Is Google making us less rational?

Google may be making us all more knowledgable, but could it also be making us less rational? I've got a suspicion that online search engines are making us especially susceptible to at least one particular blunder: confirmation bias, the phenomenon by which you're more likely to seek out, notice, and remember evidence that supports what you already believe.

The term "confirmation bias" was first used in a classic 1960 paper by P.C. Wason called On the failure to eliminate hypotheses in a conceptual task. Subjects were given a sequence of numbers: "2,4,6" and told that the numbers were picked according to a rule, and the goal was for the subjects to guess that rule. They could test their guesses by suggesting other sequences and the experimenter would answer "Yes, that fits the rule" or "No, that doesn't fit the rule."

Most subjects started out by hypothesizing rules like "Even numbers increasing by two." They then tested their hypothesized rule by asking the experimenter about sequences that would conform to it, like "8, 10, 12?" The experimenter would truthfully respond, "Yes, that fits the rule," and the subjects would become more and more confident that their guess had been correct.

In fact, the correct rule was simply "Increasing numbers." That is, any increasing sequence of three numbers would have worked. In order to discover that their original hypothesis was wrong, subjects would have had to test it by asking about sequences that their hypothesis would have predicted would violate the rule, for example, "2,4,5." The experimenter would have responded "Yes, that fits the rule," and the subjects would then have known their hypothesis couldn't be right. Instead, they kept testing their hypothesis with sequences that did fit it, and kept getting affirmative replies, until they felt confident enough to announce that they'd figured out the rule -- only to discover that they'd been barking up the wrong tree all along.

Reading about this phenomenon, it struck me that online search engines like Google are, by their very nature, rich with potential for inadvertent real-world replications of Wason's experiment. Here's a personal case-in-point: I was having problems with my Dell netbook recently, and I was curious if it was a systemic problem with the brand. So I Googled Dell netbook cursor freeze, and found thousands of pages of people complaining of the same problem. Bingo! From then on, when someone asked me if I was happy with my computer, I would warn them not to get a Dell netbook because they have problems with their cursors.

But what if that wasn't the right hypothesis? Today, I tried Googling Acer netbook cursor freeze -- and got roughly the same number of hits. (Well, actually, I got half as many hits, but if you normalize by dividing by the baseline number of hits for just "Dell" and "Acer," respectively, that more than makes up the discrepancy.) Point is: I had a hypothesis (i.e., that my cursor froze because of a problem with Dell netbooks), I looked for evidence confirming that hypothesis, and promptly stopped searching after I found it, without proceeding to see if I could find any disconfirmatory evidence. The true hypothesis might be that my cursor froze because of a problem with netbooks in general, or maybe with touchpads, but I didn't find out because I stopped looking after I found evidence to support my original theory.

Even the way you phrase a search query can make a huge difference in the type of results you get, making you more likely to find the evidence you already expected to find. Another real-world case-in-point: A few weeks ago, I met a guy who insisted that feminism was invented by the CIA in a plot to control the world. Hard to imagine how someone could possibly believe that, right? But let's assume this fellow heard or read this theory about feminism somewhere, and he wanted to check its veracity. He might very well go to Google and search feminism cia. And if you do that, every single result on the first page of search results touts the feminism-CIA link, complete with elaboration and supporting "facts."

Of course, other search queries would give you very different results. A neutral query like feminism origin yields not a single mention of the CIA on the first page of results. And a disconfirmatory query like feminism cia debunk produces plenty of opposing viewpoints. But we just don't think to try those neutral and disconfirmatory queries -- we seem to be wired to search for confirmatory evidence, then close the case file.

And I predict that the problem is about to get more severe. On December 4th, Google announced that their page rank algorithm -- the formula that determines which search results you get in response to a query, and the order in which they appear -- will from now on be partly dependent on your personal past search history. Their blog explained, "Now when you search using Google, we will be able to better provide you with the most relevant results possible. For example, since I always search for [recipes] and often click on results from epicurious.com, Google might rank epicurious.com higher on the results page the next time I look for recipes." As SEED magazine's Evan Lerner perceptively noted last month, this can't help but amplify the confirmation bias effect. I love Google's increasingly eerie, near-telepathic ability to know just what I was looking for, as much as everyone else does. But what I'm looking for isn't necessarily what I should always find.

Julia's Picks

* This brilliant clip has been making the rounds for a while, but I only discovered it recently: Animator vs. Animation. A fourth-wall-smashing classic with a poignant resolution.

* If a building could dream, this is exactly what it would look like.

* This physicist's underappreciated webcomic, Abstruse Goose, is like XKCD's kid brother. It's clever, absurdist, and frequently educational.

* Online personals websites are one of the best sources of hard data on what guides people's dating choices, and OKCupid -- founded by a couple of math geeks from Harvard -- makes excellent use of that data. Last week they published an analysis of what makes a good profile picture. Also, check out their earlier analyses about people's racial preferences, and about which words are strong predictors of whether someone will respond to your message.

* Wired has an interesting article about a researcher who studies research: how it works, why it fails.

* Two of my best friends recently launched a blog called Ask a Mathematician, Ask a Physicist which I highly recommend. They're very clever guys who'll tackle any question from "What happens if you fall into a black hole?" to "Would it be possible to kill all of Earth's life with nuclear bombs?" to "What is the meaning of life?"

The rotting of American democracy

Let me get straight to the point: here is some of what is seriously wrong with American democracy and how to fix it. Of course, the point is entirely rhetorical, since I have no expectations at all that the corrupt political body in Washington or the nearly illiterate (in terms of democratic values) American public will actually act on it. Nonetheless:

1. Corporations (and Unions) are not people, they do not have fundamental rights like free speech (they have legal rights as legal entities, of course), and money does not equate with speech. Contrary to what the current Republican majority on the Supreme Court has recently, not at all surprisingly and highly disingenuously, decided.

Fix: Congress should pass a constitutional amendment that declares that rights are applicable only to individual persons, not legal entities.

2. Lobbying is a form of institutionalized bribery, a point related to the one above. In other democracies this is a crime, which is not to say that politicians aren’t corruptible, but it does mean that if caught they go to jail. Americans, who love to describe their system as “the best democracy in the world” apparently have no clue that all they have is the best democracy that money can buy. And they aren’t getting much for their money either.

Fix: all forms of lobbying should be outlawed. Individual citizens have the right to petition government, but corporations and other entities don’t have the right to pay professionals to cajole and bribe members of Congress.

3. The Senate’s filibuster is an idiotic and undemocratic tool. It is not in the Constitution, its current incarnation was implemented as recently as 1975 as a revision to Senate Rule 22, which itself is most certainly not in the Constitution and quite clearly contrary to its spirit. It makes it almost impossible for a party to govern even if it is elected with an overwhelming majority of votes.

Fix: the Senate can simply change its own governing rules and be done with it.

4. Speaking of the Senate, it is completely absurd that every State still gets to elect two senators, regardless of the population of that state. This may have made some sense back in 1787, when delegates at the Constitutional Convention were faced with a possible breakdown of negotiations if the individual colonies were not allowed a sufficient degree of independence (they called it “the Great Compromise,” it should have been called the Great Sham). But we don’t have “colonies” any more, and it is an insult to democracy that the smallest State (Wyoming, 544,270 inhabitants) has as much power in the most powerful chamber of Congress as the largest one (California, 36,961,664 inhabitants). Change that and we won’t have a “red/blue states” problem anymore.

Fix: we need a constitutional amendment to finally get rid of the “Great Compromise.”

5. Two parties is democracy on life support. A system that essentially — because of its structure — allows only two parties to vie for political control represents the bare minimum for a democracy, considering that it is just one step away from totalitarianism. I don’t buy the common idea that “there is no difference” between the parties. It should by now be painfully clear that the eight years before Obama would have been very different had the Dems been in charge. Regardless, two players is just not enough, and it breeds complacency and corruption.

Fix: this one is a tough cookie, because it would require widespread structural changes to the system, changes that of course would have to be designed and enacted by the two parties currently in charge. The disincentives are obvious. Still, getting rid of the “winner takes all” system during both primaries and general elections, as well as stopping the corrupt gerrymandering of electoral districts (just make ‘em coincide with counties, for crying out loud!) would go a long way toward accomplishing the goal. The best approach would probably be a grassroots effort that establishes alternative parties at the local level first, followed years later by attempts at a national election (the major mistake of third-party presidential candidates is typically precisely the fact that they jump straight onto the national stage without sufficient local support).

There is more, oh so much more, beginning of course with seriously curbing self-financing of political campaigns (this is becoming a game for billionaires, with an obscene amount of money being spent during every electoral cycle), for which goal public financing is really the only way to go. We should also have automatic and permanent voter registration whenever someone reaches voting age, as it is done in other civilized countries (when Republicans invoke the danger of voter fraud they are being nakedly dishonest). And elections should take place over two days and on weekends, to maximize participation. Still, if we could get through the five points above, the US would truly be a remarkable democracy, though still not “the best.” Instead, it is rotting away, and the stench is becoming unbearable.

On morality, a response to Julia

I want to thank Julia, our new regular contributor to Rationally Speaking for an honest and clear presentation of her doubts about the possibility of moral philosophy. Judging from the comments to her post, a good number of our readers seem to agree with her position, which is essentially one of moral skepticism, inevitably leading to a morally relativistic position (although she says that she gets her own moral sense from the way she is wired as a social primate, she also admits that she could not honestly blame someone who acted differently and had no inclination to be kind to others or help human welfare).

First off, then, let me suggest that I don’t think anyone is really a moral relativist, not even Julia. Moral relativism, or moral skepticism, is akin to skepticism about the existence of the world: it may be ultimately impossible to conclusively refute in an air-tight logical manner, but no one actually lives in this way, and no one really believes it. (Bertrand Russell once famously said that he wished that all those people who deny the existence of a wall would get into a car and drive straight into the wall at a speed proportional to their lack of belief in the existence of said wall. I am not aware of the actual experiment ever having been carried out, but of course, as any good skeptic knows, even if the people in the car all died this would not prove the existence of the wall — though as Russell remarked rather drily, we would get rid of a number of bad philosophers... But I digress.)

Second, although this discussion is fascinating and I think useful for our readers, neither Julia nor I can possibly hope to settle in this context a complex issue that defines a whole field, that of metaethics, or the rational justification of ethical thinking. Despite the fact that both Julia and several of our readers are dismissive of philosophy as a type of inquiry (a rather curiously anti-intellectual position, in my opinion), I urge the rest of you to read this excellent introductory essay in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy to begin to dig deeper.

All of the above said, let me finally get to the meat of Julia’s essay. Let’s start with this business of “axioms.” During one of our discussions over dinner I brought up the idea of axioms in ethics to refute a point that moral skeptics never fail to bring up, despite its obvious weakness: ethical reasoning is fluff because there are no moral empirical facts. But the skeptics curiously seem to miss an obvious case study which reveals the hollowness of their position. There are in fact well established and unquestionably serious areas of human endeavor for which “facts” are irrelevant. Consider the entire field of mathematics, for instance. I hope no one here will suggest that mathematical reasoning is arbitrary or without foundations. And yet mathematical theorems are valid / invalid regardless of any empirical fact abut the world.

This example should not be taken lightly, because it is a devastating objection to the moral skeptic, although we need to understand exactly what I am saying here. I am not suggesting that ethics and math are on the same footing, far from it. Rather, I am demonstrating beyond doubt that lack of empirical facts per se in no way precludes the ability of the human mind to reason rigorously about certain entities. It is an interesting philosophical (imagine that!) discussion whether mathematicians discover mathematical truths or they invent them, but in either case such inventions or discoveries are both rigorous and non-arbitrary.

It is of course true that the early 20th century quest for an ultimate, self-contained logical foundation for mathematics failed (see Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica) and was ultimately shown to be a mirage by Godel with his incompleteness theorem. Still, no one would argue that because of that mathematics is an arbitrary castle built on clouds. (Indeed, if we take that sort of skeptical position, then even Julia’s much touted empirical science gets into deep trouble, as rather ironically shown by Hume himself with his problem of induction.)

Indeed, I think that ethics is in some sense on a firmer foundation than math, because we can use empirical data from evolutionary biology and cognitive science to provide us with relevant empirical facts in which to ground our enterprise. As I will argue in a minute, this is not at all an instance of Hume’s naturalistic fallacy.

To begin with, I define ethics as that branch of philosophy that deals with the maximization of human welfare and flourishing. I’m sure this will disappoint Julia and others, but I simply don’t understand what else they might possibly wish to include in a talk about ethics. Neither Julia nor I believe in morality as imposed by a god, for a variety of reasons, including the fact that there is not a shred of evidence in favor of the existence of any gods, but more importantly because of the decisive (again, philosophical!) argument known as Euthyphro’s dilemma, in which Plato showed that gods are simply irrelevant to the question of morality.

So yes, for me morality is neither arbitrary (the relativist position) nor absolute (the typical religionist position, though Kant also famously attempted to arrive at a logically necessary ethics via an entirely secular route — and failed). Rather, I think of morality as something that makes sense only for human beings and other relevantly similar species. By relevantly similar, I mean social animals with brains complex enough to be able to reflect on what they are doing and why they are doing it (that is, being able to philosophize!). As far as I know, Homo sapiens is currently the only such species on planet Earth, though of course there may be others elsewhere in the cosmos.

By definition, then, something is moral in my book if it increases human welfare and flourishing (I am leaving aside for the moment the issue of animal rights, which would be an unnecessary distraction at this point. Interestingly, consequentialists like Peter Singer have tackled that problem, and Julia presented herself to me once as a consequentialist — apparently without realizing that a moral skeptic cannot also coherently endorse a particular school of ethics. For the record, I incline toward virtue ethics.)

It is at this point that Julia accuses me of committing the naturalistic fallacy, that is of deriving an “ought” from an “is.” There are several issues to be considered here. First, contrary to what Julia maintains, it is not at all clear that Hume argued that the is/ought connection is impossible, he may simply have been saying that if one wishes to make that connection the project has to be pursued by explicitly unpacking how said connection works or can be justified. Second, of course, as much as I myself love Hume, I don’t think the guy was infallible, and generally speaking invoking authority truly is a logical fallacy.

To be as clear as possible, then, I define as moral an action that increases human welfare and/or flourishing (and yes, I’m aware that the latter two also need to be discussed and unpacked, but this is a blog post, not a treatise), and then ask biologists and cognitive scientists to provide me with some empirical points of reference so that my concept of human flourishing is based as much as possible on the so highly valued empirical data.

Here is where Julia makes a subtle, but revealing, shift: she writes that “science can tell me that if I want to make other people happier, then treating them in certain ways — giving them health, freedom, and so on — will accomplish that goal. But science can't tell me whether making other people happier should be my goal.” But ethics is not about what an individual may or may not want, it is about the species as a whole (and possibly beyond, see my comment on Singer above). Julia of course may reject the idea of behaving herself so as to increase human flourishing, but then she is by definition acting immorally (or at least amorally). She may shrug her shoulders and keep going with her life, of course, but most of us are going to think of her as immoral (she isn’t, by the way, she is one of the nicest people I’ve met).

What I’ve got so far, then, is a working definition of morality and some empirical evidence (from science) of what helps human beings flourish. Why do I need philosophy? Because biology provides us only with a very limited sense of morality, an instinct that there are right and wrong things. But that instinct was shaped — slowly and inefficiently — by a blind natural process that simply maximized survival and reproduction. Once human beings became able to reflect on what they were doing they immediately developed an enlarged sense of flourishing that is not limited to personal safety, food and sex. We also want to enjoy life, be free to explore opportunities, to speak our mind, to admire art, to pursue knowledge, and so on.

Our instincts become a less and less reliable guide when the circle of flourishing is thus enlarged. For instance, it is a universal moral intuition among human cultures that randomly killing members of your group is bad (psychopaths, or to put it as Julia does, people with a different wiring, are not exceptions, they prove the rule: we put them away whenever we encounter them). But natural selection probably also bred into us an instinctive distrust of outsiders. It has taken thousands of years of moral progress (not an oxymoron!) to slowly realize that there is no rationally defensible distinction between in-group and out-group, which means that we need philosophical reflection to build on our natural biological instinct and come up with the humanity-wide rule that it is wrong to randomly kill anyone, regardless of which group s/he happens to belongs to as a matter of accident of birth.

To summarize, then, I think that:

1. The objection that moral reasoning is not based on empirical facts is irrelevant, since there are other non-arbitrary human endeavors that are also so characterized and yet we do not reject them on those grounds (mathematics, logic itself).

2. I define ethics/morality as concerned with exploring the sort of behaviors that augment human (and possibly beyond human) welfare and flourishing. Since this is a definition, it cannot be argued for, only either accepted or rejected. And yes, definitions are tautologies, but they are nonetheless very useful (all of math can be thought of as a tautology, and so is every single entry in a dictionary).

3. Some empirical facts from evolutionary biology and cognitive science inform us as to where and why we have a moral instinct to begin with, and also about what sort of behaviors do in fact increase human flourishing. It is because of this that I can confidently say, for instance, that genital mutilation of small girls is wrong regardless of which culture practices it and why.

4. To move beyond the narrow sense of flourishing that generated our moral instincts we need to be able to reflect about these issues in a rational and empirically-informed manner. That is, we need to do science-informed philosophy (or what I call sci-phi).

One more thing: I really don’t think Hume would be upset with any of the above, and I believe he would invite me over for a meal (he enjoyed dinner parties) to amicably explore our differences of opinion. As he famously put it: “Truth springs from argument amongst friends.”

Massimo's picks

* The Scientist published a special on the evolution of evolutionary theory. Yours truly is abundantly quoted, alongside the usual two or three critics...

* The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry nominates 16 new fellows, including me. I'm honored.

* Apparently, the current crop of American novelists are both more sensitive to feminist concerns and a hell of lot less interesting when it comes to sex...

* What's a natural kind?

* The problem with the US Senate is not the filibuster, it's that it's cheap to filibuster.

* Apparently some people are depressed, and even suicidal, because they don't live on Pandora, Avatar's imaginary world. Get a life, and while you're at it, go down to Haiti and make yourselves useful.

* How many philosophers are anti-realists about science?

* Center for Inquiry's take on the latest obscene absurdities from Pat Robertson, the Devil and Haiti.

* For Hindus the Ganga river is holy, but not enough to stop polluting it.

Hume's Guillotine

by Julia Galef


I hope Massimo won't start regretting his generous invitation for me to co-blog with him (hi readers! great to be here!) if I kick things off by immediately and publicly disagreeing with him. He and I have been having a debate on moral philosophy for the last few weeks, and after the twentieth iteration of the same arguments we decided it makes sense to invite you all to weigh in, at the very least because we're tired of the sound of our own voices by now. Massimo asked me to lay out the debate, and then he'll follow up with his own post next week.

So, I agree with Massimo that moral reasoning is possible, given a set of initial axioms. (Axioms are the starting assumptions on which all of your moral judgments are based, like the concept of certain fundamental rights, or tit-for-tat justice, or protecting individual liberty, or maximizing total happiness). Where I disagree with him is over his belief that it is possible to use scientific facts to justify selecting one particular set of initial axioms over another.

Roughly speaking, Massimo starts with biological and neuroscientific facts such as "Human welfare requires things like health, freedom, etc." and "Humans are wired to care about each other's welfare," and from these he derives the conclusion, "Therefore, it is moral to act in a way that increases those things which are necessary for human welfare." In my opinion, this is an example of what is sometimes called the naturalistic fallacy: telling me scientific facts doesn't tell me how to act on those facts, and the alleged point of moral principles is to tell me how to act. Science can tell me that if I want to make other people happier, then treating them in certain ways -- giving them health, freedom, and so on -- will accomplish that goal. But science can't tell me whether making other people happier should be my goal.

Alternately, you could use evolutionary biology and neuroscience to argue that being kind to others is the best way to maximize one's own happiness, thanks to the way our brains have become wired over the course of our evolution as social animals. I agree that there's some truth to this claim, but I deny that we can derive any moral principles from it -- it implies only an appeal to self-interest that happens, through lucky circumstances, to have positive consequences for others. (Furthermore, if your moral imperative takes this form, the implication is that if for some reason I were wired differently, then being unkind would not be immoral.)

The difficulty of deriving facts about how people ought to behave from facts about how the world is was most famously articulated by David Hume in his A Treatise of Human Nature (1739):

"In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remark'd, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary ways of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when all of a sudden I am surpriz'd to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, 'tis necessary that it shou'd be observ'd and explain'd; and at the same time that a reason should be given; for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it."

This is called the "is-ought problem", or sometimes "Hume's Guillotine" (because it severs any connection between "is"- and "ought"-statements). My understanding is that Hume is generally believed to have meant not just that people jump from "is to "ought" without sufficient justification, but that such a jump is in fact logically impossible. There have been a number of attempts to make that jump (here's a famous one by John Searle), though I've found them pretty weak, as have other people with much more philosophical expertise than me.


With that in mind, I can't see any way in which a claim of the kind Massimo is making -- "doing X increases human welfare, therefore X is the moral thing to do" -- could logically hold, unless you're simply defining the word "moral" to mean "that which increases human welfare," in which case the statement is tautologically true. But I'm not sure what we gain by simply inventing a new word for a concept that already exists.

Fortunately, even though I think the blade of Hume's guillotine is inescapably sharp in the philosophical world, I don't think it has the power to sever much in the real world. Because, thanks to some combination of evolutionary biology and social conditioning, I do enjoy being kind, and I do want to reduce other people's suffering -- and I would want to do those things even without a rational justification for why that's "moral." And I believe most people would feel the same way.

But if someone didn't care about other people's welfare, I couldn't accuse him of irrationality. He would be committing no fallacy in his reasoning, nor would he be acting against any of his own preferences. (If he wanted to increase human welfare and yet he knowingly acted in a way that reduced human welfare, then I could legitimately call him irrational.)

Massimo, I believe I've represented our disagreement accurately, but please correct me if I haven't! *thwack* Ball's in your court!

New author joins Rationally Speaking: Welcome Julia Galef

Dear Readers,

Over the past few weeks you have seen posts by my friend Julia Galef, who will also be the co-host of the soon to be released Rationally Speaking podcast (produced by Benny Pollak for New York City Skeptics). Her guest posts, “Love, a skeptical inquiry,” “Provably nonsense, part I” and “Provably nonsense, part II” have so far gathered a whopping 165 comments (and counting), which as usual for this blog range from the well-intentioned but somewhat vitriolic to the constructive and almost agreeable...

I have now asked Julia to join the Rationally Speaking team (which includes our editor-in-residence, Phil Pollack) to make this blog even more stimulating and intellectually varied.

Julia is a journalist with a B.A. in statistics from Columbia. After graduating in 2005, she spent several years as a research assistant in social science at Columbia, Harvard and MIT, including a year writing case studies on international economics for Harvard Business School. She is now a full time writer and editor based in New York, covering science, religion, and culture for publications including Science and The Humanist.

Most importantly for this blog, Julia’s background in science and philosophy — coupled with her significantly different take on things compared to my own (especially regarding philosophy), makes her an exciting contributor to the expanding RS universe.

From now on, Julia will blog at Rationally Speaking independently of me, though her first contribution as a resident author will be a critique of the idea of moral philosophy, to which I will respond a few days later. We will also both independently publish our selected “Picks” each week, which again will have a different focus, reflecting our distinct interests.

As David Hume famously put it, “truth springs from argument amongst friends”. So welcome Julia, I look forward to many friendly arguments to start the new decade on a good rational footing.

Massimo's picks

* Apparently, the elusive g-spot doesn't exist. Here is xkcd's take on it.

* American missionaries partly responsible for Uganda's proposed death penalty for gays...

* ...While in the US the American Law Institute decided that, after all, the death penalty is a bad idea.

* Sam Harris pointedly responds to Karen Armstrong, perhaps a bit too pointedly.

* Is the iSlate coming to town?

* Liberal Arts education is under attack as useless, again. Even though employers keep telling universities that they need students who can think critically and write clearly.

* Irish atheists challenge their country's idiotic blasphemy law.

* Jason Colavito argues in eSkeptic that shows about the paranormal help the skeptics' message. I doubt it.

Provably Nonsense, Part II

[from guest blogger and podcast co-host Julia Galef]

Entropy

Scientists know that a crucial test of whether you've understood a phenomenon is whether your understanding helps you accurately predict new information. (Some people argue that refining our predictions about the world is in fact all science actually does, but that's a topic for another day.) So it occurred to me that a good test of whether you've understood a postmodernist text -- as opposed to merely thinking you've understood it -- might be whether your alleged understanding of a string of pomo text helps you predict the next word in that string.

That's where information theory enters the picture. The information-theoretic definition of entropy is a measure of the uncertainty associated with a random variable, or how reliably you can predict its value based on the information you already know. In 1950, the father of information theory Claude Shannon measured the entropy rate of English-language texts by how predictable each successive letter was, based on the letters preceding it. The less predictable each letter is, the higher the entropy rate of the entire sequence of letters. As you might guess, English has a lot of unpredictability (if I say "This letter is an e, what comes next?" it's hard to guess with much confidence) but also some predictability (If I say "This letter is a q, what comes next?" you can probably make a pretty confident guess).

Measuring a text's entropy rate at the letter-level the way Shannon did probably wouldn't tell you much about whether it contains any coherent ideas. But what about entropy at the word-level? The unpredictability of a word based on the preceding words is a measure of the information content of a text and also of its meaning. Too predictable (entropy too low) and you've essentially got repeated mantras; too unpredictable (entropy too high) and the words have literally no relation to each other. Somewhere in between those two extremes is a range of entropy rates in which meaningful fields fall, and I'd be willing to bet that pomo would be a high-entropy outlier.

Let's return to the quote from Deleuze I used in my previous post:

“In the first place, singularities-events correspond to heterogeneous series which are organized into a system which is neither stable nor unstable, but rather ‘metastable,’ endowed with a potential energy wherein the differences between series are distributed ... In the second place, singularities possess a process of auto-unification, always mobile and displaced to the extent that a paradoxical element traverses the series and makes them resonate, enveloping the corresponding singular points in a single aleatory point and all the emissions, all dice throws, in a single cast.”

This text obeys the rules of the English language, but so does the sentence "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously," linguist Noam Chomsky's quintessential example of a grammatically correct but meaningless statement. In meaningful writing, there is more logic to the placement of words than just the logic of grammar, and that's the difference which I think an entropy rate calculation would capture. So when Deleuze talks about singularities that "possess a process" and of "differences" being "distributed" in an "energy," those are arrangements of words which you would not normally see in coherent English writing. Phrases like these are a large part of what makes pomo writing incoherent, and I suspect they would also make its entropy rate very high relative to other expository writing.

Falsifiability

Finally, before I stop picking on the poor postmodernists, I want to mention a great, intuitive test proposed by Tony Lloyd in the comment thread of the previous post. Pick a statement in a pomo text and ask an expert, "What evidence could conceivably falsify this claim (or at least cast doubt on its veracity)?" If no evidence which could ever be obtained, even in principle, has any bearing on the claim's veracity, then the claim is consistent with literally all conceivable states of the world and therefore meaningless. So, Deleuze: How would we know if singularities do NOT possess a process of auto-unification?

The vagueness of pomo writing also makes it very difficult to falsify (conveniently, some might add). What conceivable evidence could falsify Deleuze's description of a system being "neither stable nor unstable"? It’s the same trick that astrologers, and other people who make pseudoscientific or mystical predictions, use to inoculate themselves from disproof. If your horoscope predicts that you are "extroverted but can also be withdrawn," or that you will experience "financial success but watch out for setbacks," it will never be wrong. But that doesn’t make it right.

~Julia Galef

Massimo's picks

* A new episode of my "5-minute Philosopher" series is out, on 'David Hume, the jovial skeptic.'

* Check out this hilarious guide to the philosopher's hand signals!

* Just for the ultra-geeks among you, The Big Bang Theory's new version of an old game: Rock, Paper, Scissors, Lizard, Spock...

* Why it is important to teach philosophy to children.

* A semi-serious academic analysis of what it means when the Dude abides...

* Physicists and the quest for meaning.

* Benjamin Radford's picks for the 9 strangest stories of 2009.

* A thoughtful review of Nicholas Wade's "The Faith Instinct," though I'm still pretty sure there ain't no such thing.

* The good news: 29% of Americans say that faith is out of synch with the times. The bad news: 56% still consider it very important in their lives.

* The truth took a beating in the media during 2009, according to PolitiFact.

* A friend of mine wrote a nice review of Alain de Botton's The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work.

From the APA: is faith a virtue?

Frankly, it’s hard to imagine that a bunch of philosophers have to ask the question at all, the answer for me is obviously no. But ok, let’s see what happens here. We have two speakers: Robert Audi (Notre Dame) on “Faith, faithfulness and virtue” and John Schellenberg (Mount Saint Vincent, Halifax-Canada) on “How to make faith a virtue.” (Interestingly, both speakers come from Catholic Universities — coincidence?)

Audi distinguishes between blind and non-blind faith, and between religious and secular faith (the latter being “faith” in your family, country, democracy, etc.). Right off the bat we are into silly territory: first, I find the whole idea of non-blind faith nonsensical, if it ain’t blind then there are reasons for the belief, which means it’s not faith. As for “faith” in family, country, institutions, etc., if it is blind, it is just as irrational and dangerous as the religious variety, and if it is not blind, then see above (it should be called trust, or belief, etc.).

Audi sees faithfulness — not surprisingly — as a virtue (I’d call it a vice). For him, however, faith is different from, say, justice, in the sense that the latter tends to be directed toward all others (when we are being just, we are not just only with regard to some people), while faith is typically directed to a subset of subjects (you are faithful to your family, or country, or god, but not other families, countries, or gods).

He then finally moves to the real issue: Christian faith (ah, I thought so!). He claims that this sort of faith implies having moral virtues, it is a virtue of character. His big example is Christians (ideally, as we know) treating others as ends in themselves (as Kant would have put it), rather than as means to other ends. Right, but since we can easily get there following an entirely secular route (as Kant himself showed), then why do we need the Christian mumbo-jumbo about god, the trinity, original sin, and so on and so forth?

Audi says that we can be faithful to someone we do not have faith in. This is certainly empirically true, but should we? If my partner betrays my trust in some major way, should I keep unwavering faith in her, or would it be both more rational and more just to question my trust in her? But of course if I question my trust, it automatically means that I did not have faith to begin with, but rather a conditional form of belief. Frankly, I see the latter as the only reasonable, and in fact ethical, relationship to other humans (at least adults, the case is more complicated for children given their temporary immaturity of character).

Time to move to Schellenberg’s talk on how to make faith a virtue (good luck). He says that virtue, rather by definition, is something that is admirable or desirable for a person to have (indeed, which is why I don’t think faith fits the bill). He wants to propose that “nondoxastic” faith, i.e. faith-that without belief-that, is a virtue. Oh boy.

The possibility of nondoxastic faith is exemplified by a woman who found herself in a potentially life-threatening situation while hiking on ice. She “had faith” that she would make it, despite her (alleged) lack of belief that she would actually make it. Bad example for a large number of reasons. First off, how do we know that she didn’t believe in the possibility of making it? Just on the basis of subjective self-report? Second, perhaps she had a very low level of belief, since beliefs don’t often come in yes/no versions, but that low level was enough to motivate her to try. Third, regardless of issues of faith, it was simply the rational thing to do for her to try to get out of danger anyway, even if her chances were close to zero, for she would have certainly died otherwise. Fourth, one could easily construe an example where irrational faith (I know, redundant) is actually positively harmful to an individual’s physical or psychological health.

Here are the author’s examples of the good that nondoxastic faith can do in a secular world: faith in the possibility of knowledge in the face of radical skepticism; faith in personal worth to overcome addiction or depression; socially, in pursuing friendship and cooperation; and morally, to reject the idea that there are no moral absolutes.

These seem to me all perfect examples of instances where one does not need faith, but reason: I don’t have faith in the possibility of knowledge, I have good evidence that human knowledge can improve over time (though it certainly isn’t boundless); addiction and depression are complex problems that depend on a combination of external circumstances and internal biochemical imbalances, and it seems to me that reason is a better guidance for addressing both constructively (to the point that it is possible) rather than “faith”; I think I have better ways than faith to see the cooperation of my fellow human beings and to establish friendship, since I happen to know enough about human needs and frailties to be able to navigate the human social universe qua human; finally, there are in fact no moral absolutes, dude, but that doesn’t imply that moral relativism is the only game in town — again, we get ourselves out of this particular ditch by the power of reason.

Finally, Schellenberg comes to nondoxastic faith in the religious dimension. Here is where his thoughts become seriously confused. The author seems to argue that religious faith can help us reject both “pure skepticism” and “naturalism” (i.e., a science-informed philosophy). But while I can see the (pragmatic, not substantial) rejection of skepticism as inevitable if we want to have a life, it seems to me that rejection of naturalism (presumably in favor of supernaturalism) is a really bad move, essentially the very same bad move that has been made by a large part of humanity over and over in the course of centuries, and which has caused much suffering and a large waste of human resources.

It is not by chance, I think, that Schellenberg toward the end mentioned one of the most irritating concepts in modern philosophy: William James’ “will to believe,” the last refuge of the rationally-challenged believer. It has always seemed to me to be a perfect example of taking the blue pill (in the now famous metaphor out of The Matrix), a choice that I find both unethical and highly dangerous.