On Confidence

I ended my last post with a comment about emotion being the enemy of reason, which conveniently brings me to the point of what I've been thinking about lately, and that is confidence and how much I hate it.

Political debates are the worst.  The candidates never say anything.  It's just buzzword after buzzword, intentionally designed to play off of your emotions.  This is because voters think with their hearts and their subconscious perceptions, not with their minds.  There is seldom any real content.  But then, later you hear everyone talking about who won the debate, and I'm thinking, "How can you tell?! No one actually said anything!" And the things they talk about are things like, "Oh, well Candidate X kept wiping his brow and looking down at his papers.  Candidate Y was clearly more composed, I think he really came out on top, Jim."  Bullshit.  Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.  The state of modern debate is entirely focused on pathos with a bit of ethos for an occasional stab here or there.  Political debates are only an example, what I'm really talking about here are one on one arguments between two people.  Time after time I've seen arguments where one or both of the parties involved use emotion, confidence, and clever wording to support their claims, yet make logical fallacies left and right.  They rarely use facts or scientific evidence to back up their points, and who usually comes out on top? Whoever was the most confident, said the most things, and spoke the loudest.

Bear in mind that I'm only talking about debates about factual matters.  When you're arguing over which pudding is better (ice cream or vanilla), or whether disco is better than reggae, you're arguing over preference.  It's important to distinguish between the two.  In arguments over factual matters, there is one, true answer.  For example, if an atheist and a theist are arguing over the existence of God, this is not a matter of opinion; there either is a God or there isn't. Where this gets fuzzy is when you realize that your terms aren't specific enough.  What do you mean by God? Do you mean an intelligent creator, or do you mean some cosmic, creative force? Maybe both parties are wrong: maybe the theist is a Christian and is arguing for the Christian version of God, when in actuality the universe was created by Brahma, or some other unspecified, unintelligent creator.  The point is that there is one, single truth of the matter.  However, the reason these issues are controversial is either because there is not enough evidence to definitively say one way or another, or because the evidence that proves a certain truth is not salient enough to convince some people of a that truth when it runs up against differing beliefs that carry with them some emotional weight that makes the truth of the matter painful.  Once again, here is another division in any topic for debate.  In one type of argument, there are issues where the truth is currently unknowable, either because there is not enough evidence to support any rational decision on the matter (i.e. the existence of a universal creator) or because the truth of the matter lies in Value (that is, why is something "good" or "bad"), the source of which is unknowable (i.e. abortion).  For ease of reference, let me call these "Arguments about the Unknown."  In the other type of argument, there is heavy, observable evidence pointing to the truth, but the salience of the evidence is outweighed by the emotional baggage that is attached (i.e. evolution, global warming).  Let's call these types of arguments, "Emotional arguments."

Let me take a sidebar here to talk about "Truth." When I say "truth," I mean an objective fact about existence.  The problem with truth and the human condition is that we can never know an objective truth outside of our own perception.  For example, we can never, with 100% confidence say "this apple is red."  The best we can do is say "I perceive that this apple is red."  Now, we can be fairly confident that the apple is objectively and does in fact reflect wavelengths within the visible spectrum that we perceive is "red," but only because we democratically agree that all of us healthy observers perceive the apple as red.  Therefore, the closest we can get to making any logical statements about the objective universe is: "We collectively perceive this object as red, therefore it is very likely that this object is, in Truth, objectively red."  Some would lead you to believe that this implies that there is no objective reality, but there's really no reason to believe that.  Even if we are all suffering from planet-wide delusions, even if we all live in the Matrix and all of our perceived reality is just a product of our own consciousness, it is utterly undeniable that existence exists.  What these people are trying to do is come up with a clever way of dealing with the conundrum.  Therefore, there is an objective truth to all debates.  We just cannot know it.  Therefore, for the purposes of having a purpose, and the fact that we have to believe that there are facts, we should agree that all "Truths" of the objective universe can be determined when the observer(s) with the most evidence from observation interpret that evidence to indicate one alternative over all other alternatives (carefully applying Occam's Razor), that interpretation is very likely to be the objective "Truth," but can be usurped should a simpler truth or a truth that explains more phenomena should arise.

Anyway... how is this related to confidence? People are often incapable of recognizing where their arguments breakdown, many of them being astonished that there's even a controversy at all.  "Of course abortion should be legal! It's the woman's body, it's no one else's right to tell her what to do with it, how is this even an argument??" Or, alternately: "Of course abortion should be outlawed! The child is an individual human with its own genetic code! What changes in it's development that suddenly gives its life value? How is this even an argument?" This pisses me off to no end.  How can you be so confident on a controversial issue that you are flabbergasted by the opposition? And some of the most confident people I've ever met are religious people, about their beliefs.  Your faith is based entirely on emotion.  How does God speak to you? Through your heart.  How many times has God audibly proclaimed himself to you? Christians, are you aware that there are Muslims who are SO confident in their beliefs, that they will kill and die for them (and vice-versa)? You can't both be right, what makes your case any better than theirs?  I am not an atheist, but doubt is a very good thing.  Doubt makes you ask questions.  Doubt can make you back off emotionally when you come across someone who disagrees with you, because you realize that there is a chance that you just might be wrong.

Unfortunately, many people are afraid of doubt, and think that it is a bad thing.  I was brought up to believe that doubt showed a lack of faith; it's best not to ask questions, or you might make God mad.  What a convenient thing to be taught by a faith that loses its power if it loses its members, huh? For others, doubt is a sign of weakness.  Or rather, being wrong about something is a sign of weakness.  We are remarkably good at convincing ourselves of pretty much anything, so we ignore the reasonable part of our minds telling us that we are wrong so that our fragile egos don't have to deal with it.

Again, I am not an atheist, nor am I agnostic.  My whole point here is that the universe is a mysterious place.  Human reasoning is so subjective, and none of us are capable of purely rational thought.  Being overconfident in your beliefs blinds you. It shuts you down to other alternatives, and it keeps you from fully investigating your own beliefs, which in turn keeps you from being able to adequately defend those beliefs to others.

I'm not going to even start on how much of a role confidence plays in dating and in getting jobs, which is equally dumb (I act like I'm the shit, so you think I'm the shit).  Maybe I'll make a part two where I rant about that.

First Post: Disclaimer

So, blogging.  I often find myself wanting to say things in some sort of public forum, usually by making Facebook statuses.  But there are a variety of problems with this.  First, statuses are too frickin short! I post one snippet of an idea, and next thing I know I'm roped into hours long discussions which I've already had a million times.  So this will be a way to get more fleshed-out thoughts out there, so that I can address several points all at once and hopefully avoid so many repeated one on one discussions.  That is definitely NOT to say that I don't like one on one discussions; I love them! This is just a way to go ahead and dispel many of the surface arguments against my viewpoints and jump right in to the meat of it.  Second, pretty much everyone can see a Facebook status, whether they want to or not, and many of the things I say can be offensive or off-putting.  So, I've decided to start a blog; a place where I can speak my mind and pretend people are reading it, and if you are actually reading it you have chosen to do so, and it was not forced down your throat by appearing on your news feed.

Along those lines, if you are easily offended by people with strong opinions that may be different from yours, and who are, indeed, actually trying to be offensive at times, and if you find being offended to be an unpleasant thing, and if you are unable to debate your deeply held beliefs without getting upset, then please don't read this.  Expect a lot of religion, a hefty amount of armchair philosophy, politics (though not really current affairs, more like "governance" in general).  I plan to be brutally honest and overly personal, probably self-deprecating, and definitely arrogant and pretentious.  Also, I will ramble incoherently.  I'm usually going to be writing these in a sort of stream-of-consciousness way.  While part of me is doing this because I want to form a cohesive argument, most of me is just doing it because I need some sort of outlet, and putting things out there makes me happy.  Therefore, I will not spend a lot of time editing and reorganizing things.  It is what it is.

If you are a family member, please be warned that I probably haven't talked to you about a lot of my opinions on things.  Why start arguments with loved ones over these silly things?  If you're taking the time to look at this, it's probably pointless to tell you that you shouldn't read it, so if you really want to talk to me about it, please actually do that: let's get together for dinner or a drink and talk about our ideas, on the one condition that we can agree to keep our heads cool.  Emotion is the enemy of reason.