Confirmation Bias as Original Sin

Confirmation Bias as Original Sin:

When Homo Saps Are Intellectually Deaf and Blind--

A Musing on the Mother of All Rabbit Holes

and How to Begin to Regain Objectivity,

with a comment on the crucial importance

of the philosophy of Ayn Rand,

and a plug for Leonard Peikoff too.

There has lately been yet another round of impassioned shouting, at high dudgeon, over the latest terrible mass shooting, with calls for more gun control, and further arguments over the ineffective and counter-productive, unintended consequences of such gun control.  

I believe it is fruitless even to attempt a conversation on such specific matters of politics until we can agree on such foundational matters as the purpose of government, and on what the relation between citizen and state should be.

Now these questions on the purpose of government and the relation of citizen to state entail humanity's very deepest questions, because politics is a late branch of philosophy, and answers to political questions necessarily flow from underlying views on the nature of existence, on what human knowledge consists, and on ethics. These ideas stamp our opinions even when these ideas are not identified explicitly, but are merely held implicitly. I dare say that most of us never get this deep, and the beliefs we hold tend to be the unquestioned ideas we breathed in from the cultural air of whatever tribe we were born into. It never occurs to most of us to question what everybody in our circle believes to be true and false, or good and evil.  We reject out of hand anything at variance with our tribe's beliefs.

Suppose that Plato believes that the individual citizen is an expendable cell in the greater organism of the state, to be disposed of according to the wisdom of its philosopher kings, and Jefferson believes that an individual citizen enjoys the inalienable right to her own life, liberty, and property. It is certain that Plato and Jefferson will never be able to talk about such matters as taxation, abortion, or gun control until they address their deeper, underlying differences. Moreover, if we fail to employ logic and evidence to make a case for our opinions, and if, instead, we blast others with opinions which lie at the surface of the political landscape, then we find ourselves talking past each other, and we render our listeners deaf to anything else we say. When we go on to call others ugly names for holding their opinions, we make our subsequent remarks impossible to hear.

I believe that the Mother of all Rabbit Holes is humanity's Original Sin: not Adam and Eve's expulsion from Paradise (which merely captures the metaphorical truth that human survival depends upon our power of Reason) but Confirmation Bias, also known as attribution bias, which names the lamentable tendency of all Homo saps to be deaf and blind to anything which we do not already hold to be true and right. Get that? Our minds tend to filter out everything that does not fit into our preconceived notions of right and wrong, good and bad, true and false. (Full disclosure here: intellectual honesty compels me to include myself among those who tend to be thus deaf and blind.)

The only antidote I know that works against this awful tendency of confirmation bias is to force myself to read the work of people with whom I am certain I will disagree, but to read them nonetheless, and read them with an honest effort to grant them the benefit of the doubt--to read them with the benevolent assumption that they are well-intentioned human beings like me who are just trying by their best lights to make sense of the whole cloud of madness and misery that human beings have brought to the earth (not to mention the exalted and wonderful things humans do). By this method, I have actually come to change my mind on some truly foundational issues (such as my naïve, and  youthful idealistic belief in socialism as the road to heaven on earth.)

But, of course the deeper point is that, as always, it is philosophy itself that we must grapple with, in our effort to free ourselves of this terrible version of Original Sin of humanity to which I am pointing. 

Objectivity must be the goal, if we are to inoculate ourselves to the hazards of confirmation bias and every other variant of prejudice and mental blight. 

How do we learn to be objective?

Objectivity is already a topic that is well down the list of starting points in philosophy.

So where do we begin?  We must begin looking at the world where we began as babies, and nothing I know in the whole of the intellectual literature better captures this point than the opening page of Leonard Peikoff's Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, which combines passages from Rand and Peikoff. 

I love this opening passage that explains the crucial, life-serving importance of philosophy more powerfully than anything else I have ever read.  Peikoff writes:

"Philosophy is not a bauble of the intellect, but a power from which no man can abstain.  Anyone can say that he dispenses with a view of reality, knowledge, the good, but no one can implement this credo.  The reason is that man, by his nature as a conceptual being, cannot function at all without some form of philosophy to serve as his guide.

"Ayn Rand discusses the role of philosophy in her West Point lecture 'Philosophy: Who Needs It.'  Without abstract ideas, she says,

'you would not be able to deal with concrete, particular, real-life problems.  You would be in the position of a newborn infant, to whom every object is a unique, unprecedented phenomenon.  The difference between his mental state and yours lies in the number of conceptual integrations your mind has performed.

'You have no choice about the necessity to integrate your observations, your experiences, your knowledge into abstract ideas, i.e., into principles.'

"Your only choice, she continues, is whether your principles are true or false, rational or irrational, consistent or contradictory.  The only way to know which they are is to integrate your principles.

'What integrates them? [Rand continues] Philosophy.  A philosophic system is an integrated view of existence.  As a human being, you have no choice about the fact that you need a philosophy. Your only choice is whether you define your philosophy by a conscious, rational, disciplined process of thought and scrupulously logical deliberation--or let your subconscious accumulate a junk heap of unwarranted conclusions, false generalizations, undefined contradictions, undigested slogans, unidentified wishes, doubts and fears, thrown together by chance, but integrated by your subconscious into a kind of mongrel philosophy and fused into a single, solid weight: self-doubt, like a ball and chain in the place where your mind's wings should have grown.'"

Wow!  Self-doubt, like a ball and chain in the place where your mind's wings should have grown!  Oh, my sweet Zeus and Artemis!

This is the most inspiring call I have ever come across for embracing the glory which is your life, along with a blueprint with instructions for how to bring your life to full fruition.
 

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revised 2013.1123