Restating some positions

Restating some positions

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  • Post last modified:May 17, 2022

Okay, in all fairness, the last few times I said I’d keep it short it didn’t end up short at all, but I’ll really try and keep it short this time.

After observing further how rationality and reasoning actually plays out in reality, I believe there is some benefit to restating (rehashing, more precisely) some otherwise ambiguous positions I’ve taken recently. More details are, unfortunately for the sake of brevity, confined to either scattered passages in previous articles or future ones should the need arise.

This will be a rough restating of some of my current positions, more haphazard road signs for directions than a sophisticated GPS-based navigation system.

Friendly fire

My side? Your side? Aren’t we both on the side of truth?
Our common enemy is falsehood and ignorance, not each other. The amount of friendly fire in debates with people attacking each other instead of trying to discuss the evidence and facts is inefficient and unwarranted. What’s the point of that? If the goal of every party is to arrive at a conclusion closest to reality, what does attacking each other have anything to do with it?

What each party is saying isn’t necessarily relevant—reality won’t be changed just because the other party concedes, and one can win an argument and still be wrong; just because both of us agree on something doesn’t have to mean we’re right.

If you go home at the end of the day, mistakenly convinced in the veracity of your argument after confidently winning a lengthy debate, then you haven’t won—falsehood has won, you’ve lost.

Competent reasoning

While everyone has the potential to understand logical coherence and reason, we are still prone to a myriad of easy cognitive pitfalls such as biases, heuristics, and numerous logical fallacies. The advantage scientific and philosophical inquiry has is that it tries to actively avoid these pitfalls, even if not always consistently (it’s the thought that counts!), compared to alternative beliefs formed under less-stringent standards of reasoning. Or, to put it another way, the advantage lies in the former holding the highest rational integrity, even if not always perfect. (It doesn’t have to be!)

The blind men and the elephant
A story many readers will be familiar with is that of the blind men and the elephant. One way a person can make a logically-sound conclusion and still be wrong is by means of incomplete knowledge—believing that all the evidence they have available to them is, indeed, all the evidence. This is of course, false, and I hope this helps to elucidate the point that people making even the most ridiculous conclusions need not necessarily be completely incapable of forming logically-coherent conclusions.
Critical thinking is not an opinion—we don’t believe in critical thinking and reasoning, we merely use it¹—the very same methods one uses to arrive at the conclusion that lemmings are reincarnated car accident victims can backfire when further analysed in detail, showing various contradictions with premises possessing similar weaknesses in contradiction and ambiguity.
Expanding on our tendency towards rationality
Expanding further on Chapter 21 (“Reason”) of Pinker’s Enlightenment Now, when people are faced with evidence against their beliefs, instead of simply accepting that their beliefs are flawed and moving on as if it didn’t matter, they try, desperately, to try and remove that evidence from consideration in order to maintain coherence in their beliefs—as if by some need to only believe in true things coupled with the innate understanding that contradictions are naturally false (one does not say “a dog bit me yesterday” followed by “a dog did not bite me yesterday”. Even in this example we are, once again, naturally inclined to believe that the first statement was a lie in order to maintain logical coherence.).

This can be done using various means (non-exhaustive): One might find other evidence (also in the form of reasoning) to show that this contradicting evidence is false, or dismiss it on grounds of some fallacy, discrediting and reducing the validity of the contradicting evidence. One might also choose to ignore the evidence, dismiss it on grounds of blasphemy, appeal to several informal fallacies, or (sometimes and), quite literally, run away. A few brave individuals will also try and rationalise the evidence into their beliefs so that it “lines up” with their expectations and maintains coherence.

It is as if people would go to any extent to resolve any contradictions and potential falsities in their beliefs, some even going as far as aggression and violence to defend their ideas by means of shutting the other party up by force. This only further demonstrates how much people care about being right—even the looniest conspiracy theorist has some logically-coherent framework behind their beliefs, even if it falls apart on further analysis.

Just like the belief that everyone has some good in them and can be persuaded to do good things, if everyone has the innate capacity to reason and recognise contradictions and falsehood, they can be persuaded to reason better.


If an assertion does not require evidence to advance, then it can be equally, and fairly, dismissed using the same amount of evidence (none). On a somewhat related note, one of my pastimes was inventing superstitions for fun after I realised how little evidence I actually needed to rationalise a basic framework for a superstition. I wonder, then, if I may be described as a very superstitious person? One of the simpler examples was the belief that all lifts were under the jurisdiction of a “lift god” that would “often” send the lift to my floor “right as I stepped out” the door if I prayed to it “sufficiently” in advance.

Using confirmation bias for entertainment
Confirmation bias, when understood, can be used almost like playing with fire as a method of cooking up the craziest, most entertaining conjectures for the sake of curbing boredom and misleading others for fun. Many of my inventions, especially the more elaborate and intricate ones, has left me wondering how many religions in the world actually began as jokes taken too far. Some of my more intricate ones had genuinely convinced people who proceeded to deny my explanation that it was just a joke and that what I had “witnessed” was actually something real.

Being right, but only by chance

Just because you ended up in the right place doesn’t mean you know how to read a map.
There is a non-negligible chance that a person, using a faulty line of reasoning, can fortuitously arrive at a conclusion that just so happens to align closest to reality. These people have a “faith” in science, and are thus still vulnerable to all the traditional shortcomings that come from the intuitions of superstition and other beliefs. I suspect this may even be the reason why many are still are resistant to science, thinking that it is some kind of alternative religion in itself. They have a point: many people accept scientific conclusions not because they understand how it works and why it works, but because it’s more “fashionable” and “modern” (many so-called atheists, in a different, previous era, would just have easily been theists, because they lack the fundamental disposition to think for themselves). It’s more enticing to be part of the club that’s associated with all the cool stuff as opposed to the old-fashioned (yuck) and traditional institutions of religion.

It just so happens, in this case, that scientific inquiry has led us to conclusions that align most closely with reality. Many who purport to be on the side of science and “critical thinking” still do not fully understand it, not limited to countless examples of logical fallacies being liberally misapplied. A statement that discredits what Noam Chomsky (or, for a more modern example, Steven Pinker), says about anything outside of linguistics on the basis of his lack of formal qualifications is, by definition, an ad hominem argument.

Yet, when this is brought up in internet discussions and forums, it is more quickly met with acceptance rather than bewilderment (as evidenced by upvotes or “likes”), I suspect as a result of not understanding what an ad hominem argument really is to begin with other than as an “you insulted me therefore you lose” counterargument (that’s really not what it means, as much as it is often misused in this manner).
One of my favourite quotes found in Fashionable Nonsense
First of all, we have no desire to prevent anyone from speaking about anything.
Secondly, the intellectual value of an intervention is determined by its content, not by the identity of the speaker, much less by his or her diplomas.

The linguist Noam Chomsky illustrates this very well:
“In my own professional work I have touched on a variety of different fields. I’ve done work in mathematical linguistics, for example, without any professional credentials in mathematics; in this subject I am completely self-taught, and not very well taught. But I’ve often been invited by universities to speak on mathematical linguistics at mathematics seminars and colloquia. No one has ever asked me whether I have the appropriate credentials to speak on these subjects; the mathematicians couldn’t care less. What they want to know is what I have to say. No one has ever objected to my right to speak, asking whether I have a doctor’s degree in mathematics, or whether I have taken advanced courses in this subject. That would have never entered their minds. They want to know whether I am right or wrong, whether the subject is interesting or not, whether better approaches are possible—the discussion dealt with the subject, not with my right to discuss it.

But on the other hand, in discussion or debate concerning social issues or American foreign policy, Vietnam or the Middle East, for example, the issue is constantly raised, often with considerable venom. I’ve repeatedly been challenged on grounds of credentials, or asked, what special training do you have that entitles you to speak of these matters. The assumption is that people like me, who are outsiders from a professional viewpoint, are not entitled to speak on such things. Compare mathematics and the political sciences—it’s quite striking. In mathematics, in physics, people are concerned with what you say, not with your certification. But in order to speak about social reality, you must have the proper credentials, particularly if you depart from the accepted framework of thinking. Generally speaking, it seems fair to say that the richer the intellectual substance of a field, the less there is a concern for credentials, and the greater is the concern for content. (Chomsky 1979, pp. 6-7)(Sokal & Bricmont, 1998, p. 12)
Similarly, many other fallacies are often neglected or misused, showing a lack of fundamental understanding of the scientific method. As Nietzche once lamented, too many scientists have a faith in “truth” and are no less religious than the very institutions they have sworn against. Science is not about finding “the truth”, as much as we try to, it would be fundamentally misled to believe in the existence of said “truth”. Nietzsche raises a good question: how different is this unconditional belief in a “truth” different from an unconditional belief in “God”?

It limits our ability to reason objectively and introduces a form of cognitive/emotional myopia, anchoring us to certain theories or hypotheses and giving us the motivation to otherwise unnecessarily invest ourselves emotionally.

Scientific inquiry is blind to “truth” in the sense it doesn’t know that it exists, nor is its existence relevant to the process. We can come up with hypotheses and theories that align extremely closely with all the observations and experiments in reality, but our conclusions will only remain, at best, probabilistic, especially in regards to the problems of induction and the following uncertainty: no amount of white swans can prove that black swans do not exist anywhere in the known universe. This is, of course, unless we circumvented the problems of using an inductive process and instead documented literally every single swan in the entire known universe in order to use the process of deduction to form our conclusion.

But we can’t do that yet, at least not within the next few centuries. Even our farthest spacecraft is “only” 156 AU away from Earth (at the time of writing). Given how difficult space travel still is for us, I cannot imagine us being able to search the entire known universe for every swan in existence just so we can use deductive reasoning instead of “guessing” that we are unlikely to encounter any black swans (of course, this is just an analogy; black swans do exist in reality)
Cygnus Atratus
The Black Swan - The Impossible Avian (Cygnus Atratus)
Photo of a black swan @Alexas_Fotos on Unsplash
Most theories and established hypotheses are also far more complex and harder to deduce than sending swan detectors through space.

In closing, those who believe in science despite not properly understanding it are no different from those who believe in other things without really understanding them. These people may find themselves equally lost when their object of conviction turns around and contradicts itself with a new hypothesis, leaving them stranded as, in addition to their incomplete understanding of science, they have yet to develop the cognitive tools that acclimates them to the constant adaptation of science.

Emotional investment

Don’t invest more emotions than necessary in ideas, doubt everything, including yourself, then doubt the doubts themselves—are the doubts justified, reasonable, or practical? Being skeptical about literally everything should also include a skepticism of the skepticism itself—whether the skepticism is in itself justified.

When encountering a new situation:

  • Step 1: React
  • Step 2: Disregard Step 1
  • Step 3: Analyse the situation carefully
  • Step 4: React

A process like this maintains the benefits of avoiding immediate danger while still being adaptive to the complexities of the modern world which our intuitions often fail to accurately represent. I initially came up with these steps as a measure against people who overreact to any emotionally-salient news without thinking, easily misled by headlines and applying careless, hasty reasoning to form immediate conclusions.

Step 2 is critical as people are generally able to think more rationally when not in an emotionally-elevated state, enabling them to form more balanced and rational conclusions.

The whole idea of believing something in order to fit in with a particular group, giving little thought to the veracity of the belief is an interesting idea, because any rational human being, educated in psychology, knows that one will, at the very least, go insane from being left alone too long. Loneliness is debilitating, and people thrive on social connections. Is it not, then, better to abandon the often lonely lofty intellectual pursuits in favour of creating and maintaining social networks where members subscribe to particular beliefs on the basis of belonging rather than this nebulous desire for truths?

If abandoning one’s belief means becoming outcast from the community and losing all but their closest of friends (who even then may no longer treat them the same way), then the tradeoff doesn’t seem very palatable. As with detecting liars, the most convincing way to prove that you think something or believe in something is to actually think and believe that something. Despite my attempts, I could never quite blend in in churches as my pretence could only get me so far (I fall apart very quickly when my purposes are questioned, and, it seems like church people have this troublesome quirk of detecting newcomers). They were, still, very friendly, though I wonder if they were intrinsically motivated by empathy and compassion or if they were extrinsically motivated by fear of divine punishment just like many believers of “karma”.

More rambling
But, it’s not nice to doubt others’ kindness, right? Perhaps I’ll never know. More likely than not, most do not believe they are being nice to others for their own selfish reasons, including myself. When I see others in pain, I help them not out of the “goodness of my heart” but to get rid of the annoying feeling of discomfort caused by empathy, though others often misunderstand me and think that I am “kind” because I like to “help” other people. Just because it breaks my heart to see someone in need of help doesn’t mean I’m “kind”, I’m only helping them so I can get rid of that annoying feeling. In case one wants to take this opportunity to accuse me of humble bragging, I dislike empathy, I have no desire to be “kind”, and I wish I could put it permanently on mute. When the discomfort is tolerable, I often choose to ignore it instead of helping.

Closing

This is the first part of a planned future series as I come back from time to time to summarise and gather my thoughts, including sometimes revising the current positions stated here.

¹Example taken from Pinker’s Enlightenment Now
Along with the previous post, this is a book I’ve been reading recently, and I’m writing as I come across interesting ideas I feel I can expand on. The passages on humans’ tendency towards reason and rationality were inspired by ideas presented in the book combined with fragments of my own. Though I have briefly deliberated about it in the past, I never got to properly develop these ideas until Chapter 21 where I experienced what might be described as an Eureka! moment and managed to put everything together.

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