ShrinkWrapped

Struggling with Confirmation Bias

Confirmation Bias is the unconscious tendency that all of us have to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms our preconceptions.  The operations of Confirmation Bias have effects from the most intimate, as a derivative  of transference, to the most public, in our political and policy prescriptions.  Recognizing and compensating for CB should be a vital part of any contentious discussion. 

The solution that is offered by the Scientific Method is to require that science only address hypotheses that are falsifiable and to require independent replication and corroboration before accepting a scientific statement as valid.  Even then, scientists are careful to report their findings as significant to a clearly defined level of confidence, recognizing that contrary results can occur based on chance alone. 

That so many people do not understand these basic logic and scientific concepts leads to all sorts of problems, from law suits alleging that Vioxx causes heart attacks to confident assertions that Global Warming is an impending crisis. 

The key point I want to make is that Confirmation Bias is pervasive and operates on a predominantly unconscious level.   However, it is possible to understand (some of) your own CB and take steps to at least partially protect oneself from falling so far into the trap that your perception of reality is impaired.

They Can't Help Themselves, Its Their Nature.

Ali  Eteraz at Unwilling Self-Negation has an interesting post (and be sure to read the comments), Zaid Shakir Is Not Our Mouthpiece, that was triggered by an article from the New York Times.  The Times piece by Laurie Goodstein, U.S. Muslim Clerics Seek a Modern Middle Ground, is a bit of a puff piece apparently meant to humanize the face of Islam to its readers.  However, perhaps inadvertently, Goodstein includes some rather revealing comments from one of her subjects.  Zaid Shakir, nee  Ricky Mitchell, is described as an African-American who has used "anti-American rhetoric" in his past but is now older, wiser, and more moderate.

Toward the end of the profile of Sheik Hamza Yusuf and Imam Zaid Shakir, Goodstein quotes some remarkably revealing statements from Shakir [Emphasis mine-SW]:

While leading a mosque in New Haven in 1992, Mr. Shakir wrote a pamphlet that cautioned Muslims not to be co-opted by American politics. He wrote, "Islam presents an absolutist political agenda, or one which doesn't lend itself to compromise, nor to coalition building."

Standing with Israel: Part III

My chief interest in reading and writing about David Brog's book, Standing With Israel, concerns the deep-rooted resistance American Jews have shown to recognizing who their friends are.  Brog delineates a number of reasons for this reticence and I hope to explore this today, and add my own view "from the inside" of liberal Secular New York Judaism.

One salient explanation is that American Jews have traditionally been aligned with the Democratic Party and with "Progressive" politics, in general.  There are many reasons for this, not least that for much of the last century, anti-Semitism was more closely identified with the Right than the Left.

[An interesting discussion could ensue to explain how the Nazi's National Socialism became identified with the Right and how Soviet anti-Semitism managed to be so thoroughly white washed and minimized, but that is not for today.]

Brog identifies this as one of the significant impediments to the Jewish Community resisting the support of those Christians who support the state of Israel and count themselves as friends of the Jewish people.

He also makes the point that the history of the Jewish people has not been exactly filled with the friendship of the majority population in the countries in which they have resided; this leaves a residue of distrust, even when expressions of friendship are extended:

The Council Has Spoken!

For a special Father's Day treat, this week the winning Council Post was SPINNING THEIR WAY TO DEFEAT IN NOVEMBER at Right Wing Nut House where  Rick Moran made some cogent critiques about the Democrats political strategy, which he thinks won't work too well in the fall; I suspect they won't heed his warnings.  There was a tie for second place between Outer Darkness by Dymphna at Gates of Vienna in which she peers into the depths of a comment thread and decides to put on sunglasses, and Hix Nix Chix at Done With Mirrors where Callimachus does his best to educate a reporter who seems to miss the point.

The winning non-Council Post was One Liberal’s Argument for Still Staying in Iraq at A Newer World, where he pretty much does what he says; its nice to know there are some liberals who can construct an argument, but it continues to be worrisome that people like this are so marginalized in the Democratic party these days.   In second place was Malloch Brown's Message to America at the Belmont Club in which Richard Fernandez helpfully translates from neo-Diplomatic speak into English the thoroughly obnoxious remarks made by UN Deputy Secretary-General Malloch Brown.

As always all the posts can be found at the Watcher of Weasels and all will reward your perusal.

Standing with Israel: Part II

A Disclaimer: I am not an expert on Jewish theology, let alone Christian theology, and do not intend this series to be anything but a layman's attempt to understand and organize some of my thinking about the evolving relationship between American Jews, including their emotional investment in the state of Israel, and Christianity.   I am an unapologetic Zionist and until the last few years, without having done any particular exploration in the area, I had bought fully into the New York Times enunciated model of Israel/Jewish/Christian relations, that is that liberal Christians and Jews were the main bulwark of American support for Israel.  The argument included the constant refrain that Israel, from its position of great strength, had to take risks for peace, and such risks always included doing things to enhance the position of the poor, victimized Palestinians, and usually ended up with more Israelis being murdered and maimed.  Over the last 10-15 years I have come to see that the liberal side of the political divide, through the amplifying voice of the MSM, were more supportive of Israel in word, while the Conservative side tended to be much more supportive in deed.  This tendency has only accelerated in the current century, and the contrast between the last two Presidential Administrations in this area could not be more dramatic.   As a result, when my blog reading led me to find commonality with many avowedly Christian bloggers, I found the opportunity to explore this further through David Brog's book a serendipitous occasion.

While a number of commenters suggested that Christian support of Israel rests on much more significant geopolitical and moral ties than theological beliefs (a position with which I am fully in agreement), I believe that the eclipse of "replacement theology" is the bedrock upon which the moral and geopolitical support rests. 

[I would also suggest that there is a modified, attenuated, version of "replacement theology" that has emerged, in practice, within Catholicism, which I will address in a later post.]

Now, back to William Hechler.

Standing with Israel: Part I

A few weeks ago I had dinner with one of my oldest friends.  We both went to college together, protested against the Vietnam war together, and eventually went on to mature together as New York Jewish American Liberals.  He remains an anti-war liberal and at dinner asked me how I felt being aligned with crazy, right wing Christian fascists.   In response I asked him if he actually knew any Conservative or Evangelical Christians.  His answer was typical for a New York Jewish Liberal, "No! Of course not."

I remarked some time ago on a curious (to me) fact:

For a person from New York, immersed in liberal New York thought, a surprising number of the bloggers on my short list were religious Christians.  Considering that the usual characterization of religious Christians in the pages of the Times and from the lips of the typical liberal is that they are intolerant religious bigots, indistinguishable from the religious fanatics who live in the Middle East and form the Taliban or al Qaeda, the thought occurred to me to wonder what the meaning of this could be.  How was it that I had come to see The Anchoress, Gates of Vienna, Kobayashi Maru, and  La Shawn Barber, among others, as making more sense than that paragon of rationality, the New York Times?

The contrast between the traditional view of the relationship between Christians and Jews, from the liberal Jewish perspective, and the powerfully supportive position of Evangelical and Conservative Christians for the Jewish people and the state of Israel has been a source of some curiosity and, I will admit, some unease.  I recently finished David Brog's Standing With Israel, which explores this changed and changing relationship and have found it to be extremely thought-provoking and worth describing in some detail, which I will attempt to do in this post and others to follow.

Distortion by Omission

Comments on blogs do several things.  At their worst, they amount to name calling and degenerate into flame wars but when they work, they have the ability to move the discussion forward.  My last couple of posts addressed some worries I have that our prosecution of the war has been, and continues to be, compromised by our own best impulses (to be fair and ethical) being held to an impossibly high standard of perfection, as well as the tendency of important parts of our society to be always ready to believe the worst of our side. 

In Skepticism and "News" I suggested that accusations of misconduct against our troops should be investigated, but our default position should be that such accusations are enemy propaganda until proven otherwise.  This is entirely consistent with our legal system's presumption of innocence.

In Lessons from Vietnam, Iraq, and Palestine I expressed my concern that if we lose this war because of our domestic politics, the eventual outcome will be markedly worse, and worried that our inability to wage this war until victory would compromise our objectives in ways which would make our political loss more likely.  I further suggested that by not waging Total War we made failure more likely.

Luckily, a number of commenters took me to task for some of my conclusions. 

TDE quite correctly pointed out that if we are at war (something he doubts) then we are not very mobilized as a country; further, he wondered what Total War means in the context of the GWOT.

Lessons from Vietnam, Iraq, and Palestine

World War II was the last war in which there was a clear winner and a clear loser.  While there have been minor skirmishes in which one  side or the other emerged the unmistakable winner (the Falklands, Grenada would be two examples) the logic of warfare and the exponential leap in destructive capacity that Hiroshima and Nagasaki epitomized, changed the calculus of military action in ways which we are still trying to define. 

In Korea, opposing armies fought to a standstill, with neither side willing to risk an expanded war.  A stable equilibrium emerged that held until the 1990s when the North Koreans developed their nuclear capacity; the final outcome of the Korean war has not yet been determined.

In Vietnam, the South Vietnamese army and the American army arguably won on the military front but lost on the political front.  The Johnson and Nixon administrations were unwilling to take the necessary military action to ensure an unmistakable military victory over North Vietnam for fear of expanding the war and risking a Chinese or Russian nuclear response.  Because we stopped far short of total victory and unconditional surrender, and in fact, could never even state those ends as our goal, we essentially confined ourselves to fighting the war on the defensive and never put ourselves and our allies in the position of winning the war.  (Even our offensive air attacks were designed to get the North to accept an equilibrium rather than to defeat them.)

Since Vietnam, the disproportion between the modern military might of the United States (and to a lesser extent our allies, the Israelis, British, Australians, et al) whose conventional weapons have escalated to rival the destructive power of nuclear weapons, and the third world armies which face us in conventional and asymmetric warfare, has only continued to expand exponentially. 

As a result, we are facing an unprecedented problem in winning any current or future war.

A Modest Proposal

I recall reading quite some time ago that after video cameras were installed in police squad cars, complaints of police brutality dropped significantly.  Unfortunately, I have not been able to find specific statistics on complaints of police brutality to confirm this, but there would seem to be good reason to expect just such an outcome.

The presence of cameras on the scene would have a two-fold effect.  The Police Officers would be aware of being filmed and that they would be held accountable for their behavior and would be much more likely to act in measured and careful ways.  At the same time, the accuser would be unlikely to persist in his or her complaints knowing there was film available to disprove a false accusation.

The combination of increased accountability for both Police and those who they stop comes at the cost of some small diminution of people's privacy.  The protection offered for both seems well worth the cost.

In my post yesterday I suggested that we approach news of American and Israeli "atrocities" as if the burden of proof is upon the accusers.  I would like to humbly suggest we arm ourselves with new weapons in order to blunt the effectiveness of the enemy's propaganda.

Skepticism and "News"

"A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth even gets its pants on." - Winston Churchill

I suspect for most of us, the default position in relation to other people is to take what they say at "face value" until and unless proven otherwise.  This leaves us at a terrible disadvantage when our opponents are unethical, unscrupulous, and extremely sophisticated.  It is why we would be considered foolishly naive to sign a contract without having a professional review it first.   Unfortunately, until fairly recently we did not know that we had any reason to question events as depicted by those who claimed authority in reporting such matters, and had no real reason to question the veracity of the news, including images and stories which set the standard for the facts as reported.

The blogosphere has done an extremely important job in illuminating some of the most egregious examples of poor reporting (compare the news headlines to the actual content of MSM stories about WMD programs in Iraq), misreporting (rapes and murders in the Superdome after Katrina), and overtly false reporting (the forged Texas Air National Guard memos meant to impugn Bush), but we are still left with a very significant problem.

The Second Intifada was triggered by a Blood libel.  Israeli soldiers brutally murdered 12 year old Muhamed al Durah, who died in his father's arms; video of the incident was played over and over again, courtesy of the French TV crew which filmed it.  This singular tragedy did much to legitimize the use of suicide bombers as a Palestinian (and later al Qaeda and Iraqi insurgency) weapon.  Yet a serious and thorough investigation by The Second Draft, complete with raw footage from the original video, suggests that the entire incident was staged by the Palestinians, perhaps taking a page out of the Nazi archives.

It is troubling that the French were complicit in this propaganda triumph and a source of great concern that it took so much time and effort for the intrepid reporters at The Second Draft to refute the lies.  Sadly, their refutation has been seen by only a fraction of those around the world who have seen the "atrocity" through the years.  This is a lie that has surely done its work well.