Thought for the day

I feel like I should keep track of these little ideas somehow. This one's relevant, something I've often seen in myself and others:

Confusion is the first step in learning.

When we're confronted with something we've never seen before, we may not see it at all.  Or we may see it, but ignore it. Or misinterpret it with our old set of beliefs.

When you do recognize a new phenomenon or fact as an unknown, you feel confused and try to make sense of it. Let's say someone speaks to you in a language you don't know. Are they babbling nonsense? Or is it your lack of knowledge?

People don't like to feel confused. It signals a lack of control. But confusion is your friend.

Confusion is your mind's way of telling you it's time to learn something.

The question is, how do you deal with it? Do you try to explore this new thing? Work hard to make sense of it? Or do you dismiss it, because it doesn't match what you already believe or understand? Or do you work hard to force it, to make it appear to match your previous beliefs? Do you argue it out of existence?

It's easy to imagine someone with a rigid need to feel control, dismissing the foreign language as nonsense.

But what if it's important, just in a form you don't understand?  By demanding the world conform to you, you miss that information, even if it's a loud, shouted warning that your house is on fire.

The more you ignore those confusing facts the further you move from reality. Confirmation bias is the psychological term for being unable to see clearly when a fact doesn't fit your belief or theory. Here's an example. Let's say you're looking at a friend's Facebook page, and you notice she stopped posting in public at a given time. Your belief might be: no public posting means she's not at her computer any more.

As every teenager knows, there's more to a computer than Facebook. Unless you have her computer, you can't really know whether she went offline.

You can't see whether she was on a different Web site, or using other software on her computer after that last post. But the longer you go on convincing yourself she wasn't, the deeper that belief becomes, until you can't be objective any more. You've built a whole theory of her evening based on that one moment in time. But it's wrong.

It's not logical or helpful to assume she stopped using the computer just because she didn't post again. And even less logical to draw larger conclusions, but you have. And you've announced them to the world. Your own conclusion, based on the only fact you have at hand, becomes a stumbling block to finding the truth. The more you crave the appearance of control/mastery, the harder you will work to believe your presumption. It blinds you to a degree.

And now you've put your name behind that theory, so you can't easily admit you're wrong. Say you've accused an innocent person of something horrible, based on that tiny, tiny fact. And everything that happens, and everything you hear seems to further prove you are right. You've veered off reality because you can't admit you're wrong, you don't know enough, you can't think clearly. You're not objective. You want to be right. And that in itself has caused you to jump to the wrong conclusion. And now you're trapped by it.

And even worse if you don't sort facts from gossip. We all know that the more often something is repeated, the more it seems to be a fact. So the more people you have offering biased information the harder it is to wade through it to reality. Soon, an imagined event becomes very real in your mind. You think you remember someone saying something that seems to fit in your theory. So that becomes a fact too. If it doesn't fit, then it's just someone making things up. Your theory becomes more real to you than reality. You know with all your heart and soul that you are right. And everything in the world seems to tilt toward your being right.

But there are tests, even if you can't see her computer. You can still examine the actions and comments of sources who do have access. A friend of hers, who chatted with her on AIM or Google Plus later that night; an IT professional who can see her activity log and what programs she was using. Other friends who texted with her, talked on the phone, or on Skype. There can be any number of sources and activities that inform or contradict your first assumption.

Let's say you distrust some first-hand sources, but others are reliable. You can use all their reactions, statements, behaviors,  and decisions as a way of determining reality, much the same way you can tell whether another person is behind a tree when all you see is their shadow. The more first-hand sources you have, the more likely you are to get a close approximation of what happened after that last FB post.

Or you can choose to stick with your previous belief, and ignore any facts to the contrary.

Let say some sources say, "she was working on a project on her computer" or "she was doing something but it wasn't homework" or "we have verified his statements are true" -- you might dismiss it as not matching your lone Facebook fact, as unreliable information. But when a reliable source with full professional access to her computer,  and good reason to examine her activity closely, takes the trouble to say your "unreliable" sources are being truthful based on conclusive evidence, what are your choices?

Your choices are: A. stick to your belief and pursue unreality or B. try to figure out why the reliable source doesn't agree with your belief.

Is the reliable source now unreliable if they don't confirm your beliefs?
Do you tear apart their statements trying to find an interpretation that makes it seem they're speaking in code, in secret agreement with you?
Do you assume they're agents of the unreliable source now? Is there some vast conspiracy now, some coverup that encompasses every first-hand source?

As the balance of statements and behaviors from various first-hand sources continue to pile up against you, do you dismiss it all, ignore their actions and statements? Do you look for loopholes or more complicated scenarios your theory might fit into, or accept the simple fact: if there were evidence that confirmed your belief, it would have been acted on.

The more you fight that possibility, the further you go in the wrong direction. Next thing you know, you've wasted days, months, years, trying to support an untrue belief.