Predicting The Future and Being Wrong

20:20 Vision, pah! We live in strange social and economic times, where we think we know what is going on yet actually we don’t.

Predicting The Future and Being Wrong

20:20 Vision, pah! We live in strange social and economic times, where we think we know what is going on yet actually we don’t. People often say, ‘let the facts speak for themselves’. They forget that the speech of facts is real only if it is heard and understood. It is thought to be an easy matter to distinguish between fact and theory, between perception and interpretation. Despite empirical evidence, thick data and big data it is extremely difficult to know what may be.

We know what we are, but not what we may be. – William Shakespeare

Can we trust the evidence of our own eyes? Well I went to the Optician on Friday afternoon and had a revelation. The Optician was brilliant, kind, patient, intelligent and opened my eyes (literally with some nasty yellow droplets) to some new thought processes and amazing new lens (my thanks to Archana* for the inspiration and ability to write this). Apparently now I have 20:15 vision (which is better than 20:20 vision).

Are you clear on what you see? Apart from a trip to see Archana, I suspect you believe what you see to be real. You may doubt everything else, but you have no doubts about what you see right now. Sometimes if it walks like a duck and sounds like a duck, it’s a duck. But we’re often so eager to accept that we’re right while others must be wrong that it’s essential for anyone interested in what’s true rather than what they prefer to take the view that the more complicated the situation, the more likely we are to have missed something.

In one of Plato’s dialogues, Socrates asks Theaetetus, a budding mathematician, “What is knowledge?” That is an enormously difficult question. Following Socrates’ example, what does it mean when a child eagerly lifts his hand in the classroom and repeats persuasively to the teacher, I know? Or what is meant in the statement of a financial columnist who writes that the Dow Jones standard of the market will plunge by 100, if inflation is not controlled. In what sense does he mean, I know this will be the case?

The overarching question, how do we know what we know? is vital to being a critical thinker, citizen, and scientist. It is a particularly important ‘lens’ to use today when we are awash in information from a virtually unlimited variety of sources. Scientists rely on evidence (data from their own and others’ observations and investigations) to construct explanations and answer their questions. A good scientist respects evidence and is willing to change his or her ideas, predictions, theories, and explanations if new information is inconsistent or contradictory.

But, we are all victims of powerful cognitive biases, which prevent us from acknowledging that we might be wrong (see also the God of Gaps). Other psychological problems with what you think might be true include:

The Illusion of Asymmetric Insight: the belief that though our perceptions of others are accurate and insightful, their perceptions of us are shallow and illogical.
The Backfire Effect: the fact that when confronted with evidence contrary to our beliefs we will rationalise our mistakes even more strongly
Sunk Cost Fallacy: the irrational response to having wasted time effort or money: I’ve committed this much, so I must continue or it will have been a waste.
The Anchoring Effect: the fact that we are incredibly suggestible and base our decisions and beliefs on what we have been told, whether or not it makes sense.
Confirmation bias – the fact that we seek out only that which confirms what we already believe

These biases pulls into question the notion of Truth as commonly used and pursued. But there is a further problem based on our anatomy and physiology. There are things, which we, quite literally, cannot see. My Optician tested me for what seemed like ages, on a machine where I had to follow a red dot with one eye and click how many green lights I saw when it stopped. This measured my blind spot, or scotoma, is an obscuration of the visual field. It is the place in the visual field that corresponds to the lack of light-detecting photoreceptor cells on the optic disc of the retina where the optic nerve passes through the optic disc. Since there are no cells to detect light on the optic disc, a part of the field of vision is not perceived. Your clever brain interpolates the blind spot based on surrounding detail and information from the other eye, so the blind spot is not normally perceived.

I ride a motorbike and I have often wondered why drivers pull out from side roads into the path of bikers. They cannot want to cause them harm. When they look at a busy scene, whether it’s a static landscape or a hectic rush of traffic, their brain cuts details from the surrounding images and pastes in what it thinks should be there. For the most part our brains get it right, but then occasionally they paste in a bit of clear road when what’s actually there is me on a motorbike.

In 1960, George Sperling, a cognitive psychologist at the University of California, did something amazing. You can try the experiment yourself online. He used an experiment to demonstrate that our brains are creating a virtual image of the world (and storing it) that indicates we see more than we remember. In the test, you see a three-by-three grid of nine letters flash up for a split second. What letters were they? You will only be able to report a few of them. Now suppose the experimenter tells you that if you hear a high-pitched noise you should focus on the first row, and if you hear a low-pitched noise you should focus on the last row. This time, not surprisingly, you will accurately report all three letters in the cued row, though you can’t report the letters in the other rows. Now you only hear the noise after the grid has disappeared. You will still be very good at remembering the letters in the cued row. But think about it: you didn’t know beforehand which row you should focus on. So you must have actually seen all the letters in all the rows, even though you could only access and report a few of them at a time. It seems as if we do see more than we can say.

Or do we? Here’s another possibility. We know that people can extract some information from images they can’t actually see—in subliminal perception, for example. Perhaps you processed the letters unconsciously, but you didn’t actually see them until you heard the cue. Or perhaps you just saw blurred fragments of the letters. According to views of modern philosophers we know things in a variety of ways. Whether they are ‘true’ or ‘accurate’ is another argument. These are the main ways of acquiring that knowledge:

 Testimony or the past, transmitted culture  authority
Empiricism (objects before us experienced  through the senses)
 Reason, logical truths, deductions,  inferences
Phenomenology essences, general or  universal ideas
 Self-revelation human persons and god as person
Intuition love, friendship, hunch, feeling
Apprenticeship skills, music, connoisseurship

It appears that one way may have more limitations than another. The way of the senses has all kinds of uses whereas self-revelation is quite restricted. Intuition may be the most limited way. Philosophers sometimes argue that our conscious experience can’t be doubted because it feels so immediate and certain. But scientists tell us that feeling is an illusion, too. Are we good at being wrong?Katherine Schultz says that our obsession with being right is “a problem for each of us as individuals, in our personal and professional lives, and… a problem for all of us collectively as a culture.”

Go get your eyes tested*.

Be Amazing Every Day

*Vision Optique London, 142 Hammersmith Road, London W6 7JPinfo@visionoptiquelondon.co.uk www.visionoptiquelondon.co.uk

Categories: : blog