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What Is Confirmation Bias: Examples and Dangers

May 31, 2020

confirmation bias, ignorance, reason, relationship, thought, truth

Do you know what’s the biggest obstacle to your finding the truth? You are! Each one of us must overcome their own preconceptions to discover what lies beneath. And confirmation bias is among the most insidious hurdles blocking our path.

Confirmation bias is when you favor indications or cases that support your existing viewpoints, while you disregard others that would force you to reconsider.

One typical confirmation bias example is superstition: You tend to remember the one time you had an accident after you saw a black cat, and conveniently forget the untold thousands you didn’t have an accident after seeing a black cat.

In this post we’ll take a closer look at confirmation bias: We’ll see how it works and why. I’ll offer you some typical examples of confirmation bias, and we’ll also see why it’s insidious.

I’ll even share a literary example!

confirmation bias examples — Confirmation bias means you’re blinded to your own prejudices

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Why I Lost Faith in the Academia

March 23, 2020

Criticism

academia, change, criticism, ignorance, mediocrity, motivation, society

Quite a nice little series I seem to be creating… This is the second “why I became disillusioned” kind of post after that on making Android apps. I’ve spent 12 years at the university – as a student, researcher, and teacher. But it’s time to admit it: I’ve lost faith in the academia; perhaps irreparably.

If you visit the academic section of the Home for Fiction main page, you’ll see a little quotation there. It’s something one of my academic mentors once said.

We won’t change the world simply by reading literature a different way, even against the grain. It’s a matter of whether we want to be a part of communities outside the university, where issues of equality are the daily reality.

I also note there that “I have no interest in an academia that does not act this way, and every academic work I have produced has been a small but honest effort in that direction.”

Well, let’s reverse that somewhat.

Every academic work I have produced has been a small but honest effort in that direction, but I have no interest in an academia that does not act this way.

This has been a major reason why I lost faith in the academia.

lost faith in academia — The reasons I lost faith in the academia mostly revolve around freedom of thought and, mostly, around possessing the **capacity** for freedom of thought

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The Methodological Flaw of Agnosticism

February 7, 2020

Philosophy

agnosticism, atheism, ignorance, knowledge, methodology, philosophy, religion, society

Certain things are relative: Although we can say “hot” or “cold”, we can also compare, and say “hotter/colder than”. There are also things that are binary – either or. No matter what Hegelians might claim, I doubt you can be “a little bit pregnant”. In this context, an intellectually honest philosopher has to acknowledge a methodological flaw in agnosticism.

Theism is the belief in the existence of a supreme being – “God”. A pedantic observer would perhaps make all kinds of elaborations on this (arguably focusing on the difference between a theist and a deist), but for the purposes of this post – and focusing on what I term as the methodological flaw of agnosticism – the above definition should suffice.

That is, we have people – theists – believing in the existence of God. We also have atheists, who don’t find evidence for such a claim, and therefore do not accept the existence of God. Agnostics, on the other hand, are people who argue that nothing is known or can be known about the existence of God.

Agnosticism is effectively a perpetual suspension of judgment. As an agnostic, you basically say “I can’t know that there is a God, but I also can’t know that there isn’t. Hence, I refuse to take a stance”.

However, that’s precisely what the methodological flaw of agnosticism really is, as we’ll see.

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