Meditations on Bias

Don't do that.

Image by Cedar

Evolution is an odd duck. On one hand it gives you the dodo, on the other it grants a hairless biped the ability to recognize patterns — such pattern recognition ability helping said biped conquer an entire planet full of critters with fangs and talons and appetites.

This ability to find a pattern — to recognize the stalking sabretooth, to discern threatening actions — was so important to our survival as a species that the human brain will reward finding a pattern with a little boost of Happy Neurochemicals.

As with anything else involving humans the skill of pattern recognition requires training and fine-tuning. The default setting for recognizing a pattern tends to be set to “Yes”, since a false positive when the pattern might be 400 pounds of Appetite isn’t such a bad thing; but defaulting to “Yes” when most of our predators are confined to zoos and far countries can be … less optimal.

A false positive on pattern recognition can not only initiate confirmation bias, but it can skew your confirmation bias, which affects further analysis of patterns, which reinforces the bias … it becomes a loop of self-fulfilled error, all reinforced with dopamine.

These days we don’t teach a lot of logical thinking, which aids both in filtering bad pattern recognition and recognizing confirmation bias when it raises its ugly head — and this is particularly bad considering that social media was designed from the ground up to distort pattern recognition, while modern click-driven journalism is a case study in confirmation bias.

What’s the fix? Teach yourself to look at situations from a third-party viewpoint. Look for viewpoints counter to the one you hold. Learn the difference between objective facts and subjective opinions and feelings. Recognize when you — or anyone else — are twisting facts to fit beliefs instead of bending beliefs to fit the facts.

Above all: The 72-Hour Rule. Learn it, love it, live it. Initial information is very rarely accurate; but the modern news cycle demands IMMEDIATE information NOW.

Immediate information is, at best, a collection of SHAGs¹. Treat it as such, and when the guesses turn out not to be correct — as they will most of the time — don’t allow that to feed your confirmation bias.

Ian

1. Scientific Hairy-Arsed Guess