Category Archive

Anyone who reads this blog for more than fifteen minutes knows how quick I am to excoriate someone who’s telling a lie. But is there ever a time when lies can serve to illuminate a greater truth? One college professor found lies useful in teaching:

What made Dr. K memorable was a gimmick he employed that began with his introduction at the beginning of his first class:

“Now I know some of you have already heard of me, but for the benefit of those who are unfamiliar, let me explain how I teach. Between today until the class right before finals, it is my intention to work into each of my lectures … one lie. Your job, as students, among other things, is to try and catch me in the Lie of the Day.” And thus began our ten-week course.

This was an insidiously brilliant technique to focus our attention – by offering an open invitation for students to challenge his statements, he transmitted lessons that lasted far beyond the immediate subject matter and taught us to constantly checksum new statements and claims with what we already accept as fact. Early in the quarter, the Lie of the Day was usually obvious – immediately triggering a forest of raised hands to challenge the falsehood. Dr. K would smile, draw a line through that section of the board, and utter his trademark phrase “Very good! In fact, the opposite is true. Moving on … “

As the quarter progressed, the Lie of the Day became more subtle, and many ended up slipping past a majority of the students unnoticed until a particularly alert person stopped the lecture to flag the disinformation. Every once in a while, a lecture would end with nobody catching the lie which created its own unique classroom experience – in any other college lecture, end of the class hour prompts a swift rush of feet and zipping up of bookbags as students make a beeline for the door; on the days when nobody caught the lie, we all sat in silence, looking at each other as Dr. K, looking quite pleased with himself, said with a sly grin: “Ah ha! Each of you has one falsehood in your lecture notes. Discuss amongst yourselves what it might be, and I will tell you next Monday. That is all.” Those lectures forced us to puzzle things out, work out various angles in study groups so we could approach him with our theories the following week.

So, yes… lies sometimes have their uses — if one is using them openly, to teach critical thinking and the ability to sort the true from the false. Lying for the express purpose of deceiving one’s listeners, though, still ranks among the most disgraceful and damaging things a person can do.

PZ Myers has posted a beautiful and eloquent piece, entitled “An atheist’s creed”.

An atheist’s creed

I believe in time,
matter, and energy,
which make up the whole of the world.

I believe in reason, evidence and the human mind,
the only tools we have;
they are the product of natural forces
in a majestic but impersonal universe,
grander and richer than we can imagine,
a source of endless opportunities for discovery.

I believe in the power of doubt;
I do not seek out reassurances,
but embrace the question,
and strive to challenge my own beliefs.

I accept human mortality.

We have but one life,
brief and full of struggle,
leavened with love and community,
learning and exploration,
beauty and the creation of
new life, new art, and new ideas.

I rejoice in this life that I have,
and in the grandeur of a world that preceded me,
and an earth that will abide without me.

What’s the Harm? collects examples of folks who have been killed, injured, or who have suffered economic loss as a result of a lack of critical thinking:

Not all information is created equal. Some of it is correct. Some of it is incorrect. Some of it is carefully balanced. Some of it is heavily biased. Some of it is just plain crazy.

It is vital in the midst of this deluge that each of us be able to sort through all of this, keeping the useful information and discarding the rest. This requires the skill of critical thinking. Unfortunately, this is a skill that is often neglected in schools.

This site is designed to make a point about the danger of not thinking critically. Namely that you can easily be injured or killed by neglecting this important skill. We have collected the stories of over 120,000 people who have been injured or killed as a result of someone not thinking critically.

The site presents a frightening litany of catastrophes caused by uncritical belief in things like Scientology, homeopathy, and creationism. Read and be warned.

Ed Brayton has an excellent post about a priori dismissal, a variant of our old friend the straw man argument.

Here’s what I think is really going on here: assuming an evil agenda is easier than engaging someone’s real position. It’s what Matt Nisbet would call a convenient cognitive shortcut. It makes the world so simple when you can just dismiss the person taking the position out of hand without having to engage the position itself. But sometimes the world just isn’t that simple; sometimes, frequently in fact, a clash of ideas really is a sincere dispute between people who both care about doing the right thing even if they disagree on what the right thing is.

...

Such arguments are made as a means of a priori dismissal. They tend to cloud our judgment rather than aid in it. Once we’ve decided that the contrary position is not just wrong but evil, all serious thought about the subject ceases. So does all meaningful communication. Such shallow thinking is seductive precisely because it’s all too easy. Probably none of us are entirely immune to it; I know I’m not. But it’s something that rational people should make a concerted effort to avoid.

One sees a great deal of this from the wingnut extremists of the right, but it can be found coming from all parts of the political spectrum. Certainly I know that I am not guiltless in this regard. Ed is quite right: Anyone interested in rational discussion of the issues of the day should work very hard to avoid this fallacy.

Michael Montoure has written what may be the finest, most succinct essay on the elusive art of happiness and self-improvement that I have ever read…

Find the demon.

Do you know what I’m talking about? It’s the little voice in the back of your head that’s always whispering, “You can’t.” You know the demon. You may think you hate the demon, but you don’t. You love it. You let it own you. You do everything it says. Every time there’s something you want, you consult the demon first, to see if it will say, “You can’t have that.”

What you don’t realize is that your demon doesn’t know anything. It’s an idiot. It’s nothing but a parrot, repeating back to you anything negative that its ever heard, anything that makes you hurt, makes you squirm. If a teacher once told you “You’ll never accomplish anything,” it was listening; it hoards words like that and repeats them back to you to watch you jump. It doesn’t know what its saying. It doesn’t care.

Exorcise yourself.

You can take me literally or not, as suits you. But do, please, the next time you hear that voice in your head, imagine it, visualize it, as something physical that you can get hold of; tear it out of you, feel its fingers weaken and lose their grip on your spine, and grind it to dust, to nothing, under your boot heel on your way out to dance in the streets.

You can. You think you can’t; but it’s telling you that. You can.

Read it all.

Scientist, writer, and rationalist Richard Dawkins recently presented his documentary “The Enemies of Reason” on Britain’s Channel 4. View part 1 and part 2 below.

In related news, both of Dawkins’ US and UK foundations have been officially recognized as charities.

(via Pharyngula and Denialism)

An article at lifehack.org explains succinctly the benefits of "Becoming an Effective Skeptic":

There are a lot of practical applications for using skeptical thinking. Unfortunately, with the recent popularity of programs like The Secret and positive thinking self-help, rational thinking is being subverted for a self-induced placebo effect. Here are some benefits you can get from using skepticism on practical matters:

• Creativity – The best way to prevent new solutions is to believe you already have the answer. Allowing a gap of doubt can allow creative alternatives to flow in. If you are adamant that advertising will not work for your product, you might cut off hundreds of ideas for improving your business.


• Planning – Assumptions are the enemy of planning. A common rule of thumb for software development is to plan to use double the amount of time you need; then add six months. Write your plans too narrowly and they may collapse under new information.


• Quickly Integrate New Facts – When you also maintain a small margin of doubt, you can allow in new facts easily. If you are completely certain your approach is perfect, you won’t be able to adjust when evidence points that it isn’t.


• Reveal Weaknesses – Many of the things that sabotage your efforts will be completely unknown. Thinking critically and examining the information can reveal some of these traps.

Worth a read. I am certainly aware that I apply the principles listed imperfectly… but I do try.

The Nietzsche Family Circus randomly picks a Family Circus cartoon and a quote from the works of Friedrich Nietzsche. The very first one I got was dead on:

From the mouths of dead philosophers…

We all have biases. What are yours? Most, if not all, of them will be found in this handy list of cognitive biases...

• Bandwagon effect – the tendency to do (or believe) things because many other people do (or believe) the same. Related to groupthink, herd behaviour, and manias. Carl Jung pioneered the idea of the collective unconscious which is considered by Jungian psychologists to be responsible for this cognitive bias.
• Bias blind spot – the tendency not to compensate for one’s own cognitive biases.
• Choice-supportive bias – the tendency to remember one’s choices as better than they actually were.
• Confirmation bias – the tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions.

Hat tip to linkfilter.

They’re everywhere. And there is a way to recognize them...

Ever since I visited Dr. Robert Hare in Vancouver, I can see them, the psychopaths. It’s pretty easy, once you know how to look. I’m watching a documentary about an American prison trying to rehabilitate teen murderers. They’re using an emotionally intense kind of group therapy, and I can see, as plain as day, that one of the inmates is a psychopath. He tries, but he can’t muster a convincing breakdown, can’t fake any feeling for his dead victims. He’s learned the words, as Bob Hare would put it, but not the music.

The incredible thing, the reason I’m yelling, is that no one in this documentary — the therapists, the warden, the omniscient narrator — seems to know the word “psychopath.” It is never uttered, yet it changes everything. A psychopath can never be made to feel the horror of murder. Weeks of intense therapy, which are producing real breakthroughs in the other youths, will probably make a psychopath more likely to reoffend. Psychopaths are not like the rest of us, and everyone who studies them agrees they should not be treated as if they were.

I think of Bob Hare, who’s in New Orleans receiving yet another award, and wonder if he’s watching the same show in his hotel room and feeling the same frustration. A lifetime spent looking into the heads of psychopaths has made the slight, slightly anxious emeritus professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia the world’s best-known expert on the species. Hare hasn’t merely changed our understanding of psychopaths. It would be more accurate to say he has created it.

The condition itself has been recognized for centuries, wearing evocative labels such as “madness without delirium” and “moral insanity” until the late 1800s, when “psychopath” was coined by a German clinician. But the term (and its 1930s synonym, sociopath) had always been a sort of catch-all, widely and loosely applied to criminals who seemed violent and unstable. Even into the mid-1970s, almost 80 percent of convicted felons in the United States were being diagnosed as sociopaths. In 1980, Hare created a diagnostic tool called the Psychopathy Checklist, which, revised five years later, became known as the PCL-R. Popularly called “the Hare,” the PCL-R measures psychopathy on a forty-point scale. Once it emerged, it was the first time in history that everyone who said “psychopath” was saying the same thing. For research in the field, it was like a starting gun.

As you may have noticed, I have criticized a great many of the arguments made by radical right-wingers on the basis of mistakes in reasoning. The topic of critical thinking is an interest of mine, and along those line, I commend to you the list of logical fallacies compiled and explained by Dr. Michael C. Labossiere.

A fallacy is, very generally, an error in reasoning. This differs from a factual error, which is simply being wrong about the facts. To be more specific, a fallacy is an “argument” in which the premises given for the conclusion do not provide the needed degree of support. A deductive fallacy is a deductive argument that is invalid (it is such that it could have all true premises and still have a false conclusion). An inductive fallacy is less formal than a deductive fallacy. They are simply “arguments” which appear to be inductive arguments, but the premises do not provided enough support for the conclusion. In such cases, even if the premises were true, the conclusion would not be more likely to be true.

It’s always useful to know what logical fallacies are, and how to recognize them in arguments made by others — or yourself.

ADDEMDUM: The resources listed in the Wikipedia article on critical thinking look to be most helpful. I am slogging through them, slowly.