An Orgy of Confirmation Bias

As you know, Freud was in the business of interpreting. He told people what it all meant. Or, what it appeared to mean. The meaning of life, the meaning of death, the meaning of the universe… whatever it was, Freud claimed to know what it meant.

Invariably, the meaning was all about desire. Freud knew what people really, really wanted. This implies, of course, that he could read minds. Why would he know better than you what you wanted?

As it happens, your desire is not an objective fact. You cannot determine empirically, on the basis of evidence, that you want an ice cream cone or a trip to Tahiti. And even if you are persuaded that you know what you want, no one else can really claim to have any objective knowledge of your desire… beyond what you tell him.

You sense that you want this and not that. You act on your sense impression, but that is not the same as knowing, for example, that a cat is on a mat. The latter can be determined objectively. Your desire cannot.

One thing we know about desire is that if you have something you cannot want it. By definition. Wanting something means not having it. You can say that you wish you were anywhere but where you are right now, but you cannot say, in English, that you wish you were where you are. It makes no sense. No one uses such sentences.

No fact proves that you desire something. Just because you do not have a carpet in your hallway does not mean that you want to carpet the hallway.

Nowadays, as the emotionally overwrought have lit upon the notion that the incoming president has no relationship with facts, one feels constrained to note that the outgoing president has never let himself be constrained by fact or by constitutional law or by loyalty to America.

If one can argue cogently that the incoming president is not qualified for the office he is about to assume, what mind warp can possibly make it that the outgoing president was even remotely qualified for the office of the presidency.

In a fact-free world, Obama was supremely qualified, his presidency was a rousing success and Hillary Clinton was the most qualified candidate for the presidency… ever. In a fact-free world you can say what you want and then force people to believe it all… as a higher truth. What matters is not what is true but what you want to be true.

During the Obama years America took leave of fact. Now, with the incoming Trump administration, Americans are rediscovering facts.

You know which ones. Take the fact that tells us, biologically, based on chromosomes, that Bradley Manning is a male. It’s a fact. And yet, Manning believes that he is a she and if you deny the fact you are a bigot. And now, our fact-challenged president, reverting to the kind of thinking that caused him to spend two decades lapping up the hate-filled swill issuing from Rev. Jeremiah Wright, has decided that Manning’s betrayal of America was no big deal.

Is it a fact that no one died as a result of Manning’s treason? The New York Times says so. Thus, you can ignore the fact that terrorists the world over pored through the documents that Manning leaked and exacted revenge on anyone who remotely resembled the people described therein. It’s a fact.

Freud liked to pretend that his interpretations could be proved or disproved. Early in his career he claimed that if hysterics said that they desired X and then obtained X, and if they were not satisfied with X that meant that they did not know what they wanted. Thus, they were neurotic and needed psychoanalysis.

One must mention again that this is grossly disrespectful to women, but it is also a seducer’s ploy. If a seducer can persuade a woman that she does not know what she wants, he is on the road to convincing her that she wants him, only she does not know it. That is the point of psychoanalysis.

Later, Freud declared that if his interpretation elicited a patient’s memory or fantasy, that piece of psychic data confirmed that he was right. Later,  Karl Popper argued persuasively that Freud would not accept the existence of a fact that could disprove his interpretations or his theories. Ergo, that he was not doing science but was trafficking in an ideology. He was not transmitting knowledge but was running a polemic. One whose goal was to persuade you to believe something—most often, a narrative—that made no sense.

But, what happens when we examine Freud’s practice through the theories of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Twersky, especially their theories of confirmation bias. One mentions in passing that those who claim that the K/T theories show that we are more irrational than we think we are should be careful lest they end up throwing out the Enlightenment. Today’s world is not running short on irrational thinking, so let’s not encourage this bad habit.

Anyway, New York Magazine defined confirmation bias:

Confirmation bias comes from when you have an interpretation, and you adopt it, and then, top down, you force everything to fit that interpretation,” Kahneman says. “That’s a process that we know occurs in perception that resolves ambiguity, and it’s highly plausible that a similar process occurs in thinking.

At that point you can kiss psychoanalysis good-bye. It becomes an orgy of confirmation bias. The truth is, that a patient in psychoanalysis-- like many patients in less rigorous and less orthodox treatments-- develops a bias toward finding material that will confirm whatever his therapist is selling.

On a more philosophical note, we can ask whether information that confirms you bias is a fact. What do you think of the economic recovery? It’s a fact that the current unemployment rate is below 5%. It’s also a fact that the workforce participation rate is as low as it has been in four decades. If you only look at the first fact you will be confirming your bias. The truth lies in the qualification offered by the second fact.

We should ask this question: when is a fact not a fact? All facts are not created equal. All facts do not have the same value. Any prosecuting attorney can put together a bunch of facts to prove that Col. Mustard killed Mrs. Peacock in the library with a candlestick. The police found his fingerprint on the murder weapon and they know that he had good reason to want her dead. The fingerprint is a fact. How it got there is speculation? What it does or does not prove is a question.

Once you determine that Col. Mustard was out of the country at the time of the murder, the fingerprint remains a fact. It is no longer a relevant fact. It appears to show something that it does not show.

So, when is a fact not a fact? The answer is: when it is an appearance. When a datum appears to demonstrate something, to prove a point, to confirm your bias… it may or may not be a fact. That is, it may or may not prove the point that you want it to prove. It might appear to do so, but that does not mean that it necessarily does so.

One understands that the intellectual tradition called Western idealism is based on appearances. Plato did not believe that you could ever have objective knowledge of real objects. Despite what some people persist in thinking you cannot produce scientific thought out of Plato’s theories.

Later idealists believed that we could only know things as they appeared to us, as we processed appearances. Our knowledge was limited to what came to be known as phenomena. Beginning with Kant, those who believe in phenomena tell us that we never really see things as they are. We only see things as they appear to us. Or else, Nietzsche declared that there are no facts. There are only interpretations.

This implies, to the minds of idealistic philosophers, that we can change the world if we learn to think differently or if we rid our minds of bias. We can never really know what is. We can only know how things appear to us.

Thus, the world is overrun with thought police who want to teach you the correct way to see the real world. Examine the following case. During the Obama years, the president’s home town, led by one of his most stalwart allies, became a killing field. The murder rate spiked. The incidence of gun violence spiked. What percentage of those crimes have been black-on-black? Probably the number is well over 90%. How does the Obama Justice Department deal with the problem? You guessed it, by issuing a report about racial animus on the part of the Chicago police department. Thus, with one fell swoop it exonerates those who have committed murder and mayhem… and has blamed it all on the police.

Confirmation bias, anyone? What’s the word for: willfully blind to reality?

As K/T and Popper and others have been at pains to point out, empirical science does not begin with bias. It does not even begin with a narrative or a theory. It begins by collecting the facts, the data. Then it formulates a hypothesis and, if it wants to do science, creates an experiment to test it. It must, Richard Feynman insisted, report all the facts, those that would tend to confirm the hypothesis and those that would disprove it. Then you can evaluate the hypothesis on a rational basis, on the basis of the evidence. If there is no such thing as a fact that can disprove your bias, you are within the tradition of Western idealism. If you allow the facts to challenge and to disprove your theories, you are engaging in rational thought and are using the scientific method.