bias
For the last few months I have been subscribing to the RSS feed of Overcoming Bias, the blog of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute. I find very appealing the idea of a group blog dedicated to isolating and (if possible) rooting out the habits of mind that cause us to misunderstand the world. But after much careful scrutiny I have discovered that the bias that needs to be overcome is always — always — bias exhibited by other people. Especially religious people and conservatives, and sometimes those who like poetry. I’d love to find a site where bloggers dedicated themselves to overcoming their own biases, but in the meantime: Delete.
A few posts do discuss religious people and/or conservatives (not so much the latter), but the word “always” is just not accurate. Most of the posts at Overcoming Bias (including my own posts) have nothing to do with religion in particular. Just so far in May, there have been posts discussing how stock investors misremember their past performance, the placebo effect in medicine, the fact that people stigmatize someone seen in the presence of an overweight person, the bias of relying too much on abstract mathematics, the ill effects of blood transfusions and vitamin supplements, and more.
— Stuart Buck · May 13, 03:33 PM · #
Stuart, you seem to have conflated two of my sentences. I did not say that the OB blog always criticizes the bias of religious people and conservatives, I said that it always criticizes the biases of other people. Then I wrote that, among those other people, religious believers and conservatives are especially prominent (in fact, I believe they are the only two groups to recur significantly as objects of critique). What you say I wrote would be inaccurate, what I actually wrote is, I think, correct.
— Alan Jacobs · May 13, 03:50 PM · #
1. Even with that conflation corrected, I don’t see how the blog “always” criticizes “other people.” Many posts discuss biases that can affect all of us. I’ve posted, for example, about the faults of human memory. Like most Overcoming Bias posts, I didn’t phrase the post as “here’s something that affects other people’s memories, but not mine.”
2. I think that if you avoid Eliezer’s posts, that would account for the overwhelming majority of the posts that mention religion.
— Stuart Buck · May 13, 04:45 PM · #
I also am not sure where you see a bias against “conservatives.” The more common criticism is that Overcoming Bias often features posts about the faults of government regulation or government in general (see, e.g., http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/03/wilkinson-on-pa.html or http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/10/what-evidence-b.html).
— Stuart Buck · May 13, 04:52 PM · #
Stuart,
1. Avoiding Eliezer’s posts isn’t all that easy. Plus, Robin I-can-handle-the-truth Hanson (and sometimes others) can sound much the same.
2. Even doing a site search for “conservatives” could yield some evidence on this point, once one filters out non-political or strictly descriptive uses of the term. At least, I think it does. But then I may be biased.
3. I think there’s a big difference between posts that (given considerable effort) could theoretically be applied to the author, or to fellow contributors, and posts that are explicitly critical of others. If a site is going to call itself “Overcoming Bias,” then I think its contributors incur an obligation to be explicitly and self-consciously critical of biases to which they are likely to be prone. If that’s been done on the site, I haven’t seen it, and at this point I’m tired of looking. I’ve given it a fair shot, and now I’m done.
— Alan Jacobs · May 13, 05:33 PM · #
Fair enough. There are plenty of other good blogs to read.
That said, a final couple of points:
1. When I search the site for “conservative,” I come up with posts like these, which aren’t exactly examples of bias against conservatives:
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/01/effects_of_ideo.html
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/05/academics_again.html
and
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/12/reversed-stupid.html
2. Expecting people to talk very much about their own biases is a bit like asking, “Can you name 5 issues where your opinion is wrong?” People aren’t usually very aware of where they themselves are wrong or biased. That said, I might try (as a religious conservative myself) to come up with a post about secular biases.
— Stuart Buck · May 13, 06:15 PM · #
As a faithful OB reader myself for about a year, I’ve noticed a POV perhaps more in favor of conservatism (at least of the economic variety) than against.
— Christopher · May 13, 06:27 PM · #
Stuart, you know, I could cite three posts that point in the other direction. If this is going to get beyond mere impressions (no offense, Christopher) someone’s going to have to start doing some counting. Unfortunately, I don’t have the time to do it right now.
As for: Expecting people to talk very much about their own biases is a bit like asking, “Can you name 5 issues where your opinion is wrong?” Well, I don’t think it’s like that at all. If I could name opinions of mine that are wrong, they wouldn’t be my opinions. But a reasonable person should be able to identify areas where he or she is likely to be biased. For instance, I have thought a lot more about the so-called “New Atheism” than I have written about it, because as a Christian I clearly have a dog in that fight. So I need to be extra careful that my objections don’t arise from my biases before I commit myself publicly.
I’d be quite interested in what you’d have to say about secular biases, but the issue of more general relevance, to me, is: How do we, whatever we believe, find ways to identify our biases and recognize them when they’re getting in the way of real knowledge? I’m inclined to say that Step One should be to acquaint ourselves with the smartest people who disagree with us.
This is something — to get back to the issue of secular bias — that New Atheists (and Old ones too, for that matter) almost never do: you can always count on Hitchens and Harris and Dawkins (and Yudowsky, for that matter) to grab the lowest-hanging fruit they can find.
— Alan Jacobs · May 13, 06:43 PM · #
Technical note: I am using “bias” in this discussion to mean “possibly unwarranted, and certainly dangerous, prejudice.” Not all prejudices are wrong, and I subscribe to Hans-Georg Gadamer’s view that one of the cardinal intellectual tasks is “to distinguish the true prejudices by which we understand from the false ones by which we misunderstand.”
— Alan Jacobs · May 13, 06:46 PM · #
Eh. It’s pretty much impossible to read this thread without coming to the conclusion, “Alan Jacobs is biased, and is annoyed that his biases have been routinely called out on the OB blog.” Yes, we should all examine our biases, but there are some pretty good reasons to expect a self-described Christian to have stronger biases than a self-described atheist.
— A · May 14, 02:42 AM · #
Hmmm. “It’s impossible not to come to the conclusions I have come to.” Well, no hint of bias there.
— Alan Jacobs · May 14, 12:55 PM · #
I’ve been reading OB for more than a year, orginally with the idea that if I could reduce the biases in my judgement I might make better investment decisions.
Little of help in that regard appeared. But, I’ve continued to watch with a fascinated horror as really bright people fight like a pack of dogs. I’ve learned much about the personalities and biases of public intellectuals. Thank God I’m not one of them!
— Bob Knaus · May 14, 04:51 PM · #
“Yes, we should all examine our biases, but there are some pretty good reasons to expect a self-described Christian to have stronger biases than a self-described atheist.”
Not really. Certainly if we’re talking about a specific person we’d have to listen on a case-by-case basis. You can have a relatively biased, or unbiased, atheist or Christian. (And I’d say that the self-description is an equally bad sign for both.) What is required for lack of bias is willingness and propensity to discuss the possible angles under which each one could or couldn’t be true, and avoidance of giving magical conclusive extensional indicativeness to information or arguments in regard to things that that information and those arguments do not really or necessarily bear on.
And bias is, among other things, deciding things on intuitive obviousness, rightness, or ludicrousness. Self-described atheists can be worse than terrible about this. This kind of thing isn’t upholding rationality, and you don’t prove it is by saying indignantly that your view is true and truth and objectivity. By the way, I’m an atheist.
A more general question might be: How in tarnation can you have a blog about overcoming bias that doesn’t end up to be about other people’s biases? It’s a nontrivial problem, because that is always the drift.
Maybe only if you have multiple contributors taking stabs at it, and their biases point a number of different ways, and the reader can fly over the fray and take possibly useful beakfuls. It seems to me that Overcoming Bias qualifies, insofar as it can be used that way.
Just as much, I distrust the “Delete!” conclusion for the reasons given here. I mean, if opposing one’s own bias is the idea.
— Alex Russell · May 14, 05:41 PM · #
Just as much, I distrust the “Delete!” conclusion for the reasons given here. I mean, if opposing one’s own bias is the idea.
I don’t think Alan was looking to Overcoming Bias for criticism of his personal biases, but in hopes of a more general methodology for examining oneself (as opposed to pointing fingers at others, which is much easier). That’s the part that he found lacking.
— Michael · May 21, 05:02 PM · #