#239: Belief Perseverance, Misapplied Trial and Error & Finding the Edge
3 Ideas in 2 Minutes on Argument vs. Conviction
I. Belief Perseverance
Early in the flight, your pilot is convinced that a minor instrument anomaly is harmless. As the flight continues, readings that appear normal are taken as confirmation. Any warnings are explained away as glitches or turbulence. Even when several indicators begin to diverge, the initial assumption stays the same: “It’ll be fine.”
This is Belief Perseverance. Once a conclusion is formed, incoming information is interpreted in ways that preserve it. Data that aligns with the belief is weighted heavily. Data that conflicts with it is discounted, reclassified or ignored. The belief becomes the reference point against which evidence is judged.
But how was this initial conviction formed to begin with? According to Social Psychologist Jonathan Haidt, it’s mostly just a feeling. The good news is your plane landed safely because aviation procedures are designed to catch and correct such flawed thinking.
II. Misapplied Trial and Error
Don’t give up already! You haven’t even tried!
In many contexts, that’s an understandable reaction to someone refusing to use the Trial & Error Heuristic as a problem-solving strategy. I guess that’s why it drives me up the wall when people misapply it. Misapplied Trial and Error happens when someone insists on “learning by doing” in a situation where the outcome is already predictable.
Why treat a multi-million dollar flight deck like a broken vending machine when pushing random buttons during an aircraft emergency will likely get you crashed faster than doing nothing at all? What’s the point of trying to back up into a 5-foot parking space when you already know your 6-foot truck won’t fit?
Trial & Error is valuable unless the result is foreseeable, or the consequences of failure are irreversible or too severe.
III. Finding the Edge
That doesn’t keep us from arguing a lost cause while others try to reason us out of it. Philosopher Alan Watts had a way of explaining why argument fails against conviction.
People can’t be talked out of illusions. If a person believes that the earth is flat, you can’t talk him out of that, he knows that it’s flat. He’ll go down to the window and see that its obvious, it looks flat. So the only way to convince him that it isn’t is to say, “Well let’s go and find the edge”.
—Alan Watts
Conviction does not tend to collapse under argument, only under experience that reaches the belief’s own boundary conditions. Sometimes you just have to squeeze your 6-foot truck into that 5-foot parking space to come back to sanity. 🐘
Have a great week,
Chris
themindcollection.com