Confirmation bias

Confirmation bias refers to a phenomenon that makes us to seek out evidence, and only that evidence, which supports what we believe in. So, if we do not believe in climate change, we will seek out scientific studies that support our belief, even if they disagree with what a majority of scientists agree on. Thanks to our ability to search the vast amount of knowledge that exists out there, it is very easy to find what we want to see. Such propensity and ability to find one-sided evidence makes us harden our position, once we have made up our mind.  

Overcoming confirmation bias is a difficult task. We tend to blame others of suffering from it, while they may feel the same way about us. They will tell us, the “liberals” or “progressives” or whatever label they decide to bestow on us, that we tend to just listen to the liberal outlets and ignore those that do not support the conservative views.

That is true. I do not watch Fox News and tend to ignore what the Heritage Foundation may say. I read New York Times and laugh with them at the Conservative politicians. On Facebook, I am friends with people holding similar views and stop following those who do not.

So, how do I cure myself of my bias? Should I pay more attention to the other side and be willing to change my position on issues?

This is a real challenge.

Personally, the other side has to meet certain requirements before I listen to them.  The argument needs to be rational not ideological or theological. I am too much of a scientist or an engineer to have it otherwise. That means I just cannot watch Fox News or listen to Rush Limbaugh. Give me a more rational news source.

Second, by the same token, I have to feel that the position I hold has stopped being rational. It is hard for me, just like most people, to accept that I am wrong, but I am willing to do that.

Third, the person making argument has to recognize that my position has some merits too. It is just that my thinking has led me to a different conclusion. The last point is what I need to work on because that is what people holding the other position would want me to do.

Confirmation bias is a serious phenomenon that is capable of tearing a society apart, and we need to address it. Starting with us.

Photoshop

Recently I have started using Photoshop---a very well known digital post-processing program from Adobe---not just for touching up my photographs, but for creating images that are classified as  “digital art”. The process of creating them is deeply satisfying and uses a different set of right brain neurons than does conventional photography. Using Photoshop, I have converted some photographs to images that resemble impressionist paintings (or so I think). Some have elements juxtaposed from different images, just for fun (like one I created by superimposing a polar bear from Arctic on an Antarctic landscape full of penguins).  Occasionally, I imagine a scene, say a science fiction landscape, and then try to create it using different photographs and techniques.

Interestingly, some of my Facebook friends are not too happy at my foray into this media. Although most are too polite to tell me on my face, I get occasional comments regarding how they appreciate my conventional photographs more than this stuff that I am now posting.

As I think about it, I see why they dislike Photoshopping. A major reason has to do with what they see as the purpose of photography. As I had mentioned in a previous Blog Post (July 2014), photographs are taken, broadly, for three purposes: to memorialize an event, for reporting a story (photo journalism) or to create a work of art.

For people used to using a camera for the first purpose, using Photoshop to insert a missing person is almost scandalous, unless the photographer says that that is what was done. Same is the case with those who think that an image is supposed to be telling a story that has happened in reality. For them, a polar bear in middle of penguins, in what they expect to be a story about Antarctica, is a willful distortion.

On the other hand, for people who think that a photograph has the third purpose, to entertain us as a work of art, a Photoshopped image should not come as a big shock. On the surface of it, what difference does it make if a butterfly in an artistic photograph (not one meant for an Audubon guide) was really there or imported from another photograph in order to serve as an element of composition?

I think the issue here is similar to what I discussed in a previous Blog Post on Authenticity (December 2009). Why should people care if a diamond is real or fake that looks like real?  For those whose intention is to use diamond as a fashion accessory, fake would be fine. However, if your intent were to show off wealth, only the real one would do---accompanied by a statement that it is not fake, in case the observer appears uncertain about its authenticity.

So it is with the observers of a digital image. There are those who are wedded to the notion that a photograph has to represent reality. For them, it is hard to accept that a photographer can manipulate pixels to create a work of art; only an artist does with paint and brush is allowed to do that. Then there are those who are looking for visual stimulation that comes from watching a work of art, no matter what media was used to create it. They should accept digital art without hesitation.

The decision to select fake or real diamond is based on what wearer wants viewer to do --- be impressed by the its looks or by the wealth of the wearer. Applying the same logic, but from the other point of view, the acceptance of digital art is based on what the viewer expects from the medium of photography---depiction of realty or pleasure of viewing a work of art.

Age of Avatars

I am told by people who know Donald Trump that in real life he is quite different from what he appears to be in his quest for Republican nomination. In public he is quite bombastic, arrogant and over confidant. He says things that a segment of society would like to say but does not because it would be considered impolite or politically incorrect. In person, he is not quite like that I am told. So, he has assumed the persona, an “Avatar” to use a video game metaphor, just to please an untapped segment of population in order to win the Republican party nomination.

Similarly, Bobby Jindal, a brilliant Rhodes scholar, acts like a religious zealot who is anti-science and against any social progress. There is no doubt that it is his Avatar that is speaking in public, not real him. He just needs to get votes from the segments he has hitched his wagon to. Through a careful study of how large these segments are, and who they would vote for, he has become that type of person in the eyes of the public.

The ability and need to become an Avatar in public is not restricted just to our politicians. All of us who are active in the social media create our on-line alter egos that are not quite like who we really are. All the smiley photographs, bits of wisdom we share, and posts we like are all to some extent supporting the brand we have created for ourselves. Most people we are friends with on-line do not see us in person and assume that our Avatars are who we really are. Just like they do for Donald or Bobby.

What I wonder is where this will take us next. Are we going to reach a stage where every utterance and action, on-line or in media, will be choreographed? Will we be so infatuated with our Avatars that we will lose our authenticity all together? Will our society become like a giant video game, with each one of us optimizing our characters for the function we are supposed to perform or brand we are trying to create? 

In the future, genetics, artificial intelligence and robotics will advance to such an extent that we will all have the option to become what we want using these technologies. It will be hard to distinguish what is authentic “us” and what is not.

Is what we are experiencing the beginning of that transformation?

Any jackass can kick down a barn...

The second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy of a closed system remains same or increases---it cannot decrease. There are many definitions of entropy, but the one easiest to understand is that it is a measure of disorder in the system. So, left to itself, a system becomes increasingly disorderly. To create order, on the other hand, requires work.

It is because of this law that it is easy to mix cream in coffee, but to separate the two out once mixed, is almost impossible. Ice melts in water but a glass of cold water does not separate into ice and warm water. And, as all of us know, a house always becomes messier and dirtier, unless a positive action is taken to put order and clean it.

Also, because of this law “any jackass can kick down a barn, but it takes a carpenter to build one,” to quote Sam Rayburn, an American politician.

I like this quote a lot, because it is applicable to so many things going on today. It takes a lot of effort to build an orderly society and make it function. Any group of anarchist can tear it down. The Buddha statues in Bamiyan, Afghanistan, took tremendous effort to carve out, but a bunch of hooligans put a few sticks of dynamite and destroyed them completely.

The current discourse on the Iran Nuclear treaty reminds me that the second law of thermodynamics is alive and well in this great country of ours. It was a team of “carpenters” who took years to develop this treaty. One of the key architects of the treaty, Energy Secretary Earnest Moniz, an eminent nuclear scientist (who I had the privilege to meet when he was at MIT), spent a lot of effort to identify all different pathways to nuclear weapons and device ways to block them. John Kerry and his team negotiated their way to get the best deal that they could get. I for one am convinced that this is the barn that is well constructed and serve its purpose.

Now jackasses are out to tear it down.

It is very easy to do so. One such jackass, Senator Jim Risch told John Kerry that he was bamboozled by Iran. Has Senator Risch every negotiated a treaty? What proof does he have to produce to back up his claim? Chris Christie says in a new ad, “This deal was negotiated so badly that you would not let this president buy a car for you at a car dealership.” Makes me bristle with anger.

But so it is. It is easy to bomb a country as a way to address a conflict, but very difficult to use diplomacy to solve it. Left to itself, the world will end up in chaos. Civilization is difficult to develop and maintain.

Of immigrants and race

I finished reading an interesting book by a Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Titled “Americanah” it describes in vivid details the life of two fictional characters who grew up in Nigeria but spent time in US, and UK. What make it especially colorful are people and experiences they encounter in their journey.

We who grew up in India, also a developing country like Nigeria, can easily relate to what the author describes in the first part of the book, the life in the “old country.”

 

For example, a rich Nigerian woman tells one of the main characters of the book, Obinze, “You must send your child to the French school. If you want to disadvantage your child by sending to one of these schools with half-baked Nigerian teachers, then you only have yourself to blame.”

That reminded me of a conversation one of my father’s friends had with my parents. “You should send Ashok to this exclusive school (yes, we had one in the town where I grew up) whose headmaster is an Englishman. How can you send him to a Gujarati school, where all the common folks go?”  Thankfully my parents ignored him and I did not turn out to be too bad for the experience, just like Obinze.

The other main character of the book, Ifemelu, leaves Nigeria and arrives in US. She does encounter racism, as can be expected. However, as the story is set in the Northeast (New Jersey, Maryland, Massachusetts), this treatment is not overt. True, she has difficulty in finding a job, due to the covert racism, but at the same time, most of the white folks she encounters are nice to her, almost overcompensating in their attempts not to sound racist or uncaring rich.    

For Kimberly (a white upper-middle class woman), the poor were blameless. Poverty was a gleaming thing; she could not conceive of poor people being vicious or nasty because their poverty had canonized them, and the greatest saints were foreign poor.

In describing another encounter with upper-middle class white Americans; Ifemelu observed that Americans use the word “wonderful” too often. “In Tanzania, we had a wonderful tour guide. We are making donations to a wonderful charity in Malawi, a wonderful orphanage in Botswana, and a wonderful microfinance cooperative in Kenya.”

Just substitute India for all the African countries, and that would be the conversation I have had with so many people in this wonderful country.  I remember an instance when one of my friends, upon looking at picture of one of my aunts said that she looked so pretty. That was not the adjective I had ever heard in connection with that particular aunt. However, my friend was overcompensating and making sure that I would not think she co-relates color of the skin and prettiness.

One of the most interesting parts of the book describes Ifemelu’s interactions with the African Americans. When her Blog about the experience of being black in America is being discussed by a group of African Americans, one rather pompous character says, “You know Ifemelu can write that Blog because she is an African. She is writing from the outside. She does not really feel all the stuff she is writing about. It’s all quaint and curious to her. So she can write it and get all the accolades. If she were African American, she would just be labeled angry and be shunned.”

In my bachelor days, I had a number of friends from Nigeria, Ghana and the Cameroons. One of them had married an African American woman. I had always assumed that there was a common thread between them, both being black and of African heritage. How stupid I was. The marriage did not last long at all. My friend, just could not get along with his strong minded and independent wife, who was all American, and hardly African.

Ifemelu made the same mistake. When she did not participate in a college protest against an injustice suffered by a black security guard, her African American boy friend just could not understand. He accused her not merely about her laziness, her lack of zeal and conviction, but also about her Africanness; she was not sufficiently furious because she was an African, not African American.

I can imagine our children facing a similar (but actually reverse) situation when dealing with people from India, who would assume a certain level of Indianness in them that they do not have. That is a continuing story of the great melting pot that our country is.

This is a very worthwhile book to read on multiple levels. It makes you think more deeply about immigrants and race, and about developing and developed world. It also makes you aware of what it is like being black in this world.