A different type of post

Fair warning: unlike most of my posts, this post (and hopefully some subsequent ones) have at best a slight relationship to my work on Hive or on cryptocurrency in general, so feel free to skip it if a meandering form of philosophy isn’t your cup of tea.

Some of the posts, such as this one, will have some relationship to the information rating system I’m working on, but even those connections will often be tenuous at best.

For a long time I’ve planned to share some my own opinions and philosophy on Hive, but I always felt like I never had enough time to do it. In truth, I think it was just a matter of procrastination (something I admit I can be more than a little subject to), so I’ve decided to bite the bullet and write down some of the things I’ve been thinking about (either recently or even from the distant past).

About the community choice

I mostly post in HiveDevs, but that clearly wasn’t the correct choice for this type of post. When I went looking through the list of community descriptions, the first one that seemed to match somewhat was this one, so I hope it is OK to make this type of post here.

About the picture

Personally I have no desire to add a picture to my posts unless it conveys some information better than I can convey it in words, but it is sort of a convention on Hive to have at least one image attached to the post for aesthetic purposes, so I’ll abide by the convention, but in my sort of lazy way.

I wanted an image I could use on all posts on similar topics to this one, so I searched on pixabay for “introspection” since I think I spend a lot of time on introspection and that’s generally what leads me to the ideas I’ll be talking about in these posts.

Somewhat humorously to me, some of the other tags associated with this image were “depressed”, “stressed”, and “isolation”, whereas for me introspection usually embodies quite different feelings for me (i.e. I find introspection generally pleasant).

I guess the reason for those other tags is that in the image, we see someone who is maybe a bit different from the other people, and this leads to a feeling of loneliness. In some ways I do see myself as different from most people, but I don’t think our differences have to lead to loneliness. Indeed, if we embrace our differences, it can lead to a more interesting life where we can think about more ideas.

Beliefs vs opinions

I almost titled this post “Beliefs and Confirmation Bias”, but I feel that belief is a word with two conflated meanings: one is “opinion” which indicates an idea based on some rationale, where the other is “belief” in the religious sense, which in at least some religions implies that the idea requires no rationale or logical support (and indeed in some religious circles even trying to supply such support is looked down on as an inferior form of belief).

Opinions can be logically argued and/or supported with evidence, religious beliefs which require unthinking belief cannot.

Personally I feel this latter form of belief is very dangerous, because it doesn’t allow for a discussion that leads to agreement, and worse, the beliefs are often strongly held and essentially arbitrary, so they can easily lead to violence between people with differing beliefs of this type.

Since beliefs of this type aren’t subject to reason, I typically won’t be talking about this type of belief much. Going forward, If I use the word “belief” or “believe”, assume I mean “opinion” unless I make it clear I’m referring to a religious belief.

How I first learned about confirmation bias

Our beliefs (and our religious beliefs as well) and philosophy are mostly shaped by our life experiences. I think it is easier to understand someone’s ideas when you know what life experiences led to those ideas. So while I’ll generally be discussing ideas, I’ll sometimes share personal events that led me to examine those ideas.

One of the first things we all learn as a child that can be surprising is the concept that people sometimes lie. At first we trust everything we’re told (and for most of us, most of that information comes from our parents or caregivers), then we slowly learn that sometimes we are intentionally told false information.

But even more surprising, at least for me, was that a lot of people can tell the same lie and create a fictional reality. Why was that surprising? Because I observed that people typically lie for their own benefit, and most lies don’t benefit the majority of people, especially not enough that almost no one disputes the lie.

I still think this is generally true and it is a good way to evaluate whether something is true or false (or at least relayed honestly), but in childhood I found at least one exception: the St Nick myth. Here, the lie was told by adults for my benefit (and yes, I see it as such, even today), so it is one of those exceptional cases where almost everyone will lie to you.

In fact, I only found out the truth from a cousin who was my main playmate in my early years. He was three years older than me (I was 8), and even to this day I’m not really sure why he told me.

When he told me, at first I didn’t completely trust him in this particular case: after all, everyone had told me otherwise, and I also didn’t really want to believe him. So I asked his mom and she confirmed it for me.

I remember being disappointed, but not entirely surprised. Because, after all, if I had ever given the issue serious consideration, there were lots of really improbable things that would have to be true if the myth itself were true. When I look back, I can only be incredulous that I was able to avoid thinking about all the things that should have made it clear it was a lie.

But I think that is one of the main lessons I learned from that experience: when we don’t want to know something is a lie because we desire it to be true, it is very easy to ignore any information that contradicts the lie. The idea stuck with me, because it showed me a big weakness in my ability to think rationally. Of course, it wasn’t until much later in life that I learned we have a fancy term for this idea: confirmation bias.

Confirmation bias doesn’t always affect our reasoning: after all, for many questions we don’t have any real preference as to the answer to the question. But when it does, it is very difficult to avoid without training your mind to this weakness.

How to identify confirmation bias (in ourselves or in others)?

The most important step to avoiding confirmation bias is to identify if you (or another person) have any bias towards a question’s answer. But how do you do that?

I can’t be sure on this point, but for the most part I think bias is generated when there’s an answer that will in some way make you feel better.

This is perhaps less obvious than it sounds. After all, at first it would seem like answers to questions like “Does almost everyone like me?” should then be biased towards “yes” in a person’s mind. And often, I think that is the way such a question will be biased.

But what if you endure many hardships or have a lot of problems achieving your life goals? In that case, it is easy to conceive of a person who might actually feel better if they attribute their problems or failures to other people acting against them, in which case they might actually somewhat non-intuitively be biased to “no” on this question.

All this is to say that determining someone’s bias towards a question can sometimes be more difficult than it appears on the surface. But it at least seems it should be easier for the person themselves, as they should generally have better insight into their own feelings (yes, of course it isn’t always true, as we sometimes willfully blind ourselves to our own feelings as well, but it is less common I think).

And determining your own bias is generally the most important thing you can do: while it can be helpful to identify other people’s biases, it is not easy to then change their minds based on that knowledge. You can mostly only use that knowledge to discount their opinions somewhat. But when you know your own biases, you have the power in your hands to reject your biases and more honestly examine arguments and evidence.

Does bias identified = bias gone?

I’m guessing at least half of my readers were about to raise the above objection after my last paragraph, and they can now all pat themselves on the back.

But I only said you had the power, not that you will fully reject your bias just because you’ve identified it. A full rejection is quite difficult, so even knowing we’re biased on a subject doesn’t always mean we can then act as completely impartial arbiters weighing arguments and evidence on a biased topic. It just helps.

Countering bias with bias

So besides knowing we’re biased on a topic and trying to therefore pay more attention to evidence that contradicts our bias, what else can we do?

One of the most useful techniques I’ve found is to find another rational person who is either unbiased on the topic or even biased in the opposite direction and debate the issues and evidence with them.

This can be a very effective method for countering your own bias somewhat, if you in general respect the other person’s opinions (that’s why I slipped in “rational person” into the technique’s description). Using this method, you can see how an argument or evidence is analyzed by somewhat who isn’t suffering from your bias.

Of course, if your bias or their bias is too extreme, it becomes less likely this method will be effective at countering your bias.

But even when I’m been relatively sure on a topic and therefore not likely to change my opinion, I’ve still often found this method useful in another respect: when I debate a topic with someone, it often allows me to refine my own internal ideas and identify weaknesses in the arguments I use to support them.

So it can be a great way to weed out cognitive dissonance in your own mind and enable you to become more persuasive on the topic (assuming you have that desire).

Generalizing the method to counter-weight optimism

After getting to know someone really well, I often find myself classifying them as either an optimist, a pessimist, or a realist. Of course, this is a big over-classification, since people can be optimistic about some things and pessimistic about others, but in a surprising number of cases, they tend to fall into one of these three categories on a large number of topics.

I think each of these categories can have benefits for a person. An optimist will often be willing to try something that a pessimist won’t, so they have more opportunities for success. But contrariwise, the extra risks an optimist takes can backfire, so pessimist generally reduces the chance for loss.

Probably a realist who tries to look at things without bias has the most chance of success without too much chance for loss, but it is still easy to imagine scenarios where you have to be an optimist to be successful, or you have to be a pessimist to survive. So as a species, having a mix of such people is probably beneficial.

As an analog to the idea of finding someone who can counter balance your bias on a specific issue, I believe it is also possible to find someone who can counter balance more generalized biases you may have.

For example, for most of my life I think I’ve been an optimist (although in my latter years I think I’ve become more of a realist). When I started planning my first business, my view of myself as a mild optimist had me a little concerned that I would be too biased at times and potentially take risks that were too big. So I chose as a business partner someone I considered mildly pessimistic to look over my shoulder and raise a warning if I was moving too fast and not spending enough time examining risks.

Should you ever "go against the tide"?

For the most part, I think this method worked out well for me and I recommend it. But I can’t say it is a silver bullet in all cases: in at least one case, I’m pretty sure one of my early ideas would have worked out, but I lacked the confidence at the time to disagree with the opinion of almost everyone else I knew, even when my logical analysis of the situation told me it was a really good idea.

So I guess the last point I want to make in this post is if you’ve really thought something through well and you’ve really given a full consideration to opposing ideas, sometimes you may want to “go against the tide” and trust your reasoning.

But we’re social animals and that’s not always easy either. And if you do, be sure you double and triple-check your reasoning: it is going to be a rare time indeed that you are right and everyone else is wrong.

Feedback welcome

Feel free to let me know what you think of my ideas, positive or critical. While I'm sharing opinions I have, many of them aren't super strongly held, and it is unlikely I will get upset debating them :-)

Also feel free and to share any techniques you employ in your own life to identify or counter your biases.

Finally, I’m generally curious if you consider yourself an optimist, a pessimist, or a realist, whether you’re happy with that characteristic of yourself, and if so why?