The Questioning Christian

Our collective experience helps us compensate for the fallibilities of our individual observations and insights

I've been involved in a week-long discussion at Kendall Harmon’s conservative Anglican site TitusOneNine. My online friend Todd Granger, M.D., responded to one of my comments thusly:

... all knowledge - all knowledge - involves a personal decision to commit oneself to an epistemological framework in the absence of compelling a priori evidence to make the decision. There is no Cartesian point of objectivity from which one may serenely decide between frameworks.

Here's a slightly-edited version of my response.

It seems to me that Todd is saying each of us must choose his or her epistemological framework. That strikes me as saying we must each choose our own truth. I don't think either claim is defensible.

I would argue that, so far as we can tell, there's a single reality, wrought by the Creator (though sometimes different people perceive that reality in different slices, or from different perspectives).

Likewise, there's a single epistemology, a single approach to assessing what we know and how we know it: As best we can, face the facts of reality as they’re revealed to us — keeping in mind that those facts include the limitations of our abilities to perceive, correlate, remember, and communicate.

As near as I can tell, the post-modernist view maintains that our limitations require that we abandon the notion of objective reality.  That doesn’t seem correct.

Our knowledge of reality isn’t a painting that each of us must examine in the moment, alone and in a vacuum, with no information about the depicted scene except as supplied by our imaginations.

Thanks to our gifts of "memory, reason, and skill" (Eucharistic Prayer C, if memory serves) — especially the skill of communicating with each other — our knowledge base is more like a movie: Our past experience, individual and collective, allows us to know more about the scene than could ever be depicted by a painter.

Consider that over millennia, humanity has accumulated gazillions of observations of the Creation.

Individually, each observation is subject to error in perception, recordation, transmission, and/or interpretation.

Collectively, though, our accumulated observations — including meta-observations about how we make and use observations — can give us something like a serviceable facsimile, within its limitations, of the Cartesian point of objectivity Todd describes.

In The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki tells of a surprising observation by statistician Francis Galton; as explained by an Amazon.com reviewer:

In 1906, Francis Galton, known for his work on statistics and heredity, came across a weight-judging contest at the West of England Fat Stock and Poultry Exhibition. This encounter was to challenge the foundations of his life's study.

An ox was on display and for six-pence fair-goers could buy a stamped and numbered ticket, fill in their names and their guesses of the animal's weight after it had been slaughtered and dressed. The best guess received a prize.

Eight hundred people tried their luck. They were diverse. Many had no knowledge of livestock; others were butchers and farmers.

In Galton's mind this was a perfect analogy for democracy. He wanted to prove the average voter was capable of very little.

Yet to his surprise, when he averaged the guesses, the total [sic] came to 1197 pounds. After the ox had been slaughtered, it weighted 1198.

Emphasis and extra paragraphing added.)

Surowiecki gives several other examples — including how the sunken submarine USS SCORPION was located — to illustrate the point: If each of a (sufficiently-large) number of 'observations' includes a randomly-distributed error component, and the observations are mashed together, e.g., by averaging them, then the error components tend to cancel each other out, and the resulting collective picture can be a serviceable representation of the underlying reality.

I'm now bumping up against the limits of my (scant) knowledge of epistemology. It seems to me, though, that Galton's story of guessing the weight of an ox is a useful metaphor for how our collective experience over time helps us compensate for the lack of an a priori frame of reference.

(If I'm not mistaken, what I've described above is a crude summary of the notion of critical realism.)

Confidence sometimes counts for more than being right

From New Scientist:

The research, by Don Moore of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, shows that we prefer advice from a confident source, even to the point that we are willing to forgive a poor track record. Moore argues that in competitive situations, this can drive those offering advice to increasingly exaggerate how sure they are. And it spells bad news for scientists who try to be honest about gaps in their knowledge.

In Moore's experiment, volunteers were given cash for correctly guessing the weight of people from their photographs. In each of the eight rounds of the study, the guessers bought advice from one of four other volunteers. The guessers could see in advance how confident each of these advisers was (see table), but not which weights they had opted for.

From the start, the more confident advisers found more buyers for their advice, and this caused the advisers to give answers that were more and more precise as the game progressed.  This escalation in precision disappeared when guessers simply had to choose whether or not to buy the advice of a single adviser.

In the later rounds, guessers tended to avoid advisers who had been wrong previously, but this effect was more than outweighed by the bias towards confidence.

Peter Aldhous, Humans prefer cockiness to expertise, New Scientist, June 10, 2009 (emphasis and extra paragraphing added.)

The man who could have been Bill Gates

From the Oral History Gets Distorted desk:  Hacker News * links today to a 2004 Business Week story, recounting the vastly-different accounts of how Microsoft entered into its original operating-system license agreement with IBM, which started Bill Gates on the road to being a billionaire.

Legend has it that IBM initially approached software pioneer Gary Kildall, seeking to license his widely-used CP/M operating system, but Kildall wasn’t interested (“Gary went flying instead,” goes the story). Whereupon IBM asked Gates whether MIcrosoft could do the job; Microsoft bought the rights to a CP/M workalike; and the rest is history.

But the legend leaves out some crucial details . . . .

Read it all.

* Hacker News is a legitimate and very-popular site for ‘hackers’ in the original sense of the term, which refers to highly-skilled programmers.

Harvard longitudinal study confirms the distorting effects of time on stories recalled from memory

Here’s some hard evidence showing the questionable reliability of stories that are recalled long after the fact — something that credulous New Testament scholars (like Bishop N.T. Wright) would be well-advised to keep in mind when they claim that X or Y really did happen in 33 AD:

… The Harvard data illustrate this phenomenon [of memory distortion] well.

In 1946, for example, 34 percent of the Grant Study men who had served in World War II reported having come under enemy fire, and 25 percent said they had killed an enemy. In 1988, the first number climbed to 40 percent—and the second fell to about 14 percent.

“As is well known,” Vaillant concluded, “with the passage of years, old wars become more adventurous and less dangerous.”

Distortions can clearly serve a protective function. In a test involving a set of pictures, older people tend to remember fewer distressing images (like snakes) and more pleasant ones (like Ferris wheels) than younger people.

By giving a profound shape to aging, this tendency can make for a softer, rounder old age, but also a deluded one. …

From Joshua Wolf Shenk, What Makes Us Happy? in The Atlantic, June 2009 (emphasis and extra paragraphing added).

Related posts: 

• Reasons to Question the Reliability of Scripture
• The Distortions category of this blog

Here’s a news flash: Authors will sometimes lie and defame if they think it will help advance their agenda

In today’s on-line WSJ, a piece by Mark Penn caught my attention:

The United Kingdom has just had a major scandal in which an official at 10 Downing Street had planned to leak to a friendly blogger all sorts of lurid stories about the Conservatives, complete with descriptions of secret sex tapes.

But all of it was to be made up, and the friendly blogger who was going to post it all thought it was an “absolutely brilliant” idea.

Someone blew the whistle, but had the plot gone through, this blogstorm could have played a major role in the upcoming election.

America's Newest Profession: Bloggers for Hire, Wall Street Journal, Apr. 21, 2009 (emphasis and extra paragraphing added).  I searched for more on this UK story and found a Guardian article:

Damian McBride sent the first of two emails that would cost him his job at 6.30pm on 13 January. "A few ideas I have been working on for RedRag," he wrote to Labour blogger Derek Draper. "For ease, I've written all the below as I'd write them for the site."

The email suggested a series of unfounded and puerile smears against senior Tories. Draper responded 20 minutes later: "Absolutely totally brilliant Damian. I'll think about timing and sort out the technology this week so we can go as soon as possible." …

McBride suggested spreading gossip, entirely unfounded, that [Conservative party leader David] Cameron may have suffered from a sexually transmitted disease. He wrote that Cameron should be challenged to publish his "full financial and medical records". He also suggested "inserting [a] picture of Dr Christian Jessen", who appears on the Channel 4 programme Embarrassing Bodies. There was no suggestion the two men knew each other.

For some reason this brings to mind the Gospel of John’s faintly-disparaging comments about Peter and Thomas, to say nothing of those about “the Jews.”

Scholar Claims Dead Sea Scrolls 'Authors' Never Existed

From the We'll-Likely-Never-Know Department:  "[A] prominent Israeli scholar, Rachel Elior, disputes that the Essenes ever existed at all - a claim that has shaken the bedrock of biblical scholarship. Elior, who teaches Jewish mysticism at Jerusalem's Hebrew University, claims that the Essenes were a fabrication by the 1st century A.D. Jewish-Roman historian Flavius Josephus and that his faulty reporting was passed on as fact throughout the centuries. [¶ ¶]  Elior claims says these ancient historians, namely Philo and Pliny the Elder, either borrowed from each other or retailed second-hand stories as fact."

From Tim McGirk, Scholar Claims Dead Sea Scrolls 'Authors' Never Existed, TIME.com, March 16, 2009.

Too bad there was no Twitter in 33 AD

From a story in NPR's Weekend Edition of today:

"What we are losing is editing," [Daniel] Schorr said. "I grew up and nothing could be communicated to the outside world that didn't go through an editor to make sure you had your facts right, spelling right and so on.

"Now, every person is his or her own publisher and/or her own editor or her own reporter. And the world is full of people who are sending out what they consider to be news. It may be, it may not be, it may be made up and it doesn't matter anymore.

"That, to me, is the worst part of this. The discipline that should go with being able to communicate is gone."

In response, I offered up two recent examples of breaking news stories that played out on Twitter: the attacks in Mumbai and the riots in Greece. Occasionally, you'd see stories circulating on the Internet — or even on air — that weren't necessarily true but because it was happening so fast it was hard to keep up with it.

And then people on Twitter and Facebook started asking, 'Are you really sure about that? Did you see this yourself? Did you get this from a news source? Did you get this from a blog?'

And so, in a way a system of checks and balances kicks into high gear with people who are just innately very skeptical — wanting to get to the heart of a matter.

And sometimes stories actually get debunked that way.

(Emphasis and extra paragraphing added.)

Related stories:  See the Distortions category

Rocky Mountain News was not above inventing its news

From Saturday's NY Times: 

In many ways, Rocky stories and Denver stories are synonymous, partly because the paper’s unabashed mission, especially in its early days, was to help Denver grow and prosper, sometimes even at the expense of the facts.

The first owner and publisher, William Byers, who founded the paper on the second floor of a saloon, decided early on, for example, that Eastern moneyed investors would want Denver to have good steamboat access — a profoundly unrealistic prospect here on the High Plains. So he simply invented it. Shipping news, complete with the made-up names of arriving and departing vessels, heading out on the South Platte River, bound east with made-up loads of freight, became a fictional staple.

Eyewitnesses can have their minds changed by others

See Christie Nicholson, "When an Innocent Confesses to a Crime," Scientific American Web site (Jan. 27, 2009).

Voices in their heads

From The Atlantic, January/February 2009, at 21:

Lots of people hear voices in their heads—but only some are bothered by them. One group of voice-hearers in a recent study, who considered themselves psychics or mediums, said they found the voices “benevolent” and were more likely to engage with them than resist them. Members of a second group, who had sought psychiatric help, found the voices “malevolent and omnipotent,” and suffered more stress and anxiety. Hearing voices may not be as problematic as what the voices are saying.