Critical thinking and how it applies to blogging
This is from a presentation I gave at work today. I thought it was excellently appropriate for bloggers, since we seem to be so opinionated and brutal with those who do not share our opinions.
I start with a question: Which is more likely to cause death in the United States? Being killed by falling airplane parts or by a shark?
According to a 1994 report in Newsweek, in the United States, the chance of dying from falling airplane parts is THIRTY TIMES GREATER than being killed in a shark attack. How much do vivid media images affect our perception?
How much do our beliefs and views differ from reality? How much do they differ from the opinions of others? Are we truly open-minded and self-critical in our thought processes? Or do we let others (like the media, a political party, or fellow bloggers) form our opinions on our behalf?
Joseph de Rivera wrote, "We take our perception of the world for granted... If someone else points out that our perceptions may be wrong, we may intellectually admit the possibility but continue to act as though our perception were true. It is precisely in this feeling of certainty that our danger lies."
So the point of this article, critical thinking, is to balance perception and limit bias.
Perception: a process of inference. An active rather than a passive process. Implies understanding and awareness. It is a critical human process, linking people to their world and is essential for understanding of the world and its happenings.
1. We tend to perceive what we expect to perceive. It takes more informaiton and more unambiguous information to recognize an unexpected phenomenon than an expected one.
2. Mindsets are quick to form, but resistant to change.
3. New information is assimilated to existing images.
Biases take many forms
Evidence Bias:
Also, one must be careful to avoid evidence bias: evidence not available to thinkers tends to be ignored, even if its absence is known. Analysts do not even question whether the absence of certain evidence is normal or even an indicator in itself.
Assimilation Bias:
"It is far easier to lead a target astray by reinforcing the target's existing beliefs, thus causing the target to ignore the contrary evidence of one's true intent, than to persuade a target to change his mind." -- Richards S. Heuer, Jr.
Or in other words, lead the intended target astray by playing to his encultured biases and shaping the data to what he already believes, and he will be much more likely to believe you.
Confirmation Bias:
Thinkers and analysts typically undervalue or ignore evidence that contradicts an early judgment about something.
As additional evidence is considered, even contradictory evidence, the level of confidence held by those analysts about that judgment stays the same or increases.
Indicators selected as being valid tend to be those that confirm already held hypotheses and not the ones with the most diagnostic authority.
Hindsight Bias:
"I knew it would happen!" Thinkers who look back on how good their past judgments have been, will normally overestimate their accuracy.
"I knew it all along!" People who think about how much they've learned from news wijll normally underestimate its true value.
Indicators of events are more apparent. Did we see the intelligence failures of 9/11 before 9/11?
Reliability Bias:
Information may be less than reliable, due to source unreliability, unrepresentative sample sizes, distortion in the reporting chain, misunderstanding or misperception by analysts, or faulty memory. However, people in general tend to deal with this information at face value!
Oversensitivity-to-Consistency Bias:
Consistency with an established body of evidence is often considered desirable in intelligence gathering. However, analysts tend not to ask whether the set of evidence is representative, preferring to look at consistency instead.
Expert Bias:
"In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, in the expert's mind there are few." -- Shunryu Suzuki
Keep an open mind, especially if you think you're a subject matter expert!
Pollyanna vs. Cassandra
Are you a wishful thinker who, like Pollyanna, thinks only the best will play out? Do you only look at the positive?
Or are you a doomsday scenario fan, like Cassandra, who was cursed by the gods to accurately foretell the future and never be believed. Do you only look at the negative and consider the worst-case scenario?
Both these mindsets cause bias.
Cultural and personal biases
Ethnocentrism
Lack of Empathy
Mirror-Imaging
Prematurely Formed Views
Presumption of Unitary Action by Organization
Organizational biases
Excessive Secrecy
Group-Think
Organizational parochialism
Scientism
Mindsets
Patterns of expectations that predispose one to think in certain ways.
Distillation of the analyst's cumulative factual and conceptual knowledge into a framework.
Mindsets are used for making estimative judgments on complex subjects.
The danger of using mindsets in thinking and opinion making is that our mindsets affect how our predictions are made and viewed. They derive partly from the complexity of the issues at hand, partly from ambiguity of data or perception of "right and wrong", and partly from deadlines, both at work and self-imposed.
Working complex issues required more than a cursory examination of facts, but how many of us are guilty of seeing, assessing, blogging, and moving on?
How mindsets can bring us down...
NAME THIS COUNTRY! A MINDSET CAUSED THE OVERTHROW OF THIS NATION...
1. A totalitarian government enjoying the support of effective military and security organizations cannot be overthrown by popular opinion.
2. When the position of a dictatorial ruler is threatened, he will defend his position with force if necessary.
3. The principal threat to friendly governments comes from the left, not ther right.
Anybody guess the Shah of Iran? Anybody still reading this? If you answered yes to either, I may have a job for you in DC.
SO WHAT?!
As bloggers, we have a mandate and a personal drive to be frank and opinionated. It behooves us to understand how to think, since that is the source of opinion. And the closer our opinions come to fact, the better thinker we have become. We need to guard our work against biases that may cloud or distort our perceptions. Not doing so will cause "intelligence failures."