The Parable of the Op-ed Column
About Bias and How it Relates to the Creationism vs. Science Debate, or more generally, to all forms of belief
- Stephen W. Hawking
It's All About The Facts
I had been raised in a more or less conservative home and had to some degree adopted fiscally conservative views pretty much without even realizing it. I'd say that initially these beliefs were at a relatively low level - mainly, I just didn't think about it too much. And it's probably important to recognize that many beliefs start out this way - unconsciously, transparently.I began subscribing to a stock market oriented newspaper back in the 1980s, Investors Business Daily, and read it every day pretty much cover to cover for over twenty years.
I had never been much for editorial columns, but as I was very scholarly and seriously into the stock market, I began reading the whole paper, um, religiously you might say, op-ed columns as well. And of course these were fiscally conservative views, pro-business, advocating smaller government and free markets, etc. And so it was pretty much telling me what I was unconsciously already disposed to hear.
And they had facts.
Facts! Facts, I tell you. By the way, did I mention that they had facts? Real, true facts?
So over time, as much of a skeptic and freethinker as I was, I guess you could say I kind of let my guard down in this area, intellectually. I saw so much "evidence" lining up with my unconsciously "chosen" beliefs that I began to look at the situation as a slam dunk for that kind of fiscally conservative thinking, because they had ... facts. Two or three columns with new facts every day, I guess about 250 business days a year, for over 20 years. That's a lot of facts. It became almost an assumption that liberals were deluded in this area, because they clearly must not be looking at the facts!
But almost all of my friends were liberals, with a couple of libertarian outliers. So I heard a lot from the liberal side.
Beginning to Understand
I think the seeds of my eventual enlightenment in this area began in some ways with the widespread adoption of the internet, where instead of just sharing opinions, it was a bit easier to share ... facts, or what we should probably call something like un-vetted fact-like material. Links to newspaper articles, etc.And what I slowly, very slowly began to see, was that while these op-ed columns had facts, and the facts checked out, they weren't telling me the whole story.
What I began to see is that in any relatively complex and often discussed area of human endeavor, there are a lot of facts. Too many, probably, for any one person to digest. And what op-ed columns and virtually everything else to at least some degree (even the biggest names in journalism have their biases) were doing was to reach into the big box of facts about an issue and carefully select only the facts that support that particular viewpoint. The problem is that people make a generally unconscious assumption that those selected facts represent the whole truth.
Now to some of you this may be painfully, stupidly obvious, and I'd certainly say I was aware of this type of thing in most areas, but like I said, somehow in this area especially it just kind of crept up on me.
To my embarrassment, I began to find that these op-ed columns were sometimes doing things that were downright intellectually dishonest in their presentation of facts. Telling only part of a story, part of the truth, often leaving out extremely important information that was contradictory. Cherry picking examples. Engaging in any number of biases or logical fallacies to make a point.
And not that there is anything wrong with having a point of view such as conservatism or liberalism. It's just that, to get a bit abstract, a point of view has to be seen as made up, and to evaluate that point of view you have to choose what criteria you're going to use to evaluate it. But once you do choose to evaluate it, you need to be intellectually honest about doing so. You have to start looking at both sides of both sides, which pretty much no one does.
At first the changes in me were subtle. I began to pay somewhat more than mere lip service to other points of view but I was still was missing a lot. At this point I hadn't seen enough examples of the whole truth, and I was still overly discounting other points of view. But I began to see more examples of this, and I began to see it in many different fields, and then, finally, there came some relatively clear realizations.
I began to be able to see this kind of distortion everywhere, to recognize the signs of these biases, and the likely places for them to occur. I began to cringe when I saw these, whether it was my viewpoint or the opposite. I had never particularly watched any of the political newsmagazines on TV (video op-ed columns), but around this time I made it a point to watch a few to check things out. I saw it in Fox News and Bill O'Reilly on one side, and MSNBC and Keith Olbermann on the other. In print I saw it in a Walter Williams column on the one hand, and a Paul Krugman column on the other. And many other places. My liberal friends are just about as biased as my conservative friends, and they have just as much trouble seeing it when it is gently pointed out. Many seem to think they are getting an unbiased view of the truth from sources like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, for example. Kind of like a conservative imagining they are getting the whole truth from talk radio. Guess again.
Advertisements for Belief
Most people understand at some level that advertisements for products and services are inherently biased, and they take the appropriate mental steps to be skeptical of claims in advertising. They realize that a manufacturer may not be divulging the worst aspects of their product, and that they probably aren't going to point out the benefits of their competitor's product. People just need to go one step further and understand that an op-ed column, or anything resembling an op-ed column, can be seen as an advertisement for a particular belief, and to take the necessary steps to guard against unwarranted trust in such information.It's All About The Biases
To some extent you can't get away from it. What I'm describing is a very well documented form of bias, with plenty of research in the field of psychology to back it up. People reliably tend to spend more time looking at and believing things that align with their belief systems, and when they come across information that is contradictory, they tend to gloss over it and discount it.So it's obvious, but I think it's the kind of thing where most people think it's the other guy doing it, but not themselves. In practice, based on the kind of divisive political beliefs that almost everyone seems to have these days, I have to assume that almost everyone is in fact suffering from this form of bias without realizing it.
And I don't see it as some kind of conspiracy or anything, like people are intentionally telling only part of the truth or whatever. I think the various pundits, or your drinking buddy, or whoever, just have these biases that are transparent to themselves, and they are filtering the data just like the psychological research says they do. In many cases the sources themselves are looking at information that has already been pre-filtered for the use of that particular belief system.
So that is a very important observation by itself, but the reason I was thinking about this as a parable (if this even qualifies as a parable) in the first place was as a way to communicate the basic difference between creationism and science. Specifically, in reference to an old friend who had gone the creationist route, I had spent a lot of time thinking about how to talk to him, as it became immediately clear within one conversation that the basic arguments would always get rationalized away and we would never get anywere. So I spent a lot of time thinking about how I might bridge the gap, and I eventually realized you have to get to the source, which is the bias itself, the belief itself and how and why it formed.
Ultimately, the fault lies with the fact that our brains are pattern-recognition engines, with the unfortunate quality that they tend to see patterns even when they don't exist (i.e. superstition). It should be understood that these types of errors are often useful for survival, i.e. it's better to mistakenly see a predator in the brush and run away than to fail to see a lethal threat. But survival is not the same thing as seeing the world accurately. If we want to see the world accurately, the only real method we have is to look very carefully at things, come up with ways of rigorously testing the patterns we think we see, be open and honest about the pros and cons of what we find, check our work, and then get other people to check our work, in a self-correcting fashion, so that over time, the body of knowledge slowly increases. Given our biases, rationality, skepticism, and scientific method are not luxuries, they are requirements, if you are interested in looking at the world accurately.
So here's the deal. Creationism, which I'm willing to admit has compiled an impressive number of fact-containing "answers" to difficult questions, and which rightfully (to some degree) pokes skepticism at science, is unfortunately for their case one big op-ed column. They are indeed presenting facts, yes, but they are only presenting facts that support their position. They are decidedly not telling the whole story, or looking at the whole picture. And that is a BIG problem. That is a flaw as big as the universe, because selective truth is not the same as the whole truth, which leads to its corollary:
It Is Possible To Lie While Telling The Truth
That's worth saying again, it is possible to lie while telling the truth, and you are most definitely being lied to.It's kind of like if I took a box full of nails and tossed them on the floor, then removed all the nails that didn't point exactly in a particular direction, and then showed you the remaining nails saying, "look at all those nails, I threw them on the floor and these all ended up pointing in the same direction." So that would be true, of course. And if I don't tell you anything about the other nails, that would seem pretty remarkable. But if you take the trouble to investigate the totality of evidence, if you go back and look at a video of ALL the nails, suddenly it doesn't seem so impressive. Suddenly it appears that I've merely cherry picked the evidence from a large set of random data. Suddenly it appears quite disingenuous or intellectually dishonest that I have only pointed out part of the truth.
And that differs from science. Sure, you can find scientists that have adopted knee-jerk atheism as their belief system, but at least a tacit or technical agnosticism is necessary for true science. And you can definitely find examples of bad science, but science isn't about an individual study - it is about carefully validating and advancing the overall body of knowledge, whatever that turns out to be.
The scientists I admire are the ones that can follow a certain line of research for 20 years of hard work, finally coming up empty, with conclusive proof that the basic direction of their hypothesis was wrong, and openly smile and say, "excellent!" They know that their work was not in vain, that it pushed the body of knowledge forward by substantially eliminating that particular avenue of research.
In the creationist world, work like that would be quietly swept under the table. Sorry, but that's not science. In science, you generally don't get to pick and choose what you publish. You don't get to only look at the facts that agree with your viewpoint. You don't get to look at an op-ed column the same way you look at a well-vetted textbook. Opinion backed up with selective facts is not knowledge, it's half of a debate (and debate is a lousy way to learn about anything, because it's two biased viewpoints). As Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman put it, "the idea [behind science] is to try to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another."
In creationism, after poking around I saw a lot of criticism of individual studies or studies in a particular area. By and large the criticism and facts were technically correct (i.e. selective truth). Say we're talking about a particular form of radiometric dating. The problem is that the creationists seem to think that a single anomaly ends the discussion, or that the scientists are unaware of these anomalies or criticisms. What they don't ever seem to mention is that the scientists are aware of these things and, in the area of historical dating (info from a group of Christian geologists), have come up with rigorous and creative ways to address these issues and reliably cross validate the various measures. Although it's a single example, I like the interesting multi-discipline way that some ancient coral was dated.
It makes a certain amount of sense to be skeptical of an individual study, or studies that haven't been validated by several independent research groups. What doesn't make much sense is to disbelieve an entire branch of well vetted science, that in many cases may have dealt with said anomalies decades ago. The "debate" over climate change is another example of where individual anomalies are being exploited to cast doubt on strong scientific evidence. And that's another one where for me, the conservative op-ed columns had me overly skeptical, and it took quite a bit of stuff like this to get me more agnostic about it.
So a creationist really needs to look with open eyes, and not just glance over and discount, a site with opposing views like TalkOrigins or maybe The Panda's Thumb. And if you're on the side of science, maybe you need to do the same with something like the Creation Wiki or Answers in Genesis, if for no other reason to understand that you can't dismiss the other side with a mere wave of the hand. You have to understand that more is going on, and some education is in order. My observation is that the biased op-ed presentation of information that so many humans seem to crave, can almost completely obfuscate reality for believers, because, in line with the Stephen Hawking quote at the top of the page, it creates the illusion of knowledge.
Similar Viewpoints
The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science
Also, the book Stumbling On Happiness by Daniel Gilbert is not quite so much about happiness as it is about an in-depth look at all our biases and self-delusion. Great stuff.
And, Richard Feynman's 1974 commencement address at Caltech, Cargo Cult Science, also available in his book, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman. I LOVE this guy and highly recommend all his books.
A Couple of Quick Political Examples
An example of modern conservative bias: "47% of taxpayers don't pay any tax." This is a good example of a fact that is true only in a very selective sense, and is used to imply that 47% of Americans are living off the other 53% and that pretty soon they will learn to vote as a bloc and then extort the rest of us. The real truth is that the 47% refers only to federal income tax, which most people will be somewhat surprised to learn only comprises about 45% of federal revenue. For example, it does not include payroll tax, a regressive tax that raises another 35% of federal revenue, or corporate income tax, and naturally it doesn't include state or local taxes. Once you actually include all of the taxes that apply, you will only find around 10% of taxpayers that don't pay any tax.An example of modern liberal bias: "The United States has a high infant mortality rate." Comparisons with European countries can make the U.S. look like a bunch of baby killers, but there is a reason. European countries have different reporting standards for infant mortality. So it's not an apples to apples comparison. By the time you read this, it may have changed, but basically the European countries have various ways of not counting premature babies, for example by excluding low birthweight babies, or those less than a certain length, or less than a day old. As infant mortality statistics basically have everything to do with premature babies, if you don't count them, your statistics will look real good. In the U.S. we count them all. (And this is not to say that there aren't pockets of low income groups in the U.S. that have some high infant mortality rates that need to be addressed).
Do you see?
Home