Confirmation bias is downstream of 'factism'

It's not just a war between the stupids and the clevers

SARS-CoV-2 was/is a dangerous coronavirus that killed or accelerated the deaths of millions of people.

Covid-19 is like a bad cold and the whole thing was a false public health crisis.

There is overwhelming reason to believe that Earth's climate is warming and that this does - or will - create problems for living in many places.

Global warming is a misattributed or manufactured issue.

Historic oppression of black people in many places created a 'pipeline effect' which means that many of their descendants on average have not caught up with white people on average in terms of material wellbeing or status.

Critical Race Theory is stupid virtue signalling with no basis in fact.

‘Wokeism’ is a collection of ideas intended to rectify injustices perceived by people who identify as progressives.

Wokeism is a 'mind virus' and its adherents are mentally compromised.

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Something interesting goes on when people disagree over certain propositions.

It's that they actually aren't really disagreeing over the facts.

They are disagreeing over the implications that have arisen from the facts.

The factual debate is typically a surface level ritual masking resistance to responses proposed by one side and an expectation of deference to their superior understanding.

No matter the weight of evidence in support of a proposition, if you don't like the policy approach to mitigating something it's easier to deny the proposition that gives rise to the proposed solution.

Of course it's what we know as motivated reasoning and endless energy is expended on confronting it head-on, mostly to little avail.

All this means is that the necessary conversation doesn't happen, because both sides are talking past each other.

There is a common belief that the problem is one of knowledge deficit and that the solution is therefore more information. A surfeit of the 'correct' information will surely solve the problem.

So you have two sides, equally naive and inflexible.

For simplicity, call them dissenters and expert-aligned.

The dissenters think that their 'research' is conducted in good faith, when it's usually an exercise in confirmation bias.

The expert-aligned think that because the facts have been established reliably, the next steps are self-evident.

This seems to be the basis for a lot of polarisation and a manifestation of the Will to Power as a primary driver.

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We're so obsessed with intelligence we overlook wisdom

Having spent time as a minor cog in what became known as the 'disinformation industrial complex' I came to realise that 'fact-checking' is among the most naive strategies of persuasion.

Hence an intuition that facts are overrated as a basis for debates about solving problems at levels that affect a lot of people for whom the problem isn’t directly relevant.

Despite what the 'expert-aligned' think, people don't deny facts because they are stupid and irrational.

It's rational - in a Game Theory kind of way - to cut the solution you don't like off at the knee by saying there's no need for it.

It's annoying, though. The denial of a problem is just a blocking move, which is why deniers of obvious truths seem so childlike.

But there's another side to this coin, which also seems somewhat infantile.

Call it the naivety of 'factism'.

We saw this in the Covid crisis and it retards every conversation about the warming Earth because the protagonists are talking past each other.

It isn't that facts don't matter. It's that facts don't automatically or necessarily justify the measures proposed in response to them.

An obvious problem with basing every conversation about a problem on the facts is that people will start inventing facts, if facts are the only turf on which to fight.

This is the famous problem of 'alternative facts', which the 'sensibles' get mad about because they never understand that their actual and verifiable facts don't necessarily point to the conclusions they think are self-evident.

The funniest proponents of 'alternative facts' are Donald Trump and his acolytes, with the best recent example being Haitian migrants eating people's dogs and cats in Ohio. This is a thing that doesn't seem to be happening. It's almost certainly just a stupid story designed for rhetorical impact rather than to provide meaningful information.

It's like the whole of QAnon - more entertainment than anything else.

Something is definitely up in Springfield, Ohio and something is definitely up with elite technocracy. But most of the conversation about both revolves around alternative facts.

This appears to be because normative values inculcated by a certain class (educated, cosmopolitan, 'progressive', socially liberal) are so ingrained it is literally risky to raise objections for fear of appearing Stupid or Bad.

And at the heart of this is attachment to 'factism' and the sense that once the facts are in, it is obvious what we must do about them. The two are inextricable, even though they really needn't be.

This is why it's so clear that 'debunking' things is as much an expression of subjective cultural superiority as it is about providing an information service in good faith. This is how a misleading term like 'The Science' came to prominence as a tribal marker during the Covid crisis.

'The Science' is not to blame (although many who 'do' science believe that it's also their duty to determine how it is applied to policy - moving beyond their own wheelhouse) because 'The Science' is the most reliably insightful tool for understanding how the material world works.

People who are accused of being 'anti-science' are probably not always pro-woo or epistemic anarchy. You won't find a bigger fan of the scientific method than me. But the culture has become so confused over the difference between 'factism' and 'wisdom' that a scientist/engineer friend was annoyed by my suggesting that credentialed experts might sometimes wind their necks in when it comes to imposing their will on the world, instead of just reporting on how it works. We expect determination to influence, not just inform, from the academic humanities, which is full of activist ideologues with little respect for objective truth.

But when physicists are opining that transwomen are actual women or epidemiological statisticians advocate for sacking people who refuse a Covid vaccine, the distinction between facts and what we might do about them is unnecessarily blurred.

And that's why you get so much motivated reasoning downstream of this worship of facts.

If the facts are portrayed as necessarily dictating policy instead of feeding into policy decisions it's no wonder people want to deny the facts and come up with their own.

In the culture it seems to have become self-evident that if you know how something works, you're then qualified to tell everyone else what to do. I'm out of touch with philosophy of science these days, but I hope this is being discussed somewhere, because it seems to be creating some cultural problems. Starting with people denying obviously true things and ending with them not trusting people who really know what they’re talking about.

The naive 'factism' of suggesting that all of the most stringent public health measures were necessarily entailed by the consensus understanding of how SARS-CoV-2 affects the human body was really an avoidance of more difficult questions.

Until we have direct elections for scientific advisors I'd prefer the cowardly, lazy, ignorant politicians we elect to stop hiding behind them and lead some conversations about what a 'good life' for the broadest possible swathe of their people might look like.

The problem of motivated reasoning, confirmation bias and bespoke realities will not retreat unless we can separate 'factism' from what to do about things like climate change.

It's somewhat depressing that one of the most interesting commentators on climate change and resulting policy

Roger Pielke Jr.

is smeared as a climate change denier, despite writing approximately once a week that he believes it's a genuine problem, just because he identifies a gap between the facts, popular interpretation of the facts and existing default policies.

Such is the monochrome perspective provided by the current culture that until I started reading Pielke I had no idea that there is even a discussion to be had about how to respond to global warming. Whether attenuating it is possible or affordable (in brute resource availability terms) or whether accepting and adapting to it is an equally valid strategy to investigate.

He might be wrong in what he says. I'm not qualified to know. It just seems strange that he's a kind of 'fringe' figure in this field because he isn't automatically onboard with 'net zero'.

This is what happens when people think that 'the facts speak for themselves', which is really shorthand for I don't want to think about the tricky questions. Such as what might a balance between safety and wellbeing look like on the ground, rather than in an Excel spreadsheet.

An ex-smoker writes ...

It's a fact that cigarettes are deadly, so the age limit for buying cigarettes in Britain is going to rise until it effectively applies to the whole population.

Facts are assumed to be all that matters to such an extent that it seems ridiculous in our culture to argue for retaining a free choice in the matter of imbibing carcinogenic substances and almost certainly ruining our pulmonary function for relaxation or pleasure.

Talking about this is left to 'fringe' characters and right-wing think tanks, who end up with a reputation for moral repugnancy due to sometimes valuing freedom over safety, which is deeply unfashionable at this point.

It's all about facts. Safety is quantifiable, such as by measuring how many people come to harm from certain situations. Freedom not so much. Including the freedom to be an idiot.

So?

This is the part where custom dictates a rousing takeaway or a call to action, but there isn't one.

Except to suggest that it matters that motivated reasoning doesn't just come from being stupid. The culture almost demands it as long as wider-ranging and more open conversations about solutions to problems aren't happening.

The problems listed up top are all real. They are identified and described (as far as I can see) using verifiable facts. It's the assumed solutions that many people object to - and they are certainly not always terrible people. They are tired people and I can't always blame them for reaching into the nether regions of desktop 'research' to find reasons to deny the 'facts'.