Does taking sides make us dumb? Our
very fallible human reasoning
We all believe in something. And among
these beliefs, we do not limit ourselves to moral choices. We also
make statements about how we think the real world is. And we feel
that these beliefs, this taking sides is not only not problematic,
but it is also the right thing to do. A new preprint
from André Martins at aArXiv.com defends that the opposite is true. By
combining results from Logic and the results of several known
experiments on how we human reasons, his paper shows that the very
action of taking sides and believing should be avoided because it can
prevent us from learning. Taking sides, it seems, turns even the very
smart among us dumb. Simulations presented in the paper also show
that simply wanting to have one option to believe might be at the
heart of the appearance and strengthening of extremist points of
view. Some serious problems that arise from our taking sides also
identified as generating errors in scientific inquiries. The author
presents a discussion of the problem, how it affects society and
research in general and suggests ways to make the problem of
believing less serious. When Socrates claimed he knew nothing, he had
almost completely understood the problem. But we forgot it and we
kept choosing descriptions of the world we choose to defend. The
problem, according to the paper, is not what we believe; the problem
is that we believe.
The Results
We have been aware for a few decades
now that, when we humans reason naturally, we commit a staggering
amount of mistakes. We make very basic logical errors, we are
influenced by others in ways that can make us fail even trivial tasks
where we would not have failed at all. And we fail at those tasks
just to agree with our group. Our reasoning does allow us to navigate
the problems of the daily life in a reasonably competent way but,
without training, it does not go further than that. We are simply
much dumber than anyone among us would want to believe. New trivially
simple logical problems are often beyond our natural skills. More
recently, researchers have also observed in their experiments that we
the main function of our reasoning is not as a tool for solving
problems by finding the best available answer. Instead of looking for
truth or best answers, our reasoning seems to have, as its primary
function, a simple argumentative cause. We reason to establish
arguments to convince other people and, as long as our arguments
work, they do not need to be right. Quite the contrary, they could
even be quite incompetent and wrong, as long as they get the work
done. As in any heated discussion, our brains seem to work to get us
ahead in the fight with our opponents. And, in this fight, being
right or wrong is just an incident. What matters is that we sound
convincing. At the very least, we should sound convincing to the
social group we belong, to those people from where we draw
validation. And when our social group is attacked by outside ideas,
we use our brain power not to examine the situation and try to find
who is right. We use it to defend the group we feel where we belong.
We hold sets of beliefs that show clearly that we do not reason in an
independent, correct way. Instead, we look for justifications for the
conclusions we want to be true. And, in an almost unexpected twist,
the smarter we are, the better we are at the defending our
conclusions. And that can make smarter people less capable of
changing their opinions, of learning.
In a recent preprint “Thou shall not
take sides: Cognition, Logic and the need for
changing how we believe”, currently at the ArXiv preprint server at
http://arxiv.org/abs/1508.05169,
André Martins, from Universidade de São Paulo has combined these
results from Cognitive Psychology with our current knowledge on Logic
about accepting propositions as true. By observing that our logical
methods can not provide any certainty about statements about the real
world and that the best we can hope for is to find ways to estimate
probabilities for those statements, it becomes clear that our
side-taking has no logical origin. While there are statistical
methods that try to accept or reject ideas, they are actually a
desperate attempt to justify our desire to have just one idea to
believe. As it has always been clear that they never ruled out any
ideas. While there are circumstances where one might decide to act as
if one idea is true, in logical terms, only an estimate of
probability makes any sense (and even this might be beyond our
current reach for many problems, given our actual state of
knowledge). The conclusion: we should never take sides and adopt
beliefs as if those ideas were true. For there is no logical reason
to do that and, when we embrace these identity-defining beliefs, our
instincts make us unable to learn, they make our minds work to defend
those beliefs instead of inspecting them. Taking sides and believing
make us stupid; sometimes the more stupid, the more intelligent we
are. Unless you actually just care about defending your side,
regardless of who is right, you should not hold beliefs. You can and
actually should have probabilistic beliefs, but those are just
uncertainties where some ideas are more uncertain and others less
uncertain.
Simulations in the preprint also
strongly suggest that our desire to have one single idea to believe
and defend is a fundamental key in understanding the origin and
spread of unjustified extreme beliefs. Indeed, a simple change in the
mental model of the agents, where they start looking for answer that
combine the available ideas instead of looking for one to discard,
has the amazing effect of avoiding extreme beliefs in the problems
studied in the preprint.
Finally, why we actually can trust
Science is discussed. And we learn that, despite being the competent
and correct way to learn about the world, scientific work still has
much room for improvement. As scientists are also humans, the
preprint shows the consequences of the desire to have one single idea
in the beliefs of different areas. And, while some scientific fields
are lucky enough that the mistakes the researcher do there on a daily
basis are of no consequence to the reliability of their ideas, in
other areas the problems do cast much larger doubts on the
reliability of our knowledge. The author shows that taking sides
causes us problems in all aspects of our lives. We become less
capable of learning, groups become extremists with no reason, and
even our scientific knowledge has suffered greatly from this natural
instinct. The conclusion is that we should start learning as soon as
possible to never take sides on issues that are not just moral
issues, but that include statements about how the real world is. It
is not that our emotional side can drive us to wrong decisions, our
ability to reason does exactly the same. We have tools to avoid that
(or, at least, to minimize the problem), it is fundamental that we
learn to use them. One of them is to never trust our own beliefs.
They may be probable. But we simply never know if they are right.
