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the recent cliché that we’re living in a “post-truth era” cannot be true. If it were true, then it would not be true, because it would be asserting something true about the era in which we are living.
“Those who are governed by reason desire nothing for themselves which they do not also desire for the rest of humankind.”
Foremost among informal fallacies is the straw man, the effigy of an opponent that is easier to knock over than the real thing. “Noam Chomsky claims that children are born talking.” “Kahneman and Tversky say that humans are imbeciles.” It has a real-time variant practiced by aggressive interviewers, the so-what-you’re-saying-is tactic.
These tactics shade into begging the question, a phrase that philosophers beg people not to use as a malaprop for “raising the question” but to reserve for the informal fallacy of assuming what you’re trying to prove.
One can always maintain a belief, no matter what it is, by saying that the burden of proof is on those who disagree.
Sometimes both sides pursue the fallacy, leading to the style of debate called burden tennis. (“The burden of proof is on you.” “No, the burden of proof is on you.”) In reality, since we start out ignorant about everything, the burden of proof is on anyone who wants to show anything.
Another diversionary tactic is called tu quoque, Latin for “you too,” also known as what-aboutery. It was a favorite of the apologists for the Soviet Union in the twentieth century, who presented the following defense of its totalitarian repression: “What about the way the United States treats its Negroes?”
An essential part of rationality is dealing with randomness in our lives and uncertainty in our knowledge.
The availability bias may affect the fate of the planet. Several eminent climate scientists, having crunched the numbers, warn that “there is no credible path to climate stabilization that does not include a substantial role for nuclear power.”21 Nuclear power is the safest form of energy humanity has ever used.
Yet nuclear power has stalled for decades in the United States and is being pushed back in Europe, often replaced by dirty and dangerous coal. In large part the opposition is driven by memories of three accidents: Three Mile Island in 1979, which killed no one; Fukushima in 2011, which killed one worker years later (the other deaths were caused by the tsunami and from a panicked evacuation); and the Soviet-bungled Chernobyl in 1986, which killed 31 in the accident and perhaps several thousand from cancer, around the same number killed by coal emissions every day.22
At best, a public outrage can mobilize overdue action against a long-simmering trouble, as is happening in the grappling with systemic racism in response to the Floyd killing. Thoughtful leadership can channel an outrage into responsible reform, captured in the politician’s saying “Never let a crisis go to waste.”31 But the history of public outrages suggests they can also empower demagogues and egg impassioned mobs into quagmires and disasters. Overall, I suspect that more good comes from cooler heads assessing harms accurately and responding to them proportionately.
As the economist Max Roser points out, news sites could have run the headline 137,000 People Escaped Extreme Poverty Yesterday every day for the past twenty-five years.33 But they never ran the headline, because there was never a Thursday in October in which it suddenly happened. So one of the greatest developments in human history—a billion and a quarter people escaping from squalor—has gone unnoticed.
Availability-driven ignorance can be corrosive. A looping mental newsreel of catastrophes and failures can breed cynicism about the ability of science, liberal democracy, and institutions of global cooperation to improve the human condition. The result can be a paralyzing fatalism or a reckless radicalism: a call to smash the machine, drain the swamp, or empower a demagogue who promises “I alone can fix it.”
How can we recognize the genuine dangers in the world while calibrating our understanding to reality? Consumers of news should be aware of its built-in bias and adjust their information diet to include sources that present the bigger statistical picture: less Facebook News Feed, more Our World in Data.
“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”
If an ethnic group or a sex has been disadvantaged by oppression in the past, its members may be saddled with different average traits in the present. If those base rates are fed into predictive formulas that determine their fate going forward, they would lock in those disadvantages forever. The problem is becoming acute now that the formulas are buried in deep learning networks with their indecipherable hidden layers (chapter 3). A society might rationally want to halt this cycle of injustice even if it took a small hit in predictive accuracy at that moment.
This is a perfect description of structural racism or “racism without racists”
If the sex ratio in a professional field is not 50–50, does that prove its gatekeepers are trying to keep women out, or might there be a difference in the base rate of women trying to get in?
This question might be a false dichotomy.
Utility is not the same as self-interest; it’s whatever scale of value a rational decider consistently maximizes. If people make sacrifices for their children and friends, if they minister to the sick and give alms to the poor, if they return a wallet filled with money, that shows that love and charity and honesty go into their utility scale.
an extra hundred dollars increases the happiness of a poor person more than the happiness of a rich person.11 (This is the moral argument for redistribution: transferring money from the rich to the poor increases the amount of happiness in the world, all things being equal.)
Yet when we look at a predictor that has to be more powerful than the best regression equation—a person’s identical twin, who shares her genome, family, neighborhood, schooling, and culture—we see that the correlation between the two twins’ traits, while way higher than chance, is way lower than 1, typically around .6.36 That leaves a lot of human differences mysteriously unexplained: despite near-identical causes, the effects are nowhere near identical.
The obvious reason that people avoid getting onto a train of reasoning is that they don’t like where it takes them. It may terminate in a conclusion that is not in their interest, such as an allocation of money, power, or prestige that is objectively fair but benefits someone else.
a large majority of Americans consider themselves less susceptible to cognitive biases than the average American, and virtually none consider themselves more biased.22
As the novelist Philip K. Dick wrote, reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.
Submitting all of one’s beliefs to the trials of reason and evidence is an unnatural skill, like literacy and numeracy, and must be instilled and cultivated.
We also have a beachhead of rationality in the cognitive style called Active Open-Mindedness, especially the subtype called Openness to Evidence.64 This is Russell’s credo that beliefs should be based on good grounds. It is a rejection of motivated reasoning; a commitment to placing all beliefs within the reality zone; an endorsement of the statement attributed to John Maynard Keynes, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”
