| Signs that your opinions function more to signal loyalty and ability than to estimate truth:
- You find it hard to be enthusiastic for something until you know that others oppose it.
- You have little interest in getting clear on what exactly is the position being argued.
- Realizing that a topic is important and neglected doesn’t make you much interested.
- You have little interest in digging to bigger topics behind commonly argued topics.
- You are less interested in a topic when you don’t foresee being able to talk about it.
- You are uncomfortable taking a position near the middle of the opinion distribution.
- You are uncomfortable taking a position of high uncertainty about who is right.
More at http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/09/opinion-warning-signs.html
While not terribly profound on a point by point analysis, the overarching message of the post is profound and important.
Here's Kurt Vonnegut's more whimsical rendition:
And here, according to Trout, was the reason human beings could not reject ideas because they were bad: “Ideas on Earth were badges of friendship or enmity. Their content didn’t matter. Friends agreed with friends, in order to express friendliness. Enemies disagreed with enemies, in order to express enmity.
“The ideas Earthlings held didn’t matter for hundreds of thousands of years, since they couldn’t do much about them anyway. Ideas might as well be badges as anything.
“They even had a saying about the futility of ideas: ‘If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.’
“And then Earthlings discovered tools. Suddenly agreeing with friends could be a form of suicide or worse. But agreements went on, not for the sake of common sense or decency or self-preservation, but for friendliness.
“Earthlings went on being friendly, when they should have been thinking instead. And when they built computers to do some thinking for them, they designed them not so much for wisdom as for friendliness. So they were doomed. Homicidal beggars could ride.” |
| When I hear American officials discussing this region, I shudder. My government is obviously out of its depth. For all the talk of President Obama’s secret, traitorous sympathy with the Islamic world, or his childhood experience of the mysteries of the exotic Other, the man is—obviously—as American as a stalk of corn waving lonely on a Kansas plain. I am certain he, and everyone around him, thinks in terms of “reasons,” “logic,” “arguments,” “truth,” and “facts.” I am sure that deep down, he believes everyone does. All Americans do, just as all Turks believe the rest of the world is basically like them.
http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/articles/2010-JulyAugust/full-Berlinski-JA-2010.html |
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