Garbage In, Garbage Out
Philosopher’s notes on how to prevent flawed inputs from producing nonsensical outputs.
Garbage In, Garbage Out is a principle that became popular in the early days of Computer Science. It’s the idea that an input that makes no sense will invariably produce a nonsensical output. The concept also applies to human reasoning. If we are unable to filter bad inputs we produce equally bad outputs, or to put in other terms: misinformation plus lack of critical thinking leads to poor choices. In the following paragraphs we’ll take a closer look into ways people have found to reduce the likelihood of making errors in reasoning. By the end of this article you should be able to identify and avoid some common pitfalls, you’ll also add a couple of interesting frameworks to refine your decision making processes.
If we want better outcomes in any area of our life, we have to make better decisions, and those decisions depend on our ability to use the best tools for reasoning. Technological revolutions aside, the concern about the quality of human thought processes it’s no new endeavor. Can reasoning be taught? To what extent can we use formulas to avoid errors and make better decisions? Are they universally valid?
Philosophy’s focus on the questions we want to address are as old as recorded history. We are going to take a look at two classic approaches, whose influence is still relevant in today’s world. But why invest time in learning about the origins of these schools of thought? As designers, we should always keep in mind that we never read directly out of reality. Everyone interprets things based on paradigms that had been created and built upon for centuries, if not millennia. We look through filters embedded in our culture, schemas that help guide us in the world, and they constantly affect our behavior and actions. The more we know about those schemas, the more we’ll be able to understand different cultures, identify cognitive biases and develop better tools for thinking.
Most of the information we’ll be examining in this article comes from Richard Nisbett’s work. Nisbett is an American Social Psychologist and researcher, currently working at the University of Michigan, who has extensively studied differences in thinking according to geography and intellectual traditions. He’s the author of The Geography of Thought and Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking among other works on the subject.
Two pillars of reason: Logical and Dialectical reasoning
Rumor has it that the Greek philosopher Aristotle got tired of hearing poor arguments at the marketplace, so he decided to set a system of formal rules to improve the thinking processes of his fellow Greeks, giving birth to what we call formal logic. But Aristotle was not alone in his concern, some couple of centuries and many thousand miles apart, the Chinese philosopher Confucius was also opening paths to better reasoning, although using different methods: his tool was dialectical reasoning.
Logic
Columns, togas and premises
“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”
― Aristotle, Metaphysics
Greeks have a long list of contributions to western culture. Besides creating fascinating myths, art and architecture, they designed a system of thought that would long outlive their civilization.
All men are mortal.
Socrates is a man.
Therefore, Socrates is Mortal.
The previous statement probably sounds familiar, you might recall seeing this structure of thought before; it’s called syllogism and it basically works with categories and quantifications. Premises are the materia prima of syllogism, a minor premise follows a major premise to derive a valid conclusion. You can think of it as a sort of algorithm to order your thoughts: you follow a set of rules for inputs (premises), and you get a valid output (conclusion). This is what we call deductive reasoning; it works from top to bottom, or from the general to the particular.
So, our “algorithm” can be expressed in general terms with the following code:
Major premise: All A are B
Minor premise: C is an A
Conclusion: Therefore C is a B
A, B and C are our variables.
We don’t use this structure in a conscious way for everyday thinking, but logic has shaped thinking for centuries; formal logic is a cornerstone of Science and mathematics.
Let’s see what validity means in this context; an argument is valid if its premises logically guarantee a conclusion. Here’s a an example taken from Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow:
All roses are flowers
Some flowers fade quickly
Therefore some roses fade quickly.
Even though the structure is correct, this syllogism is flawed. It is possible that there are no roses among the flowers that fade quickly. The conclusion does not logically derive from the premises.
If you thought that the conclusion was correct you are not alone: as Kahneman explains, the vast majority of college students that have been presented with this syllogism endorsed it as valid. In this and many other cases, plausible answers often come to mind and override our capacity to check for validity. The little voice in the back of your head that shouts “it’s true!, it’s true!”, makes it difficult to check the logic. That’s why a graphic aid such as the Venn diagram is so helpful. These diagrams are pictorial representations of category membership.
Even when the formal requirements are met, there’s something very important to keep in mind: the validity of a syllogism guarantees that it has been correctly formulated, not that its conclusion is necessarily sensible. In other words; a conclusion might be formally valid and still don’t make any sense.
All things made of plants are healthy.
Cigarettes are made of plants.
Therefore cigarettes are healthy.
This is perfectly valid in a formal sense, but does not make any sense in practical terms.
Even among people who are aware of these rules the word logic is frequently misused. We often say something is logical (logically derived from premises) even though it is clearly not, because we want it to be true. Even worse, sometimes we reject conclusions whose premises are true and derive logically from them, because we don’t want to believe them.
The RedBurn, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Dialectical reasoning
Enter the Dragon
“It is precisely because the Chinese mind is so rational that it refuses to become rationalistic and refuses to separate form from content”
― S.H.Liu, Chinese philosopher
China has no history of formal logic, even though some Chinese philosophers dwelled upon the subject, its main system of thought has been dialectical reasoning.
The west also has a long history of dialectical thinking; from the Socratic Dialogue to Kant, Fichte, Hegel and Marx. Western work in this field is centered around the concepts of Thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. A central proposition (Thesis) faces a contradictory proposition (Antithesis), and a resolution of those contradictions (Synthesis). But as we’ll see, this branch of dialectical thinking differs substantially with that of their eastern counterparts. And when pushed to choose, westerners have usually sided with logic.
Aristotelian influence might be one of the reasons why westerners tend to resort to logic rather than dialectics, this framework has established some ironclad rules:
- Identity: A=A. A is itself and not some other thing
- Non contradiction: A and not A can’t be true. A proposition and it’s opposite can’t both be true.
- Excluded middle: Everything must either be or not be, not something in between.
These rules had a profound impact in building what centuries later will become scientific thinking, and almost all technological progress.
Eastern culture has been much more keen in accepting contradiction as a fundamental concept, rather than an obstacle in the way of clear thinking. Change and uncertainty are also respected principles in this worldview. Chinese dialectical reasoning in particular, deals with much broader topics than its western or Indian counterparts.
Three main principles guided this worldview:
- Principle of change: reality is in constant change, what is now true will soon be false.
- Principle of contradiction: contradiction underlines change, because change is constant, contradiction is constant.
- Principle of relationship of holism: the hole is more than the sum of its parts.
Rather than forcing a resolution to contradiction, as Hegel pursued by Synthesis, Chinese dialectics accepts that contradictory arguments can coexist.
This form of thought is also deductive but it usually doesn’t deal with abstractions, rather than validity, is concerned with the truth and usefulness of its conclusions. The application of dialectical thinking has proven that progress in many fields can be achieved by different means than those of formal logic. Will Durant highlights this approach in his History of Civilization:
“Confucius taught the art of reasoning not through rules of syllogisms, but by the perpetual play of his keen mind upon the opinions of his pupils. When they went out from his school they knew nothing about logic, but they could think clearly and to the point.”
In broad terms, Western thinking has established a set process with specific steps: it focuses on a central object or person, identifies the attributes of an object, assigns objects to a category, apply the rules that govern a category of objects, and apply a causal model of the object so that it can be manipulated for one’s own purposes. In contrast, East Asian tradition sees the object in its context, pays special attention to the relationship among objects and relationship between object and context.
Ignoring context is often the cause of what is called Fundamental Attribution error: we explain a person’s disposition by attributing it to personality and human behavioral traits rather than situational and environmental factors. This error may be directly traceable to Greek metaphysics.
Recent study of dialectical reasoning and its application in the field of psychology has taken shape as Post formalism. This has put the focus back on how systems function, and the concept of equilibrium, observing complex structures from living organisms to complex factories.
Post formalists are actually Anti formalists, dialectical reasoning opposes formalism because of its separation of form from content; they argue that we make errors by abstracting elements, ignoring facts and context. Overemphasis on logic derives in distortion, error and rigidity
Unknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Blindspots
Common errors you should avoid
As useful as these two frameworks we’ve discussed might be, they don’t apply universally. Even in the cases where they do, we don’t always apply them in the right way. Mind these habitual reasoning flaws:
Inverse error: a common error when applying syllogisms that takes the following form “if P then Q, not P therefore not Q.” Example: if it’s raining then the street must be wet. It is not raining, then the street must not be wet. Sure you can imagine a number of causes that can make the street wet, regardless of the rain.
Converse error: also a common error that takes the formula if P then Q and incorrectly assumes that If Q then P. Example “If the car is not in the garage Jane is gone downtown. Jane told me she’s gone downtown therefore the car is not in the garage. Again, the conclusion does not logically derive from the premise.
Confirmation bias: the tendency to interpret information in a way that supports one’s prior beliefs or values. Studies have shown that westerners were more inclined to believe the more plausible proposition when contradicted by a less plausible proposition than when presented alone, as opposed to easterners. Some authors see this as a common example of western eagerness to resolve a contradiction by choosing the right answer, which in turn leads to even more confidence that the chosen proposition is true.
Fundamental attribution error: attributing human behavior to a person’s enduring dispositions rather than to situational factors. An error directly traceable to Greek metaphysics. If you want to avoid this, just give context its proper weight before rushing to conclusions.
Attitude towards trends or “Gambler’s fallacy”: Easterners are more likely to assume that a trend will level off or even reverse itself, as opposed to westerners, who have a tendency to assume that a trend will continue in the current direction. This framework has disadvantages in business scenarios like the stock market: according to many authors, selling a stock that’s going up and buying one that’s going down in the hope that tendencies will reverse is a clear instance of an erroneous preference.
Which path should you choose?
For most people it’s almost certain that their education under one paradigm has already shaped their thought process. This is not to say that the world is divided into two clearly distinct groups, but rather than depending on geography one school prevails over the other. Knowing their origins and how they operate will help you choose your thinking tools more wisely, and prevent common errors in both. But to ask whether logic or dialectical reasoning is better is to miss the point; each has made great contributions upon which civilizations have progressed substantially.
In some interpretations it might seem as if formal logic has overcome dialectical thinking, especially because science owes so much to it. But it’s important to note that many intellectuals have in recent times drawn attention to the flaws of reductionism, arguing in favor of more holistic approaches. In these views, context and contradiction are back in the spotlight. The challenge posed by Quantum Mechanics to Classical Mechanics, with its change from a deterministic world view to a probabilistic one, has much to do with this.
Broadly speaking, we can say that logic is the way to treat scientific, well defined problems, while a dialectical approach usually works better for not so clearly defined problems, human relationships and social issues. Keep both in your cognitive toolbox, they will come in handy.
