Fight the Bias

How can we counteract these cognitive biases we're learning about? The best starting 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.

The Conspiracy Bug

Here's an article on a 9/11 conspiracy physicist that brings up a number of issues we're discussing in class (specifically appealing to authority and confirmation bias). I've quoted an excerpt of the relevant section on the lone-wolf semi-expert (physicist) versus the overwhelming consensus of more relevant experts (structural engineers):

While there are a handful of Web sites that seek to debunk the claims of Mr. Jones and others in the movement, most mainstream scientists, in fact, have not seen fit to engage them.

"There's nothing to debunk," says Zdenek P. Bazant, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Northwestern University and the author of the first peer-reviewed paper on the World Trade Center collapses.

"It's a non-issue," says Sivaraj Shyam-Sunder, a lead investigator for the National Institute of Standards and Technology's study of the collapses.

Ross B. Corotis, a professor of civil engineering at the University of Colorado at Boulder and a member of the editorial board at the journal Structural Safety, says that most engineers are pretty settled on what happened at the World Trade Center. "There's not really disagreement as to what happened for 99 percent of the details," he says.

And one more excerpt on reasons to be skeptical of conspiracy theories in general:

One of the most common intuitive problems people have with conspiracy theories is that they require positing such complicated webs of secret actions. If the twin towers fell in a carefully orchestrated demolition shortly after being hit by planes, who set the charges? Who did the planning? And how could hundreds, if not thousands of people complicit in the murder of their own countrymen keep quiet? Usually, Occam's razor intervenes.

Another common problem with conspiracy theories is that they tend to impute cartoonish motives to "them" — the elites who operate in the shadows. The end result often feels like a heavily plotted movie whose characters do not ring true.

Then there are other cognitive Do Not Enter signs: When history ceases to resemble a train of conflicts and ambiguities and becomes instead a series of disinformation campaigns, you sense that a basic self-correcting mechanism of thought has been disabled. A bridge is out, and paranoia yawns below.

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:

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.

Filling in Memory

Here's a section (pages 78-80) from psychologist Dan Gilbert's great book Stumbling on Happiness about how memory works:



The preview cuts off at the bottom of page 80. Here's the rest from that section:

"...reading the words you saw. But in this case, your brain was tricked by the fact that the gist word--the key word, the essential word--was not actually on the list. When your brain rewove the tapestry of your experience, it mistakenly included a word that was implied by the gist but that had not actually appeared, just as volunteers in the previous study mistakenly included a stop sign that was implied by the question they had been asked but that had not actually appeared in the slides they saw.

"This experiment has ben done dozens of times with dozens of different word lists, and these studies have revealed two surprising findings. First, people do not vaguely recall seeing the gist word and they do not simply guess that they saw the gist word. Rather, they vividly remember seeing it and they feel completely confident that it appeared. Second, this phenomenon happens even when people are warned about it beforehand. Knowing that a researcher is trying to trick you into falsely recalling the appearance of a gist word does not stop that false recollection from happening."

Too many words, Sean! Can't you just put up a video? You better make it funny, too!

Fine. Here's Dan Gilbert on The Colbert Report:

Hearsay, You Say?

-via GraphJam

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?

Deodorant Gender Norms

If you don't buy these products, you're being unnatural:

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.
  

Penguin Digestion Experts? You Bet!

So you didn't believe me when I said that there are experts on the subject of penguin digestion? Oh, you did? Fine, well, I'll prove it to you, anyway. Here are some academic articles on the topic:

• Adjustments of gastric pH, motility and temperature during long-term preservation of stomach contents in free-ranging incubating king penguins from a 2004 issue of Journal of Experimental Biology
  
• Feeding Behavior of Free-Ranging King Penguins (Aptenodytes Patagonicus) from a 1994 issue of Ecology

Of course, no list would be complete without the often-cited, groundbreaking 1985 Ornis Scandinavica article:

• Differential Digestion of Fish and Squid in Jackass Penguins Spheniscus demersus

Perhaps my favorite, though, is the following:

• Pressures produced when penguins pooh—calculations on avian defaecation from a 2003 issue of Polar Biology
  

If any of these articles are above your head (I think they're all above mine!), you might like this, uh, simpler video demonstration of penguin digestion.

An Expert for Every Cause

Looking for links on appealing to authority? This is your post! First, here's an interesting article on a great question: How are non-specialists supposed to figure out the truth about stuff that requires expertise?

Not all alleged experts are actual experts. Here's a method to tell which experts are phonies (this article was originally published in the Chronicle of Higher Education).

It's important to check whether the person making an appeal to authority really knows who the authority is. That's why we should beware of claims that begin with "Studies show..."

And here's a Saturday Night Live sketch in which Christopher Walken completely flunks the competence test.

Have You Stopped Loading Questions?

Begging the Dinosaur

I couldn't resist giving you some stuff on begging the question. Here's my favorite video for Mims's logically delicious song "This is Why I'm Hot":

Paper Guideline

Due Date: the beginning of class on Monday, December 7th, 2009

Worth: 5% of final grade

Length/Format: Papers must be typed, and must be between 300-600 words long. Provide a word count on the first page of the paper. (Most programs like Microsoft Word & WordPerfect have automatic word counts.)

Assignment:
1) Pick an article from a newspaper, magazine, or journal in which an author presents an argument for a particular position. I will also provide some links to potential articles at the course website. You are free to choose any article on any topic you want, but you must show Sean your article by Monday, November 30th, for approval. The main requirement is that the author of the article must be presenting an argument. One place to look for such articles is the Opinion page of a newspaper. Here’s a short list of some other good sources online:

• The New Yorker
• Slate
• New York Review of Books
• London Review of Books
• Times Literary Supplement
• Boston Review
• Atlantic Monthly
• The New Republic
• The Weekly Standard
• The Nation
• Reason
• Dissent
• First Things
• Mother Jones
• National Journal
• The New Criterion
• Wilson Quarterly
• The Philosophers' Magazine
  

(for even more sources, check out the left-hand column of Arts & Letters Daily)

2) In the essay, first briefly explain the article’s argument in your own words. What is the position that the author is arguing for? What are the reasons the author offers as evidence for her or his conclusion? What type of argument does the author provide? In other words, provide a brief summary of the argument.
NOTE: This part of your paper shouldn’t be very long. I recommend making this about one paragraph of your paper.

3) In the essay, then evaluate the article’s argument. Overall, is this a good or a bad argument? Why or why not? Check each premise: is each premise true? Or is it false? Questionable? (Do research if you have to in order to determine whether the author’s claims are true.) Then check the structure of the argument. Do the premises provide enough rational support for the conclusion? If you are criticizing the article’s argument, be sure to consider potential responses that the author might offer, and explain why these responses don’t work. If you are defending the article’s argument, be sure to consider and respond to objections.
NOTE: This should be the main part of your paper. Focus most of your paper on evaluating the argument.

4) Attach a copy of the article to your paper when you hand it in. (Save trees! Print it on few pages!)

TIP: It’s easier to write this paper on an article with a BAD argument. Try finding a poorly-reasoned article!

Possible Paper Articles

Here are some links to a variety of articles you could use for your paper on explaining and evaluating an article's argument:

1. Bad Stereotyping: race & gender = insufficient info
2. The Idle Life is Worth Living: in praise of laziness
3. In the Basement of the Ivory Tower: are some people just not meant for college?
4. Who Would Make an Effective Teacher?: we're using the wrong predictors
5. Study Says Social Conservatives Are Dumb: but that doesn't mean they're wrong
   
6. The Financial Crisis Killed Libertarianism: if it wasn't dead to begin with
7. How'd Economists Get It So Wrong?: Krugman says the least wrong was Keynes
8. An Open Letter to Krugman: get to know your field
9. Consider the Lobster: David Foster Wallace ponders animal ethics
10. Genetically Engineered Pain Free Animals: would it be ethical to make 'em feel no pain?
11. Is Worrying About the Ethics of Your Diet Elitist?: since you asked, no
    
12. Loyalty is Overrated: adaptability & autonomy matter more
13. FBI Profiling: it's a scam, like psychic cold reading
14. Singer: How Much Should We Give?: just try to think up a more important topic
15. Can Foreign Aid Work?: it has problems, but we should use it
16. The Dark Art of Interrogation: Bowden says torture is necessary
17. Opposing the Death Penalty: it's not about innocence
18. You Don't Deserve Your Salary: no one does
    
19. Against Free Speech: but it's free, so it must be good
    
20. What pro-lifers miss in the stem-cell debate: love embryos? then hate fertility clinics
21. Is Selling Organs Repugnant?: freakonomicists for a free-market for organs
22. Why I Have No Future: Strawson's intuition that death's not bad
    
23. Should I Become a Professional Philosopher?: hell 2 da naw
24. Blackburn Defends Philosophy: it beats being employed

Let's Be Diplomatic: Straw Person

Here's some stuff on the straw man fallacy:

• Politicians love to distort their opponents' positions. Even Obama does it.
• Politicians aren't alone: we do it, too. Often we distort arguments for claims we disagree with without even realizing it. This is because we have trouble coming up with good reasons supporting a conclusion that we think is false, so we have a tendency to make up bad reasons and attribute them to our opponents.
  
• Hire your own professional straw man!

Also, speaking of red herrings, here's a cute cat picture:

Wait, we weren't just speaking of red her--Oh. I see what you did there.

Clever.

Midterm

Just a reminder: The midterm will be held at the beginning of class on Monday, November 9th. It's worth 15% of your overall grade, and will cover everything we've done in class so far:

• definitions of 'logic,' 'reasoning,' and 'argument'
  
• evaluating arguments
• types of arguments:
  -deductive (aim for certainty, are valid/invalid and sound/unsound)
  -inductive (generalizing from examples, depend on large, representative samples)
  -args by analogy
  -args about cause/effect
  -abductive (inferences to the best explanation)
  
• the eleven fallacies covered in class so far
  

Finally, here's a sock puppet displaying the fallacy of appealing to ignorance.

Take My Wife, As Amphiboly

Here's some stand up from Henny Youngman, the violin-toting comedian who came up with "Take my wife... please!"