Right thinking = Right start series

Before we get to the Baloney (and not the meat), whether you’re aware of it or not, we all have biases and as I touched on in part two we develop these Cognitive biases through our experiences and interactions with life & others, but what are these biases?

1. Confirmation bias
2. Personnel bias                
3. Political bias

Trouble is about 99% of those results are well… worthless opinions and Pseudo science that are not backed up with evidence in the form of theories that have tests that can be repeated and if they appear to be, when you investigate that evidence, the foundations are questionable.

Francis Bacon among other past figures stated, “For what man had rather were true he more readily believes”.

We forget to test our thoughts to see what the arguments are against them, we do not have the open mind to consider those alternatives.

Belief bias

One thing we need to discuss here is that we as humans are prone (call it our skill) to finding patterns in anything (even when one doesn’t exist), as Michael Shermer puts it “Our brains are wired up to find meaningful patterns” so if we can’t explain it we try to by finding meaning with our personal bias.

On the flip side if 400 years ago you said “The sun orbits the Earth” people would believe you because the evidence (based on just looking) and intuition would agree. But if you said “The world & everything is made up of quantised packets of energy” then you would have been probably taken to the gallows.

I won’t tell you what to believe, you simply need to recognise the bias & remove it from your judgements.

Political bias

What can we do to detect Baloney?

So, what can we do to ensure we don’t fall into the trap with all these biases (currently there’s more than 3 and most are sub-categories).

For the initiated I’m sure you picked up at the start that I would eventually get round to Carl Sagan’s “Baloney Detection kit”, for those new to it I’ll quote from his book “The Demon Haunted World: Science as a light in the darkness”.

Carls Baloney kit

• Wherever possible there must be independent confirmation of the “facts.”
• Encourage substantive debate on the evidence by knowledgeable proponents of all points of view.
• Arguments from authority carry little weight — “authorities” have made mistakes in the past. They will do so again in the future. Perhaps a better way to say it is that in science there are no authorities; at most, there are experts.
• Spin more than one hypothesis. If there’s something to be explained, think of all the different ways in which it could be explained. Then think of tests by which you might systematically disprove each of the alternatives.
• Try not to get overly attached to a hypothesis just because it’s yours. It’s only a way station in the pursuit of knowledge. Ask yourself why you like the idea. Compare it fairly with the alternatives. See if you can find reasons for rejecting it. If you don’t, others will.
• If whatever it is you’re explaining has some measure, some numerical quantity attached to it, you’ll be much better able to discriminate among competing hypotheses. What is vague and qualitative is open to many explanations.
• If there’s a chain of argument, every link in the chain must work (including the premise) — not just most of them.
• Occam’s Razor. This convenient rule-of-thumb urges us when faced with two hypotheses that explain the data equally well to choose the simpler. Always ask whether the hypothesis can be, at least in principle, falsified…. You must be able to check assertions out. Inveterate sceptics must be given the chance to follow your reasoning, to duplicate your experiments and see if they get the same result.

My thoughts

I won’t be describing these points in detail as there are many websites and media that can be found easily that already does this, what I want to dig into at this point is the idea of not believing everything at face value by asking probing questions to first test the information. This can be exhausting but would you rather be led or make your own choice based on penetrating into the information given.

So, what is the main point of this piece?

As I mentioned before events can be unlikely but still have a chance of being true, that’s where even with the baloney kit we must be willing to recognise theories in the light of new evidence, since there are variables and uncertainties within each experiment that over time improve in their sensitivity / control. For example Einstein tested General Relativity with a thought experiment and 100 years later we’re using satellites trying to disprove him (so far his theory has stood up against every iteration of testing).

The Internet and the Baloney kit

What should I do when surfing the internet (which does have a lot of baloney to be aware about)? The simple solution is to adopt how we used to research at the library (not sure if people still do that), but you generally grab every book you can find about the subject you wish to research and read them looking for trends of common references / tests / results, this is where the foundation is to start from.

So with the internet we do something similar but we don’t grab every site, we start with:

1. Government Services (i.e. NHS)
2. Institutes (i.e. IMechE / PHE)
3. Professional Publications (i.e. Nature / Discovery)

Then look for those trends in Data / Tests / Outcomes / Theories which have stood and implement the baloney kit.

To end this piece I wanted to note that:

• Everyone falls into these bias (and I have many times),
• Our minds work in a way that makes associations and generalisations of what information is feed in.
• It’s natural for our brain to sift / sort and categorise this information quickly if we don’t analyse it first.
• We are influenced by environment / stereotypes / experience and authority.
• We seek patterns
• We take shortcuts

Carl’s kit was written in 1995 and it goes into some considerable depth, however for those of us beginners starting off I would like to refer to the questions Dr Michael Shermer listed, to ask when researching / presented with information:-

1. How reliable is the source of the claim?
2. Does this source often make similar claims?
3. Have the claims been verified by another source?
4. How does the claim fit with what we know about how the world works?
5. Has anyone gone out of the way to disprove the claim, or has only supportive evidence been sought?
6. Does the preponderance of evidence point to the claimant’s conclusion or to a different one?
7. Is the claimant employing the accepted rules of reason and tools of research, or have these been abandoned in favour of others that lead to the desired conclusion?
8. Is the claimant providing an explanation for the observed phenomena or merely denying the existing explanation?
9. If the claimant proffers a new explanation, does it account for as many phenomena as the old explanation did?
10. Do the claimant’s personal beliefs and biases drive the conclusions, or vice versa?

References used:-

• Carl Sagan – The Demon-Haunted world – The Baloney detection kit
• Dr Michael Shermer – https://michaelshermer.com/
• Cognitive Bias – A. Wilke, R. Mata, in Encyclopedia of Human Behavior (Second Edition), 2012
• MasterClass.com
• Open University – Critical-thinking-Open-University.pdf
• www.sciencedirect.com – Peer reviewed papers

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