Mind Infections Part 3: How to Quarantine Them
Learning to test your views and ideas
In the previous articles, we have seen that some ideas evolve to become more infectious, others evolve to be more useful or more accurate. We have also seen spreading mechanism in action through a story typical of indoctrination victims.
It becomes clear that since some ideas are growing better at bypassing our defense mechanism and at motivating us to act in it’s favor, it would be to our benefit if we could differentiate between useful ideas and infectious ideas.
How do we know if an idea is grounded in the real world? Test, test, test.
Falsifiability: Is it possible to come up with a test that would demonstrate that a belief is false? Even at night, we know the sun exists. Its existence is falsifiable in the sense that if it stopped existing, everyone around the globe would stop seeing it. Here are some examples of how true and false claim can be falsified.
- I have Kleenex: I can see one coming out of the box, but one day there won’t be. I’ll be able to falsify the claim by putting my hand in the box and verifying if there is one.
- Santa is real: At first glance, how else would gifts appear under the tree? But that would be an argument of ignorance, i.e. claiming that something unverified is true only because we don’t know of alternatives. So I stood up at night and noticed that my father who came home late after work would take them from his bedroom, put them right under the tree, drink the milk and eat the cookies.
- 97 is a prime number: it’s not divisible by 2, nor by 3, nor by 4, nor by 5, and so on…. Quite boring. No wonder this fact does not spread easily. Why would we care in our everyday life anyway?
- There is a small teapot orbiting the sun between Earth and Mars: This is almost impossible to falsify and it’s useless to know. I would not subscribe to this idea.
Measurability: Is it possible to measure the claim? Air is invisible but you can weight it, you can push it around your mouth, you can blow it and people out of arms reach will feel it. Each claim will require a different measure.
- Strategies will be measured in term of success rate or return on investments.
- Physical objects have weight and sizes.
- Energy can be measured through the changes they cause in their target in terms of heat, speed, electrical charges and so on.
How do we know that an idea is useful to us? From the simple gut feeling to the complex double blind medical experiments with control groups and placebos, there are many ways to find what is useful and what is not. Obviously, deciding between the ham sandwich or corndog for dinner does not need the same standards as choosing between medication such as Angiotensin-Converting Enzyme Inhibitors and Aldosterone Antagonists.
How you want to decide what is good to you is your choice. A good rule of thumb is that you might want to be more careful about decisions that have greater impacts. If you care about your health, you’ll invest more time and energy in health related decisions. You probably also want to figure out what has impact on what you care.
Some ideas will have us care about things that others do not care about. They might even have us care about things that are not grounded in the real world.
To find if an idea is useful, think about what you care for. Think of how you can measure how well it’s doing. When you have a good idea of measuring your goal, find what improves your situation and measure the improvement. Focus on ideas that are in line with your goals. Find compromises between goals (like weight loss and good tasting food)
If you care about your weight, define a desired weight, measure it, try to change it, measure it again. If you got closer, keep doing it. If you got further away, change tactics.
If you care about someone, ask them how they feel, try to improve it, ask again. If you got closer, keep doing it. If you got further away, change tactics. You get the idea.
In short, if you want to entertain useful ideas, make sure that your ideas are in line with what you care about, that their impact is measurable and that they are grounded in the real world.
How do we know that an idea is nothing more than good at spreading? So far, we have seen that some ideas are testable and useful. They can be good or bad at spreading but their emphasis is not on being easy to spread. Other ideas will spread like wildfire and have no use nor truth to them. As Churchill said: “A lie gets halfway around the world before truth puts on its boots.”
If you care about whether your ideas are useful or not, question them. Validate their impact on your life. The more time or energy they demand, the more effort you should put in verifying them.
A double blind experiment is not required for everything. You do not need to test before using an idea, but put a calculated amount of effort to verify that it is what it claims to be. If it’s a statement of fact about the world, validate how accurate it is before using it to take a decision. Some research/prospecting is cheaper than actual experiments but you have to keep in mind that not all experiment and research are as reliable.
Find your bias. Humans are liable to overestimate how accurate we are and underestimate the errors we make. Study the known biases and the proper methodology to avoid being misled by your them.
Use sound logic. Unreliable logic gives unreliable conclusion. Learn about misleading logic like sophism.
Learn how proper research is done. Also learn what improper research look like and how mishandling of an experiment can lead to misleading results.
