“To combat a prominent Idol of the Tribe—the tendency to seek and be moved by confirmatory evidence more so than by disconfirmatory evidence (what we now call confirmation bias)”
Does anyone else want to plead “not guilty” to confirmation bias?
When an item of disconfirmatory evidence comes to my attention, it is as though a hand grenade has landed in my foxhole. I immediately jump up, hair afire, and run hither and yon in great distress until I have thoroughly examined the new evidence and discovered whether it is true or false.
This could take weeks, months, perhaps even years, but I don’t stop until it is done.
I can see the smug expressions on the Karens in the room as they object: “Wait. You may think you do this, but how do we know you really give appropriate weight to the disconfirmatory evidence? All you’re actually doing is giving lip service to objectivity as you find ways to dismiss the new evidence and revert to your previous position.”
When I started college in 1971, I didn’t know shit from Shinola. Everything I thought I knew was wrong. I went along with the leftwad positions because that’s what all the cool people did, and if you conformed, you got invited to the hipster doofus parties.
Over the following decades, reality kept chucking grenades into my foxhole. As Benjamin Franklin wrote, “...for having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged by better information or fuller consideration to change opinions even on important subjects which I once thought right but found to be otherwise...”
Down the years, I had to change my opinion on practically every important issue. In no particular order, divorce, marriage, adultery, abortion, drunkenness, seduction and sex...one after another, grenades of disconfirmatory information forced me to reexamine and actually change long-held opinions, regarding which I had for years or even decades been, not merely wrong, but obnoxiously, obstreperously wrong.
Being forced by disconfirmatory evidence to admit that I was as full of shit as a Christmas goose, not once, but time after time, was very unpleasant.
Having gone through all that, I am not content that some Dunning-Kruger case should declare me guilty of confirmation bias. And I’m betting that most if not all conservatives are free from any taint of this intellectual weakness.
If they weren’t, they’d be liberals.
Did you have any conservatives in your family growing up?
Here is an interesting article covering D-K.
The Dunning Kruger Effect is a psychological phenomenon in which people of the lowest ability in a subject rate themselves as most competent, compared to others. Ironically, people who lack the most knowledge on a topic also lack the ability to recognize their own mistakes and errors, making them exceptionally confident and biased self-evaluators. They are also unable to fairly judge other people’s performance.
Nice post!