“The Idols of the Cave, which originally alluded to the conflicting interests of the scientist, must now emphasize the ubiquity and variety of financial and nonfinancial conflicts of interest attendant to the massive institutional and bureaucratic systems that have risen up around scientific activities.”
Man made global warming has to be at the top of that list, followed by just about any other environazis scam.
“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.
Wonderful and enlightening. Thanks for posting this.
Good article, good post.
We are blessed with Jordan Peterson who is our 21st century Francis Bacon. Peterson is very insightful in his “thinking about thinking”. We’re fortunate to have Doctor Peterson and his revelatory observations available to us today. I keep the man in my prayers.