{"id":23850,"date":"2012-12-19T16:43:02","date_gmt":"2012-12-19T21:43:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/?p=23850"},"modified":"2013-02-16T12:04:34","modified_gmt":"2013-02-16T17:04:34","slug":"the-opposite-of-epistemic-humility","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2012\/12\/the-opposite-of-epistemic-humility\/","title":{"rendered":"The Opposite of Epistemic Humility"},"content":{"rendered":"

[This is Part 4 of a 4-part series. Part 1<\/a>.\u00a0Part 2<\/a>.\u00a0Part 3<\/a>.]<\/p>\n

In my first three pieces I\u2019ve spent an awful lot of time talking about epistemic humility. Now I\u2019m going to talk about what I consider to be the antithesis of epistemic humility: extremism.<\/p>\n

My definition of the term is non-standard,\u00a0but I believe it both fits as the antithesis of epistemic humility and matches our intuition that there\u2019s something to extremism that is more than merely being far removed from the mainstream. After all, if you live in a society where child sacrifice is the norm and you consider it an abomination you are an extremist in a technical sense, but that lacks the pejorative connotations that we typically bundle in with the term.<\/p>\n

People believe things for a lot of reasons, but the very last reason is that they have gone through some kind of rational evaluation of the evidence and logic and concluded that the belief in question is likely to be true. It is my experience that, almost without exception, our explanation of our positions (political, religious, aesthetic, etc.) are not explanations<\/i>, but post hoc rationalizations<\/i>.<\/p>\n

I initially came to this conclusion as an undergraduate philosophy major (and promptly switched my major to math), but the really exciting work is coming out of behavioral economics where, as Bryan Caplan argues in The Myth of the Rational Voter<\/a>, people are understood to have preferences over beliefs. Simply put, this means that we would like for some things to be true rather than others. For example, we would generally like to believe nice things about ourselves. I think that probably the most important, pervasive, and powerful source of preferences over beliefs has to do with our desire to maintain social bonds, however. We use beliefs as a way to signal our in-status to our peers.<\/p>\n

Along with this desire to believe certain things, however, there is also a desire to be right<\/i>. In \u201cPaying for Confidence: An Experimental Study of Preferences over Beliefs<\/a>\u201d, researchers demonstrated that people are willing to pay for non-instrumental information that will increase their probability of being right without actually influencing their decision. They explain the setup this way:<\/p>\n

Would you prefer to make a decision that has a 90% chance of being correct rather than a 60% chance? Certainly most people would say yes. If this is so, would you be willing to pay for information that might raise your prior belief from 0:60 to 0:90? While this information is non-instrumental to your decision – you would be making the same decision under both posteriors – it might make you feel better about your decision.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Experiments verified that people will indeed pay for this information, and that \u201ca person would pay for such information because he values having a high posterior at the time of making a decision, or put differently, \u2018he wants to feel confident in his decision\u2019.\u201d Taken in conjunction, the combination of preferences over beliefs and a willingness to pay for non-instrumental information tell a simple story: we seek to feel certain rather than to be correct.<\/p>\n

I believe that is the essence of epistemic pride, the antithesis of epistemic humility, and the true root of extremism. It is also, in a very real sense, a counterfeit salvation. After all, don\u2019t we believe that the kind of rest we find in the next world is not a lack of work, but a freedom from the hard slog of fighting temptation? Well, this false certainty offers a reasonable facsimile of freedom from temptation but leaves us plenty of opportunity to be anxiously engaged in \u201cgood\u201d works.<\/p>\n

To give in to extremism, by which I mean to adopt epistemic closure around our irrationally chosen beliefs, is to \u201ccall evil good, and good evil\u201d and to \u201cput darkness for light, and light for darkness\u201d (as Isaiah would say<\/a>) or to \u201cexchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage\u201d (as Roger Waters<\/a> would say).<\/p>\n