Why is it important?

All too often I find that two parties trying to debate each other, myself included, talk past each other or just fail to realize they both share the same goals while how to achieve them is the only disagreement. These and many other reasons for the break down of productive discourse can be traced to phenomena including scientific illiteracy, cognitive biases, and emotional outbursts. By themselves none of these are necessarily bad, but when multiple people try to interact and resolve their differences you need something common to everyone. I turn to objectivity, logic, and evidence to evaluate and improve the world, and I hope more people will familiarize themselves with the concepts briefly mentioned on this page.

Evidence and Opinions

I wrote a blog post about this, perhaps somewhat provocatively named You Are Never Entitled to Your Opinion. Do read it (or the article that prompted its writing) if you're interested. But basically, if you ever find yourself saying "That's just my opinion." during an argument, you should really take a step back and re-examine your position. This touches on what I generally view as the hardest but most important part of rationality: being able to admit when you're wrong. Using that age-old phrase is usually just a way of trying to seem reasonable while actually being completely unreasonable in service to not conceding a point. Of course, no one can tell you "You're wrong to say you don't like chocolate." since they don't have your tastebuds, brain, or past experiences. But if someone says "You're wrong to say homeopathic remedies work better than modern medicine." then your opinion doesn't matter if the evidence says homeopathy is mostly fake.

The Scientific Method

Not all evidence is created equal, but thankfully we have a pretty good tool for gathering evidence and testing hypotheses. There's a reason science is regarded as superior to anecdotes or gut feelings. It's been tested again and again, and proven that it is effective and eventually leads to the correct result. Good scientists are great at admitting when they're wrong; indeed they do it constantly. Effective experiments try to gather evidence that falsifies a theory or claim. The experiment designer tries as hard as possible to disprove their own theory, because the goal isn't to prove that the hypothesis you just devised is true. The goal is to find the truth, which, more often than not, is only achieved after dozens or hundreds of hypotheses are proven wrong. The beauty of science is that it's the same everwhere and for everyone; that is to say, real science is reproducible. When someone proposes a scientific theory, you don't have to take their word for it. You can test it yourself and see if your results match up. Indeed, in the scientific community, no result is truly accepted until it is confirmed by multiple independent sources. Unfortunately, because people are not objective or perfect, they make mistakes, and sometimes experiments are designed poorly or interpreted incorrectly. This is why reproduction of results is so important; if done enough, you can identify shortcomings and correct them.

Biases and Fallacies

Evolution and natural selection result in organisms more likely to pass on their genes. More specifically, this means the human brain evolved to "Help humans survive and reproduce" not "Figure out the truth." Our minds have documents "blind spots" that lead to some very weird and surprising results. These are collectively called Cognitive Biases, and they plague virtually every human. This is a very long list, but so many of the results are astonishing and enlightening that I think you should consider clicking on a few random ones and reading the summaries.

I do, however, want to touch on a specific bias that has been exacerbated by the advent of technology and the internet. Confirmation Bias is the tendency for people to only search for and read evidence or sources that support their position. People have an inherent proclivity to view sources that support their views as credible, while completely dismissing anything that disagrees with them. This is a huge problem when trying to look at the world scientifically or rationally. Of course, to make a logical decision, you need to be aware of the good and bad consequences of each action. You should actively seek out both supporting and opposing evidence. This bias is especially devestating to the scientific method, since the entire point is to try to disprove your hypothesis. If you only ever gather evidence or design experiments supporting a proposal, you will only ever arrive at that proposal, not necessarily the truth. In modern times, this has gotten much worse due to "Echo Chambers" (e.g. Facebook) where you are only presented with views that already agree with you.

Logic and Emotions

Emotion is part of what makes us human, so telling someone to never feel anything is both outrageous and counter-productive. Yet, emotions too often get the better of us and lead to rash decisions or the end of a constructive debate. If you let only emotions drive you, we quickly encounter a problem when trying to interact with others. In most cases, logic cannot persuade or overcome emotion. Put another way, a person driven by pure emotion will likely never admit they are wrong. Most of the time, once one party drops logic and turns to uncompromising emotion, the other party will follow suit. Why continue to argue from logic and rationality when you know the other person will not respond? Now both parties are unlikely to ever admit they are wrong, because unlike objective reason, which exists irrespective of the individual, emotional responses are inherently unique and often hard to empathize with.

Again, this isn't to say you shouldn't feel anything, but rather that you should harness those feelings constructively. Try to realize that the person you are talking to probably has just as strong an emotional response to your position as you do to theirs. Understand why you feel a certain way, but also try to understand why others feel how they do. Explain your emotions to the other person, rather than throwing them in an insult or diatribe.

Conclusion

None of these things are easy, and I've still got a long way to go with practically everything I've mentioned on this page. Sorry if I didn't explain something well, but here are some other resources you might find helpful to understand where I'm coming from.

• Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality
• Stephen Colbert interviews Neil DeGrasse Tyson
• Less Wrong
• Rationality (Wikipedia)
• Rational Wiki