The Epidemiology of Bias

Think of social/political/religious and psychological factors as
"diseases" infecting our rational processes. (This still assumes that
there is an underlying "rational" process which is really what's at
issue here.)
Let's say we have a population and we want to estimate the likelihood
of infection of any given individual (theorem, piece of information,
etc.) (not of a particular individual, but purely of the chances that
any one of them might be infected).
There will be "factors" affecting our estimation in some ways. Here
are the factors I see (admittedly limited by my perspective) - height,
width, depth, time.
________________

The height of the problem is this:

How dependent on our lower-level abstractions are our higher-level
abstractions. I mean this:

Say theorem N depends on theorem M, M depends on L, ..., B depends on A.

Let's imagine that our acceptance of some, possibly all, the theorems
is infected, we don't know how much, by social/psych factors.

If we were to estimate the "damage" done to N based on the infection
of (A ... M) we could come up with some kind of number (it would be a
wild guess) as to "how infected N is based on the probability of
infection of (A .. L)".

If we estimate the damage to be "random" 50/50 chance of produce a
false theorem at every step, we get roughly 0.006103515625% chance of
N being "true". If we estimate that higher, say 80%, we still get a
very small likelihood that at the level of 14 "theorems high" that the
result is "true".

It seems to me that the further the distance between the base axioms
(in this case A) and the proved theorem (N) the greater the likelihood
of infection across the entire ratiocination.

Let's call this the "remoteness" problem.

"The longer your string of reasoning, the more likely it will include
factors that are infected." I think it's a corollary of Murphy's Law.


______________

The width of the problem is this:

How many different disciplines and axioms (or axiom-systems) are
affected by this problem?

Let's say there are 100 "scholarly disciplines". Of them, a certain
number are likely to be infected by social/psych factors.

We can't say which, since to say which would be to be in a position to
decide which of our reasoning methodologies are socially determined,
which would, in turn, presume to give us an answer to which ones are
not.

We can, however, make an estimate. We might say "The more scholarly
disciplines we have, the more likely that some of them will be thusly
infected."

We'll call this the "sprawling" problem.

_________________________________

The depth of the problem is this:

What is the extent of the infection? "How bad is it?" It may be that
some "truths" are only lightly infected by the social factors
surrounding them and don't transmit them to other areas. It may be
that they are massively infected beyond salvage and they are
constantly causing infections in other areas.

Likely the depth of infection may be related to their height, BUT it's
possible that some of the worst infections are at the root (we would
liken this to having the disease itself in the population of
individuals we're deciding whether or not they're infected, or perhaps
there is a "carrier" parent who infects the entire population by
exposure, but that parent is not itself showing symptoms.)

It may be that some of the infections get worse - that small
infections then become carriers, etc.

We'll call this the "deepness" problem.

_____________________

The temporal aspect of this problem is also multi-dimensional:

SPREAD:
The problem grows. Disciplines increase the number of "bits of
knowledge" in them as a matter of practice. We "learn more things",
"derive more theorems", etc. These increase our height, width and
depth as particular "bits of knowledge" all carry with them the
possibility that they may be "infected". Thus the ancient wisdom "The
more we know, the less we know."

MUTATION:
The nature of the infection may be changing. "Cancer" is "one thing"
but there are varieties of cancer. 'AIDS' is one thing but there are
varieties of the infection. Influenza is one thing, but there are
varieties of it, etc. What if influenza could become cancer? How
would we "doctors" identify the problems?

REACTION:
A cure proposed for one issue may cause more problems elsewhere.
People die of leukemia, but they also sometimes die of the treatment.
Quinine is effective as a prevention for malaria. But if you take too
much it kills you. That is to say, as we involve ourselves in the
problem of "fixing the problem" we may cause more disease.

INTERACTIONS:
While a cold may not kill someone, a person with chronic heart disease
can die of a cough caused by the cold. So too in knowledge,
interactions of different kinds of pathology - religious AND political
AND economic views tend to be behind the Gay Marriage debate, for
instance. Some interactions are new, as new problems are created by
us, the thinkers.

We'll call this the "complexity" problem.

____________________

In short, the problem of the fallibility along the lines of deepness,
sprawling, remoteness and complexity of thinking(s) is pervasive in
human "rational" activity. I think it turns out that our epistemic
situation is worsened by progress.

__________________

The "skeptical solution to the skeptical problem" is thought by some
to be worse than the disease.

But I think this is roughly right - there is no standard of
rationality and any attempt to say that there is is just denial or
political play.

Pretending there are no stones in the field will not make it easier to
plow, though.

If we recognize we have problems, though, we can usually find a way to
work around them.

"The cure" is to swallow the pill - there is no "better logic", no
"correct way of reasoning", no "absolute truths", no "pure empirical
facts", etc. There are only possible pathogens and apparently healthy
activity and various degrees of each. More and less useful ways of
talking and thinking, different standards of usefulness, different
standards of goodness, and no one to decide among them.

Rational Revisability of Logic

Science is provisional in this sense - while we are striving to find "The Absolute Truth", we are also aware that the world via new discoveries, and consequenctly changing ideas can cause us to rationally revise our theories based on new evidence. They can even, occasionally, cause us to want to be more tentative with our judgements in light of various complications regarding a theory.

For instance, with Quantum Mechanics we have many "interpretations of the formalism" from which we have no obvious way to choose. This could change. Our empirical situation might change, our understanding of the mathematics and geometry of the matter might change. We may discover new techniques or new relevant data from other areas that might help us decide among them.

However, what we do know is that we currently don't possess a good "interpretation of quantum mechanics" - good in the sense of there being a definitive reason to choose it from amongst the options. There are many other ideas floating around in "the standard model" that have a similarly tenuous nature. (Godel's theorem, for instance, raises many questions of interpretation.)

For these "tenuous" parts, we objectively give science a pass - we allow it to continue until the matter is decided hoping for the best, sometimes expecting the worst - and we consequently suspect attributing "absolute truth" to those tenuous aspects of our knowledge, recognizing that we may have to revise our ideas. It may turn out that there is a better formulation of quantum physics that someone simply hasn't thought of that would have all the same empirical results but was deterministic. It may turn out that there are better logical and mathematical laws under which Godel's theorem is not derivable.

Those ideas that are "most closely associated with philosophy" also tend to be the ones about which we suspend our judgement. We don't assert that the "standard model" implies the existence of God because we're willing to suspend our judgement about the nature of causation. But we don't assert that the standard model denies the existence of God either. We don't assert that Godel's theorem is "absolutely true" because we don't assert that all the unproved axioms which allow its derivation are themselves known firmly, mostly because the arguments for them tend to be "philosophical" rather than definitive.

The ability to rationally revise our ideas based on evidence is a core scientific value. It is one of the many things that is intended to separate science from non-science.

This revise-ability needs to include our notion of rationality, which is said to be defined by Logic. Logic is the study of the quality of inference - validity, truth preservation, etc. To study this with an eye toward providing a framework in which good inferences are generally made and bad inferences are generally not made is to have a pragmatic view of it. We want our "rules of inference" to allow us to make good inferences - be flexible enough to cover new situations while conservative enough to prevent us from flying wildly off the deep end, so to speak.

If our logical systems were not thusly revisable, what would we call them but philosophy? They would become dogmas, there would be schools, and they would have no grounds by which to decide the matters. Those schools would be motivated primarily by political, economic, religious and psychological factors that have nothing to do with the matter at hand and which would be decidedly anti-science. I think this is the condition we find our philosophy in today.

(Anecdote: A boy at a funeral hears that the dead man is going to a house where there are no friendly neighbors, no roof, no floor and no door. The boy exclaims "Pappa, they're bringing the dead body to our house!")

In philosophical logic we have schools. Intuitionism and Platonism being the "most largely populated" of them, but like democracy, strength in numbers doesn't determine the justice of the matter, only who wins. There are many sub-opinions and even completely conflicting opinions. And, as in politics, the subjugation of the minority views only tends to create disharmony and strife, eventually revolution. The current "malaise" in philosophical logic should be regarded as the symptom of this irrational subjugation. Progress in philosophical logic is being stilted not by lack of interest, but by the inability of the practitioners to treat it as a science - as open to development and even major paradigmatic change - this despite the fact that the tenets of the various schools are the closest to "philosophy" of any scientific practice - the unproved axioms of (insert your variety of logic here).

How can we move forward? The political aspects (and here I mean to include the psychological, political, religious and economic aspects) of logic have already dominated the field, for millennia. Is there any way to remove those aspects of the science that are "inherited" from these political factions and move forward and somehow revive this science, make it more than the mere rhetoric it (effectively) is today. If we could identify them, obviously, different factions might disagree on which ideas were purely political and which ideas weren't.

I submit that there is no removing the purely political from the supposedly rational in this essential science by any rational means.

Any 'rational means' would presuppose an adequate definition of the term "rational" for which the science of logic is searching. If we presume an answer to this question, it would likely have to come from these pre-rational ideas that are the motivating factors in our logics today - politics, religion, economics, psychological idiosyncrasies.

For instance, I started this note by appealing to the scientific notion of rational revise-ability. Good scientific theories, I say, are rationally revisable. If we took this to mean also Logic as a science is rationally revisable, we could use this as a standard for picking a logic - we would pick a logic that allowed us to revise its standards as necessary. But that wouldn't be our only criteria. And many people would object even to this criteria as it, no doubt, wouldn't fit their own political, religious, economic or psychological paradigm. As a result, the only real way to regard my idea of science as rationally revisable beliefs, is as part of a political program (which in my case is obvious enough).

But will the others in the game admit their bias?!

Doubtful, but I'm open to revising my opinion.

Robbie Lindauer