Are You Sure?

I wonder if the author is certain about this:

On Being Certain: Believing You are Right Even When You are Wrong: The day after the 1986 Challenger shuttle accident, psychologist Ulric Neisser asked 106 students to write down exactly where they were and what they were doing when they first heard about the explosion. When he interviewed the students two and a half years later, 25 percent of them gave strikingly different accounts. But when confronted with their original journal entries, many students defended their beliefs. One of them answered, “That’s my handwriting, but that’s not what happened.” ...

Robert A. Burton tries to get to the bottom of the curious sensation he calls the “feeling of knowing”—being certain of a fact despite having no (or even contrary) evidence. Throughout his book, Burton makes the compelling argument that certainty “is neither a conscious choice nor even a thought process.” Instead, he says, that unmistakable sense of certainty “arises out of involuntary brain mechanisms that, like love or anger, function independently of reason.”

Burton thinks that just as we perceive our external world through our physical senses, our internal world presents itself in the form of feelings, such as familiar or strange and correct or incorrect. And he shows that these inner perceptions are necessary for us to function properly in everyday life, because our thoughts are subject to constant self-questioning. For example, even though reason may tell us that running up a tree to escape a lion is an excellent strategy, experience shows that great strategies can fail and that there may be better options. Because alternative choices are present in any situation, logical thought alone would be doomed to a perpetual “yes, but” questioning routine. Burton reasons that it is the feeling of knowing that solves this dilemma of how to reach a conclusion. Without this “circuit breaker,” indecision and inaction would rule the day.

One of the startling implications of Burton’s thesis is that we ultimately cannot trust ourselves when we believe we know something to be true. “We can’t afford to continue with the outdated claims of a perfectly rational unconscious or knowing when we can trust gut feelings,” he writes. ...

Comments

[reason]

One of the startling implications of Burton’s thesis is that we ultimately cannot trust ourselves when we believe we know something to be true. “We can’t afford to continue with the outdated claims of a perfectly rational unconscious or knowing when we can trust gut feelings,” he writes. ...

Why is this startling exactly? It is one of the fundamental building blocks of science. If we all just knew what what was right, why would we need such elaborate and carefully controlled tests?

[wphurley]

Reason, your comment is spot on! It also provides a clear reason as to why religionists harbor resentment toward science.

[Pitt]

reason: I came here to post exactly that; well said. I'm surprised this would be surprising to anyone (but, then again, I'm a scientist).

I explain this mindset as simply viewing "things I believe" and "things I know" as being very separate and very different. No matter how strong my intuition on a question, it's a "thing I believe" until I have significant evidence that supports it. Similarly, no matter how strong my intuition against a proposition, a preponderance of evidence will keep it firmly within the "things I know" category.

This just boils down to "sometimes I'm wrong". How is that "startling"?

[elvis]

I know I'm right because my wife told me what to say.

[reason]

Pitt,
I understand what you are saying but I don't like your terminology much. "Believe" sounds too much like ideology. "Know" sounds also too definite to me. Replace "believe" with "think" and "know" with "seems to be the case" and you will have it just about right.

[Jay]

"One of the startling implications of Burton’s thesis is that we ultimately cannot trust ourselves"

But we can trust Al Gore!

[anne]

There is a peculiar sort of person who must always slander and deceive and otherwise behave as an immoral monster.

[reason]

Anne,
if Jay wants to make silly irrelevant remarks, let him. We don't have to descend to his level of dialog.

[Jay]

Sorry, I meant to say...

"One of the startling implications of Burton’s thesis is that we ultimately cannot trust ourselves"

But we can trust George W. Bush!

[jean]

I have, over the years, learned to trust my 'gut'. When I've gone against it I have ALWAYS regretted it. Gut, intuition, whatever. Belief? I don't know. I have put belief in the religous corner. 'Knowing' doesn't really fit into science very well because our knowing is so imperfect (Donald Rumsfeld WAS right). There is an article in Sci Am about a plant that DOESN'T FIT IN. The botanists are going nuts because it doesn't FOLLOW THE RULES!(does Mother Nature follow OUR rules?) You know, that fits into the religous corner. I suspect science is continually fighting (internally) against the religous/belief mindset: see ostracizing of new ideas.

[John]

Jean,

Of course science relies on this mechanism of certainty, for much the same reason that individuals do. Without certainty, every single aspect of every single experiment would be up for questioning, and no advancements would be possible.

This plant that you mention is the kind of anomaly that shatters the current certainty in an irrecoverable way. It puts everything in flux again, until a new pattern emerges and a new certainty gels around the field, driving new research and new questions.

Read Thomas Kuhn or other recent science historians for more about this. While, you're at it, dig up Wittgenstein's "On Certainty" for a long, agonizing essay on how certainty is not knowledge.

[reason]

Jean...
Are you sure your memory isn't selective regarding this? And how do you what would have happened if you had made another decision? The evidence is compelling that what you believe (including about what has happened) is often wrong.

[andrew]

Malcolm Gladwell writes in his book "Blink" about different ways of decision making, the "gut instinct" and the more rigorously considered ones. He writes convincingly of situations where it works very well to trust your first impression, and describes many situations where it works very poorly.

[Patricia Shannon]

My instincts have frequently been wrong, esp. about people.

Our imperfect, selective memories are the reason that science depends heavily on written records and statistics.

A few years ago, when it seemed to me that NPR news was slanted heavily right-wing, and with a total black-out on any mention of anything that would even suggest the idea of global warming, I knew that to verify my observations, I needed to keep a written record, which I did for about a year and a half. I kept detailed notes on news items, those which would indicated that I was right, and just as important, those that would indicate that I was wrong. In this case, I was right. Once the oil companies, at least one of which was a contributor to NPR, admitted that global warming caused by the greenhouse effect is a problem, NPR started reporting on it. I was motivated to check this out when they had a program on the large amounts of money being spent on toxic waste cleanup, and the meager results. There was no mention at all that this was due to the fact that most of the money was going to legal fees because the companies responsible for the messes were appealing their fines. The person who narrated this program sounded to me like he knew he was giving a misleading program and was not happy about it (that part is my personal impression, of course). So NPR addressed their shortcomings a couple of months later, giving the same information, again no mention of costs of legal appeals, but narrated by someone in a happy voice. I don't think I've donated to NPR since. The ironic thing is that after being so solicitous of conservative, big business interests, the Republicans in congress tried to cut them out of the budget entirely anyway!

[kthomas]

Ouch, well-said, Patricia.

BTW, I know EXACTLY where I was at when the ye ole shuttle blew up: in the Gym with the rest of my football team. We saluted the honored dead and went right back to lifting.

[marcello]

try this sometime:

pick any topic and ask someone their opinion. Then ask them WHY they have this opinion. WHY do they know what they know ?

I am forever amazed how often people will defend their opinions, to the death on contentious issues, yet not be able to articulate WHY they have that opinion. they JUST KNOW. like they were born with it :-/

scientists are often derided as "know it alls", but really, we are more "know it whys" - we can tell you WHY we believe something, or not. It is certainly part of the training to always question oneself, reflect on what you know or don't know, and why. of course scientists are not alone with that.

In my hopelessly biased viewpoint, the general level of public discourse would skyrocket if people just made it a point to know why they know, or don't know, something. anything. dealing with the "know what I know" crowd drives me mad ...

[Why open minds are closed]

I strain to avoid rolling my eyes every time I hear someone claim to have an open mind. People who believe their mind is “open” have actually managed to convince themselves that bias will not influence their decisions, failing to recognize that believing you have no bias is itself a bias. In the real world, in almost every case people are either biased or ignorant — it’s called cognitive dissonance.

[reason]

WOMAC...
Who is that comment addressed to exactly?
And having an open mind is not the same thing as not having bias - so I don't understand your comment anyway.

[Patricia Shannon]

Hate to take up space for something that nobody else will care about, but it's bugging me that I posted something incorrect. I realized yesterday that I have contributed to NPR since the incident I related above, (eg., when they were doing an excellent series about the reality of poverty). So now that I've corrected that, I can stop thinking about it.