> As for biases... I think in many discussions these could also be called opinions. And you are allowed to have one of course.
Of course, there's no getting away from people having opinions, but then I see no need to either. What might be helpful though, is a serious widespread effort to first, start paying attention to the degree to which sub-optimal thinking may be taking place in our ~societies (global, national, regional, forums, etc), and then try to figure out of anything can be done about it.
A few examples of such sub-optimal thinking/behavior that are common (start looking for it and judge for yourself) even here on HN:
- mistaking opinions for facts (at least when it comes to conversational presentation)
- the mistaken belief that true enough generalizations of a group necessarily carries down to individual members & line items - ie: since <party/candidate x> behaves in a certain way, then therefore it logically follows that each individual who voted for (or continues to support) that entity will act in unison with each other and the greater entity, on all individual decisions. Of course, no one actually explicitly thinks this way, but start paying attention and see if you notice anyone behaving this way. Typically, this manifests as an apparent perceived ability to read minds and predict the future.
- operational (behavioral) unawareness of the difference between ~facts and perspectives on facts. Or, evaluation of a high dimensional object on a subset of dimensions, without realizing it. This will often manifest as two people arguing about a complex issue and both behaving as if their position is absolutely correct....it's because both positions very well may be correct!
- "believing" (due to heuristics) that because something worked out one way in the past, it will always work out that way in the future, regardless of whether the conditions have changed (ie: socialism/capitalism will result in <x>)
- an apparent inability/unwillingness to accept more than two states of knowledge: true or false. Not only is there a third state, unknown, but varying levels of reasoned certainty are also possible (this one seems rather innocuous, but I have a feeling it is one of the most impactful - it's difficult to argue passionately when you have no strong beliefs)
- letting emotions override logic, often in response to triggers such as inflammatory comments
- and so on, the list is endless
> Trying to find the minimal common position is probably more constructive and you would need to work out things from there. Conflicts will arise inevitably that need to be dealt with by compromises.
Exactly, but a prerequisite for that is the development of skills in understanding how the human mind works, and an ability to put that knowledge into practice. Many intelligent folks have decent academic skills in this area already, but change the topic to something controversial and watch the memory of those skills vanish as they revert to heuristic-based thinking.
> As for vetting information, there simply isn't any authority. Everyone could become one, you would just need to convince all the others.
I completely agree, but how many people actually realize this on a behavioral basis, whether or not they believe it on an academic basis? In a thread about trustworthiness of news, there will typically be little more than minor disagreements here, but move the topic to something else, that is based on the content broadcast by that very same news, and watch the fireworks start. This is the phenomenon I refer to as operational/behavioral, or putting the knowledge into practice. Like Mike Tyson says, everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.
The general sentiment I perceive on whether improvements can be made in this area tends to be quite negative. It's been like this forever, so why should we expect it to ever change? Well, have we ever actually tried to do something about it? The US government and media claim there is a near crisis level of disinformation based foreign interference in our democracy, yet have you heard any politician float the idea of maybe putting a little effort into teaching people how to think, just as we teach them all sort of other things that don't happen to come naturally (math, spelling, physics, programming, etc). It seems like a rather odd situation to me.
Or, rather than sitting around waiting for the government to do something on a grand scale, is there a smaller domain or platform where individuals could collectively agree to start working on these issues, sort of as a group experiment in mass psychology?