Michael Perkins

The “what should be” never did exist, but people keep
trying to live up to it. There is no “what should be,”
there is only what is.
--Lenny Bruce





See Also:
Chuang-tzu: The Master soars past sun and moon ...
Laugh at the Sky
Jane Hirschfield: The Adamantine Perfection of Desire
Ikkyu: A single night of love ...
The Mind's Worst Disease

In the following TED presentation, Michael Shermer discusses the natural human tendency to see patterns where none exist. He argues that failing to see a pattern that exists is typically more costly than mistakenly seeing a pattern that does not exist. Failing to see a predator, for instance, would have much worse consequences than imagining a predator that does not exist. Consequently, the brain has evolved to err on the side of seeing too many patterns. This tendency leads humans to adopt all sorts of strange beliefs.




See Also:
Seeing Faces
The Whole Problem with the World
Believing Things Which We Know to Be Untrue
Do Not Believe ...
Denialism

In a controversy, the instant we feel anger
we have already ceased striving for the truth
and have begun striving for ourselves.
--The Buddha











See Also:
The Whole Problem with the World
Believing Things Which We Know to Be Untrue
Do Not Believe ...
Denialism

We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right.  Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.
--George Orwell (1946)


See Also:
Denialism
Global Warming and Cognitive Dissonance
The Whole Problem with the World
Bertrand Russell

In the following video, Peter Sinclair provides a nice high-level overview of what we know about global warming:



Click here for additional videos and other information about global warming.

See Also:
Global Warming and Cognitive Dissonance
Denialism
Scientists Create First Synthetic Life Form
Beautiful Hubble Images

According to a recent Gallup poll, 74% of liberals but only 30% of conservatives believe that "the effects of global warming are already occurring." This is an interesting statistic because we would not normally expect disagreements of fact to divide along ideological lines. Facts are neither liberal nor conservative. The methods of science are independent of ideology, and the same data are available to both liberals and conservatives.

Note that disagreement about the facts is a different thing altogether from disagreement about what to do about the facts. It is not surprising that liberals and conservatives disagree about what would be an appropriate response to global warming. Liberals are more likely to advocate the regulation of industrial greenhouse gas emissions than conservatives since conservatives are generally opposed to government regulation of business.

So what are we to make of the data that shows an apparent relationship between beliefs about the facts of global warming and political affiliation? Perhaps the best explanation appeals to the notion of cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is a state of tension that occurs when a person holds conflicting beliefs or attitudes. A smoker, for instance, might experience cognitive dissonance that arises from the conflict between his belief that smoking will kill him and his desire to smoke cigarettes. In Mistakes Were Made (but not by me), Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson describe this case as follows:

Dissonance produces mental discomfort, ranging from minor pangs to deep anguish; people don't rest easy until they find a way to reduce it. In this example, the most direct way for a smoker to reduce dissonance is by quitting. But if she has tried to quit and failed, now she must reduce dissonance by convincing herself that smoking isn't really so harmful, or that smoking is worth the risk because it helps her relax or prevents her from gaining weight (and after all, obesity is a health risk, too), and so on. Most smokers manage to reduce dissonance in many such ingenious, if self-deluding, ways.

Similarly, a conservative might experience cognitive dissonance arising from the conflict between her belief in global warming and her aversion to regulating business. Just as a smoker can relieve her dissonance by denying that smoking is harmful, a conservative can relieve her dissonance by denying that global warming is happening. Thus, the theory of cognitive dissonance would predict that people's beliefs about global warming would divide along ideological lines.

In general, cognitive dissonance is a universal and powerful motivator. All of us are prone to various forms of self-delusion when our beliefs and attitudes come into conflict. We should all take special note when groups disagree about the facts along ideological lines. In such cases, there is a good chance that one side or the other is motivated more by cognitive dissonance than by good science.

See Also:
Denialism
Scientists Create First Synthetic Life Form
Beautiful Hubble Images

A denialist is someone who champions certain beliefs despite clear and overwhelming evidence that the beliefs are false. Holocaust deniers are paradigm examples of denialists. Despite the overwhelming and incontrovertible evidence that the holocaust did indeed occur, Holocaust deniers claim that the genocide of the Jews during World War II was a hoax perpetuated as part of a Jewish conspiracy. Other examples of denialists are those who deny that HIV causes AIDS, those who believe that the U.S. government was complicit in the 9/11 massacre, those who deny that tobacco use causes cancer, and those who deny that Barack Obama is a natural born citizen of the United States. Some commentators also claim that those who deny evolution, those who believe vaccines cause autism, and those who deny global climate change are denialists in this sense.

In his 2009 book, Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives, science writer Michael Specter claims that denialism occurs "when an entire segment of society, often struggling with the trauma of change, turns away from reality in favor of a more comfortable lie." The denialist denies the facts because the facts are uncomfortable. One might argue, for instance, that the Holocaust deniers are anti-semites who are faced with the fact that anti-semites were responsible for one of the most horrific crimes in the history of mankind. Their denial of the Holocaust resolves the conflict between their anti-semitism and this uncomfortable truth.

In a recent New Scientist report on denialism, Michael Shermer argues that the denialist's discomfort is usually based on a conflict between the facts and an ideological or religious belief. This discomfort causes the denialist to filter the evidence so that these ideological or religious beliefs need not be discarded.

Denialism is typically driven by ideology or religious belief, where the commitment to the belief takes precedence over the evidence. Belief comes first, reasons for belief follow, and those reasons are winnowed to ensure that the belief survives intact.

In the video below, Michael Specter provides an interesting discussion of denialism and the harm that it causes.



Related:
Taxes at Lowest Levels in 59 Years
The Whole Problem with the World
Bertrand Russell
Blind to the Look of Disgust
The Taste of Fine Wine
The UK Statistics Authority
Facebook Linked to a Rise in Syphilis

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.
--Bertrand Russell











Related:
Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Russell was a giant among 20th century intellectuals. He is remembered primarily as a philosopher and mathematician.  He was one of the founders of analytic philosophy, and with Alfred North Whitehead, he co-authored Principia Mathematica, one of the 20th century's most important works on the foundations of logic and mathematics.

Lord Russell was also a pacifist and political activist.  He was inprisoned and later dismissed from Trinity College for his pacifist activities during World War I. Later in life, he was a tireless advocate of nuclear disarmament and a strong opponent of the Vietnam war.

Russell was an outspoken social critic who often found himself at odds with the establishment. In 1940, his appointment as Professor of Philosophy at the City College of New York was annulled by the New York Supreme Court on the grounds that he was morally unfit for the post. In defense of this claim, the court cited, among other things, his liberal views on premarital sex.

A prolific writer on a wide range of topics, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950.

Above all, Russell was a tireless champion of reason in all areas of human affairs.

In the following brief excerpt from a 1959 BBC interview, Russell expresses two ideas he would like to pass down to future generations.

Jonah Lehrer discusses how easily the sensory impressions of wine experts can be influenced by false beliefs about the wine. He describes two interesting studies:

In 2001, Frederic Brochet, of the University of Bordeaux, conducted two separate and very mischievous experiments. In the first test, Brochet invited 57 wine experts and asked them to give their impressions of what looked like two glasses of red and white wine. The wines were actually the same white wine, one of which had been tinted red with food coloring. But that didn't stop the experts from describing the "red" wine in language typically used to describe red wines. One expert praised its "jamminess," while another enjoyed its "crushed red fruit." Not a single one noticed it was actually a white wine.

The second test Brochet conducted was even more damning. He took a middling Bordeaux and served it in two different bottles. One bottle was a fancy grand-cru. The other bottle was an ordinary vin du table. Despite the fact that they were actually being served the exact same wine, the experts gave the differently labeled bottles nearly opposite ratings. The grand cru was "agreeable, woody, complex, balanced and rounded," while the vin du table was "weak, short, light, flat and faulty". Forty experts said the wine with the fancy label was worth drinking, while only 12 said the cheap wine was."

Lehrer draws the following conclusion:

"When we taste a wine, we aren't simply tasting the wine. This is because what we experience is not what we sense. Rather, experience is what happens when our senses are interpreted by our subjective brain, which brings to the moment its entire library of personal memories and idiosyncratic desires. As the philosopher Donald Davidson argued, it is ultimately impossible to distinguish between a subjective contribution to knowledge that comes from our selves (what he calls our "scheme") and an objective contribution that comes from the outside world ("the content"). Instead, in Davidson's influential epistemology, the "organizing system and something waiting to be organized" are hopelessly interdependent." (emphasis mine)

I'm not sure that this is exactly what Donald Davidson had in mind, but the point is still interesting.  For more on wine experts, click here for an interesting WSJ article by Leonard Mlodinow.

A March 23 a Huffington Post headline asserts that:


The facts reported by Huffington Post to support this claim are:

• The Washington Times reported that a dozen SEC workers were caught viewing porn.
• Documents obtained by Gawker suggest that there were sixteen investigations of porn use at the SEC and that porn was viewed over 8000 times. The Huffington Post article doesn't say how many people were responsible for the page views or over what period of time they occurred.

According to a 2005 Harris Interactive poll, 25% of men and 12% of women admit to having viewed porn at work.  I don't know the proportion of men to women at the SEC so let's use the lower number and assume that 12% of the SEC workforce has viewed porn at work.  According to the SEC's site, they have 3500 employees.   If we believe the Harris Interactive poll and if the people at the SEC are like the general population, then we would reasonably expect 420 of them to have viewed porn at work.

The fact that twelve people were caught viewing porn and that sixteen were investigated hardly constitutes a rampant porn problem.  Actually, this is much less than we would expect from an organization of this size.  This is just another example of sensationalist media headlines unsupported by the facts.

The following headline appeared on Telegraph.co.uk today:


Similar stories were carried by other British media outlets.

The Telegraph reports that:

The virus has increased fourfold in Sunderland, Durham and Teesside, the areas of Britain where Facebook is most popular, because it has given people a new way to meet multiple partners for casual sexual encounters.

Professor Peter Kelly, director of public health in Teesside, said staff had found a link between social networking sites and the rise in cases, especially among young women. 

This conclusion appears to be based on the fact that the reported cases of syphilis in Teesdale last year rose fourfold to 30. And what is the connection with Facebook? The Telegraph reports that:

Research has shown that young people in Sunderland, Durham and Teesside were 25 per cent more likely to log onto social networking sites than those in the rest of Britain. 

So an increase to 30 total reported cases of syphilis in an area of Britain that is know to use social networking sites more heavily than the rest of Britain constitutes evidence that "Facebook is linked to a rise in syphilis."

It sounds like there's an opportunity here for the UK Statistics Authority!

It's easy to make fun of this, but the sad fact is that many people will read it and believe it.

It comes as no surprise that government officials often misuse statistics to advance their own political and personal agendas. In an attempt to reverse the British public's growing skepticism of public statistics, in 2008, the British Parliament established an independent agency, the UK Statistics Authority, for evaluating government practices in the collection and reporting of official statistics. The Authority's web site states:

The Authority's statutory objective is to promote and safeguard the production and publication of official statistics that serve the public good. It is also required to promote and safeguard the quality and comprehensiveness of official statistics, and ensure good practice in relation to official statistics.

Richard Aldritt was named the Authority's Head of Assessment. Aldritt, a professional statistican, and his team evaluate the data and review the claims made by officials in over 200 agencies.

Last month, for instance, Conservative MP Chris Grayling claimed that police statistics showed an increase in violent crime during the Labour party's time in government. The Conservatives, moreover, sent the numbers to activists throughout England and Wales in an attempt to show a decline in law and order under the Labour party. The UK Statistics Authority issued an assessment of Grayling's claim that concluded that the apparent increase in crime was due to a change in reporting methodology. Moreover, they noted that the British Crime Survey, normally considered a more reliable source, showed a decrease in violent crime during the same period.

Predictably, Chris Grayling responded as follows:

The reality is these figures actually reflect real crimes, reported to real police stations, by real people. And the reality is however you caveat these figures, whatever qualifications you make about changes to the recording methods, they show a big increase in violent crime over the past decade and we are going to carry on saying that.

Click here to read a BBC article about the flap.

It should be noted that not all assessments by the Authority have been dismissed so cavalierly. The BBC article states that:

In 2008, [the Authority] criticised Labour ministers for releasing what it said was "premature and selective" data about hospital admissions for knife wounds in certain parts of the country. The then Home Secretary Jacqui Smith apologised for the early release.

A truly independent gadfly agency that checks public statistics is probably a good idea, but I doubt that it is going to solve the problem. The flood of statistics, many of which are flawed or misleading, coming out of government and the media is making education in statistics increasingly important. As H.G. Wells said:

Statistical thinking will one day be as necessary for efficient citizenship as the ability to read or write.

A study reported in the August 2009 issue of the Journal of Investigative Dermatology seems to show that patients with psoriasis have a diminished capacity to recognize facial expressions of disgust.

When male psoriasis patients were shown images of disgusted faces, fMRI data showed significantly reduced activity in the insula cortex compared to age-matched male controls. No significant differences in brain response were found when the psoriasis patients viewed neutral or fearful faces.

These results were corroborated by the test subjects' performance on the facial expression recognition task (FERT). Psoriasis patients were less able than controls to identify various intensities of disgusted facial expressions. They were, however, able to identify fearful and sad expressions as well as the control group.

The investigators hypothesize that the psoriasis patients' inability to process disgusted facial expressions protects them from stressful emotional responses.

This appears to be a striking example of what Cordelia Fine calls the "vain brain."

The vain brain presents a "softer, kinder reality" that preserves the individual's positive self-evaluation. While it troubles philosophers, for the rest of us it is vastly more comfortable that we can only know ourselves and the world through the distorting prism of our brains. Freud suggested that the ego "rejects the unbearable idea," and since then experimental psychologists have been peeling back the protective layers encasing our self-esteem to reveal the multitude of strategies our brains use to keep our egos plump and self-satisfied. (Cordelia Fine, A Mind of Its Own,  p. 6, emphasis mine)

Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.

-- The Buddha