Self-Deception

A great article from The Skeptic's Dictionary  about self self-deception. Confirmation bias is something that we all have a tendency for. And knowing this, we should be forewarned so that we will make a concerted effort to nullify this tendency in our search for truth:

Self-deception is the process or fact of misleading ourselves to accept claims about ourselves as true or valid when they are false or invalid. Self-deception, in short, is a way we justify false beliefs about ourselves to ourselves.

When philosophers and psychologists discuss self-deception, they usually focus on unconscious motivations and intentions. They also usually consider self-deception as a bad thing, something to guard against. To explain how self-deception works, they focus on self-interest, prejudice, desire, insecurity, and other psychological factors unconsciously affecting in a negative way the will to believe. A common example would be that of a parent who believes his child is telling the truth even though the objective evidence strongly supports the claim that the child is lying. The parent, it is said, deceives him or herself into believing the child because the parent desires that the child tell the truth. A belief so motivated is usually considered more flawed than one due to lack of ability to evaluate evidence properly. The former is considered to be a kind of moral flaw, a kind of dishonesty, and irrational. The latter is considered to be a matter of fate: some people are just not gifted enough to make proper inferences from the data of perception and experience.

Quote Of The Day

“For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged, by better information or fuller consideration, to change opinions, even on important subjects, which I once thought right but found to be otherwise.”
Benjamin Franklin  (1706-1790)

Men Becoming Civilized

"Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt."
~ H. L. Mencken

"The Evolution Of Real Knowledge"

"In formal logic, a contradiction is the signal of defeat, but in the evolution of real knowledge it marks the first step in progress toward a victory." ~ Alfred North Whitehead

Bamboozled

"One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It is simply too painful to acknowledge -- even to ourselves -- that we've been so credulous. (So the old bamboozles tend to persist as the new bamboozles rise.)" ~Carl Sagan, The Fine Art of Baloney Detection)

Skeptical Scrutiny's Winnowing Effect

"Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep thoughts can be winnowed from deep nonsense." ~Carl Sagan

Quote Of The Day

I am patient with stupidity but not with those who are proud of it. ~Edith Sitwell

Quote Of The Day

"It is wrong, always, everywhere, and for everyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence."  W.K. Clifford

Access To Information Changes Everything

By ThinkTank ~ from EXchristian.net

When people ask, “What made you lose your faith?” it’s always a little challenging to know what to say. How do we compress 5-10 years and 100 reasons into a short response when we really need several hours (or days) to talk about the process of losing our faith?

 

Partial map of the Internet based on the January 15, 2005 data found on opte.org. Image via Wikipedia

There is also a similar question that ex-christians ask themselves -- “How could I have believed something so improbable for so long?” It turns out, we were far from unintelligent and there is a very good reason why we believed for so long. We did not have access to information.

No Information = Problems

For most of human history, people have had very limited access to information. Most people were dependent on some type of authority for information because it was difficult to find information or to verify things on one’s own. Being dependent on others for information had lots of problems.

It was hard to learn things independently

People were dependent on what other people wrote, taught, said, did, or presented via TV/movies. Even something as simple as looking up the definition of a word meant stopping to find a dictionary. Most people skipped the hassle and learned to be content with ‘not knowing’.