I Want to Believe

We all have had the strange experience of conversing with a seemingly rational and sane person who at some point expresses some belief that to us seems unimaginably weird: that transdimensional reptilian aliens killed JFK or some such thing. Most often the expressed belief isn’t so far outside the mainstream as that, but even mainstream beliefs can seem inexplicable to those of us who don’t share them. We like to believe (there’s a variant of that word again) that we are logical and those other people are not. This is improbable. Even if we happen to be right, or at least less wrong, the odds are we arrived at our beliefs first and found reasons to justify them later. This is just the way the human mind works; those of us with mainstream opinions come by them with few exceptions the same way the reptilian enthusiasts do.

Michael Shermer is a founding publisher of the magazine Skeptic. He also writes a column for Scientific American. I’d read numerous articles by him in the past. Last week I picked up The Believing Brain in which he explains how people are hardwired to see patterns and agency in the world. Shermer writes about the physiology of belief and the effects of priming, anchoring, and pre-existing expectations. There are good evolutionary reasons for people to be good at discerning causes, patterns, meanings, and hidden links where they exist, but also to be just as talented at seeing and believing in them where they don’t. Those of our primate ancestors who concluded a rustle in tall grasses meant that leopards were lurking in there because there was one the last time the grass rustled, for example, most often were wrong; nonetheless, they were more likely to survive than the primates who didn’t believe in the connection. Being credulous is less likely to get you killed and thereby removed from the gene pool. Evolution favors belief based on shoddy evidence over skepticism. Far from being a barrier to holding outlandish beliefs, by the way, intelligence actually helps. Shermer argues that intelligent people can convolute, reinterpret, and interconnect data in creative ways that dimmer bulbs cannot match. It is especially hard to change minds when a sense of self is tied to a system of beliefs such as a religion or political ideology: “our most deeply held beliefs are immune to attack by direct educational tools, especially for those who are not ready to hear contradictory evidence.” The truth, or something approximating it, sometimes can be found, however, and the scientific method is best way of finding it. It behooves us to recall the admonition of physicist Richard Feynman:

“If it disagrees with experiment, it is wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It doesn’t make any difference how beautiful your guess is, how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is. If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong. That’s all there is to it.”

My math teacher back in high school liked to quote Edgar Allan Poe: “Believe nothing you hear, and only one half that you see.” This is hyperbolic (and of course logically self-negating), but there is an underlying value to the advice. “Belief comes quickly and naturally, skepticism is slow and unnatural, and most people have a low tolerance for ambiguity,” says Shermer. Turning skepticism on ourselves is especially hard, but in a world increasingly characterized by true believers (secular and otherwise) and extreme partisanship it is something to be encouraged.

The Believing Brain is worth a read, as prods to question ourselves (not just others) and our own belief systems usually are. Thumbs Up.

Thin Lizzy – Don't Believe a Word