Confirmation Bias and Lessons from History


Have you heard of the term, “confirmation bias”? The original experiment that led to this term would help understand:
1)      At the outset, you are told that a certain rule applies to triplets of numbers in a series. The triplet (2, 4, 6) fits that rule.
2)     To find out if you figured out the rule, you have to come up with another triplet and are allowed to ask if that triplet fits the rule or not.
3)     There is no limit on how many questions you can ask.
Sounds simple enough, right?

Does (4, 6, 8) fit? Yes. Does (24, 26, 28) fit? Yes. Is the rule “any 3 successive even numbers”? Wrong! Does (6, 10, 14) fit? Yes. Does (10, 22, 34) fit? Yes. Is the rule “the middle number is the average of the first and third”? Wrong again! The rule is proving surprisingly difficult to figure out, isn’t it?

The correct answer was simply “any ascending series”! Why was that so hard? Because we humans tend to look for data that confirms what we believe. If you thought the rule was “3 successive even numbers”, the best way to check it is by asking if a group that violates that rule still fits the series! Because, if it does, out goes your theory. By nature, we don’t tend to seek “falsification”. Rather, we seek “confirmation”; hence the term “confirmation bias”.

Karl Popper, a philosopher of science, declared that falsifiability is (and should be) the bedrock of science. Continuing, he said this falsifiability is what differentiates science from pseudo-science. Shane Parrish pointed out Popper’s take on drawing conclusions from history:
“An interesting piece of Popper’s work was an attack on what he called historicism — the idea that history has fixed laws or trends that inevitably lead to certain outcomes. Included would be the Marxist interpretation of human history as a push and pull between classes, the Platonic ideals of the systemic “rise and fall” of cities and societies in a fundamentally predictable way, John Stuart Mill’s laws of succession, and even the theory that humanity inevitably progresses towards a “better” and happier outcome, however defined.”
No, says Popper:
“Popper realized the important point that history is a unique process— it only gets run once.”
The rest is just extrapolation. Even worse, one data point does not make for a trend. The best you can infer?
“We can only merely deduce some tendencies of human nature, laws of the physical world, and so on, and generate some reasonable expectation that if X happens, Y is somewhat likely to follow. But viewing the process of human or organic history as possessing the regularity of a solar system is folly.”
Ok, but is there any harm in “historicism”? Isn’t it just academic? No, says Popper:
“(Historicism is) a dangerous ideology that tempts wannabe state planners and utopians to control society.”
Ah! And we know how well that ideology, religious or political, works. Apart from the untold torture, brutality and cruelty that it brings to the very people it claims to care about.

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