Strategies for overcoming bias

*what* are you supposed to do…

If we cannot see clearly, let us at least see clearly what is unclear. — Freud

A belief statement requires no evidence at all

• Does that imply that there are no facts?! Of course there are facts…but “beliefs” are not facts. Facts require evidence. A belief statement requires no evidence at all.

False beliefs abound. Yet no linguistic object is a ‘false fact’. When a statement turns out to be false on the evidence — then, a (legally) reasonable person backs out by saying, “I thought that it was a fact, but it was not. I withdraw my statement. I wrongly believed that it was true.”

Statements are the linguistic objects which are true or false. But, to arrive at statements which are true, which are facts, requires methods for determining truth by using evidence and rational methods.

Conspiracy fanatics — like xians who insist that Easter marks a historical event — have an easy time of it. Believing that a statement is true (or false) has nothing whatsoever to do with that statement being a fact.

While believing is not more blessèd than knowing, it’s much easier to believe than to know. All ideology (including religious ideology) provides an illegitimate path to “knowledge” through “faith” (‘trust’ in xian Greek).

• No matter of fact is ever certain — since no statement about reality is necessarily true, or logically true, or mathematically true, or statistically certain — as if any statistical fact could be certain! Any statement about nature or human action must be open to “criticism” (the possibility of being false); otherwise users refuse to acknowledge what the concept of evidence based criticism is. And, in so doing they become unreasonable.

No empirical statement (a statement about nature, or about evidence in a trial) is certain. Otherwise, there would be no need for experimentation in science or evidence in jurisprudence — just as there is no need for information about the world in mathematics. Axioms and sound reasoning are enough.

• Conspiracy “theories” — and xianity is a massive, successful conspiracy theory — turn on a rabid strategy — What people want to disregard, they will; what people want to deny, they will — no matter how “unreasonable” (non-rational or irrational) they become.

A need for evidence and sound methods always leaves theory (good or bad) open to claims of fraud — thus the fact that the US government routinely lies to the people and that religious institutions always lie in matters of “faith” — leaves plenty of room for deniers, both illegitimate and legitimate.

After all, without standards for being “a reasonable person” there could be no lying or cheating — there could be no order without rule governed behavior. Even pre-linguistic smarties, like bonobo chimps, know how to game the hierarchical system of instinctual and learned “rules” by theft, cheating, and guile.

If “ordinary” individuals were talented at altering their beliefs based on evidence; then, rule governed cultural institutions — science, technology, law — would be less necessary to create widely shared human well-being.

• Only religion and mores easily survive in cultures without well-grounded methods for establishing knowledge claims. Mores and religion are cultural atavisms given over to indoctrination, paternalist norms, and the principle of ‘wish fulfillment’.

Without formal systems of rule-governed method and rule-governed review, science, technology, secular law would disappear. Xianity destroyed the high culture of the west for a thousand years (500-1500 CE). Xians in their hatred for the body closed baths, destroyed public sanitation, and let fall the aqueducts.

Anti-science fundie theocrats in US school boards, state houses, congress work overtime to destroy our open culture. They stink, but stinking is godly.

the anti_supernaturalist