Reply With QuoteJust you wait until I tell you about time. Once it clicks, you listen to people babbling on about stuff like time travel, and it gets kinda scarey.
Here's something you guys ought to find interesting. It's an essay I wrote a couple of years back when I first twigged that conviction isn't just a religion thing. People have this nasty habit of believing in things for which there is no evidence at all, and that includes people who take pride in their rationality. I wasn't kidding when I said I'm the super skeptic. Enjoy.
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF BELIEF
When I analysed my basic concepts, I found things that weren’t real, that don’t exist, that we never actually see. But we assume they’re real, we take them for granted, and we believe in them. Because we have holes in our understanding, holes that we’ve all grown up with. We’ve lived with them for so long that we don’t know they’re there. We cover them up with ignorance of our ignorance, with blindness of our blind spot, and we shield ourselves with a peer pressure that persuades us there are no alternatives to consider. We do it because we are social animals, we follow the herd, we're prey to groupthink. That’s the way we are. So much so, that we even place our faith in negative carpets.
What’s a negative carpet? Well, let’s say that the wife is so impressed with the new lounge carpet, that she now wants a new carpet for the baby's bedroom. The room is square, and we need sixteen square metres. What’s the square root of sixteen? There are two solutions, four and minus four. So wise guy that I am, I opt for the latter solution, and get down on my hands and knees to cut a big fat square out of our brand new living room carpet. I roll it up, put it over my shoulder, and take it to the carpet shop, walking backwards for dramatic effect. I hand it over to the proprietor and pay him a minus ten pound note, which I stick in my pocket, then go back home to crack open a bottle of wine and greet my guests. We're standing in the living room talking about my negative carpet and discussing its negative mass when the wife walks in. She stands there open-mouthed for a heartbeat or two as I begin to explain the merely technical details of relocation to the baby’s bedroom. Then all hell breaks loose.
The thing about all this, is that a solution is sometimes crazy, but it's not always plain. People just don't spot it. So we talk about it quite seriously without examining whether it’s a real solution. We end up taking it for granted and using it to search for further solutions. Then when we struggle, we forget to track back to the beginning and look at the things we took for granted. We don’t realise we’re riding a negative carpet to never-never land, and that’s why we’re getting nowhere. What it all boils down to, is that a negative carpet doesn’t exist. It isn’t real. It’s just a figment of our imagination, an abstraction, a belief. And beliefs can cause all sorts of problems. Some people believe in Santa Claus, and some people believe in fairies, despite that fact that there is absolutely no material evidence to support the existence of these things. We smile at the gullibility that foolish people show, but we forget that we too believe in things for which there is no material evidence. Things like time travel, unseen dimensions, and parallel worlds.
We’ve all got our beliefs. That’s the way we are. I’ve got them, and so do you. It was Feynman who said “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool”. This is more true than you realise. It’s true because when you’ve fooled yourself, you don’t know it. You convince yourself that you haven’t fooled yourself, and you develop a conviction, a faith, a belief about it. You'll be quite irrational in defence of this belief. You won't test your belief in an empirical scientific fashion. Instead, when challenged, you'll become defensive or incredulous. If you don’t behave this way, that’s fine, you’re not a believer. You merely have an opinion, and an open mind. But let me demonstrate something: You don’t have an open mind. You’re fooling yourself. At which point I imagine you're bristling already. See how it works? If you really believe something and I challenge it, it's all too easy to construe the challenge as an insult, and then become hostile and unreasonable. That's human nature. Everybody likes to think they have an open mind, and very few understand that about some things at least, they don't. The truth is this: you’re not quite as open minded or as rational as you think. This is hard to accept, but that’s the way it is. It’s like that because if you believe something, you don’t need to think about it. Because you already know the answer. Hence you're less receptive than you should be. And so you don’t look at the out-of-the-box solutions that solve the problems that have troubled you all your life.
Stop a minute and think about it. Why do you think we have suicide bombers? What on Earth possesses them to think that there’s seventy two virgins waiting for them in paradise? What possesses them is something called The Psychology of Belief. And they don’t think, that’s just it. This thing is far more powerful and far more prevalent than you know. There’s a whole spectrum of belief out there. Think about Young Earth Creationists and their Intelligent Design friends. You can talk to these people until you’re blue in the face, but they're totally immune to logic because they believe that they're right. You can say anything and everything, but they duck and dive and dismiss every last scrap of evidence you throw at them. Everything you say goes whoosh, in one ear and out the other. They just aren’t listening. They just aren’t thinking. The weird thing is that they don’t know they’re immune to logic. These guys aren’t lying to you. They don’t have a rational open mind, but they don’t know it. They think they’re being perfectly rational, and you’re just some crazy fool who just doesn’t know.
It doesn’t stop at religion. There’s ideology, Kafkaesque bureaucracy, and dynastic communism, all the sorts of things that can end up with starvation, murder, and Nazi death camps. There’s racism, tribalism, and insane conspiracy theories, all leading to enmity and hate and violence. There's heroin, crack, and alcohol addiction where people die before their time. Moving down the scale there's anorexia and obesity, and the dieting that makes you fat as your body sets store for a rainy day. Then there’s gentler symptoms like fashion, where folk let themselves be brainwashed into thinking purple is the new black. Or swaggering around with some eco cotton bag containing the keys for the 4x4 and the plane tickets. It affects everybody to some degree, even people who consider themselves to be utterly rational and totally open minded. Everybody’s got some kind of belief about something. When you find it and hit it, whoosh, everything you say goes in one ear and out the other. They just don’t listen. They just don’t think. It’s like the shutters are down and there’s nobody home.
Would you like to put yourself to the test? This will show you what I mean. This will demonstrate that you're not immune to The Psychology of Belief. Nobody is, not even me. Take a look at the picture below:
http://web.mit.edu/persci/people/adelson/checkershadow_illusion.html
OK, here’s the deal: squares A and B are the same colour. They’re the same shade of grey. Oh no they’re not, I hear you say. Oh yes they are I insist. Oh no they’re not, you answer back. We could do this all day, but I’m afraid I'm right and you’re wrong. They really are the same colour. Squares A and B are the same shade of grey. The apparent difference in colour is the illusion. Let me prove it. It's very simple: just look at it from a narrow angle. Another method is look through a small hole to remove the context that fooled you into fooling yourself. You can even download the image and check it out with photoshop. Satisfy yourself. Be empirical, test yourself, find a way to stop fooling yourself. Then you realise that A and B really are the same colour.
Don’t be surprised. I told you The Psychology of Belief is powerful. More powerful than you ever dreamed. What’s surprising is just how common it is, even amongst scientists. If you don’t believe me, you should look up paradigm on Wikipedia, and read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn. Conviction is a hard nut to crack, and it applies to scientists too. It’s the way we are, the way we think. Why do you think Bruno got burned at the stake? Why do you think it took Einstein seventeen years to get a Nobel Prize for the wrong thing? And why do you think there’s that saying: catch ‘em young? It’s because there are people out there who are quite fully aware that if you instil children with a belief they’ll carry on believing it come heaven or high water. These children remain so utterly convinced, that they grow up to become adults who will fight and die for it. But we’re not going to fight and die for something like The Capacity To Do Work are we? Because we are rational, we have an open mind, and we listen and we think.
Yes, The Capacity To Do Work. Einstein said you don't really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother. Can you explain energy to your grandmother? You might believe you can, but the chances are you’re fooling yourself, and your explanation is no explanation at all. Your grandmother will peer at you over her bifocals, suck on her false teeth, say Thank you Dear, and then she’ll carry on with her knitting. She’s too polite to say it, because butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. But what she really meant is: Capacity To Do Work my arse.
Come on now, The Capacity To Do Work is no explanation at all. You swallowed that when you were young and gullible, and you haven’t looked at it since. Energy is a simple basic concept that you really ought to understand, but you don’t. And you don’t know that you don’t. Because Donald Rumsfeld was right. And what you also don’t know, is that The Capacity To Do Work is merely a label that covers up a hole in your understanding. A hole that you’ve grown up with, that’s been there so long it’s like a blind spot, all grown over with such thick skin that you don’t even know it’s there any more.
I’ll show you the holes in your understanding. I’ll peel back those labels and fill the holes with concepts that are crystal clear. Then you can stop fooling yourself. But remember this, it’s important: the basic concepts I will give you are better than the concepts you hold now. But don’t ever think they’re perfect. Don’t fool yourself that you’ve stopped fooling yourself. Keep that open mind open.
Just you wait until I tell you about time. Once it clicks, you listen to people babbling on about stuff like time travel, and it gets kinda scarey.
Farsight - you do realise that there are several psychologists on here don't you?
Whilst there are some errors in your essay, I don't think too many skeptics would disagree with the basic thesis.
But it does invite the question: If someone makes a claim, how can you differentiate between a 'belief' and knowledge?
In other words, if you reach a conclusion on an issue that is alternative to that which is currently scientifically accepted, how do you know that you are right and everyone else is wrong?
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Originally Posted by John Jackson
The whole negative carpet concept is new to me though... but hey, if I was smart I'd be in cognitive neuroscience ....
Ahem
"Expect the Inquisition..."
Nope, but no problem.
Thanks. Please tell me what the errors are. I hope they're minor, but if I've made a howler or two, I'll take it on the chin. I've been wrong before, and expect I will be again.
You don't. If you think you do, you're falling into the same old trap. All you should have is a current-best-fit idea or model or theory based on the available evidence and empirical observation and logic and mathematics. In science you can never prove that a theory is right. All you can ever do, is prove that it's wrong. Black swans and all that.
Talking of which, see http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/print/38468 for an interesting article. And if I might offer a sly piece of humour: it sometimes seems that those people who are convinced that they're white swans are also convinced that I'm the ugly duckling.
Sadly I can't find the original where I read up on it a few years back. Search on it and all you get is me, for example with this selfsame essay on this forum where I was looking for some help from psychologists. I ended up wondering if there's some link between conviction and hypnosis. We had a hypnotist at a work Christmas do a few years back. He started by asking for about a dozen volunteers, and had us all lined up pressing our hands together, seeking out those who were susceptible. Later in the show one of the guys I played 5-a-side with would jump up on cue to wash the "window" at the front of the stage. Weird stuff. If I hadn't seen it myself done to people I knew, I wouldn't have believed it.
And how did you know it was 16 square metres in the first place? I'm afraid I think your illustration doesn't work because you wouldn't start with the area, you'd start with measuring the walls. And you would order the carpet giving those measurements not the area.
That's not a belief, it's a persistent optical illusion. It is a trick being played on the senses because of the way they project forward 0.1s to make up for the time it takes to proces sensory input. See here. So, this point, just like the 'negative carpet', does not actually illustrate your point.
Incidentally, all that stuff you say about the psychology of belief, paradigms and so is very old. Do you have any new take on it because, otherwise, I think you may be 'preaching to the converted'.
Last edited by Mulder; 6th September 2009 at 05:35 PM.
Mulder's already highlighted the optical illusion one. Optical illusions are not the result of belief or indoctrination etc. They errors of perception based on how our brain is 'hardwired'. You can learn about an optical illusion, how it works etc., but you cannot stop yourself from seeing it no matter how much you understand it.
I think you're making a big fallacy of equivocation when using the term 'belief'. Belief in fairies and belief in the laws of physics are not isomorphic. So by saying something like 'some people believe in things like fairies and you can't shift those beliefs' it's not the same as saying something like 'some people accept the findings of physics and are reluctant to change'.
Beliefs can be: true and justified; false and justified; true and unjustified; and, false and unjustified. So your argument may sound superficially fine but you're really swapping between the alternative meanings of 'belief'.
Also, I don't like the negative carpet analogy either as it doesn't really have a structural equivalent in the real world - because it doesn't make sense in the first place.
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Fair enough, Mulder. But it's the simplest example I could come up with, and the important point is that there are two solutions to the square root of sixteen, and when it comes to real things like carpets, one solution is non-real.
I've had arguments with people who swear blind the squares are different colours because that's what they believe. They're so convinced they're right that they refuse to look at the evidence that says they're wrong.
I followed your link and saw this opening sentence:
Humans can see into the future, says a cognitive scientist. It's nothing like the alleged predictive powers of Nostradamus, but we do get a glimpse of events one-tenth of a second before they occur.
This is misleading. Yes one can advance an argument that we project what we think we will see, but we don't actually see into the future. I note on that web page there's a link to time travel:
http://www.livescience.com/common/me...me_travel_deep
Now watch my lips: time travel is bunk. It demands negative energy. And just like that negative carpet, it doesn't exist.
Yes, it's old, and goes back to William James in 1889 or maybe earlier. But yes, I do have a new take on it. This conviction thing isn't just limited to YECs and spiritualists and people who believe in fairies. Scientists suffer from it too. More than they know. And just like the rest of them, they will not admit that they do.
With practice, illusions like the checkershadow illusion don't fool you any more. You learn to see what's there. I'm not kidding about this.
It certainly doesn't apply to physics across the board. But go and talk to somebody who considers themselves to be an authority on gravitons, or strings, or unseen dimensions, or time travel, or parallel worlds. Ask them to show you the evidence, and they can't. Suggest to them that they might be wrong and you'll get a range of reactions, some going as far as denial and outrage. The parallel is most certainly there.
Please elaborate on where I'm swapping between alternative meanings.
There are things in physics just like this. People believe in them, and have continued to do so for decades, even though there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever to support such beliefs.
No, the thing with optical illusions is that we see them whether we understand them or not. You could look at those squares every day for the next 50 years but you will still perceive them as different shades of grey. You may know they're identical but you will perceive them as different every time you look at the illusion.
Perhaps you could do some reading on optical illusions and get back to us with your findings.
Or do you just know you're right?
Only, to me, it looks like you're displaying the very characteristics you're highlighting in your article!
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Physicists propose these things because they are either needed to make a theory work (like higher dimensions in string theory) or come out of certain solutions to equations to existing theories that have been extensively tested (like time travel in relativity). They then look for evidence to see if these things are real. If scientists did not go through this sort of imaginative exercise, science would quickly grind to a halt.
There is an essential creative side to science. Einstein, a favourite of yours, is said to have thought of relativity by imagining what it would be like to ride on light.
So how does a super skeptic differ from a skeptic?
I use the grey square illusion in my lectures for students and will be using it at the UKS conference - wow - what a coincidence
The illusion works in a similar way to that for Emmertt's law on after-images, in the sense that both are based on unavoidable perceptual assumptions applied to physical sensations. The checkerboard works partly due to the colour of the squares around both of them being opposites and the cylinder casting a shadow.
Physical sensation on the retina shows they are both recorded as the same, but the contrast from opposite squares and because the brain 'knows' that if one square is the same brightness as the other - but is in shadow, then it must be different and so it makes adjustments accordingly for perception. It is an internal brain-based hypothesis based on physical data and internal knowledge of the world - it leads to an incorrect percpetion. It is an illusion and not a belief.
We have had numerous discussions on thei board on the relationship between illusion, delusion, and hallucination...i suggest a search on those terms will lead to some interesting further reading
Last edited by Dr B; 7th September 2009 at 12:17 PM.
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