Why It's Good To Be Biased
When everyone is rational, reasonable and nice, we all get a little dimmer
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One of the disturbing things about having children is that they expose the terrifying depth of your ignorance. They have a habit of asking questions like ‘What’s the French Revolution?’ You embark on an answer, full of confidence, then by the time you’ve got to the end of your third sentence you feel like someone in a Drunk History video. At least, I do.
Being asked to explain something often reveals a gap between what you think you know and what you actually know - a gap which, most of the time, we blithely under-estimate or ignore. Psychologists call this “the illusion of explanatory depth”. In experiments, they ask people if they know how a bicycle worked, or a zip, or a toilet. Of course we do, the respondents say, we’re not idiots. But when asked to explain, in words or diagrams, they produce a confused mess.
I’m reminded of this effect whenever I see anti-Israel protesters stumped by the most basic questions about the conflict. In fact, a lot of our political discourse happens in this gap between what people think, or feel they know, and what they actually do. Into that gap is poured much noise and fury.
The philosopher Dan Williams says that when it comes to politics, many people are “naive realists” - that is, they tend to think that they see the reality of whatever they’re opining on objectively, clearly, and comprehensively, with little or no conscious awareness of their own ignorance, or perceptual distortions.
He cites Walter Lippman, one of the great twentieth century thinkers about democracy: “The opponent has always to be explained, and the last explanation that we ever look for is that he sees a different set of facts.” Williams sees naive realism as very harmful, a problem for democracy:
Because people are naive realists, they tend to think the solutions to political problems are self-evident. This causes lots of bad politics and drives popular support for demagogues who promise to force through “obvious” policies. Further, if the truth is self-evident, people who deny the truth must either be liars, stupid, or crazy.
He then goes on to outline some interesting hypotheses as to why naive realism persists, even after it’s been pointed out and critiqued my sensible people like him. It won’t be a surprise to Ruffian readers to know that I’m sympathetic to his drift. I do think that public discourse would improve if some people were less certain about their political beliefs, and more eager to engage in what you might call self-scepticism.
Generally speaking, the more people know about a complex policy issue or conflict, the less certain they become about the solutions. For a deeply admirable example, listen to Ahmed Alkhatib, who has had family members killed and displaced by the Israelis in this war and knows more about the situation on the ground than virtually any of the campaigners or journalists we hear from every day. He does not demonise the Israelis or repeat slogans or propose facile solutions like “ceasefire”. He knows too much.
Having said all that, I don’t think we want everyone to be impeccably modest about their beliefs or to have perfectly calibrated epistemic confidence. In any given system of people (a society, a team, a family) it helps to have a mix of cognitive styles and temperaments (I touched on this theme last time in part II of my piece on slow learners). It’s good for all of us to have some of us who are over-confident.
Dan touches on one possible reason for this when he says that people who are naive realists are more likely to take political action. Those of us who worry that we don’t know enough about Israel-Gaza to take a really strong view aren’t the ones likely to change the terms of the debate on it. Maybe that’s a poor example, but pick a political achievement that you admire, and you’ll find that naive realism was central to it at some stage. The point of politics is to change the world, not to make rationally unimpeachable judgements.
I’m interested in the virtues of irrationality. In Conflicted/How To Disagree I wrote about the upside of confirmation bias, usually identified as a tragic flaw in human reasoning. The evolutionary psychologists Dan Sperber and Hugo Mercier argue that it’s a feature, not a bug of human cognition, because it increases the desire of individuals to generate new information and make better arguments.
Think about what it’s like when someone contradicts you. You really want to think of all the reasons you’re right and why the other person is wrong, especially if it’s an issue you care about. You might be doing so for selfish or emotional reasons – to justify yourself or prove how smart you are - but even so, you’re probably contributing more to the pool of arguments and information than you would do otherwise.
You can’t have a productive exchange of views if one or both parties immediately gives way to the other. It can actually help to be a little over-confident, and a little hot, and even slightly irrational (without going too far) in making your case. The function of emotion is to motivate. When I bring my best game to the table and you bring yours, the answers that emerge will be stronger for having been forged in the crucible of our disagreement.
In fact - and here I’m about to off the deep end, because this is my grand theory of everything - the most productive social systems (organisations, societies, etc) are made up of somewhat ignorant, biased, closed-minded agents (individuals or groups), which remain just about open enough to all the other agents to learn and develop. Too atomised and and the system atrophies; too connected and each agent becomes less distinctive, bringing less to the metaphorical table, resulting in a system which lacks the benefits of diversity.
Progress is driven by agents which (who) are independent but connected, and stymied when either of those conditions is neglected. You see this effect all the way up the scale, from individuals to teams to societies. There are some great examples from science and history.
After the jump, more on how this dynamic works, plus a rattle bag, which includes:
How to use AI for writing
Statistical scepticism about Hamas’s casualty numbers
Does biological race exist? (Spoiler: yes)
Some joyful and moving music
The good news on climate change
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