The dilemma of Truth

Truth, the single most entity about which our life revolves, but often it is shrouded in mystery. Everyone wants to be right, not only for others but to keep themselves sane. Being right gives you dominance and power over others. You feel good whenever someone else's corroborates whatever you were saying. Your mind rewards you for the positive confirmation. Most people don't like being proved wrong, but have you ever thought about why that's the case? Why it is so necessary for our minds to feel right about everything. Just imagine, you wake up tomorrow morning and find that whatever you knew about the world and yourself was a lie, your mind will stop working properly, you will go into extreme anxiety. To keep yourself sane, your mind needs to think that whatever it is thinking is right and from here arises what we call conformational bias. Conformational bias is a term in psychology that tells us that we will consume the information which corroborates our already learned beliefs. We will consume information that reaffirms our already known facts and we will always try to find some bug in the information when it falsifies our beliefs. So, what does it mean? Is it that once we have formed our opinion about something, we will never be able to change it? Or, is it that our belief is a totally random thing and once you have got one, your mind will find reasoning to justify that to you. To be honest, I'm not exactly sure about how we form our belief systems, I think that we make some initial assumptions based on a set of logic (it has a lot of correlation with intuition as well) and once we are sure that our initial assumption is right, we build upon that, we consume information that supports our initial hypothesis. But what if our initial assumption were wrong, then it is very likely that you will reach a wrong conclusion. The biggest example of what I'm talking about can be seen in cult followers or people supporting some political parties, no matter how hard you try, you can't win the argument against them. It is extremely tough to change our view once we have believed in something. This is the same reason why you tend to ignore the bad habits of your toxic boyfriend/girlfriend, you are convinced that deep down they are good people. There is sufficient research that has demonstrated that once you have fallen in love with someone, you will be more likely to ignore the bad habits of your partner. You will only accept the alternative hypothesis i.e. things against your belief system, if and only if your mind can't produce any counterargument to what has been presented to you. Even if someone shows a lot of holes in your beliefs, you will still continue on with your current thoughts and beliefs by saying to yourself that there are a few points that new information is unable to disprove.

Let me talk about what Rene Descartes (one of the greatest thinkers of all time and also a mathematician) writes about this topic, he says that everything you have been taught or known in your life has been a lie because you merely accepted everything that was given to you by the society. So, he goes on a humongous task of challenging every viewpoint in his life, it might sound good on paper but is almost impossible to do in real life because of our limited mental capacity. So, what can we do to avoid this trap and reach the right conclusions? Before I answer this, we should understand a bit about how wrong we are most of the time about everything. If I ask you to write a complex pseudo-code of chess AI, you are almost bound to fail, but do you know why? You already know how to play chess, then why can't you write a pseudo-code for a computer. The reason is that you are very poor at solving complex problems in a logical manner. You can't think logically about complex problems, you need analogies to make sense of a lot of things. And I personally feel that this is the place where we can differentiate between the logical and illogical mindset. If you have ever done research in your life then only you can understand that problem-solving in a logical manner takes years of practice and dedication. Only true genius minds can think logically about problems and that too in their own domains. This is the reason why we are bound to reach the wrong conclusions about most social situations. Let me tell you how wrong we are most of the time, I asked my friend how fast he can reach the train station (by walking) near our house, and he said 10 mins. I told him, it was around 3 km but yet he was convinced that he can do it in 10 mins, probably because the last time he went to the station, he was with friends thus unable to keep track of time. Even after I showed him that it'll take more than 30 mins to walk there (On google maps), he was not convinced. This recently happened to me as well, I thought I was averaging at the speed of some 30 Kmph on my bicycle but later on, I found out it to be less than 25 Kmph. These might seem very simple things that we tend to get wrong but believe me, it is everywhere.

We take some information and based on our limited knowledge make conclusions about things and this is the biggest danger to critical thinking. If you see around yourself you'll notice that a lot of people do this, first, they'll hear a doctor's opinion and then they'll go on google to collect some information to judge the opinion of that doctor. One Google search is not going to make you an expert in the medical field, NEVER EVER judge experts' opinions as another piece of information that you will accept or reject based on your limited knowledge, consider it as a fact always. People who are educated tend to do this more often than others, being educated doesn't make you an expert. It's not that the expert can't be wrong, it's just that he/she will be 80-90% time right whereas you will be right only about 10-20%. You can't beat an expert's opinion with your limited knowledge with a few google searches and some scattered information, if you wish to discredit some expert, please go and spend some 100 hours to know about the subject matter before you even dare to open your mouth. People with no knowledge about AI (never written a code for AI) have tried to convince me of AI's capability and its future. You are a fool to think that you can extrapolate to get correct insight in the future without spending some 1000 or more hours on the subject matter. If I'm saying something about AI and you are countering it, you are probably wrong. And if Geoffrey Hinton (Father of AI) is saying something about AI and I'm countering it, then I'm definitely wrong. It's just that he can make far more connections about different parts of the complex problem of AI than I and the same goes for me when I talk to a layman. No one can reach the perfect conclusion, you can only grab a part of the truth. The thing to keep in mind is that the more time you spend studying a topic, the bigger chunk of truth you will grab. This is absolutely true for everything you have ever thought about. 

At last, I will just say that don't make conclusions early in your thought process, first, analyze all the possible assumptions and correctness of the assumptions and then build upon them to reach the final conclusion. Drawing conclusions early in will always lead to a huge conformational bias.

"Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth." ~ Sherlock Holmes