by the majority, who happen to be true believers. It only takes a few dissenting voices or a few cases of statistics being "manipulated" to add credibility to it.
The conspiratorial nature of it makes it even more compelling to untrusting, unsophisticated outsiders.
I'm also suddenly reminded of Umberto Eco's book 'Foucault's Pendulum', which deals with belief and conspiracy. While a fun, satirical work of fiction, I found it to be very constructive in understanding how people can come to believe things that are completely wrong.
I would counter that reasoning doesn't stand by itself. Reasoning is a method of getting from A to B, but you need an A (your axioms) to reason from. It's easy to disparage people whose axioms are different from yours (Jehovah is God/Allah is God/There is no god), but sometimes that's all there is to it. Though once emotions get involved (such as by challenging the political/religious framework on which they've built their life), pretty much everyone will also fail to adhere to strict reason.
Christopher Tyerman's body of work on the Crusades is really interesting in this regard. One of the key points he keeps pressing home, is that though we think of Medieval people as ignorant and superstitious, they were in fact highly rational. And they were as a culture committed to rational investigation of the world.
But they had axiomatic beliefs that they were building upon. Which meant they were also committed to a rational investigation of the supernatural world. Which we generally view as non-rational.
I'm very much paraphrasing and he would not express it so crudely.
I really really like the premise of this study, but I don't buy the results fully.
The logic in the 2nd and 3rd prompts is subtle. In fact, I don't think the 2nd one is in fact a syllogism -- it's unclear if Judge Wilson believes if or if and only if. In the former case, the statement is in fact not a syllogism, but in the latter case it is a syllogism. I wouldn't expect your average study participant to pick up on the difference.
I am afraid that the only conclusion here is that, in the absence of a clear logical argument to evaluate, (either due to ambiguity or complexity), people fall back on their beliefs.
But it's not an unreasonable requirement because without inferring iff you get "Judge Wilson believes one has the right to end the life all living things" and "Doctor Simmi believes the surgery should proceed no matter what"
Still, I imagine that's enough to throw of an unknown percent of people, alas.
>I am afraid that the only conclusion here is that, in the absence of a clear logical argument to evaluate, (either due to ambiguity or complexity), people fall back on their beliefs.
Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.
As far as I can tell from skimming the paper, it fails to establish that ideology impairs reasoning more than any other kind of pre-existing belief.
There is a well-established bias, called belief bias (which the paper mentions), against accepting the logical validity of arguments whose conclusions you disbelieve. The study tested examples of this where the conclusions were political (agreed with liberal or conservative viewpoints), but AFAICT did not use a control test where the conclusions were apolitical, but the participants still agreed or disagreed with them.
A control could have established whether political arguments were more (or less, or equally) susceptible to belief bias. But they didn't use one. So the study only establishes that political arguments are susceptible to belief bias.
Sure, ideology impacts formal reasoning, but if you look at the examples given the participants have good reason to reject the conclusions of formal logic that is based on terrible premises.
Despite the result of a simple sequence of sentences divorced from reality, cigarettes really are bad for you and salads are good (depending on their contents).
In study 1) participants might disagree with dangerous drugs being banned, and they disagree that marijuana is dangerous. In 2) premise 1 seems relatively straightforward, then premise 2 is a highly ideological belief (as is the point of the study).
I don't think this is very revealing. When you add 1+2 and get 68445788, you are suprised by the conclusion and check your work. People responding to this aren't dumb, they just aren't playing along with what they regard as faulty reasoning. Basically, they are likely saying I know what the researcher wants me to say, but this is wrong and I won't go along with it.
The Milgram experiment is the most prominent example which might not be possible today because it depends on participants' willingness to obey scientists. The Milgram effect is still real, but it has become harder to measure.
So in this case, when participants are asked to reason based on premises they don't agree with, they might, as you've suggested, refuse. They might interpret the researchers' intent as nefarious, e.g. "if I agree this syllogism is valid the researcher will report that I support the conclusion". This line of thinking is of course absurd, but it comes close to what I've observed that some people believe about scientists.
What you're saying and the conclusions of the study are one in the same. Though I would disagree that their questions were like presenting 1+2=68445788. I would suggest they're more like 1 is 32119592 and 2 is 36326196 thus 1+2=68445788. 1 and 2 are not those numbers, but to be premised such a way formally the results of the logic check out.
Regardless of whether it's revealing or not it's a good thing to work towards establishing these sorts of conclusions through studies so that someday we can hope to have fewer terrible premises.
I have to agree with some of other commentators that I don't think this study is particularly revealing, because there's a lot of nuance in the questions that doesn't directly follow logical thinking. I want to address the first two questions
>All drugs that are dangerous should be illegal. Marijuana is a drug that is dangerous. Therefore, Marijuana should be illegal.
The flaw with this question is that it's divorced completely from the cultural reality we live in. Cigarette smoking is legal, despite being dangerous. The final clause does not actually follow from the rest of the logic, because we have tangible examples of Drug A being Dangerous and Legal. People might think of this, and therefore disregard the conclusion. I don't think that would be the result of ideological impairment, but rather the result of people examining nuance.
>Judge Wilson believes that if a living thing is not a person, then one has the right to end its life. She also believes that a fetus is a person. Therefore, Judge Wilson concludes that no one has the right to end the life of a fetus.
This is just poorly worded. If something is not a person, then Wilson believes you have the right to terminate it. Since a fetus is a person, then no one has the right to terminate it. That logic does not necessarily follow from the initial statement; because the nuance there is that Wilson is expanding her personal logic into the logic of everyone else. Again, there's a bit of nuance in that people may personally not be for abortion, but believe that women still have the right to abortion despite their own personal beliefs.
The logic is also initially biased right from the start, since it implies that Wilson would also believe killing animals, pets etc is OK.
I don't think these two questions really resolve the issue of bias preventing sound reasoning, because it implies that the conclusion of the two questions was logical in the first place. They effectively managed to prove that two highly nuanced questions are, in fact, highly nuanced.
It seems quite concerning then, that most political parties are ideologically driven. I would really like to see a political party focused on evidence based politics.
Politics isn’t mostly about values or beliefs, it’s mostly about winning, beating the other side. Insofar as it is about either we have a proposal to make values explicit and to incentivise teaching the goals that serve those values.
> This short "manifesto" describes a new form of government. In "futarchy," we would vote on values, but bet on beliefs. Elected representatives would formally define and manage an after-the-fact measurement of national welfare, while market speculators would say which policies they expect to raise national welfare.
Democracy seems better than autocracy (i.e., kings and dictators), but it still has problems. There are today vast differences in wealth among nations, and we can not attribute most of these differences to either natural resources or human abilities. Instead, much of the difference seems to be that the poor nations (many of which are democracies) are those that more often adopted dumb policies, policies which hurt most everyone in the nation. And even rich nations frequently adopt such policies.
These policies are not just dumb in retrospect; typically there were people who understood a lot about such policies and who had good reasons to disapprove of them beforehand. It seems hard to imagine such policies being adopted nearly as often if everyone knew what such "experts" knew about their consequences. Thus familiar forms of government seem to frequently fail by ignoring the advice of relevant experts (i.e., people who know relevant things).
The only hope for humanity is to find a way to fix this nature mistake in future generations by correcting the genetic code (or anything else important for this process), when it will be completely reverse engineered. All cognitive biases at once.
I intuitively understand the word ideology as denoting false consciousness, in the marxist sense of the word. So the title reads like a total tautology for me, a la Unsound Reasoning Impairs Sound Reasoning.
Guess I'm experiencing ideology.
[+] [-] ilaksh|7 years ago|reply
I think the reason for this is that our brains just generally don't operate on a rational basis because it's not practical for humans. We have to rely on preformed perspectives when it comes to certain broad perspectives. Another reason is that it's almost necessary to adopt your group's perspectives in order to fit in socially. Or at least it's unlikely you will have a different perspective if much of your information comes from one group.
[+] [-] haberman|7 years ago|reply
1. Invest more energy into trying to falsify your favored beliefs than into confirming them.
2. Embrace humility, since we're always wrong sometimes. Humility to me means: you can have convictions, but you should never assume that people who disagree with you are stupid or evil.
[+] [-] tj-teej|7 years ago|reply
The study found that people are less successful at spotting logical fallacies when the conclusions are supported by their politics.
This is itself an interesting finding, but (1) I don't think the "everyone has biases" argument is justified by this article and (2) that precise argument is often used by people to apologize for allying themselves with others who have abhorrent views but are otherwise inline with their political interests (e.g. White Evangelicals in Iowa who vote for Steve King). I'm 1000% not suggesting that you're doing this but I think it's an unfortunate conclusion many draw from your argument.
Yes everyone has some level of irrationality but not everyone has a sound ideology, many people often waiver between conclusions and human judgement is real, important, and helpful.
[+] [-] azeotropic|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abecedarius|7 years ago|reply
It goes way deeper than that. Reasoning being hard to do well would explain a high error rate, but not systematic biases. I think human reason mainly evolved for (as you said) getting ahead socially, and only secondarily for solving object-level problems. There's a good recent book, The elephant in the brain.
[+] [-] danmaz74|7 years ago|reply
I think there is a more fundamental reason, ie, that there is no complete rational explanation of reality. What we do have is partial rational explanations which work well in some specific contexts, but are not absolute: they break down if you change context. See for example relativity/quantum mechanics; even the hardest of hard sciences doesn't have a unified, complete theory.
That's why AI based on logical reasoning didn't work, and will never work IMHO. Rationality is a tool that intelligent creatures can use - the most advanced tool, probably - but it's not enough to live in the real world. Some of the cognitive shortcuts we use are "only" necessary to cut decision time, but many are fundamentally necessary for adaptation to our environment.
[+] [-] tathougies|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] posterboy|7 years ago|reply
But that is an ideology! That isn't even wrong, what's wrong is to say that's the opposite of logic.
> We have to rely on preformed perspectives when it comes to certain broad perspectives.
That is generally true, but if the perspective is limited, we start speculating, making and testing assumptions. That's not an ideology per se. The thing with ideology is that long distance planning requires to stick with one theory to see it through. That's why discipline, form and idea are somewhat synonymous. Think about when somebody says someone had no clue. And corollary, different people might partially succeed with different attempts and reach different conclusions. These might be mutually exclusive, if leaning on probabilistic arguments, or just not evidently the same, if it's not obvious how to correlate the experiences. These are different meanings of ideology and the contradictory sense is rather euphemistic or derogatory.
> Another reason is that it's almost necessary to adopt your group's perspectives in order to fit in
That might be dogmatism and virtue signaling, which to a degree signals subordination. That's less than ideal, but the alternative fight to death is often farther from optimal.
[+] [-] stcredzero|7 years ago|reply
Indeed. Both sides of the political spectrum have this! As a person who values truth and knowledge, let me warn my fellow people: Beware of jingoistic and tribalistic claims that reality has a [political-descriptor-here] bias. No human being is free of the need for a little self doubt and introspection. No ideology can act as an oracle, and ideologies which have made that claim throughout history have acted against the truth and even given rise to tragedy and atrocity. If you have reached the point where you believe your opponents are somehow lesser than you are, and that you no longer need to convince but instead must coerce their cooperation, you need to take a step back and beware. No belief system, philosophy, or intellectual movement is so clued into ultimate truth, that its adherents can afford to cease questioning themselves. It's precisely those groups of people who cease questioning themselves and suppress the questions from others who are most at risk of becoming history's villains.
(One of my most disilusioned days was when I saw fellow atheists wearing their atheism like an arm band, using it as a pretext to declare their superiority over fellow human beings, and intoning it like some sort of religious creed. Everyone was wasting time preaching to the choir, and as I was at a musical gathering and just wanted to play music, I called it out. Then I watched them turn on me.)
(Both sides of the political spectrum deny science for ideology. They just deny different parts of science. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkdIB03RdBg )
[+] [-] analog31|7 years ago|reply
I think that a certain level of stubbornness may actually be a survival trait, because it protects a highly social animal from manipulation and deception.
In modern society, we are deluged with information with a very poor signal-to-noise ratio and many false leads. My approach is to let my short term decisions, such as voting, be influenced to a certain degree by ideology, but let my ideology be influenced over the long term by a preponderance of evidence. This allows me to function without being jerked back and forth by the best debater or hottest news du jour.
[+] [-] throwaway2048|7 years ago|reply
There is a reason that the majority of educated political extremists come from STEM backgrounds.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2015/11/1...
[+] [-] mc32|7 years ago|reply
It has lead this person to make decisions which do not fit the characteristics of their current company. They have taken the experience from other industries and from companies with other characteristics and have tried to apply them and shoehorn them. It has lead to some poor decisions, execution as well as inferior relationships with other key players in the company. Superficially something like Mr. Johnson when he went from Apple to JCPenney.
[+] [-] SagelyGuru|7 years ago|reply
Politics is about vested self interest, not logic.
[+] [-] s17n|7 years ago|reply
Is that what the paper actually says? Based on my personal experience I would think there's a lot of variance but I would be interested to see actual data.
[+] [-] burtonator|7 years ago|reply
Yes. However, my ideology is that logic, evidence, and reason, and reality are far more important than ideology.
All I care about is evidence and if I hold a position that is faulty I abandon it the moment there is evidence that I'm incorrect.
[+] [-] maxerickson|7 years ago|reply
(I get that acting on false information is not rational, I'm arguing that it is frequently the core of the irrationallity)
[+] [-] baroffoos|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] weberc2|7 years ago|reply
Agreed, but it's also worth pointing out that not everyone indulges in ideological reasoning to the same degree in general. I've heard people make related arguments that because everyone reasons ideologically at points, there can be no objective position on <topic>; of course this argument holds little water, and it seems designed to rationalize the conversant's belief to himself rather than to persuade his audience.
[+] [-] cdoxsey|7 years ago|reply
Not meaning to pick on you, but this line of reasoning is ultimately self-refuting.
If we're not capable of operating on a rational basis, then the belief that "we're not capable of operating on a rational basis" is itself irrational and therefore shouldn't be believed.
Since this is self-refuting it must not be true and therefore we must be capable of operating rationally.
[+] [-] ataturk|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] aaron695|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Pristina|7 years ago|reply
speak for youself
i have yet to be proven the case while i have shown many others that they are.
[+] [-] james_s_tayler|7 years ago|reply
The worst part is it's excruciatingly difficult and extremely unlikely for you to find your own blind spots. So you need to hash things out with other people. As others mentioned the best thing you can do is hold defeasibility and corrigibility as some of your highest values and do your best to understand all the pitfalls in our thinking.
[+] [-] acabal|7 years ago|reply
Taking that theory to its conclusion, that means that most people are approaching the question of rationality vs. emotion the wrong way by assuming that appeals to reason and logic are the way to convince the average person. Not so; one must convince their emotions first, and then they will reason together a logical framework to fit their emotion.
It's a bit distressing to think about, but unsurprising when one reflects on the course of history that humanity has taken, and is taking.
[+] [-] cjslep|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] clairity|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tabtab|7 years ago|reply
Therefore, climate-change deniers ask if one should trust scientists over their favorite political pundits or favorite CEO's. There are enough incidents of scientists being biased based on funding source to have some skepticism.
When I reply, "Don't pundits and CEO's have similar financial biases"?
Deniers typically respond something like, "Sure, so I have to rely on my gut, and my gut gives them more credit than it gives to scientists. Most scientists come from liberal-leaning universities."
[+] [-] oldprogrammer2|7 years ago|reply
The argument is made that facts are selected or engineered to support a negative outcome because those producing the science already deeply believe in a particular truth and inject that bias into their work. Any scientist seeking to prove otherwise is silenced or ridiculed by the majority, who happen to be true believers. It only takes a few dissenting voices or a few cases of statistics being "manipulated" to add credibility to it.
The conspiratorial nature of it makes it even more compelling to untrusting, unsophisticated outsiders.
I'm also suddenly reminded of Umberto Eco's book 'Foucault's Pendulum', which deals with belief and conspiracy. While a fun, satirical work of fiction, I found it to be very constructive in understanding how people can come to believe things that are completely wrong.
[+] [-] parsnips|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] indigochill|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scandox|7 years ago|reply
But they had axiomatic beliefs that they were building upon. Which meant they were also committed to a rational investigation of the supernatural world. Which we generally view as non-rational.
I'm very much paraphrasing and he would not express it so crudely.
[+] [-] nerdponx|7 years ago|reply
The logic in the 2nd and 3rd prompts is subtle. In fact, I don't think the 2nd one is in fact a syllogism -- it's unclear if Judge Wilson believes if or if and only if. In the former case, the statement is in fact not a syllogism, but in the latter case it is a syllogism. I wouldn't expect your average study participant to pick up on the difference.
I am afraid that the only conclusion here is that, in the absence of a clear logical argument to evaluate, (either due to ambiguity or complexity), people fall back on their beliefs.
[+] [-] TomMckenny|7 years ago|reply
But it's not an unreasonable requirement because without inferring iff you get "Judge Wilson believes one has the right to end the life all living things" and "Doctor Simmi believes the surgery should proceed no matter what"
Still, I imagine that's enough to throw of an unknown percent of people, alas.
>I am afraid that the only conclusion here is that, in the absence of a clear logical argument to evaluate, (either due to ambiguity or complexity), people fall back on their beliefs.
Still an interesting conclusion though.
[+] [-] viburnum|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gonehome|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tlb|7 years ago|reply
Psychology seems to be responding to the replication crisis by studying some really obvious truisms.
[+] [-] rntz|7 years ago|reply
There is a well-established bias, called belief bias (which the paper mentions), against accepting the logical validity of arguments whose conclusions you disbelieve. The study tested examples of this where the conclusions were political (agreed with liberal or conservative viewpoints), but AFAICT did not use a control test where the conclusions were apolitical, but the participants still agreed or disagreed with them.
A control could have established whether political arguments were more (or less, or equally) susceptible to belief bias. But they didn't use one. So the study only establishes that political arguments are susceptible to belief bias.
[+] [-] fhfjgkvjvj|7 years ago|reply
Despite the result of a simple sequence of sentences divorced from reality, cigarettes really are bad for you and salads are good (depending on their contents).
In study 1) participants might disagree with dangerous drugs being banned, and they disagree that marijuana is dangerous. In 2) premise 1 seems relatively straightforward, then premise 2 is a highly ideological belief (as is the point of the study).
I don't think this is very revealing. When you add 1+2 and get 68445788, you are suprised by the conclusion and check your work. People responding to this aren't dumb, they just aren't playing along with what they regard as faulty reasoning. Basically, they are likely saying I know what the researcher wants me to say, but this is wrong and I won't go along with it.
[+] [-] scythe|7 years ago|reply
http://www.niemanlab.org/2019/01/a-gloomy-vision-for-fake-ne...
The Milgram experiment is the most prominent example which might not be possible today because it depends on participants' willingness to obey scientists. The Milgram effect is still real, but it has become harder to measure.
So in this case, when participants are asked to reason based on premises they don't agree with, they might, as you've suggested, refuse. They might interpret the researchers' intent as nefarious, e.g. "if I agree this syllogism is valid the researcher will report that I support the conclusion". This line of thinking is of course absurd, but it comes close to what I've observed that some people believe about scientists.
[+] [-] blakejustblake|7 years ago|reply
Regardless of whether it's revealing or not it's a good thing to work towards establishing these sorts of conclusions through studies so that someday we can hope to have fewer terrible premises.
[+] [-] fzeroracer|7 years ago|reply
>All drugs that are dangerous should be illegal. Marijuana is a drug that is dangerous. Therefore, Marijuana should be illegal.
The flaw with this question is that it's divorced completely from the cultural reality we live in. Cigarette smoking is legal, despite being dangerous. The final clause does not actually follow from the rest of the logic, because we have tangible examples of Drug A being Dangerous and Legal. People might think of this, and therefore disregard the conclusion. I don't think that would be the result of ideological impairment, but rather the result of people examining nuance.
>Judge Wilson believes that if a living thing is not a person, then one has the right to end its life. She also believes that a fetus is a person. Therefore, Judge Wilson concludes that no one has the right to end the life of a fetus.
This is just poorly worded. If something is not a person, then Wilson believes you have the right to terminate it. Since a fetus is a person, then no one has the right to terminate it. That logic does not necessarily follow from the initial statement; because the nuance there is that Wilson is expanding her personal logic into the logic of everyone else. Again, there's a bit of nuance in that people may personally not be for abortion, but believe that women still have the right to abortion despite their own personal beliefs.
The logic is also initially biased right from the start, since it implies that Wilson would also believe killing animals, pets etc is OK.
I don't think these two questions really resolve the issue of bias preventing sound reasoning, because it implies that the conclusion of the two questions was logical in the first place. They effectively managed to prove that two highly nuanced questions are, in fact, highly nuanced.
[+] [-] collyw|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] barry-cotter|7 years ago|reply
http://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/futarchy.html
> Futarchy: Vote Values, But Bet Beliefs
> by Robin Hanson
> This short "manifesto" describes a new form of government. In "futarchy," we would vote on values, but bet on beliefs. Elected representatives would formally define and manage an after-the-fact measurement of national welfare, while market speculators would say which policies they expect to raise national welfare. Democracy seems better than autocracy (i.e., kings and dictators), but it still has problems. There are today vast differences in wealth among nations, and we can not attribute most of these differences to either natural resources or human abilities. Instead, much of the difference seems to be that the poor nations (many of which are democracies) are those that more often adopted dumb policies, policies which hurt most everyone in the nation. And even rich nations frequently adopt such policies. These policies are not just dumb in retrospect; typically there were people who understood a lot about such policies and who had good reasons to disapprove of them beforehand. It seems hard to imagine such policies being adopted nearly as often if everyone knew what such "experts" knew about their consequences. Thus familiar forms of government seem to frequently fail by ignoring the advice of relevant experts (i.e., people who know relevant things).
[+] [-] the6threplicant|7 years ago|reply
Either you're a conspiracy theorist and believe so many weird things that adding another believe won't top the cart.
Or is it that we want to believe explanations that we understand (or think we do) and not believe what we don't understand (science).
[+] [-] xvilka|7 years ago|reply
It might take centuries though...
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] mbrodersen|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] tokai|7 years ago|reply