[FRIAM] All hail confirmation bias!

Tue Jul 30 06:00:48 EDT 2019

Hi Nick,

Yes, agreed.  I won’t lard, but will try to flag a couple of points (and to stay brief…)

> [NST==>”should chose to throw it away”:  This sentence chilled my heart as no sentence has done in a very long time.  We are in an age, now, when we are choosing to throw the enlightenment away.  There must be a thousand books on the origins of the enlightenment; how many are there on the origins of its jettisoning.  Don’t we need to be reading them urgently? <==nst] 

Maybe 20 years ago, Walter Fontana first recommended this book to me as one that had influenced his thinking, and that he saw coming back into currency today.  Maybe 20 years ago one needed some subtlety to be sensitive to the similitude (though Philip K. Dick did it pretty good job all the way back in the 1960s), but today the echos are deafening.

Two related comments together:

> [NST==>This works, but I am having a little trouble with distinguishing it from what you wrote above, which seemed also to work.  <==nst] 
[NST==>But doesn’t it make a difference if those choices turn out well for us, and doesn’t that take us back to what you wrote above? <==nst] 

I think the distinction is between what criteria for truth the contents of the system may or may not meet, versus what kind of entity the system “is”, as a thing we try to empirically characterize, comprehend, and figure out how to manage.  This is where I see the main concerns of the pragmatists (better, the pragmaticists, as Pierce tried to protect a name for his original construction from James and later such complete philistines of instrumentalism as Rorty) as being somewhat different from the main concerns of the phenomenologists.  The latter seem to me to have a more explicit overlap with empirical psychology, while the former seem more concerned with an analysis of what scientific method is or could be as a next edifice in human behavior and society.  (Of course, both are philosophers and want to deal with the “real” or the “true”; my previous statements only address the senses in which they overlap with more modest domains I feel I can comment on.)

I think Ortega is trying to start the book by saying “Don’t put too much stock in your belief that it _should_ `make a difference if those choices turn out well' or badly”.  We can see that choices many people will agree are bad after the fact are still made — sometimes on large scale and with great commitment — by the same people beforehand.  And never forget that many nazis were unreformed at the end of the second world war in the defeat of Germany.  Therefore first try to get a correct causation of why the things that we see happening do happen.  We can always come back afterward to how that causation relates to our prior beliefs about what should matter.

The proof of all these puddings, however, is always in the eating.  Can we do anything with this that steers the world back from the cliff, if we have read it?

All best,

Eric

> On Jul 29, 2019, at 10:35 PM, Nick Thompson <nickthompson at earthlink.net> wrote:
> 
> Hi, Eric,
>  
> As often, I am overwhelmed by what you write.  Makes me wish I were younger.  Still, I was able to muster a couple of “lardings” below: 
>  
> nick
>  
> Nicholas S. Thompson
> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
> Clark University
> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ <http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/>
>  
> From: Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com <mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com>] On Behalf Of David Eric Smith
> Sent: Monday, July 29, 2019 6:16 AM
> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com <mailto:friam at redfish.com>>
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] All hail confirmation bias!
>  
> Hi Nick,
>  
> The part of the book that prompted me to forward it to the list was most of the first 3 (short) chapters.
>  
> I think there are two parallel discourses going on, which are not about the same thing, and which probably are not incompatible, but which also may not be part of a cognitively unified sense of understanding.
>  
> One thread concerns the choice or construction of whatever specifics we wish to regard as “true”, and what we take to be the source of confidence in those choices.  For Pierce’s characterization of scientific method, inter-subjective observation and stress-testing, etc., as the distillation of the better parts of common empirical practice, all of what you say in your later paragraph is stuff I agree with and think is correct.
> [NST==>So, the question is, what are the cues in experience for experiences that are likely to endure.  <==nst] 
>  
> The other thread, which is where I think Ortega is writing, is closer to the phenomenologists, as represented (to the extent that I understand the approach) in Husserl.  In the early chapters, to set up a system for understanding why countries that had undergone the enlightenment would choose to throw it away, 
> [NST==>”should chose to throw it away”:  This sentence chilled my heart as no sentence has done in a very long time.  We are in an age, now, when we are choosing to throw the enlightenment away.  There must be a thousand books on the origins of the enlightenment; how many are there on the origins of its jettisoning.  Don’t we need to be reading them urgently? <==nst] 
> Ortega argues that the Homo sapiens characterization of man is slightly off the point.  For his purposes, man is not all that good at knowing very much, nor is the knowing the most central thing that sets him apart.  Instead, Ortega argues, a better starting point in thinking about what humans are is the relentless need to construct a domain of experience that gives guidance in what to do next.  Since in every “now” there is a need to navigate some choice of what to do, and since the experience of each now is constantly being superseded by the following now, the need to be constantly constructing an experiential edifice is the relentless driver of human nature and behavior. 
> [NST==>This works, but I am having a little trouble with distinguishing it from what you wrote above, which seemed also to work.  <==nst] 
>  The awareness that there is such an edifice, and that it is something constructed, seems very close to Husserl’s arguments that (in my language) we think of experience as a transparent window through which we passively receive a reality, but it is more like a painted surface on which we are constructing things we believe to be co-registered with something outside the window.  The assertion that we can only look at our own painting, and that it is our nature to be unable to see it as our own painting, because to function we need to use it as a transparent thing seen “through”, are I think Husserl’s conception of what “experience” (or Experience) is distinct from some list of “propositions that are true”.  These frameworks of experience, as a system from which one can extract choices, seem to be what Ortega is calling “the World” for each of us, or in a zeitgeist carried by a generation.
> [NST==>But doesn’t it make a difference if those choices turn out well for us, and doesn’t that take us back to what you wrote above? <==nst] 
>  
> I am taking my characterization of Husserl’s position at second hand from people who have put in time with him that I have not, but I think he argues that for Experience, in this formal sense, to occupy a place outside awareness and to not be recognized as its own thing in our thought system, is a source of distortion or potential inconsistency.  I don’t know in how far that is true, since I don’t think Husserl, or Ortega, or anybody modern, has an important objection to the Piercian system for choosing which things to label “true” about empirical matters.  I find the discussion interesting because I see it as an effort to give a concept decomposition to dimensions of cognition or awareness.  Even If being unaware of Experience in this sense is not an important source of error, we seem to have little concept system to discuss empirically what the aware state “is”, and I wonder if the thing Husserl and Ortega are after goes part of the way to supplying one relevant such concept.
>  
> This is not my day job, and thank god for that, so all of the above is “grain of salt” commentary.  Fortunately, the books exist as things-in-themselves, and anybody can start fresh with them.
> [NST==>Thanks, Eric, for taking a shot at it.  I see all these positions as groping toward an experience-monism of some sort, and that seems the only kind of position that makes any damned sense at all. <==nst] 
>  
> Best,
>  
> Eric
>  
>  
>  
> 
> 
>> On Jul 29, 2019, at 12:00 AM, Nick Thompson <nickthompson at earthlink.net <mailto:nickthompson at earthlink.net>> wrote:
>>  
>> Eric, 
>>  
>> Can you direct me to any particular passages or chapters in the book?   I am unlikely to read the whole thing, but I want to know your thought. 
>>  
>> I rummaged around in the Books.google <http://books.google/> site for a bit and found this: 
>>  
>> <image002.jpg>
>>  
>> If so, I don’t think I was saying anything this profound.  I was just trying to get in on the ground floor of the “skepticaller-than-thou” battle I saw developing.  
>>  
>> There are either, or there are not, consistencies in our experiences, in my experiences, in your experiences, and in those we represent to one another.  If there are not, then we have nothing to talk about, and all talk is meaningless.  If there are,  If somebody cares to call these, the world, then all power to them.  To announce that something is “the world” or “the real” or “true” or “exists outside experience” is only to announce that someday the speaker believes people will come to agree on it, the way we have come to agree on so many things in the last 300 years of science.  If we share that belief, that’s one heluva heuristic, and it is the heuristic that makes science possible, but it is, after all, only a heuristic.  I deplore a skepticism that drinks only 9/10ths of the potent, and then puts the glass down, burps, and walks away with a smug look on its face.
>>  
>> Nick  
>>  
>>  
>> Nicholas S. Thompson
>> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
>> Clark University
>> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ <http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/>
>>  
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com <mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com>] On Behalf Of David Eric Smith
>> Sent: Sunday, July 28, 2019 5:19 PM
>> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com <mailto:friam at redfish.com>>
>> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] All hail confirmation bias!
>>  
>> I think Ortega y Gasset had things to say about that in Man and Crisis.
>>  
>> I haven’t read enough to know yet whether I think his take is important.  But it would be hard to find someone who picked up the question in terms more identical to those that Nick uses below to frame it.
>>  
>> Eric
>>  
>>  
>>  
>> > On Jul 28, 2019, at 3:23 PM, Nick Thompson <nickthompson at earthlink.net <mailto:nickthompson at earthlink.net>> wrote:
>> > 
>> > While we're getting rid of concepts, let's just get rid of this foolish, unsubstantiated concept, "the world."  What sort of heuristic is THAT? 
>> > 
>> > N
>> > 
>> > Nicholas S. Thompson
>> > Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University 
>> > http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ <http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/>
>> > 
>> > -----Original Message-----
>> > From: Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com <mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com>] On Behalf Of Steven A 
>> > Smith
>> > Sent: Thursday, April 25, 2019 11:41 AM
>> > To: friam at redfish.com <mailto:friam at redfish.com>
>> > Subject: Re: [FRIAM] All hail confirmation bias!
>> > 
>> > I KNEW that confirmation bias was a problem and NOW this confirms it!
>> > 
>> > I TOLEYA!
>> > 
>> > On 4/24/19 5:25 PM, uǝlƃ ☣ wrote:
>> >> Our World Isn't Organized into Levels 
>> >> https://philpapers.org/rec/POTOWI?ref=mail <https://philpapers.org/rec/POTOWI?ref=mail>
>> >> 
>> >>> In my view, our adherence to the levels concept in the face of the 
>> >>> systematic problems plaguing it amounts to a failure to recognize 
>> >>> structure we’re imposing on the world, to instead mistake this as 
>> >>> structure we are reading off the world. Attachment to the concept of 
>> >>> levels of organization has, I think, contributed to underestimation 
>> >>> of the complexity and variability of our world, including the 
>> >>> significance of causal interaction across scales. This has also 
>> >>> inhibited our ability to see limitations to our heuristic and to 
>> >>> imagine other contrasting heuristics, heuristics that may bear more 
>> >>> in common with what our world turns out to actually be like. Let’s 
>> >>> at least entertain the possibility that the invocation of levels can mislead scientific and philosophical investigations more than it informs them. I suggest that the onus is on advocates of levels of organization to demonstrate the well-foundedness and usefulness of this concept.
>> > 
>> > ============================================================
>> > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe 
>> > at St. John's College to unsubscribe 
>> > http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com <http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com>
>> > archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ <http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/>
>> > FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ <http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/> by Dr. Strangelove
>> > 
>> > 
>> > ============================================================
>> > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe 
>> > at St. John's College to unsubscribe 
>> > http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com <http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com>
>> > archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ <http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/>
>> > FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ <http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/> by Dr. Strangelove
>>  
>>  
>> ============================================================
>> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
>> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com <http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com>
>> archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ <http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/>
>> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ <http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/> by Dr. Strangelove
>> ============================================================
>> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
>> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
>> to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com <http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com>
>> archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ <http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/>
>> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ <http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/> by Dr. Strangelove
> 
>  
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com <http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com>
> archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ <http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/>
> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ <http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/> by Dr. Strangelove

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20190730/25641068/attachment.html>