On Being Certain: A book review

The book: "On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not" by Robert A. Burton, M.D.

This book shook the foundation of my epistemological world. The crux is that the sense of knowing something is a feeling like anger or pride. Thus, the fact that you "know" something does not mean it's true.

He gives an example. Right after the Challenger exploded on take-off (back in 1986), a psychology researcher collected statements from a number of people about what they were doing when they heard the news. A few years later, he asked them again. They all remembered vividly. Except, their memories didn't necessarily match what they'd written. When shown their statements, some continued to insist that the statement was wrong, but their memory was right. It's a vivid demonstration of how utterly convincing the feeling of certainty is. But, it's just a feeling.

He goes further. We don't even have any way of knowing what unconscious mental processes went into a belief or conclusion. So introspection is of little use for determining which beliefs are true and which are false.

He gives examples involving medical doctors. One proclaims, "I believe in the necessity of research, but I know that personal experience is the 'proof of the pudding.' " Like many doctors, this one leans heavily on his own personal judgement based on experience. But how do we know that the judgement is tied tightly to reality?

Science is the best bet.

... we should know when we are basing our decisions on science and when they are based upon unsubstantiated experience, hunches, and gut feelings. But, as we've seen, we aren't reliable assessors of such arbitrary distinctions.

His suggestion is that we modulate the conviction of our beliefs by attempting to consider the probability that each is correct, and reflect that uncertainty when we express our beliefs to others.

Toward the end of the book, Dr. Burton seems to suggest that our brains are equipped with a sensory system for perceiving a representation of brain state. This is nothing short of a theory of consciousness, and nothing short of fascinating. Just like we have a sensory cortex for processing tactile and visual information, we might also have a sensory cortex for processing mental information. He doesn't say it point-blank, but launches the notion for the reader. It blew my mind. I'm not sure I agree with it, but then again, this book makes it abundantly clear that we should not let the feeling of believing fool us.

Poor kitty, but nice neurons

My graduate student and I are working on a neural network model of the visual system. We've been learning a lot about neuroscience, and I'm loving it. I'm also sitting in on PSYCH 261 (Physiological Psychology), and this week we covered the visual system. The prof. showed us this short YouTube video:


It shows Hubel and Wiesel in the 1960s measuring how certain neurons react to different light stimuli. They clamped a cat's head down and stuck an electrode into its brain (OK, the sad part is over). They found that certain neurons reacted to particular patterns of light, not just brightness. It's those patterns that we're trying to get our computerized visual system to spontaneously generate, thereby positing a theory for how the visual system achieves this organization. We're getting there.

Hitler was a moral vegetarian

Wow, the animals really caught a break from Hitler. Well, the non-human animals, anyway.

Heaviest maple leaf ever

Either this is the heaviest leaf on the planet, or it's been absorbing the sun's rays and melting the snow beneath it.

Battle of the lists

The Dissent From Darwinism list is an attempt by the Discovery Institute to convince people that there is a real scientific controversy about whether or not evolution occurred. It's a list of scientists that "are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life." As of today, it has about 850 signatories.

Contrast that to Project Steve, the NCSE's answer to the Dissent from Darwinism list. It is a list of scientists who fully support the theory of evolution. But you can only sign it if your name is "Steve", "Stephen", "Stephanie", or some derivative thereof. As of Feb. 11, 2010, they have 1134 signatories.

Science should not be decided by popular vote. But this case goes to show how insignificant the controversy really is.

Flimflam inoculation 7: Can 1 billion people be wrong?

Yes, they can. They vast majority were wrong about the earth being flat, and at the centre of the universe.

The tactic of using majority opinion to support a claim is called argumentum ad populum.

Here are some examples.

• "There are N-billion Christians (Muslims, Jews ) in the world. So Christianity (Islam, Judaism) is the one true religion."
  
• The Discovery Institute maintains a list of people who doubt the theory of evolution.
  
• "millions of people value chiropractic enough to be more than willing to pay for their care with their own hard-earned money" (snipped from here)
  

Many people find such evidence compelling. Strictly speaking, it's not evidence at all. Evidence should be objective. Opinion and belief is subjective.

But why would fallacious ideas be present in a society? Let's start out by acknowledging that there are LOTS of things we just don't know. Our ancestors can be excused for believing the earth was flat because they hadn't traveled far enough to observe that it was round.

Lack of knowledge is only a starting point. The question still remains, "Why do whole groups of people agree on things that aren't necessarily true?"

Ideas are like viruses, spreading from mind to mind, being passed along selectively; good ideas get passed on, while bad ideas don't... they go extinct. So what makes an idea "good"? More to the point, what makes an idea get passed on?

The spreading and mixing of ideas is called memetics, a cultural analog to the biochemical genetics. A meme gets passed on and mutated from mind to mind, similar to how a gene gets passed on and mutated from generation to generation.

Genetic evolution has no concept of a goal or progress, but rather plays out with mechanical indifference. Whatever gene works best at promoting itself becomes the new popular standard. Ideas are the same. There is no innate necessity that an idea be TRUE in order to be popular. As it turns out, the truthfulness of an idea is only one of the criteria. Other factors play a prominent role (ease of tranfer, humour, topic interest, consistency with other ideas).

In the realm of health fads, a mathematical model of how a medical treatment spreads shows that "the most efficacious treatments are not necessarily those most likely to spread".

That's not to say that majority opinion is useless. Most people value truth. But popularity should never be the strongest piece of evidence forwarded to support a scientific claim.

Recent photos

My buds and I play pick-up hockey at a local rink. Here is what the rink caretaker was just finishing as we arrived.


We skated all over it, but it still looked great.

The gauges in our van act stupid when the weather gets cold. In this scene, the temperature gauge is cozying up to the fuel gauge. Either that, or we're about to blow a gasket.


(Note that my speed was 0km/h when the photo was taken.)