494. The Fallacy Of Self-Overestimation

The Fallacy Of Self-Overestimation

I am sick and tired of men's fallacy of attempting to establish an intellectual hierarchy of their superiority, even when this is in no way justified.    This entry explains the general fallacy, the next entry will explain, why this fallacy is toxic in a relationship.

It is an everyday experience to feel the need to base an evaluation, interpretation or decision upon insufficient information and to fill the gap with an estimated probability of what seems most plausible.    Otherwise people are paralyzed from acting.  Therefore the strategy to derive the best estimation is very important and that includes to avoid fallacies.  

One common fallacy is the overestimation of oneself in the situation of either lacking sufficient information about another or of being biased by a prejudice to underestimate this person.    This happens often, when communication leads to a reaction of disagreement.    In this situation, self-overestimation and the underestimation of another are two sides of the self coin.

Person S as the sender makes a statement, which does not convey a convincing message to the receiving person R.   Theoretically, while omitting in this context the distorted transmission of the message, this can be explained by a deficit on either or both sides of the sequence of sending and receiving.  

• Distortion 1: Person S makes a wrong, false, stupid, unlearned, irrational statement.
• Distortion 2: Person R lacks enough knowledge, education or intelligence be able to comprehend or evaluate S's statement.

Based only upon one or a few statements from S, it is often not possible to decide, which of the two distortions is more probable.   Because S's knowledge and learning is like an iceberg.   As is known, only about one seventh of an iceberg is visible, while most of it is invisible.   Every one of S's statements is connected with all his learning and experience stored in his brain.  The more R knows about S, the better R is able to evaluate S's statements, even when the statements by themselves may appear misleading or insufficient.   Considering them as wrong is a fallacy.   The statements require further explanations and information. 

A simple example:  

S makes a statement about the harm of herbicides that is different from what R so far had heard of or considered as probably correct.   R cannot evaluate, if this statement is more probable without further knowledge about S.   When R knows, if S is a gardener having left school after tenth grade or if he has a degree in chemistry, then R has some valuable information for the evaluation of the statement.

After only hearing the statement, R needs to make a temporary decision of how to proceed in reaction to the incomprehensible statement.  There is a variety of possible reaction.   Ending the communication, ridicule, asking curious questions, ask other people, find independent information, gullibly believe it.    The better the information about S, the more appropriate is the reaction.  

When people have a realistic view about themselves, they can evaluate not only the knowledge of the other, but also their own knowledge in comparison with the other's competence.  

A realistic gardener is aware, that he knows less about herbicides than the chemist, while the realistic chemist acknowledges, that the gardener has more knowledge about pruning fruit trees.   The one with less knowledge asks questions and is motivated to learn.    

But there are people, who are not realistic.   Whenever they do not understand the other, they automatically believe, that they are right and the other is wrong.    A gardener, who claims his knowledge about herbicides to be better than the chemist's or the chemist, who claims to know better than the gardener how to prune trees, are absurd.   They are not aware of the limitation of their knowledge to their own specialty.    They are both afflicted with the fallacy of unfounded self-overestimation.   The gardener, who disputes the chemist's superior knowledge concerning herbicides and the chemist, who disputes the gardener's superior knowledge concerning pruning are both ludicrous and a nuisance.   

This fallacy can be avoided or at least drastically reduced by an a priori decision of how to handle the ambiguity of the two distortions.   This decision is to always give S the benefit of the doubt by first asking questions and getting more information and by postponing the final conclusion of considering the other as wrong, until there is no more doubt..  

365. Atheism - Skepticism

Atheism  - Skepticism

Throughout this blog, I declared myself a skeptic and an atheist, using both words separately even though I implicitly consider both as related.    But I only defined in entries 305, 60 and 11, what it means to me to be an atheist but I did not explicitly mention skepticism.   Since an interesting discussion lately, in which some people declared themselves as skeptics but not as atheists, I got aware that this topic needs some further elaboration.   

On the level of cognition, atheism and skepticism are distinguishable.    On the level of skepticism as a behavioral paradigm, a skeptical approach to the claim of the existence of a deity can only lead to atheism.   Otherwise the person is applying skepticism only partially without being a skeptic as a personality trait.  

I already made the point, that a-theos means nothing more except to be without a god.  Being an atheist means to live as if I have never even heard of the option to believe or to let a belief determine my behavior.  

When being without a god is the baseline, then this does not even need to be the consequence of a choice due to having an option, it can just as well be a state of oblivion.    A person, who has never even heard of the possibility to choose a belief is automatically an atheist, as is a newborn or a monkey or even a fly.    Believing is a choice, either by a conscious believer or by the parents, who brainwash a child to believe.   Stopping to believe is a choice.    Someone calling himself an atheist describes the awareness of choosing to not believe in spite of this being an option.      

Skepticism means doubting any claim offered as an option to believe as if true.    Someone can as often react as a skeptic as he is confronted with claims.  He cannot doubt claims that he has never heard of.    Skepticism supplies the doubt, but not automatically also the best judgment and evaluation.    The latter depend on available information and upon scientific thinking and empiricism are methods to deal with the doubt.  

But all this would not be of much importance were it not for the unavoidable requirement of making decisions based upon insufficient information as part of the survival of every day life.  Buying food means relying on the claims of the producer of its healthy ingredients.  But we need to buy food to survive.     

Gullibility and skepticism are the two opposite methods of making decisions when dealing with other persons' claims.  

The gullible believes everything and allows himself to be manipulated, he survives by imitating others' decision and evaluations, which are sometimes good, often detrimental but not often lethal.    This is why gullibility persists. 
The skeptic doubts everything, but he is still under the pressure to make decisions or to perish.    The skeptic refuses to make decisions based upon accepting others' claims as true, the skeptic avoids the misinterpretation of his own experiences like apparent contingencies.    A true skeptic does not believe.    A true skeptic estimates the probability of something being true.   If a skeptic is lacking sufficient information to estimate the probability, he does it consciously as a haphazard decision, if deciding cannot be avoided.  

Example.   A gullible person with a headache takes the remedy, that is presented to him with the strongest claim by the most sympathetic or manipulative person.   The gullible person believes, that it helps, no matter what it is.
A skeptic refuses to take homeopathic water.   But if he is a not trained in pharmacology, then the choice between different over-the-counter painkilllers is mainly a haphazard decision.   But as the headache needs a remedy, the skeptic buys one in the full awareness of not being able to evaluate the choice as really the best possible.

Therefore on the level of decisions, atheism is a logical outcome of skepticism.  Applying skepticism upon the claim of the existence of a deity can only lead to doubt this existence.      Someone with a headache refuses to buy homeopathic water and he refuses to pray to a god.   Both are claims of irrational remedies.        

328. The Evolution of Gullibility

The Evolution of Gullibility

This again is speculation.

I have been wondering before, if the mental development of children could be a fast repetition of the evolution of cognition over the 6 million years since the time, when the evolution of our ancestors branched off from that of the ancestors of today's chimpanzees.   
Seen from our perspective, a contemporary child at the age of four has both the mental and the physical development of this age group after having been alive four years.  
I consider it as possible, that at some time in the past, there had been human ancestors having the same mental abilities as for example has a four year old today, but having an adult body and being much older and having reached full maturity.    While their survival and procreation was determined by animal instincts, their cognition enabled them to adapt better to their environment than mere animals.   

To simplify and illustrate this, I compare three phases of the evolution of acquiring the knowledge of what to eat and what not.  The survival of the fittest and natural selection depended on eating, what is beneficial, and avoiding to eat, what is poisonous.    

1.  The phase of simple imitation
In this phase, our human ancestors learned like other animals from observation, when others ate berries and showed delight, and they learned by observation, if someone was killed by a poisonous snake and died immediately.   Learning was restricted to the observation of contingencies.   They could learn to avoid such snakes, but they could not learn to avoid poisonous berries, that had effects only hours later.

2.  The phase of cognitive imitation
In this phase, humans had evolved a memory and a simple way of communication, either by signs or by a rudimentary language, like the four year olds in the above example.  Thus they were able to learn delayed contingencies, and they could copy the memorized contingencies engraved in other people's brains into their own and imitate the apparently adequate behavior.  
If several humans had eaten poisonous berries and got sick or died hours or even days later, the survivors and the observers were able to learn the delayed contingencies.  They learned to avoid these berries in the future.
The knowledge, which berries are edible and which are poisonous, was transmitted not only by observation, but also by communicating the information, as was other information about where to find food, how to make the best tools, use fire and other survival skills.

This had two consequences: 

• People learned not only correct contingencies like what berries are poisonous, but also coincidences as wrong contingencies. 
• Those who believed, what they were told, and based their behavior upon the belief, increased their chances to survive and to procreate.

That was the beginning of the natural selection favoring gullibility as a temporary advantage for fitness.  

• The persons, who followed in their behavior the blind belief not to eat the berries indicated as poisonous, no matter if they understood the reason or not, lived longer than those, who did not follow the belief. 
  But it made no difference for the survival and fitness of those, who refrained from eating the poisonous berries, if they also prostrated to the sun every morning or not.    
  As a consequence, those who believed too little were eliminated by natural selection, those who believed too much, survived the same as those, who only believed, what was essential for survival.  
• The inability to discriminate between coincidence and contingency led to the false religious believes to be able to control the future and the environment by rituals, sacrifices, prayers and magic thinking.   In the absence of better survival strategies, these served as a powerful psychological crutch, because it

• reduced anxieties, insecurities and led to more daring behaviors, adding fitness to the survivors of the endeavors.     
• served as a placebo effect for healing.
• instigated irrational behaviors leading by coincidence to beneficial discoveries.  

This evolution of a simple cognition was sufficient for the life of hunters and gatherers, who were using fire and making simple tools.   The ability to doubt had not yet evolved, therefore instinctivity was in full power over the behavior, it was only aided by gullibility.  

3.  The phase of rationality
When agriculture started about 10,000 years ago, this required more rational cognition than the simple acceptance of every coincidence also as a contingency.   Those who were too much guided by wrongly believed coincidences risked starvation.   The survival depended more and more on rational procedures to develop elaborated tools and skills like metallurgy.  

Gullibility as a survival skill had become obsolete.   But unfortunately, the development of the infant's brain had still to go through the phase of gullibility before reaching the ability of fully rational cognition.   Therefore, the evolution of the brain could not eliminate gullibility, instead it branched inside the brain into the parallel evolution of rationality alongside with coexistent gullibility.   Rationality thrived only in the limited sphere of practical life, where evidence was available to be experienced, while the power of gullibility as a psychological crutch was not overridden.   
As a result, farmers were able to learn, that (in the German climate) they needed to plant vegetables in spring and not in autumn, if they wanted to harvest food.   But they never evolved enough rationality to fully discard unproven believes like the one to pray for a good harvest or to do the planting under the full moon.     

Since rationality is still a fairly recent result of evolution, human brains have two incongruent tendencies, gullibility and instinctivity as the older forces competing with the contradictory force of rationality and complex cognition.   For a minority of the vanguard of having evolved the farthest, rationality is stronger than gullibility and instinctivity, but the majority of people is still determined by the same gullibility as in the phase of mental imitation.  

One important step from gullibility to rationality is the ability to doubt, not only the input from the environment including other persons, but also the doubt of the benefits of the own urges and impulses.  The most rationally evolved people are those least determined by instinct.    The doubting person, who ate the poisonous berries, died and did not contribute the ability to doubt to the gene pool.   The doubting person, who started to experiment by feeding the berries to an animal or to the captives of another tribe, survived and added rationality to the gene pool.    (He also added the cruelty to outgroup members, but that is not the topic here.)