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Confidence management

Saturday, October 2, 2010

When you feel confident about one of your views, be suspicious. Confidence comes when we cannot imagine our view being false given our experience.

That can arise because our evidence is just that good.  Or it can happen because our imaginations are just that bad.

If we have something at stake in the issue (money, status, reputation, comfort, safety, love), and we find ourselves feeling confident about our position, it’s wise to suspect an impaired imagination.

When we have a dog in the fight, we are built to squint in just the right way so we can’t see what we don’t want to see.

We restrict the evidence we collect so we don’t accidentally find something that undermines our view.

We restrict our imaginations so we don’t accidentally see another way to explain our experience.

And we restrict the perspectives from which we try to view the facts, so we don’t accidentally feel a sympathy we don’t want to feel.

Don’t worry. It’s not just you. I’m sure you’ve noticed that other people do this too :-)

P.S.

I guess this suggests a trigger training technique:  When you feel confident — especially in a discussion with others over a controversial subject, ask yourself these 4 questions:

Do I have a dog in the fight?

If so, Am I restricting 1) the evidence I’m considering, 2) my attempts to imagine alternative explanations of my experience, 3) the range of perspectives from which I view the subject.

And, it’s only fair, once you’ve done that, to ask that question of the others in the discussion as well.

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Controversy Rubrics . . .

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Whenever we catch ourselves saying: “it has to be this way” or “I can’t imagine that it’s not this way”, especially when a topic is controversial, shouldn’t we have a standard way of catching ourselves before we back ourselves into an indefensible position, or stubbornly wrong one?

I’d love to have a small set of standard questions I always ask myself about my own positions in cases of controversy.

It would be nice if this same list would help me quickly find holes in others’ arguments as well.

I’m toying with the idea that bad thinking mostly boils down to these items: Restricted imagination, restricted evidence, and restricted framing.

If we start there, and create questions related to them, we might arrive at something like the following:

  1. Am I accounting for ALL the evidence (or am I cherrypicking?)
  2. Am I imagining ALL the possibilities (this needs refinement, obviously, but one set of possibilities I should work harder at imagining are the possible ways the evidence I know about could happen, and yet my conclusion turns out false.)
  3. Am I considering this from all the perspectives (or other forms of context) that would be useful)? E.g., Have I considered how it looks from the pov of all the major stakeholders?  Have I considered it in what Robin Hanson calls both “near” and “far” modes? Etc.

Of course it might also be useful to think about the motivators of these restricted modes of thinking?

What interests do I have in this situation that would make my brain work to keep me from considering this issue more conscientiously?

That’s the smoking gun question.  That’s the one that should make us suspect that we are apt to be overlooking considerations. If anything, that question should come first.

So, maybe these are the four questions:

  1. Do I have a dog in this fight? (Am I already on record with a position? Do I have status or financial considerations? Would it create more work for me if X is false?, etc.)
  2. Do I have all the evidence?
  3. Am I imagining all the possibilites?
  4. Are there frames I haven’t used?

Clearly that won’t catch everything, but it seems a good start.  And it’s a short enough list to be memorable and useful.

We still have questions of whether our reasoning is sound, whether our analysis of the evidence is appropriate, and so on.  But, in my experience, those issues are rarely the things that sustain controversy unnecessarily.  They are easily corrected, and others will correct you.

Now, how does this list work for evaluating others’ arguments?

  1. Does this person have a dog in the fight?
  2. Are they considering all the evidence?
  3. Are they overlooking possibilites?
  4. Have they appreciated the issue with all relevant framings?

Does this list serve to help us generate all the main criticisms we are likely to want to generate in a debate?  It seems that it gets the bulk of them.

What do you think of this rubric?

[lessons on how to not overstate your position]

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Yet another critical thinking blog . . .

Sunday, August 22, 2010

I’ve wanted to start this blog for some time.

Some topics I intend to hit upon:

  • The idea that thinking skills may profitably be taught under these three categories: critical thinking, framing, and idea generation.
  • Ways to pre-frame dogmatists in conversation so they will be on better behavior than they normally would be without the pre-framing.
  • Virtues of good thinking, and how to guard against motivated reasoning in oneself.
  • The idea that most bad behavior in discussions boils down to three main things: restricted evidence, restricted imagination, and the willingness to change the subject when the going gets rough.  I want to see if most of the common fallacies can be made to fit fairly well under these categories. (for instance, false dichotomies and non sequiturs involve a failure to imagine certain possibilities, and are a case of restricted imagination (usually motivated by concerns for status and such)).
  • The possibility that we can develop a short checklist that will help us evaluate arguments.  E.g., perhaps most of the work in debating with others involves figuring out where a person’s interests lie, and asking whether those interests might be causing them to restrict the evidence they collect, or to restrict their imaginations.
  • I want to downplay the traditional logical fallacies, and focus on things that motivate bad reasoning.
  • ETC.

This blog will be fairly close to a flow of consciousness for me.  Later posts will undoubtedly contradict earlier ones.  I’m working these ideas out for myself, and hope to arrive at an endpoint that allows me to teach critical thinking more effectively than I’ve seen done yet in other places.

As I start, I’m aware of the literature I’m aware of.  And not of what I’m not.  I’ve been much influenced in my views on good thinking by:

  • Thomas Gilovich
  • Wittgenstein
  • Kahneman and Tversky
  • Hurley
  • Nietzsche
  • Richard Feynman
  • Bertrand Russell
  • Nassim Nicholas Taleb
  • Karl Popper
  • Thomas Kuhn
  • Carl Sagan
  • And many others.

It’s all good stuff, but I just have this sneaking suspicion that there’s a way to better organize all these lessons about critical thinking skills so that it will be easier for us to reason better ourselves, and to evaluate the arguments of others. And to TEACH these skills to our children.

I hope over time to attract others to my project who will lend a critical eye and comment now and then.

Jim Stone

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