Tag Archives: beliefs

Conventional Wisdom of Crowds

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Photo by A. www.viajar24h.com

Conventional Wisdom

Conventional wisdom is an unexamined proclamation that is generally accepted as truth. We use anecdotal evidence as a short-cut for critical thinking. The problem with conventional wisdom, where it relates to incorrect beliefs, is that it obscures our ability to become aware of the assumptions upon which we base those beliefs.

Knowledge is Powerless

How do we learn? As children, we may have been taught by rote, parroting words. As we grew older, we were taught to read, enabling us to regurgitate written words. Hopefully, during our education, we were trained to think critically. Without this step, we are limited to repeating as true whatever we have heard or read.


Unfortunately, critical thinking is exactly where many of us fall short in our daily lives. Whether or not we have the necessary skills to question whether certain proclamations should be accepted or rejected, the truth is that expediency usually dictates how we evaluate such utterances.



Photo by Dashu Pagla

We are bombarded with messages continuously. Advertisements make claims. Newspaper headlines declare doom. Commentators spew sound bites. Strangers offer unsolicited advice. Officials, supervisors and other authority figures issue orders. Then there are traffic signals, bodily signals, sensory stimuli and the on-going mental conversation that we carry on with ourselves. If we are going to get through the next hour, we need efficient methods for plowing through all of these messages.

Our most powerful weapon for processing incoming messages is our knowledge base. It is our stored collection of accepted and rejected notions, through which new information is filtered. The trouble is that the knowledge base may have been built upon a shaky foundation.

The Fallacy of the Informed Decision


Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.

-Mark Twain

We defer to specialists. We have to. We don’t have time to learn enough about every subject in order to qualify as experts.

As a result, we are susceptible to parroting whatever we read or hear from sources that are supposedly solid.

When bad information propagates through the knowledge bases of many people, it is not easily dislodged. As an example, the British Journal of Medicine published an article in 2007, debunking seven medical myths as either unproved or untrue. The list includes the compelling beliefs that eating turkey causes drowsiness and that we should consume eight glasses of water daily.

These myths persist, even though they have been debunked. The reason that they do is simple: not many of us read the British Journal of Medicine! This reason is not simplistic. Another science magazine explains:

The reason for this cognitive disconnect is that we have evolved brains that pay attention to anecdotes because false positives (believing there is a connection between A and B when there is not) are usually harmless, whereas false negatives (believing there is no connection between A and B when there is) may take you out of the gene pool. Our brains are belief engines that employ association learning to seek and find patterns. Superstition and belief in magic are millions of years old, whereas science, with its methods of controlling for intervening variables to circumvent false positives, is only a few hundred years old.

- Michael Shermer, Scientific American Magazine, August 2008

This is just one example of our reliance on experts for information. If you think about how many people you regularly consult, you should not be surprised that you may be quite susceptible to misinformed messages and their attendant consequences – poor decisions.

Motivated Reasoning



Photo by Firesam

How do we justify our incorrect beliefs? Incorrect beliefs – apart from lack of knowledge – may be based on creative thinking.

An article in the March 2009 Sociological Inquiry, “There Must Be a Reason”: Osama, Saddam, and Inferred Justification, put forth the concept of motivated reasoning.

Essentially, sociologists from four major research institutions culled a group of test subjects from over one thousand study participants. From this group, the researchers concluded that these interviewees used a variety of creative strategies to justify their incorrect beliefs:

  • Counterarguing

  • Attitude bolstering

  • Selective exposure

  • Disputing rationality

  • Inferred Justification

The point here is not to become armchair sociologists, but to recognize that we actively strive to support our belief systems.

Wisdom of Crowds

Have you ever reviewed a product or service? Do you rely on them, even a little?

Companies like Amazon.com would like you to believe that these reviews are relevant. Perhaps they are.

Sarah Perez, in her article, The Dirty Little Secret About the Wisdom of the Crowds, discusses a study that refutes the trustworthiness of such rating sites.

This study was conducted by professor Vassilis Kostakos of Carnegie Mellon University. Professor Kostakos found that user-generated content on sites like Amazon.com, Digg.com and IMdb.com are created by a small subset of the user base. This certainly is not representative of the website community at large!

Jason Cohen, of asmartbear.com, suggests that we ignore the wisdom of crowds. He states that, even though groups collectively do better at guessing the number of jellybeans in a jar, there is no good reason to use groups for innovation. Cohen uses a holiday meal planning exercise to illustrate his point:

Consider what happens when you’re planning a holiday meal. There’s a range of fantastic things you could cook, but wait: Some people can’t take spicy food, Uncle Bill is allergic to garlic, Aunt Sarah doesn’t eat red meat, Timmy doesn’t eat anything green, ….

Eventually you realize there’s only way to please everyone: Cook something bland, mild, and safe, like chicken and rice. But does chicken and rice actually please anyone? Not really, it was just what everyone hated the least.

- Jason Cohen, blog Ignoring the Wisdom of Crowds

Sarah Perez goes even further:

“Perhaps it’s time we give up the idea that the “wisdom of the crowds” was ever a driving force behind any socialized, user-generated anything and realize that, just like in life, there will always be active participants as well as the passive passerbys.”

- Sarah Perez, The Dirty Little Secret About the Wisdom of the Crowds

You can always flip a coin.

“Introduce a little anarchy. Upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos. I’m an agent of chaos. Oh, and you know the thing about chaos? It’s fair!”

- The Joker, Dark Knight

Bear Right: Alcohol, Abortion and Arms

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Getting Our Bearings


One of the biggest problems that plagues rational beings is debating on dual planes. The use of emotionally charged words invokes irrelevant images, which cloud the judgment and usually obscure any attempt to make ourselves understood.
…
Once a discussion has reached enough thinkers, chaos perforce, ensues. In its simplest form, the chaos manifests itself as two people shouting across the chasm between the two planes.

– Mitchell Allen, from Fruitless Debates

I’ve always been fascinated by the polarizing power of personal beliefs. Truth and Fallacy are poor step-sisters to Perception. The reason is simple: we can not know all things, but we can believe whatever we wish.

Indeed, some ideas do not come down on the side of truth or fallacy. Instead, they represent conversations about different ideals – the way things ought to be. Naturally, some conversations are louder than others.

Bear Right – Conservatively Speaking

One way to confuse matters is to attach an ideal to an ideology and then, in the heat of discussion, paint the speaker with a stereotypical broad brush. Ideologies, at best, are a framework within which a consistent set of ideas create sense of the world. In other words, ideology is systematized perception!

Part of the systemization is the inclusion of ideals within the framework. What we tend to forget is that one or more ideals in a specific ideology might also be found in other, possibly conflicting, ideologies.

Obviously, we don’t all see things the same way, so it is pointless to base arguments of ideals on ideology.

The Right To Bear Arms

In 2006, a few months before I wrote Fruitless Debates, I indulged in one of my own.
I naively sought to interpret the Second Amendment:


Security, on the other hand, is based implicitly on the idea that a sovereign nation would wish to remain autonomous and would take steps to ensure their sovereignty. The Constitution of the United States makes this clear in various places:

  • Preamble – We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
  • Article I, Section 8 – The Congress shall have power to … declare war
  • Article II – The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States,
  • Second Amendment – A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.

Because security was not a major factor in the formulation of the United States of America, it cannot, therefore, be linked arm-in-arm with the notion of freedom.

-Mitchell Allen, Essential Liberty Vs Temporary Safety

The long-standing argument, by proponents of gun rights, that the Second Amendment applied to individuals, has finally been affirmed by the Supreme Court (District of Columbia v. Heller).
I take solace from the fact that a dissenting opinion, written by Justice John Paul Stevens, resonates with my interpretation:


The Second Amendment is naturally divided into two parts: its prefatory clause and its operative clause. The former does not limit the latter grammatically, but rather announces a purpose.
The Amendment could be rephrased, “Because a well regulated Militia is necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.”

-Justice John Paul Stevens, from Supreme Court Opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller

My Body, My Rules

To what extent does self-governance permit peaceful coexistence? If you and I decided to debate a social topic from the perspective of whether individuals are capable of self-control, how long do you think an objective discussion would last?

Here’s the problem: any assertions which strike at the core of an ideal tend to be taken as personal attacks (remember, we’re going to try leaving ideologies out of it).

Abortion is one such polarizing topic. Any statements we might make will strike at one or more ideals – the sanctity of life, a woman’s right to choose, etc.

As it relates to the theme of this post, I quote an interesting website that appears to put forth an unbiased debate on the topic:


It is important to realize that both the pro-life, anti-abortion and pro-choice positions cover a range of beliefs and advocacy. Most of the media are wrong: there is no single pro-life/anti-abortion position and no single pro-choice position.

-ReligiousTolerance.org

Prohibitively Expensive

Alcohol is another hot-button topic. Whether we drink alcoholic beverages or not, each of us has a view about our capacity, the capacity of others and the right of governments to dictate acceptable capacities. We possibly also hold moral beliefs about consumption. Can we talk about these things? I’m not sure.

In Virginia, where I live, the distribution, sale and consumption of alcoholic beverages is governed by the Virginia Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control (ABC). Recently, I read an interesting article about Happy Hour Advertising Laws. This article, and the accompanying comments, further point out the futility of reaching common ground in the debate between government control and personal freedom.

Quantifying the Fruitless Debate

Just to be controversial, I decided to include these provocative “graphs”, which depict my own perceptions. If they make no sense to you, rest assured that I couldn’t get them to clarify anything for me, either.

I deliberately refrained from assigning meaning to the chosen colors and the relative placement of the icons.
What do these graphs evoke in your mind? Are they judgmental? Self-serving? Stupid?
Leave your feedback!