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.
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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.


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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.