Why You Are Wrong

“...for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” - Shakespeare

Let me state this as swiftly as possible: if you believe in some greater being or power that exists beyond what you can observe, you are wrong. Religion, spirituality, the paranormal, intrinsic value, self-determination, vitalism, Deepak Chopra... all wrong. Two sentences in and you’ve probably curled your lips into a smirk, raised your eyebrows smugly and huffed at your screen (or hit the back button... bye!). And look, anything I say to refute your beliefs wont matter to you because, well, you believe. No argument in the world is clever enough to shake you off of what you feel deep in your heart.

I’m not here to build the case against what you believe, though. I am here to build the case against why you believe it. Everyone has their own personal story about their path to discovery, their revelation, their epiphany, but all too often, we fall victim to the frailty of our own minds. With as much certainty that we may believe in something, we definitely don’t vet the validity of our beliefs like we do those of others. There are many opportunities for our brain to lead itself astray of reality and there are many reasons why most of our bad ideas persist unchecked throughout our lives. Read on, if you will, for all of the reasons why you are wrong:

Every person treats their own thoughts and ideas as if they are possessions. Even the most ill-conceived twinkle in one’s eye will have a special sentimental value that mere logic cannot shake. We love many things in spite of their obvious flaws. In many cases we love the flaws themselves. (This is a possible explanation behind William Hung’s brief popularity.) In matters of taste, our affinity for the illogical choices can be a way to differentiate ourselves from other people, but when it comes to deciding what is real and what is not, those cute little flaws often steer us toward a comfort zone that is deceptively attractive.

Once we are embedded in that comfort zone, it is next to impossible for us to realize what is wrong with it. The pleasant self-aggrandizing nature of your thoughts form a protective padding around you that both soothes you and hinders your mental acuity. This is a psychological phenomenon known as the Dunning-Kruger effect. If we used bad logic to get in the zone, it is the same bad logic that keeps us in and no amount of good logic can dissuade us. Our incompetence with logic prevents us from realizing that we are incompetent. This is exactly why no amount of rational argument can get you to admit that you’re wrong.

One example of what I’m saying can be found in the form of this very article. I’m certain that many of the readers who I am addressing have already tuned out by now. They may have done so because they aren’t interested in being told they’re wrong or, if they are, would prefer to be told in a much gentler fashion. The information I’m providing doesn’t fit the information they want to hear. The ones left reading are the resilient few who may have some hope just yet, or at least are the ones who already agree with me and are just along for the ride.

But you’re not deconverted yet. I could tear into your beliefs with solid points, but you would still shrug them off and pat yourself on the back with your own counter-arguments. You like your ideas too much to consider that they may be wrong and if you use the same logic to vet them that you used to create them, you’ll never find the problem.

You must be saying by now, “To hell with logic!” And you’re right, I’m done with the good logic versus bad logic talk. There’s no sense in beating that horse to a pulp when there are plenty of other reasons why you’re wrong to cover.

The human psyche is so irrational when it comes to determining so many mundane things that it would be irresponsible to think our path to extraordinary beliefs is grounded in level thought. Duke University professor Dan Ariely studies irrationality in behavior and his first of two books on the matter, Predictably Irrational, outlines many scenarios where we humans believe we are in charge of our decisions. My favorite example is an experiment done on males before and during heightened states of sexual arousal. There are two takeaways from the experiment: we are consistently unable to predict how we will behave during arousal, and that behavior appears shocking outside of arousal. The point I want to begin all of this with is that your judgments about your own beliefs and actions are overrated.

Anecdotes are overrated, too. If your beliefs emerged as a result of your personal experiences, I still wouldn’t trust them. Our brains are too fragile to treat any image stored in our memory banks as more than just a hiccup. I’m not saying that this fantastic event never happened, or that it was a hallucination, I’m saying you interpreted it wrong. There are simply too many things that happen in our brains that distort the observed reality we sense. Most of it starts with the chemistry of our bodies. Epinephrine, dopamine, and other hormones can wildly swing our perceptions of the events around us from ordinary to ground-shaking. Women experience this every month before their periods, but we forget that hormone fluctuation happens every second within our bodies. Even a startle, eye contact or a question asked in our direction can get the adrenaline going.

The correlation between gullibility and various hormones like dopamine has been well documented. Parkinson’s disease patients treated with L-DOPA have been found to develop gambling habits and fall victim to scam artists. And its not just external stimulation that we are gullible to; once again, we believe our own ideas even if they are flawed and hormone spikes can only exacerbate this weakness. Those spikes are exactly what we get when we are startled or when we have realizations that open our eyes. Then, as we are seeing reality in a malleable form, a range of cognitive biases work to interpret what our senses are telling us as it may pertain to our interests. Really, first-hand accounts are not reliable at all.

The distortion gets worse when we commit our experiences to memory. Like a computer image saved at a low quality in order to preserve disk space, our brain stores our memories haphazardly, with only a small collection of details. Then, when we recall those memories, we fill in the blanks with new details; mostly reflections of the mood we associate with the thought. It is during this process that entirely new details can be imagined into the scenes we’ve stored. Then, as all this is happening, the memory is being rewritten with the new details for the next time it is recalled. Your favorite memory quickly becomes your brain’s own propaganda in favor of itself.

I experienced this last weekend when I saw the movie Inception. In discussions about the movie afterward, I realized that I happened to misremember various scenes in such a way that confirmed my initial ideas about the plot. When I realized my memories were wrong, my hypothesis about the plot was ruined, but I couldn’t re-remember the scenes in their correct form. Can you remember the last time you looked up a quote or a song lyric only to find that it was slightly different than how you remembered it? This happens all the time with nearly everything we commit to memory and we are rarely fortunate enough to realize that it affects our beliefs, too.

Earlier, I mentioned cognitive biases as interpreters of our senses’ inputs. Now it is time to explain in detail what those biases are. This is where your grasp on what constitutes as evidence for your ideas is certainly flailing. Most biases have a name. There is the confirmation bias, which states that we look for things that prove our assumptions and disregard conflicting evidence, thus only paying attention to things that match what we are looking for. Pseudo-sciences rely heavily on this, as the only way to build a case for a broken idea is to cognitively throw out all the evidence that refutes it and acknowledge only the things that agree with our hypothesis. Some people even go so far as to misinterpret evidence to to support their beliefs when it actually proves them wrong. True science forces itself to take into account every piece of information, which allows it to be falsified. Few people learn the value in looking for weaknesses in their logic and they go through life thinking that an idea that is impossible to argue against is actually a good one.

Have you ever forced yourself to like something because you invested too much time, money or emotions in it to disregard? We all have. Even in the face of criticism, you’re likely to defend your choice. It’s important to our identity that we feel good about the things we invest in, even if they are duds, so we manufacture positivity around what we must. We use the same mental mechanisms to reinforce our silly, flawed beliefs. In fact, criticisms often cause us to reinvest and bolster our beliefs further. This is a vicious cycle that burrows us deeper into a hole of constant re-justification of the unreal ideas that fuel our beliefs.

The most basic psychological need that we all feel is the need to be right. Your mind will defend the territory within ferociously against invading ideas and arguments. This, all in spite of reality. We often criticize each other for being so damned closed-minded, but we comfort ourselves by saying that our own argument doesn’t apply to us because our crazy beliefs are what makes us the open-minded ones. More wrongness.

On a more philosophical note, the main weakness of any human mentality is perspective. By default, we see ourselves as the center of our own universe, simply because we lack the ability to experience the world through any other means. Perspective also encompasses all of the other cognitive biases, because we lack the ability to process life in other peoples’ shoes. It is our nature to be biased. Our perspective weakness, as I call it, is responsible for thousands of oversights that mistakenly create a narrative about our reality that only works from the vantage point of our selves. The only way to learn whether we are right or wrong is to do something few people are comfortable with doing; step outside ourselves.

One obvious example of this weakness is the concept of a coincidence. The title of a New York Times article on the matter puts it plainly; rare coincidences are very common. Of course, we wouldn’t be able to realize this without studying it from a detached perspective, but there is something else about coincidences that prevents us from seeing how normal they really are. We want to believe that we live in a universe that has us in mind, where we matter on a scale larger than atomic chaos. The evidence shows, however, that we’re just making big deals out of things that aren’t even special in the cosmic sense. The fact that we have the ability to orchestrate our own lives and actions makes coincidences even less impressive.

My favorite application of the perspective weakness is the impression of history that we have from our current-looking-into-past tunnel vision. When we consider the history we know, we refer to a narrative that highlights key events and figures that are believed to have contributed to the grander story. But reality isn’t so simple that it can be reduced to a few individuals and a handful of dates. In fact, the bullet points found on the synopsis of any past event are more likely the culmination of an infinite number of smaller influences, the least of which include false information. The farther in the past, the fuzzier the facts. Consider what you know about a war in the past, then consider that history is written by the victor. The same reason why we can never truly grasp the past is also why we cannot predict the future; too many variables go into producing the world we live in to ever finitely be deduced.

A third important manifestation of the perspective weakness is our self-centric view of the universe. It is quite telling that man’s first impression of the world was that everything revolved around our home, Earth. Over time, science has proved that we live on a tiny rock, rotating around a tiny spec, floating amongst a hundred billion other specs, in a galaxy floating amongst a hundred billion other galaxies. Yet, we still believe in personal gods. We still believe that the universe, in its vast wonder, cares or even has culminated in our very existence. We believe that the universe, with its vast and mind-blowing age, began with us in mind. And even though our race has only existed for less than the bat of an eye in cosmic time, we are quick to assign some great importance or, more to my point, some purpose to the trivial things within our individual lives.

What this self-centered perspective means for you and me is that we consistently under-appreciate the scope of the world we live in. We see ourselves as the center or the culmination, but we are actually at the mercy of much more influential forces than ourselves. I’m not only referring to the powerful effects of nature, or the possibility of a meteor suddenly ending most life on Earth. There are more subtle sources of great natural power that we never think about. For instance, some people may thank a personal god for their life, but they’ve never considered that they should instead be thanking the microorganisms that live in and on their body that make many of their essential life functions possible; if the microbes wanted to, they could taketh that life away fairly quickly. Why don’t we acknowledge our dependence on microorganisms? Because we can’t see them and its easy to get on with life without ever considering them either. Don’t think they’re that substantial? Well, if you were to clump every biological organism on Earth together in a giant ball, microscopic organisms would make up 80% of it. Without many of those microbes, past and present, our planet would be uninhabitable.

The greater point that all of these examples points to is that reality is impossible to judge from a single perspective. It is a fallacy to think that a personal point of view is more valuable than a detached one, but it is an even larger fallacy to think that many agreeing perspectives point to the truth. Reality is not a popularity contest. Much like the strategy of triangulation, true perspective is not obtained until many different viewpoints are heard and figured into the equation. From there, it is not a matter of combining, but comparing. The truth of reality is not found along a compromise; it is a rigid, unmovable certainty. You either have it right or you don’t.

So, how do you figure out what is right? Well, you start with opening your mind to every perspective you can, and then you start whittling everything down to what not only matches the reality you observe, but the reality that everyone else experiences, too. The truth can’t just apply to you. Just like you’re not allowed to give yourself a nickname, bub. You can only know if something is real if it can be applied to others. Another attribute of a viable theory of reality is falsifiability; the potential to be wrong. In the end, a good idea works no matter how you feel about it. This is how a rationalist thinks and if you still insist, after taking into consideration everything I have laid out in this message, that reality works differently, then we can be absolutely certain that neither of us will gain a single benefit from arguing. You’re never going to change.