Critical thinking - needed now more than ever!

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, critical thinking, psychology, sociology

As I write this, a Kangaroo Court is being conducted in a Congressional committee, to hear "testimony" from a convicted perjurer. Such testimony is intended to, at the very least, embarrass the President of the United States; hopefully, to convince a larger segment of the public that said President is a liar, bigot, and general bad guy; even possibly ("Please, please!", you can almost hear them begging), to gather material that will allow Articles of Impeachment to be drawn up. P.T. Barnum would be proud (Google the two words Barnum and sucker).

So, mini-quiz:

1. Do you know what verse in the Bible states, "Money is the root of all evil."?
2. Do you believe the Moon landings of 1969-1972 were faked?
3. Do you expect part of California to "fall into the ocean"?

My analysis (feel free to disagree):

1. First Timothy 6:10 states, in the King James Version, "For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows." Note that it is "love of money" not just "money". The New International Version, usually more accurate in colloquial English, renders the first phrase, "For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil." Here it is "all kinds of evil", not just "all evil." Big difference.
2. If you believe NASA faked the Moon landings, you're in good company if you're British (52% of Britons think so), but only 7% of Americans think the landings were faked. U.S. Government hype about the Moon program is definitely worth taking with a grain of salt, but in my view, it would be harder to fake than to actually do it!
3. This was a popular belief 40-50 years ago, when everyone was waiting for a "big one" earthquake on the San Andreas Fault. In the half-century since, there have been several "nearly big one" earthquakes, which seem to have relieved the geological strain…for now. But, the S.A. Fault moves sideways, not up and down. The western side is creeping northward. If you wait long enough (40 million years), Los Angeles and San Francisco will be "sister cities", right across the Fault from one another. After a further 100 million years or so, the L.A. area will begin to descend beneath Alaska somewhere along the Aleutian Trench. That's when it will "fall" into the ocean.

Item #1 above is in the "everybody knows" category, at least for Americans brought up in a nominally Christian environment. But what most of "everybody" knows, isn't what was really written by the apostle Paul. Item #2 is a "grand conspiracy" belief. Those who believe it, can't be convinced into not believing it. And #3 takes advantage of general ignorance of geology (which direction the fault moves) and our small time horizon. It isn't just that we only live a century or less; most of us get impatient waiting for the microwave oven to heat a cup of water to make instant coffee! Even H.G. Wells's Time Machine only takes the fellow 800,000 years into the future (except for one scene, at an unknown remove, when the Sun is becoming a red giant).

When I was in college, I took a course in the English department, but it really belonged in the Philosophy department. We read articles in lots of journals of all kinds. We were to figure out what was the bias of the article, and by reading editorials or other articles in the same journal, what was the bias of the journal as a whole. So, the Wall Street Journal was, and still is, quite conservative, while Commonweal was and is liberal, bordering on progressive, and with a Roman Catholic viewpoint. There were five or six others. Near the end of the course we were to read editorials from several local and near-local newspapers, plus the New York Times. It was obvious to all of us that, without exception, the papers were exclusively left-wing. This was in the 1960's! Looking back and comparing with editorials in the local papers now, those would be considered hide-bound conservative (Jack Kennedy was fondly looked upon as a liberal, but today would be to the right of nearly everyone in Congress).

This points up two things. Firstly, I don't think any American college still has such a course in Critical Thinking. That wasn't its title, but it should have been. Secondly, baselines have shifted. Creeping leftism is one kind of "moving goal posts" trend. The fallacy of Moving Goal Posts is one matter taken up by the authors of The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe: How to Know What's Really Real in a World Increasingly Full of Fake, Dr. Steven Novella with Bob Novella, Cara Santa Maria, Jay Novella, and Evan Bernstein.

The authors, three brothers and two associates, are a core group of SGU (see book title), which produces podcasts and other materials on behalf of the New England Skeptical Society. They call themselves and their colleagues "rogue skeptics." Skeptic's Guide first discusses the many ways we can fool ourselves or be fooled by others, presents case studies from their experiences, and shows how to determine (to some degree; nothing is perfect) the veracity of the things we see and hear and read in the media. They have taken on a tall order, and the size of the book (nearly 500 pages) attests to that.

I began to read, with a niggling thought in the back of my mind, "I wonder if they'll make a full-on assault on faith?" I was relieved to find that they do not. They do criticize (rightly) young-earth creationism, anti-evolution beliefs, and the kind of "easy-believism" that attributes favorable coincidences to divine favor. In those areas, I happen to agree with them. Dr. Novella is a physician and educator. He reserved much greater disdain and his best ammunition for anti-vaccination activists and the "AIDS is not from HIV" folks, and most kinds of "alternative" medicine. As to religion, I would not call him an Atheist; that term has been taken over by evangelical anti-theists. I'd call him an honest non-theist. (Hey, Doc, I mean that as a compliment!)

Is it possible to be a Christian skeptic? Particularly for me, a Christian mystic. Let's define terms here: "mystic" means someone who has spiritual experiences; and "skeptic" means someone who withholds belief in claims not properly supported by evidence. The first half of the book points out all the ways that our "experiences" could be fallacious. Well and good. The experiences of me and my fellow believers may not make sense to the SGU folks. They'd say we have false premises. I say we have repeated and reliable experiences and based upon them, we are either crazy, or we are children of God, who know our God by direct experience. However, it is worth taking note that we have finite capacity, which does lead to our brain taking many short cuts with our perceptions. We need to be humble, which is mentioned frequently throughout the book.

So, I am a mystic, but I am also a scientist. I am a retired IT/IS computer scientist, who wrote software for geologists, biologists, chemists and physicists for 40 years. In retirement I work for a natural history museum (part time), where I use my knowledge of the workings of evolution and natural selection daily. I understand Deep Time (millions and billions of years) in a way not many people are equipped to comprehend. As a scientist, I am a skeptic. I am actually quite impressed by an argument the authors make, against the notion of "supernatural" events. If something happens, and it had a physical effect, particularly one that can be measured, it is by definition part of nature. Thus, if there is an entity that we call God, who—as theists believe, by definition—intervenes in the workings of humankind and particularly His believers, that God is part of nature. The Judaeo-Christian understanding of the creator takes that a step further, to say that "real nature", including God, is a lot bigger than the "nature" that human scientists have so far been studying.

I had a colleague at an engineering company where I worked in about 1975, who told me of his belief that God was a "super technologist". Maybe he was right. If what I believe about God is correct, I expect to have the chance to ask Him.

Back to the book. We are bombarded more than ever with "fake news". It is getting easier to fake. Even a century or more ago, some things could be faked. Have you heard of "retouching"? I have a photo from 1914 of a family reunion. I scanned it for my online family tree. In the scan, the oblique light of the scanner made the retouching more evident; I hadn't noticed it before. The photographer actually painted, right on the 8x10 inch print, to make certain of the faces more attractive, particularly one older man who had huge jowls, which are retouched to look more like a more ordinary elderly face. Photoshop was about 75 years in the future! Now such photo-editing can be done very easily and is undetectable without specialized software.

There's one spot in the book where I noticed the authors let an error (made by others) slip past them. On p.88, writing about altering perceptions by the way a fact is presented:

Another example is a survey showing that "62 percent of people disagreed with allowing 'public condemnation of democracy,' but only 46 percent of people agreed that it is right to 'forbid public condemnation of democracy.'" These are, again, the same outcome.

Actually, 62+46=108. Either there is a typo there, in the production of this book, or the source contained the typo. Considering the language used in the two statements, I suspect the latter figure was intended to be 38 percent. Now, this does little more than emphasize that I am a pretty good proof-reader. The point they are making is valid. If I say to you, "This chemotherapy is successful 2/3 of the time", it causes quite a different feeling than "1/3 of those who use this chemotherapy find it ineffective."

And I do want to say a word about selective attention. We can't pay attention to everything, so we are, by nature (natural selection, in which I do believe), fitted to discard nearly everything that enters our senses (90%? 99%? anyway, nearly all). Although we have a visual cortex with as many neurons as the entire brain of a gorilla, and it slurps up a 120-megapixel stereo image (about 8 mpx of color info), about 20 times per second, we must discard most of that. There isn't time or space to form lasting memories of everything. We actually "notice" a small number of "things" per minute, but there are upwards of 800 minutes in a waking day. By the end of the day, most of our "minute-memories" are long gone, and we remember only a few. Weeks later, we aren't sure which day we had eggs for breakfast, and which day we had Lucky Charms or Rice Krispies. We will, however, remember the fight we had with our spouse or the scare we got when a semi nearly ran us off the road…but we may not recall just which day it was. Instead, we'll remember what our spouse was wearing or the tree alongside the road that we narrowly missed.

Now, I could go into the techniques for avoiding being faked out by fake news. The book contains so many of them, you'd have to be the kind of specialist that the "rogue skeptics" are, to effectively use more than a handful. So I'll just mention a couple of things.

First, for many things we might encounter, when a viewpoint is presented, we need to ask, "Who benefits?" This principle is behind the phrase "conflict of interest." We are all prone to that! Secondly, when there are conflicting views of an event, it is useful to ask, "Who has the power?" or "Who is paying for this?"

When someone, for example, wishes to run for President, so as to move American toward Socialism, and that same someone has become filthy rich by taking advantage of Capitalism, I just have to say, "Well, his initials are B.S., and that's what he is feeding us!" But, who benefits? Socialism requires totalitarianism. Under the dictum of Marx, "From each according to his ability; to each according to his need," who gets to choose what "his ability" ought to be, and who gets to choose what "his need" is? In every Socialist nation that has been set up, the totalitarians benefit, a whole lot, at the expense of everybody else. Look at the fine suits the current (and I hope outgoing) President of Venezuela wears in his news conferences, compared to the rags worn by the people the Venezuelan troops are gunning down in the streets because they have the temerity to ask for "more". Every "Socialist experiment" has devolved into a kleptocracy.

So, for today's Kangaroo Court, who benefits? Why would Mr. Cohen volunteer to "tell all" to a Congressional committee? There must be a very lucrative book deal in it (as soon as he gets out of prison for perjury). Also, to me this smacks of revenge. That is another kind of benefit, to lots of people. And I would not be at all surprised if there are large behind-the-scenes kickbacks (suitably laundered) from some Congresspersons who are hoping for that "smoking gun" they need to proceed with an impeachment.

My default mode is to get news from numerous sources. It's just kinda hard to get anything but "leftie special", when 90+% of the media are leftists, and I don't have cable so I can't watch The Blaze or Fox. Luckily I can get conservative news from at least one radio station around here, to counterbalance the "radio Leningrad" I hear from the rest of them.

So, Dr. Novella has become a favorite author of mine, at least among the non-theists. The writing in the book is top-notch, and the thinking is clear, or at least a whole lot more clear than almost anything I see in the newspapers these days.

P.S. P.T. Barnum didn't actually say, "There's a sucker born every minute." An associate of his said he built his business on fooling suckers, "…because there's one born every minute." The geek in me just has to add: Today in America, there are 7.3 births each minute, and in Barnum's time it was pretty similar (more births per person though the population was smaller). So, it seems, 6/7 of us aren't suckers! Somehow that seems optimistic…

Prevaricators' Paradise, or Victims' Vengeance?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, logic, lying, critical thinking

I'm sure you've heard the old chestnut about public figures who lie, that some lie when they must, and some lie constantly to stay in practice. Or that for some, that the way to tell they are lying is that their lips are moving. And then we have Mark Twain remarking on "Lies, damned lies, and statistics", which he attributed to Disraeli, but he was mistaken (or, perhaps, lying!). And we occasionally hear a paraphrase of "To err is human" into "To lie is human". Ah, the great benefits we seem to attain by lying, at such a little cost!

Is it safe to say that nearly anyone trying to advance a viewpoint (or sell a product or win an argument) is lying? Usually, I suppose. It is your best, first assumption. But when you want to know "the truth", where do you turn? Now that the biggest news story closing out the year 2016 is "Fake News", where do you get "Real News"?

We have to take what we can get, and verify it the best we can. This is the primary reason for learning to think critically. It is why right, right now is a great time for a book to appear with the title A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking in the Information Age. To quote the opening paragraph of author Daniel J. Levitin,

"This is a book about how to spot problems with the facts you encounter, problems that may lead you to draw the wrong conclusion. Sometimes the people giving you the facts are hoping you'll draw the wrong conclusion; sometimes they don't know the difference themselves. Today, information is available nearly instantaneously, but it is becoming increasingly hard to tell what's true and what's not, to sift through the various claims we hear and to recognize when they contain misinformation, pseudo-facts, distortions and outright lies."

Dr. Levitin jumps right over "lies and damned lies" to statistics in the first third of the book, "Evaluating Numbers". It is a great place to start because we are so damnably bad at evaluating numbers. The brain is an unbeatable pattern recognition machine. It excels at finding similarities, and it is over-tuned: it finds patterns where none exist. Thus we see all kinds of animals and scenery in clouds; a highly educated astronomer such as Percival Lowell spent much of his career mapping the canals on Mars; and to my recollection there are at least three pieces of burnt toast being carefully stored in freezers because they bear a mark that looks sort of like Jesus, so they have become objects of worship. But we are woefully deficient in discerning the meaning of numerical quantities.

It is curious: Recognizing a face reliably is something we do thousands of times daily, and we are very, very seldom mistaken. We almost never mistake a not-face for a face. What we do easily our computing machines do slowly and rather poorly. I have made heavy use of the Picasa face-tagging system for several years, for organizing my photos. It is really, really good, but will on occasion put a hopeful "Who is this?" tag on what I see as some random blob, or on a hubcap or the "face" of a clock. And it misses about a tenth of the genuine faces in an average scene, particularly when there is quite a range of sizes, that is, distances to the subjects. The computing power needed for Picasa's algorithms to work has only been available for about ten years. It takes a few billion computations to locate a face in a scene, and more billions to match it with a similar one in the database of recognized faces in your photo collection. Every one of us can recognize a person with great reliability in a tiny fraction of the time. But very few of us can determine the product 347x94 in less than several seconds, and probably not at all without the help of a calculator or a pencil and paper. Yet a computer can perform millions or billions of similar calculations every second, and does so whenever you recalculate an Excel spreadsheet. We must face the fact that our brain is tuned to see the tiger in the grass so we don't get eaten. Prior to the ascent of "civilization", we had no need to count the tiger's stripes, and if we were interested in doing so (unlikely!), it was only after we'd ganged up on the tiger to kill and skin it.

Part Two is "Evaluating Words", and in just under 60 pages, is the briefest of treatments of logical fallacies. There are numerous volumes written about the few dozen fallacies of formal logic that philosophers study, and further volumes that cover the fallacies of informal logic, the "everyday fallacies" such as "50,000 dentists agree" or "All the Kardashians (or celebrity of your choice) love product X" or "only a fool would pass up this offer". Pet Advertising Peeve of the year: any ad containing the phrase "don't want you to know" is fallacious. Period. Trust your uncle Polymath (but, then, this is possibly another fallacy!).

The third part of the book, "Evaluating the World", presents an excellent review of the Scientific Method, which is an armory containing our best weapons to discover error and falsity and correct them. The scientific method is collaborative; it cannot be practiced in isolation. The great difficulties we encounter using the scientific method glaringly illustrate just how prone we are to being deceived and to deceiving ourselves. Thus, if the brain is a pattern-recognition engine, the scientific method harnesses many brains to sharpen the focus and more properly set the boundary between "perceived facts" and "true facts".

I hesitate to go further. A book like this presents a quandary. While it exposes a few hundred ways you could be lied to, it is also a kind of prevaricator's textbook. I am reminded of the dilemma faced by missionaries to Hawaii, as described in James A. Michener's enormous novel Hawaii: They wanted to put up a sign with the Ten Commandments, but there was a problem. The Hawaiians didn't understand them, particularly "Thou shalt not commit adultery?" What was adultery? The missionaries argued thus: If we try to describe adultery in general terms, some people will say, "Oh, that isn't what I am doing." But if we list all the different things that are adultery, others will read the list and say about one item or another, "Wow, that sounds like fun. I'll try it!" They were further troubled by the cultural requirement that the king of Hawaii must marry his sister. It took the missionaries about two generations to change Hawaiian culture enough to eliminate "that kind of adultery". Thus there is a risk that some will read the book to get ideas.

I suppose Dr. Levitin has thought the matter through, and judged that putting weapons into our hands is worth the risk that a few liars might become better liars as a result. I agree. Caveat emptor is still the best policy, and always will be. Let this book full of caveats arm you.