The feeling you're about to get smarter

As you might have noticed if you read this blog, I'm quite an aggressive rationalist - I'm big on introspection, and strive to be as rational, consistent and justified in my beliefs as possible. If someone demonstrates to me conclusively that I'm wrong I'll generally (at least: I'll try to) reverse my position on a dime.

Because I try not to invest identity in my opinions it's usually not too difficult to change a belief or position when new information or reasoning comes along. However, even I'll admit that despite my efforts in this area, It's Not Fun Being Wrong.

In particular, everyone hates that point in a discussion that most rational people experience occasionally, where you discover your argument has a gaping hole in it. You know the one - you get that sick, empty, vertiginous, see-sawing feeling where it feels like you've inched yourself out over a long drop because you trusted the plank you were standing on, only to notice now that it was apparently made of cardboard the whole time.

However, I've realised recently, that feeling is exciting and scary, but it should be savoured and sought-after, because it's the feeling you're about to get smarter.

It may feel unpleasant, but that doesn't mean it should be unpleasant - that's much more down to what we associate with the feeling than the feeling itself. For example, a muscular ache is rarely considered pleasant... and yet after a good workout we can even enjoy it. This is because - while the feeling is the same - when we've worked out hard out we often feel virtuous, and good about ourselves. Although our muscles ache, every time we notice it it's a reminder that we did something we think of as good, and that we're slightly fitter or healthier now (or can just eat an extra cream cake without feeling guilty) as a result.

Equally, it's usually unpleasant to have our insides jangled about, or to feel like we're falling, or to be out of control... and yet many people love roller-coasters. It's unpleasant to be frightened... but some people will watch horror movies for fun.

In every case, the important difference is that although the sensation might be unpleasant on its own, we recognise in each case that we're getting something greater out of it, that makes the uncomfortable sensation worth-while - health and fitness, or novelty, or entertainment and feeling more secure the rest of the time. Indeed, when we associate it strongly enough, you can find yourself searching out these unpleasant sensations, and relishing the discomfort because of what it signifies.

"Being wrong" is one such unpleasant sensation, but as pointed out above, it's actually the feeling that you've just become smarter. This is unambiguously a good thing... and yet we generally don't realise or acknowledge to ourselves that that's what's happening, so people often simply fixate on (or even actively, instinctively try to avoid) the unpleasant sensation.

What this means, then, is that as humans we very deeply, subconsciously, instinctively try to stop ourselves from becoming smarter, and we don't even realise we're doing it. Whatever we consciously tell ourselves, subconsciously we would rather feel good about ourselves and be wrong than be correct or rational in our opinions.

As you're reading this blog, I'll assume you're the kind of person who would rather be right (even if it's uncomfortable) than deluded but confident. This, then, is clearly a problem.

What to do about it?

The good news is that - because it's a subconscious association, it's malleable. You can change and modify (even, as we've seen, completely reverse) these associations with a little effort.

Try the following: next time you realise (or someone proves) you're wrong about something, stop and consciously acknowledge it to yourself. Try to hold and really feel that sensation of being wrong. Try to consciously acknowledge and analyse the emotions you're feeling - are you embarrassed? Ashamed? Annoyed? At the other person or yourself? Do you suddenly feel less sure of your place in the world, or your opinions on certain subjects? Can you feel that bruise on your ego?

Be brutally honest with yourself - if it helps, if you don't feel any of the above (or something similar), you're probably not human.

Now you're fully engaged, and aware of how you feel, try to modify it. Acknowledge that you're feeling bad, but remind yourself it's only because your ego is wounded. Realise that the only thing making you feel bad is egotism, but that even that is both instinctive (ie, uncontrollable and not your fault), and a normal part of being human.

Remind yourself that you want to be smart and right and rational about things, and remind yourself that what you're feeling is the feeling of getting smarter, that that's unambiguously good. Try to explicitly relate the uncomfortable sensation to the positive feelings you have about being smart, or correct, or rational in your beliefs. Nice, isn't it? So, like exercise, or taking care of paperwork, that feeling you initially shied away from or avoided is actually a good thing, even if it's briefly uncomfortable in the short term.

Once you're smarter or more right about a subject, you're generally smarter or more right about it for the rest of your life. Isn't that worth a brief, temporary, silly little sting?

Now you've got the hang of it, go out and try to find things you're wrong about. Read up on subjects that interest you. Challenge your beliefs and attitudes by seeking out dissenting opinions and viewpoints, and see if you can prove your existing opinions wrong. Treat it like an intellectual game of conkers - every time you're proven wrong you get a little bit smarter, and every time you win a debate you can reward yourself by being a little more confident in that opinion or line of reasoning.

Test your ideas by subjecting them to challenges, discard the ones which fail and adopt the ones which succeed. And remember - the whole time you're doing it, you're becoming smarter, more educated and more rational.

Say it with me: dumb ideas are dumb

There is a prevalent and dangerous meme rife in society today, and though some people may find the following offensive, judgemental or unfashionable, I believe it needs to be said. Your forbearance is therefore appreciated while I do so. ;-)

First, some axioms. These should be unarguable:

• Everyone is entitled to their own opinion.
• Not everyone's opinions is as valid, useful or has as much merit as everyone else's in every single situation.
• Nobody is entitled to their own facts.
• You have freedom of speech, thought and association. You do not have freedom from criticism, freedom from offence or freedom from correction.

The problem happened where the first axiom (a healthy recognition that other people have different opinions) turned into the second and subsequent beliefs; that everyone's opinion is equally valid, and that contradicting someone in error is impolite, arrogant or somehow infringing on their freedoms.

One look in some Lit Crit classrooms will show you what happens when you aren't allowed to contradict or dispute someone else's opinions, and one look in a politicised fundamentalist church will show you what happens when you believe you're allowed your own facts, instead of just your own opinions.

And while people might enjoy studying Lit Crit or subscribe to fundamentalist religions, if they've got any sense they'll notice that people acting in either of these two roles have rarely done anything tangible to better the overall lot of their fellow man... unlike all those rude, elitist, judgemental, snobby scientists, engineers, geeks and other educated types (who instinctively recognise that ideas vary in quality and efficacy, and have therefore been quietly and industriously changing the world for the better for the last few hundred years).

The Western world (ably lead, as ever, by America) is learning the hard way what happens when you confuse recognition of existence of everyone's opinions with equality or worth of everyone's opinions. Moreover, while we mouth thought-terminating clichés like "everyone deserves an equal say", we routinely disregard them in practice. Who seriously consults their toddler in the back seat on how to get home when lost in the car? Who leaves their neurosurgeon's office and seeks a second opinion from their local garage mechanic?

It's ok to judge and disregard things which demonstrably have no merit. We commonly all agree that "all people" deserve some sort of minimum baseline freedoms, protection, treatment and standard of living. And yet we still deny some of those benefits to those people who we have judged and found undeserving of them or actively dangerous (imprisoned criminals, for example).

We try to pretend that all ideas are equal, but it's not true - some ideas are brilliant, explanatory and useful, but some are stupid, dangerous or self-destructive. And refusing to judge them and pretending those ideas are harmless, valid or beneficial has much the same effect on society in the long term as refusing to judge dangerous people would have on society - internal chaos and developmental stagnation.

We don't have to ban stupid ideas or opinions, like we don't have to kill criminals. Instead we isolate criminals using jails so they can't damage society any more.

We can do the same with ideas, simply by agreeing they're dumb.

Refusing to publicly label a dumb idea "dumb" for fear of offending someone is - long term - as bad for our culture and society as refusing to lock away criminals "because their families might be upset".

Although it's unpopular to point out, sometimes people and ideas need to be judged for the good of society, even if it does end up upsetting or offending some people.

For the last decade or two - beginning around the advent of political correctness, though I suspect that was a symptom rather than a cause - we've done the intellectual equivalent of systematically dismantling the judicial system and all the courts and prisons in society. Now - in the same way if we dismantled all the prisons we'd be overrun with criminals - we're overrun with stupid ideas, unqualified but strongly-expressed opinions and people who act as if they can choose their own facts.

The only way you can help redress this situation is by not being afraid to offend people - if someone says something stupid, call them on it. Politely but firmly correct when people make erroneous claims. Question badly-thought-out ideas, and don't let people get away with hand-waving or reasoning based on obvious flaws or known logical fallacies. Yes they'll get annoyed, and yes they'll choose to take offence, but we don't free criminals because they or their families are "offended" at their having to stay in prison. They are there - largely - because they deserved and invited it, and because the world is better with them there. Likewise, dumb ideas deserve and invite correction, and the world would be a better place for everybody if more people judged and criticised them when we came across them.

Sometimes uncomfortable things do need to happen to people, and certainly if they invite them. There's no advancement without the possibility of failure, and removing the opportunity for failure removes the opportunity to develop. If no-one ever tells you you're wrong, how will you ever learn?

But most important of all, while judging people is unfashionable, can be dangerous and should largely be left to trained professionals, don't ever be afraid to judge ideas.

Cognitive dissonance

A reddit discussion came up recently, in relation to a recently-surfaced suppressed World Health Organisation report on global cocaine use, which concluded that the western "War on Drugs" is overblown, and that automatically criminalising all prohibited-drug users^[1] was counter-productive and unsupported by scientific evidence.

A comment was posted asking why - in the face of evidence, and after a conclusions by the experts tasked to investigate this very topic - governments and supporters would not only disregard the conclusions and evidence, but actively seek to suppress the report and the evidence it contains.

The answer is simple, and generalises to many different opinions and topics. Largely, it's because they're making decisions subconsciously and emotively, instead of consciously and/or rationally.

People holding these positions claim to be pro-prohibition because it "saves lives" (and that may well be how they initially started believing in it, or how they justify the belief to themselves and others), but when you believe something strongly enough for long enough it ends up becoming part of your identity. Then, if you're confronted by evidence your long-cherished belief is in fact wrong, you have one of two choices:

1. Reject the belief, and accept that - by some measure - you've wasted your life and been an idiot for however long you've held the opinion (possibly as much as your whole life up to that point!), or
2. Reject the evidence, and continue believing you're right.

Believing you're right is comfortable and safe, but believing you're wrong (and moreover, have been for years) is uncomfortable and scary. It's like having the rug yanked out from under you - first you have to find a defensible new position that you can take, and then you have to revisit every single opinion you hold that depended on the "wrong" one, and see if any of those also need changing in light of the new information.

This process takes effort, and may involve discarding many other ideas that you hold dear. This is - needless to say - highly unnerving and uncomfortable for most people.

Although it's irrational to the point of complete intellectual bankruptcy, when faced with this choice many people will simply (and irrationally) ignore the evidence to the contrary. They might go quiet and try to change the subject, they might bluster and try to shout you down, or they might declare that the contrary evidence or reasoning "offends them", and demand you stop out of politeness.

All of these things are simply tactics to get the inconvenient evidence to go away - believing something you know at some level to be false is normally easy when you don't think about it, but gets increasingly difficult and uncomfortable the closer the dichotomy rises to your conscious mind.

By offering counter-indicative evidence you force the cognitive dissonance closer to their conscious mind, so they become increasingly irritable and uncomfortable. However, the rationalisation process is almost entirely subconscious, so they often don't realise why they're getting worked up - all they know is that you're the cause of it, so they tend to become frustrated and irritated with you.

This is also why you can't easily persuade people out of irrational ideas, and why it's hard to have a good conversation about politics, religion or the like which doesn't end in offence or shouting.

The key problem(s) in the irrational person's psyche isn't saving face, it's one or more of:

• Laziness - the person doesn't want to have to undergo the effort of re-evaluating all their beliefs, so they just don't.
• Egocentricity - the person doesn't want to admit to themselves how wrong (or stupid, or duped) they were.
• Excessive attachment to their present identity - the person is too attached to their present identity (for reasons of comfort, personal gain, etc) to allow themselves to accept that part of it might need changing.
• Centrality of the opinion to who they are - the threatened belief is so central to the core of the person's identity and beliefs that re-evaluating it might leave them a largely different person (effectively, the current version of them might "die" in the process).

This approach explains many, many things that otherwise seem inexplicable - why it's so hard for people to leave religions, why it's so hard to convert people to another political party, why people continue to back politicians who violate the very tenets they espouse and why people will stick to comfort beliefs even in the face of absolute proof to the contrary.

The only way to cure someone of this kind of egotistical, emotive self-deception is to bring the cognitive dissonance to the surface, and show them how irrational it is.

Nevertheless, they'll fight you every step of the way, and if you force the issue they just end up seeing you as the enemy and disregarding what you show them.

It's a knotty problem, because you can't "cure" someone of identity-related emotive irrationality unless they want to be cured... but there are literally billions of people with these kind of incorrect or irrational opinions, and they're materially retarding the progress and development of the entire human race.

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Footnotes

[1] Of course, legal-drug use - like caffeine, alcohol or tobacco - is usually considered perfectly ok, and ingesting any of these three is a right that would cause rioting in the streets if a government tried to ban it.

On homosexuality as a choice

Many people - usually religious, right-wing "family values" types - claim that "homosexuality is a choice", and that one piece of legislation or another will "encourage kids to be gay".

This is the bit I don't get - even as a straight guy raised in a pretty liberal household, I've never once looked at the idea of hot gay buttsecks and thought "y'know, I think that's the sex for me!".

I'm straight and non-homophobic, but even offering tax-breaks and free ice-cream to gays wouldn't tempt me to indulge in hot man-loving.

I literally can't comprehend of someone examining their own feelings and deciding homosexuality was a choice, unless they're naturally inclined that way themselves and in viciously deep denial about it^[1] ("it's got to be a choice, so I can choose not to be gay!").

So when they say that X or Y will encourage homosexuality, what they actually mean is that it will encourage people who are naturally that way inclined to not live their lives miserable, unhappy and in denial, never knowing the companionship they crave and at constant war with their own essential nature, until they become bitter and twisted by their own unrelenting self-loathing.

It therefore appears that the correct response to "Homosexuality is a choice" is "Well maybe in your case, ducky".

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Footnotes

[1] This is a truly fascinating study, and I thoroughly recommend reading it. A full version of the paper in (PDF format) is available here

Your opinion is worthless

This is a slightly self-indulgent post, relating to website and forum discussions, rather than a generally-applicable epiphanette. Nevertheless, I think it's an important point, and one which far too few people understand...

I find when browsing internet discussion forums, when someone with a controversial or non-mainstream opinions posts and gets voted down I frequently run across run across comments similar to the following:

I find I get downmodded a lot because I'm a person willing to speak my mind. That makes a lot of the insecure people here (of which there are many!) uncomfortable, and to try and counter that they downmod my posts.

Straight to it: although sometimes the commenter has a point (people get very attached to their ideas, and can react irrationally when they're threatened), general attitudes like this always make me uncomfortable, because they smack of self-delusion and comfort-beliefs.

Everyone has some element of this in their thinking, but it's rarely justified. As an experiment, consider the following:

Aside from your own clearly-biased personal opinion of your posts, what evidence do you have that your thoughts or beliefs are generally:

1. Insightful
2. Interesting
3. Well-expressed, or
4. Correct?

Secondly, how many people - even really stupid, boring people - do you think get up in the morning, look in the mirror and think "shit man, I'm a really windy, boring, unoriginal fucker", and then spend a lot of time expressing their opinions to others?

Most people think what they have to say is insightful, interesting, adequately-expressed and correct, or they wouldn't bother posting it.

Now, this idea is correct in that some people vote down anything which contradicts the prevailing wisdom, but people also vote down things which are wrong, stupid, ridiculous or badly-expressed.

Conversely, I know from repeated personal experience that in many communities a well-written, well-argued, non-whingey post which counters the prevailing wisdom frequently still gets a high score, sometimes because of its contrary position.

I know when I post all I have to go on is my own opinion of my posts, which (as we've established) is almost laughably unreliable. Instead, the votes my posts get serve as a useful barometer of how much my opinion of a well-written, well-argued post compares with the general opinion.

It's terribly flattering to think of oneself as a persecuted martyr, but it also usually requires a lot of egotism and a willing blindness to statistics.

To quote the great Carl Sagan:

They laughed at Galileo... but they also laughed at Bozo the clown.

Given a poster's personal opinion is biased to the point it's worthless, and given there are many more clowns in the world than misunderstood geniuses, on what basis do people claim to be downmodded for the content of their opinions, rather than for their worth, or the reliability of the arguments they use to support them?

Claiming you're being downvoted simply because your opinions run counter to the prevailing wisdom, rather than simply because you're self-important or wrong requires you to not only assume you're vastly more intelligent or educated than the average person, but also that most people voting you down are doing so because of a deficiency in their psychology, rather than your own.

When all the objective evidence you have is that a lot of other people disagree with you, it's terribly tempting to believe you're a misunderstood intellectual martyr like Galileo.

The trouble with this, of course, is that while paradigm-shifting geniuses like Galileo only come along a few times a generation, we're knee-deep in idiots, and the tide is rising.

There are literally thousands of times more idiots than geniuses, so claiming you must be a genius on the basis you were voted down doesn't mean you're a genius - it means not only are you overwhelmingly likely to be a self-important idiot, but you're also bad at maths.

Act appropriately.

The incompetent leading the credulous - your mildly disconcerting thought for the day

It's well-known to psychologists, public speakers, politicians and con-men^[1] that in general the more confident an individual appears, the more persuasive they are to other people. This effect holds regardless of the veracity or provability of their assertions. In other words, confidently and assertively talking horseshit will make you more persuasive than simply talking horseshit on its own, regardless of the fact it's horseshit.

In other news, the Dunning-Kruger effect demonstrates that - in general - the more incompetent or ignorant someone is of a subject, the more they will over-estimate their own expertise or understanding of it. Equally, the more experienced and competent a person becomes in a subject, the more they will begin to underestimate their true level of knowledge or expertise, downplaying their understanding and qualifying their statements. In effect, when trying to assess one's own level of ability in a subject increased expertise is inversely proportional to confidence in your expertise.

The net effect of this is that - again, in general - ignorant or incompetent people are subconsciously predisposed to be more confident in their opinions, and all people are subconsciously predisposed to find confident people persuasive.

In a nutshell, all things being equal, people are instinctively predisposed to find ignorant or incompetent people disproportionately persuasive and trustworthy compared to more competent, more experienced experts.

Distressingly it appears that in the kingdom of the blind the one-eyed man is not king. Instead, in the kingdom of the blind the true king is the one blind guy who's sufficiently incompetent or delusional that he honestly believes he can still see.

This has been your mildly disconcerting thought for the day.

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Footnotes

[1] The author acknowledges that there may be some overlap in these categories.