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One of the accusations that I often hear nowadays is that a given person arguing for something is biased. Those who promote conspiracy theories use this very epithet against anyone who dares to criticize them, and likewise, those who dismiss conspiracy theory proponents argue that they are the ones who are biased. In the popular mind, a “bias” is a negative thing to have, and the condition of being biased is synonymous with not being able to know the truth. The “bias” label is particularly contemptuous when levied against a scientist. After all, scientists are in the business of discovering the truth about the way matter and energy behave in the world around us. How can scientists discover the truth if they are biased? In popular culture a biased scientist is as blind as a bat incapable of echolocation, and whatever science they do will not reflect reality. Let’s first address this issue by stating the obvious. We are all biased, and most of the time the biases we have are not something we have consciously chosen to have, but rather they are a consequence of the way the wiring of our brain has interacted with our particular life experience and the stimuli to which we are currently exposed. But being biased is not something that is necessarily negative. In fact, as it turns out, bias has a useful function! It allows us to simplify the complexity of our world in order to gain a measure of control over it. A bias allows us to quickly take action rather than be paralyzed by a multiplicity of seemingly equivalent alternatives. From this point of view, bias actually has a survival value and may have played a role in the successful evolution of our species. The downside of bias is, of course, that you will blind yourself to the truth. Thus, to avoid bias, some people suggest that we should keep an open mind. However, this suggestion, although well meaning, is misguided. If you keep your mind too open, people will dump a lot of trash into it. The proper way to deal with bias is not to keep an open mind. The proper way to address bias is to strike a balance; what I call “finding the Goldilocks zone”. This entails accepting that we are all biased, that we can’t help being biased, and that, in fact, a bit of bias can be a good thing, while at the same time taking steps to counter the excess bias in ourselves through thought and action.  Goldilocks Now let me tell you how scientists do this. But before I do that, let’s state that science has a healthy inbuilt bias. Science has a bias for established science. The majority of scientists believe that accepting something as true when it is false, is a greater evil than rejecting something as false when it is true. This is because established science has at least grasped some aspects of reality. If other scientists want to replace established science with a more complete description of reality, then the burden of proof is on them. This bias for established science is needed to protect science from error. Thus, you may ask: If scientists are biased for established science, how can they discover anything new? The answer is by using anti-bias protocols. For example, scientists will analyze or score the results of some experiments in a blind fashion. This involves the person doing the scoring or the analyses not knowing the identity of the different experimental groups. In clinical trials this involves the patients not knowing which treatments they received or even both the patients and the doctors not knowing which treatment is which (double blind protocol). Scientists will also seek to reproduce each other’s observations or experimental results. If an observation or an experimental result cannot be reproduced, then it will not gain traction. Finally, some funding agencies will devote a certain amount of their resources to funding scientists with unorthodox views to promote the debate of alternative views in a scientific field. But how can non-scientists counter their biases? First of all, you have to be exposed to all the facts. For example, if you listen only to conservative or liberal media, you will not learn about some issues or views. You need to listen to the other side. However, this does not mean that you have to force yourself to listen the conspiracy-laden drivel coming out of far right or far left media. Instead try to locate a moderate news source or a news source that leans slightly towards the opposite side of the political spectrum that you favor. The idea is not to open your mind to what these news outlets have to say, but rather to become aware of the issues they are covering, why they find them important, and what their arguments are. Avoid insulating yourself and living in an “echo chamber”. Second, try to identify a person from the other side who holds views different from yours and sit down to have a talk one day. But when I say “person”, I don’t mean a nutjob who spews far-out nonsense and will engage you in a shouting match. Choose a reasonable person. There are quite a number of these out there. A rule of thumb to choose a reasonable person is to look for someone who, despite disagreements, accepts that “the other side” has made valuable contributions and is necessary to the debate. Nothing beats discussing issues with an individual who disagrees with you but also respects you. And finally, learn to identify the characteristics of bias. Sweeping generalizations, innuendo, exaggerations, hearsay, judging the many by the actions of the few, the creation of strawmen, ignoring weaknesses in arguments, not seeing the forest for the trees, and attacking the person instead of the argument are all things that signal an emotional and irrational approach to issues that is indicative of a person who is biased and therefore unable to correctly grasp reality. Ask yourself if you are exhibiting these traits when you engage in arguments. Ask others who will tell you the truth if you are exhibiting these traits. So to wrap it up, a little bias is acceptable and even healthy, but too much bias can mess up your perception of reality. When it comes to bias, try to find the Goldilocks zone. The image “Goldilocks tastes the porridge” from the New York Public Library is used here under a Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication ("CCO 1.0 Dedication") license.
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3/29/2023 2020 Election Redux: My Opinion is as Valid as Yours! When Do We Declare Someone to Be Unreasonable?Read Now I have debated many conspiracy theorists on Twitter. In the majority of the cases the arguments they put forth are a mishmash of innuendo, hearsay, selective quoting of the evidence, exaggeration, misinformation, and ignorance. After some back and forth where I rebut their claims with evidence and facts, we reach a point where these individuals argue that in the end, it’s my opinion against theirs, and that I have my trusted sources and they have theirs. The implication is, of course, that both are equivalent. But when it comes to certain issues, nothing could be further from the truth. Take for example the notion that the 2020 election was fraudulent, and that Mr. Trump really won by a landslide. Although this may seem like a political issue that I should not be discussing in a science blog, I have already explained that the questions “Who won the election?” and “Was the election fraudulent?” are both scientific questions because they can be answered with evidence. Thus, in my exchanges with 2020 election conspiracists I present the facts: Out of 64 cases that Trump and his allies brought to federal courts, he lost 63. Conspiracists claim that most of these cases were dismissed on technical or procedural grounds without considering the merits of the cases, but this is not true. Only 20 of these cases were dismissed before hearing the merits, whereas 30 cases were dismissed after considering the merits of the case, and 14 were withdrawn by Trump and his backers before the hearing of the merits. In several of the cases the courts, which also included Trump-appointed judges, issued stinging rebukes of the unsupported claims of election fraud. A group of prominent conservatives has systematically reviewed the claims brought about by the Trump campaign and their allies in each of these lawsuits and found them to be unsupported by the evidence.
The Department of Justice led by Trump’s Attorney General, William Barr, found no evidence of election fraud. Neither did the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) of the Department of Homeland Security and other government agencies. Multiple audits and recounts of the results in swing states affirmed that Mr. Trump lost. A Michigan Republican state senator, Ed McBroom, led an 8 month investigation into the legitimacy of the Michigan election and found no evidence of fraud. A GOP-backed review of the Arizona election found that indeed Biden had won. Official examination of voter fraud claims in Georgia did not reveal any fraud of a magnitude to overturn the election. The Trump campaign employed a research firm to review voting data from six swing states, but the firm did not find anything that would have overturned the result of the 2020 election. Trump was told he lost by some of his inner circle of advisers, but he ignored them. There were no major problems with drop boxes for mailed ballots. The expansion of postal voting did not lead to widespread fraud. Mail-in-ballots are secure and widely used in the United States even before the 2020 election. There is no evidence that Biden received more than 8 million excess votes in the 2020 election. A scientific study analyzed statistical claims of alleged systematic voter fraud in the 2020 election, and found them to be unconvincing. The movie “2000 Mules” which posits that people aligned with Democrats were paid to illegally collect and drop ballot boxes in several swing states has been conclusively debunked. The type of affidavits claiming voter fraud presented by Trump and his allies to the courts were mostly hearsay, guesses, speculation, or ignorance of election procedures, and could not be taken as proof of voter fraud. Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, has been suspended from practicing law in New York for making false claims about the 2020 election. Another Trump layer, Jenna Ellis, was censured in Colorado for making false claims about the 2020 election. Trump’s lawyer, Sidney Powell, who is being sued by a voting machine company, Dominion, for claiming that the company stole the election from Trump, is arguing that “No Reasonable Person’ Would Believe Her Dominion Conspiracy Theories Were ‘Statements of Fact’.” The Dominion lawsuit has also uncovered that the talking heads and executives of the Fox News channel did not believe the election fraud claims of Trump and his allies, but nevertheless they kept giving them airtime to avoid losing viewers. Thus, all the people who relied on Fox News as a trusted information outlet for commentary on the election fraud issue were willfully deceived by individuals who did not believe that what they were communicating to them was true. But there is still a majority of Republicans who think that the election was stolen and that there is solid evidence for it. So far the evidence indicating that there was no fraud in the 2020 election of a scale that would alter its outcome is truly formidable. Nevertheless, election conspiracy advocates dismiss the investigations carried out by election officials, elected representatives, watchdog groups, the media, and government agencies as biased or indecisive, and they dismiss the court case results as not being based on merits. They also label any Republicans involved (many of whom voted for Trump) “RINOS” (Republicans In Name Only), while claiming that others are not to be trusted because they are part of the “Deep State”, part of the “fake news” media, etc. There is a criterion to decide whether someone is acting reasonably or not. This involves asking them, “What evidence would change your mind?” If the person cannot answer this question and commit to changing their mind if the evidence is produced, then we can assume that this person is being unreasonable. The opinion of an unreasonable person is not equivalent to that of a reasonable one, and this is not a trivial point. When unreasonable persons act and/or sway others to act based on falsehoods, this can lead to dire consequences such as the storming of the Capitol on January 6th 2021 by a mob enraged over an election that was never stolen. Being reasonable matters. Image by El Sun from Pixabay is free to use for commercial and non-commercial purposes. 1/29/2021 The Myth of the Unprejudiced Scientist and the Three Levels of Protection Against BiasRead Now As modern science was emerging during the 18th and 19th centuries, ideas regarding how science should be performed also began to take shape. One particular idea posited that scientists subject theories to test, but do not allow their biases to get in the way. Real scientists, it was argued, are unprejudiced, and rather than try to prove theories right or wrong, they merely seek the truth based on experiment and observation. According to this notion, real scientists don’t have preconceptions, and they don’t hide, ignore, or disavow evidence that does not fit their own views. Real scientists go where the evidence takes them. Unfortunately, the romantic notion that real scientists operate free of bias proved to be dead wrong. Scientists, even “real scientists”, are human beings, and like all human beings they have biases that influence what they do and how they do it. While a minority of scientists does engage in outright fraud, even honest scientists who claim they are only interested in the truth can unconsciously bias the results of their experiments and observations to support their ideas. In past posts I have already provided notable historical examples of how scientists fooled themselves into believing they had discovered something that wasn’t real such as the cases of the physicist René Blondot, who thought he had discovered a new form of radiation, or the astronomer Percival Lowell who thought he had discovered irrigation channels on Mars.
It is in part because of the above realization, that scientists developed several methodologies to exclude bias and limit the number of possible explanations for the results of experiments and observations such as the use of controls, placebos, and blind and double-blind experimental protocols. This is the first level of protection against bias. Today the use of these procedures in research is pretty much required if scientists expect their ideas to be taken seriously. However, while nowadays scientists use and report using the procedures described above when applicable, the proper implementation of these procedures is still up to the individual scientists, which can lead to biases. This is where the second level of protection against bias comes into play. Scientists try to reproduce each other’s work and build upon the findings of others. If a given scientist reports an important finding, but no one can reproduce it, then the finding is not accepted. But even with these safeguards, there is still a more subtle possible level of bias in scientific research that does not involve unconscious biases or sloppy research procedures carried out by one or a several scientists. This is bias that may occur when all the scientists involved in a field of research accept a certain set of ideas or procedures and exclude other scientists that think or perform research differently. Notice that above I used the words “possible” and “may”. The development of a scientific consensus within the context of a well-developed scientific theory always leads to a unification of the ideas and theories in a given field of science. So far from bias, this unification of ideas may just indicate that science has advanced. But in general, and especially early on in the development of a scientific field, science is best served not when researchers agree with each other but when they disagree. So the third level of protection against bias that keeps science true occurs when researchers disagree and try to prove each other to be wrong. In fact, some funding agencies may even purposefully support scientists that hold views that are contrary to those accepted in a field of research. The theory is that this will lead to spirited debates, new ways of looking at things, and a more thorough evaluation of the thinking and research methods employed by scientists. However, disagreements among scientists do have a downside that is often not appreciated. While science may benefit when in addition to Scientist A, there is a Scientist B researching the exact same thing who disagrees with the ideas and theories of Scientist A, science may not necessarily benefit when Scientist A and B research something and A thinks that B is wrong and doesn’t have the slightest idea of what he/she is doing, while B thinks A is an idiot who doesn’t understand “real science”. There are a number of examples of long-running feuds in science between individual scientists or even whole groups of scientists. In these feuds, the acrimony can become so great that the process of science degenerates into dismissal of valid evidence, screaming matches, insults, and even playing politics to derail the careers of opponents. But, of course, the problem I have described above is nothing more than the human condition and in this sense science is not unique. Every activity where humans are involved has to deal with bias, but at least in science we can recognize we are biased and implement the three levels of protection against this bias. It may be imperfect, it may be messy, it may not always work, but, being human, that’s the best we can do. Image from Alpha Stock Images by Nick Youngson used here under an Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0) license. 1/23/2021 Election 2020 – In the Absence of Safeguards, How Do We Distinguish Fantasy From Reality? A Scientist’s PerspectiveRead Now Elections are normally not considered a scientific topic. However, when elections take place many scientific questions can be formulated about their outcome. For example, “Which candidate obtained the majority of the votes in a given state or in the overall election?” is a scientific question, as it can be answered by counting the votes. Additionally, and more relevantly to the 2020 election, questions about the integrity of the election can also be formulated as scientific questions. However, and this is the key, BEFORE you ask questions and begin searching for evidence that fraud has taken place, you have to define what would constitute “fraud” (as opposed to mere machine glitches or human error), how said fraud would be detected and investigated, and how much fraud has to be present to label the election as “compromised”. Only then can meaningful questions be asked, evidence procured, and valid conclusions reached. Why is this? Scientists have known from decades of research into the human mind that people with a strong interest in finding evidence for something will find it even if the evidence is not there. Human psychology is such that even people whose intent is honest will filter reality and find patterns where there are none to be found. This is a process akin to finding shapes in the clouds. Defining a priori what constitutes fraud, what should be considered valid evidence for fraud, and how much of it would have to be present to declare the election to have been compromised is an elemental level of protection against human bias. As far as I can tell, Mr. Trump and his team did not do this. Rather they seem to have cast as wide a net as possible which risks ending up with a trove of false positives.
Another level of protection against bias is to recognize that the people best suited to assess whether there is fraud in the election are not those who WANT to find it. This is a very elemental concept in science which has led to the introduction of many controls in the research process. One possible way to control this source of bias is to rely on evaluations of the evidence and the election conducted by people who don’t share your biases, or at least by people committed to place doing their job and following the law above everything else. If enough of these people look at any evidence of fraud presented to them, or assess the procedures followed in the elections and still reach the conclusion that the election was not compromised, then that is an indication that this was indeed the case. Based on the foregoing, agencies such as the Department of Justice and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, along with several dozen courts and fact checkers, plus multiple election officials, state attorney generals, and governors (many of them pro-Trump Republicans) have not found convincing evidence of foreign or domestic interference in the election, or of fraud at a level that would overturn the results of the election. These assessments mentioned above involving many individuals of different political persuasions as well as different courts and agencies should have given Mr. Trump confidence that the election results were fair. Instead, Mr. Trump and his team disqualified these assessments, claiming that the people involved at best were indifferent or incompetent, or at worst had nefarious ulterior motives, and may have even coordinated with each other forming part of a massive conspiracy also involving foreign actors. Over the past few years, I have exchanged many arguments with what I call irrational skeptics. These are people that defend various conspiracy theories ranging from global warming, 911, and COVID-19 severity deniers to antivaccination advocates, creationists, and chemtrail and flat Earth proponents. All these people share the common trait that they are immune to evidence against their ideas, and that any attempt to discredit their ideas will be considered further proof of the existence of a conspiracy. In this sense, I do not see any difference between these irrational skeptics and Mr. Trump and those that support his election fraud claims. Of course, I am not naïve. I know full well that there may be political and other types of motivations behind the claims of the Trump campaign that have nothing to do with a desire to find the truth. But the intention of this post is not to speculate about motivations. My goal is just to address the elections from a scientific perspective. And in that vein, I want to propose a thought experiment. I want you to consider what would have happened if Mr. Biden had contested the results of some of the states he lost employing exactly the same methods and arguments used by Mr. Trump and his team. Suppose that Mr. Biden had selected a team of “colorful” lawyers to find voter fraud. Mr. Biden’s team could have pointed to the fact that Biden was ahead in early voting in some states such as North Carolina but that later this trend reversed, as an indication that something ”strange” happened. They could have gathered affidavits from people that thought they had witnessed something suspicious or irregular going on. They could have interpreted every glitch in the system or any clerical error in the worst possible light. They could have interpreted videos of election workers going about their jobs to suggest irregularities and edited portions of the videos in suggestive ways to make their case. They could have relied on testimonials of selected “experts” that exaggerated their credentials. They could have put forward statistical analyses of voting data based on questionable assumptions. They could have alleged that their observers were not allowed enough access to the vote counting process. They could have even named their lawsuit the “Medusa” lawsuit (Kraken/Medusa - get it?). My question then is: If Mr. Biden and his lawyers had searched for evidence of voter fraud in some of the states he lost employing these sloppy or questionable procedures, would they have “found” evidence of voter fraud of a magnitude and nature similar to that found by Mr. Trump’s lawyers in other states? The point of this exercise is to consider whether, in the absence of safeguards against human bias, the normal impressions people derive from their assessment of reality, coupled to the glitches and mistakes present in any election, can be spun to construct a narrative of fraud. I will leave it up to you to answer this question. But if your answer is “Yes”, then it should be obvious that unless rigorous and well-defined procedures are employed to analyze the integrity of a process such as elections, it is impossible to distinguish fantasy from reality. Scientists know this to be true for science which is why they use these procedures. Assuming there is an honest interest in finding the truth, why can’t we accept the same procedures are necessary for evaluating the integrity of elections? And if we accept this is the case, why can’t we accept that any investigation that was carried out without following these procedures is not trustworthy and its premises are questionable? Election 2020 image by conolan from Pixabay is in the public domain. |
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