Hacker News Reader

Comment by empath75 | Hacker News Reader

The difficult truth that no one wants to acknowledge is that determining the truth when confronted with contradictory sources requires intelligence, critical thinking and education.

The reason the us was so vulnerable to fake news is that we’ve spent the last several generations educating our children to be compliant consumers that don’t question authority or use critical thinking skills.

The funny thing about this thread is I bet that half of the people think of very different things that the other half when they think of fake news.

View on HN

What's the difference between using your "intelligence, critical thinking and education" and using your bias?

Intelligence, critical thinking and education are debiasing tools.

Depends on the type of education, really. I know intelligent people (one who won 1st place at ISEF) who believe the Earth is 6000 years old thanks to their religious education. Or take me for example. I was raised to believe that Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492 and discovered America. End of story. Education gave me that bias. Then I went on to learn that the Civil War was fought over "state's rights". Education gave me that bias. So it seems to me some (most?) education is a bias inducing tool.

Bias and false beliefs aren't the same thing.

The sum of one's beliefs, false or otherwise, is one's bias.

It is possible, though, to take a wrong idea- or even just a slightly incomplete impression- and use your intelligence to run very far with it.

Amusing example: my son refused, for a couple years, to learn single-digit addition facts. He already understood that there was no limit to the number of integers, but since he didn't know that single-digit addition facts could be composed to add arbitrarily large numbers, he silently reasoned that the infinitude of integers doomed any attempt to learn addition. Everyone talking about specific addition problems was a chump! He just went on for a couple grades thinking everyone was stupidly wasting their time before we had a conversation that unearthed his reasoning.

And that wasn't even starting with an incorrect belief- just some missing information. Imagine the sorts of explosions you could get yourself into starting with one of those and reasoning as far as you can with it!

If you have those skills and are doing it right, it will lead you to change your thinking on things an appreciable amount of the time. Sometimes quite radically.

Following your biases will never do this.

But how do you know that that is what you're actually doing? I don't think anyone can be truly objective.

Because there are rules of logic, reasoning, and evidence that are independent of your biases. You have to learn them and become skilled at applying them to sources of information (something that everyone should be learning in school).

So which particular logical heuristics would you apply to determining if a nation was in fact in recession, and what the causes of that recession were?

The simple model works when you're dealing with proving that your cat is on fire, it's much harder when the topic gets complicated.

Complicated topics that you know little about should entail a lot of uncertainty and that’s fine. Nobody needs to know everything about everything.

But then how are you supposed to make decision in regards to which political candidate has the best response to the problem?

From the information and experiences you have recieved, likely you would vote for the candidate who resonated most with your interpretation of the "truth".

Then as a society we apply the wisdom of the crowd.

> with your interpretation of the "truth".

And we've come full circle back to bias.

I think what you're diligently sussing out here is the HN crowd believes they are perfect rational and logical decision makers but are actually, just as everyone else, driven by their biases.

I don’t think that’s right. We all make decisions with imperfect knowledge, but there are well-tested ways of improving the quality of those judgements. You seem to be arguing that because we can’t make perfect judgements we are therefore condemned to always make arbitrary judgements based on bias, a sophomoric skepticism that isn’t supported by real-world experiences.

My concern is that, because someone BELIEVES they are using logic, education, and intelligence to come to a conclusion they may be just as wrong. "logic, education, and intelligence" is a way of justifying a belief, it's not a way of proving the assumption to be true. It's not a matter of being imperfect in judgement, it's a matter of being willing to accept that we are imperfect, and that, even if you think you're using the perfect method for rationalizing the world, it may not actually be.

> You seem to be arguing that because we can’t make perfect judgements we are therefore condemned to always make arbitrary judgements based on bias

Not arbitrary, I'm not arguing that. I am arguing that education and intelligence isn't enough to combat biases. A lot of people commenting here are touting education and intelligence as some sort of bias reducing (or eliminating) tool, which it can be, but as I've said elsewhere I know plenty of educated intelligent people who are slaves to their biases. Some of these people gained their biases through education, and they discount their biases because they believe they are too intelligent to have biases.

What I think many people are missing here is that biases aren't something you educate away, they're something education helps you recognize and compensate for.

Also I note your use of the phrase"perfect judgments" here. Perfect how? For whom? Under what criteria? There's no such thing as a "perfect judgment" without framing it in a context (i.e. using a bias). One person's perfect, logically sound, rational judgment might not be so for another person.

Right, so is your point that everyone experiences bias?

I was not disputing we all have an internal bias built up by our experiences. The crux of that point is you try to minimise your own bias and try to further reduce that bias by including the bias of the remainder of society.

I don't think this is a terrible way to select a political candidate.

As an aside I don't understand how a political discussion could exist without bias. What is your model of politics that would allow it to exist without bias?

I see where you are going here, but you have to be careful of false equivalences. You can never fully remove the effect of bias, no matter how hard you try. However, if you genuinely want to you can significantly reduce its impact on your thinking, and thereby make more consistent decisions.

Really you only need three things, so it is "easy" but not easy, if you take my meaning. 1) you have to genuinely value and prioritize reducing your biases, knowing this may make for some difficult times for you. 2) you must develop a capability for critical thought (essentially, education though it need not be formal). 3) and most importantly you must do the work. And it is work.

Number (2) alone won't do you any good, which is why you see highly educated people who are very biased.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com