The Ministry for the Future

24

Just as we are all subject to some perceptual errors due to the nature of our senses and physical reality, we are also subject to some cognitive errors, built into our brains through the period of human evolution, and unavoidable even when known to us.

The perceptual illusions are easy. There are certain patterns of black and white that when printed on a paper circle, and the circle then spun on a stick, the paper will flash with colors in the human eye. Slow the spinning down and the printed pattern is obviously just black and white; speed it up and the colors reappear in our sight. Just the way it is.

Foreshortening is another perceptual distortion we can’t correct for. When standing under a cliff in the mountains and looking up at it, the cliff always appears to be about the same height—say a thousand feet or so. Even if we are under the north wall of the Eiger and know the wall is six thousand feet tall, it still appears to be about a thousand feet tall. Only when you get miles away, like on the lakefront in Thun looking south, can you actually see the immense height of the Nordwand of the Eiger. Right under it, it’s impossible.

Everyone can accept these optical illusions when they are demonstrated; they are undeniably there. But for the cognitive errors, it takes some testing. Cognitive scientists, logicians, and behavioral economists have only recently begun to sort out and name these cognitive errors, and disputes about them are common. But unavoidable mistakes have been demonstrated in test after test, and given names like anchor bias (you want to stick to your first estimate, or to what you have been told), ease of representation (you think an explanation you can understand is more likely to be true than one you can’t). On and on it goes—online there is an excellent circular graphic display of cognitive errors—a wheel of mistakes that both lists them and organizes them into categories, including the law of small numbers, neglect of base rates, the availability heuristic, asymmetrical similarity, probability illusions, choice framing, context segregation, gain/loss asymmetry, conjunction effects, the law of typicality, misplaced causality, cause/effect asymmetry, the certainty effect, irrational prudence, the tyranny of sunk costs, illusory correlations, and unwarranted overconfidence—the graphic itself being a funny example of this last phenomenon, in that it pretends to know how we think and what would be normal.

As with perceptual illusions, knowing that cognitive errors exist doesn’t help us to avoid them when presented with a new problem. On the contrary, these errors stay very consistent, in that they are committed by everyone tested, tend toward the same direction of error, are independent of personal factors of the test takers, and are incorrigible, in that knowing about them doesn’t help us avoid them, nor to distrust our reasoning in other situations. We are always more confident of our reasoning than we should be. Indeed overconfidence, not just expert overconfidence but general overconfidence, is one of the most common illusions we experience. No doubt this analysis is yet another example: do we really know any of this?

Oh dear! What do these recent discoveries in cognitive science mean? Some say they just mean humans are poor at statistics. Others assert they are as important a discovery as the discovery of the subconscious.

Consider again the nature of ideology, that necessary thing, which allows us to sort out the massive influx of information we experience. Could ideology also be a cognitive illusion, a kind of necessary fiction?

Yes. Of course. We have to create and employ an ideology to be able to function; and we do that work by way of thinking that is prone to any number of systemic and one might even say factual errors. We have never been rational. Maybe science itself is the attempt to be rational. Maybe philosophy too. And of course philosophy is very often proving we can’t think to the bottom of things, can’t get logic to work as a closed system, and so on.

And remember also that in all of this discussion so far, we are referring to the normal mind, the sane mind. What happens when, starting as we do from such a shaky original position, sanity is lost, we defer to another discussion. Enough now to say just this: it can get very bad.