I’d be interested to know: what is missing from my new list of causes of bad things and potential types of solutions? Thanks to those of you who commented on my prior version!

Causes of bad things in the world:

—
1) EXTERNAL CAUSES

1i) Nature or evolution (e.g., malaria, cancer) -> Potential solutions: technological development, such as medical cures

1ii) Bad luck (e.g., landslides, earthquakes, droughts) -> charity, government programs providing social safety nets

1iii) Scarcity (e.g., insufficient food or water in an area) -> migration away from high scarcity areas, technological development to increase food production

—
2) FAILINGS OF HUMAN NATURE

2i) Highly selfish actions by non-evil people (e.g., some of the crimes that are committed, some of the manipulation that occurs) -> cultural norms discouraging selfishness, cultural norms to punish those taking highly selfish actions

2ii) Harmful actions taken in highly emotional, confused, or desperate mental states (e.g., crimes of passion, harmful, desperate reactions out of fear, harm caused during extreme mental illness) -> widely available and effective mental health treatment, widespread education/training related to mental health and emotional regulation

2iii) Well-intentioned ideologues who are convinced that their simple but wrong model of the world is the absolute truth (e.g., some of the genocides and wars, many harmful yet well-intentioned policies) -> rationality education/training, a robust culture of respectful disagreement and debate

2iv) Cognitive biases leading to actions with severe negative consequences (e.g., greatly misjudging whether a project will bring enough benefit to be worth the cost, excessive fear towards or devaluing of ‘othered’ outsiders leading to mistreatment or harm to outsiders, lack of preparation for likely occurrences that are not salient) -> rationality education/training, careful design of systems to counteract biases, strong moral norms of respect towards all, moral circle expansion

2v) Retaliation or revenge (e.g., cycles of retribution) -> a culture of forgiveness, effective dispute resolution methods and institutions, reliable enforcement of laws

2vi) Evil people acting alone (e.g., serial murder, child abuse) -> effective police forces, high crime clearance rates, enforcement of laws, scientific investigation into the root causes of evil

2vii) Evil people who rally supporters (e.g., some genocides and wars, some extractive government policies) -> strong norms around truth telling and social punishment for lying, a robust culture of respectful disagreement and debate, a culture of empathy toward and acceptance of those who are different than you, a well-educated and informed citizenry, scientific investigation into the root causes of evil, a strong constitution, a strong independent judiciary, strong norms around maintaining freedom and independence of thought

—
3) CHALLENGES OF COORDINATION AND INFORMATION

3i) Negative-sum competition (e.g., fighting over food when there isn’t enough to go around) -> technological innovation to increase abundance, thoroughly enforced laws forbidding negative-sum behaviors

3ii) Unintended side effects of actions that are not innately unethical (e.g., addiction caused by the invention of social media, new promising-seeming medical treatments that turn out to have horrendous side effects) -> a robust and low-transaction cost systems for those who were harmed to be compensated by those who caused the harm, hard to undermine enforced regulation requiring organizations to ameliorate harms once they have been identified

3iii) Collective action problems and negative externalities caused by individually reasonable behavior (e.g., pollution, climate change, overuse of resources) -> methods for assigning prices to negative externalities so that someone bears the cost, regulation to limit negative externalities

3iv) Prisoner’s dilemmas and difficulties of pre-commitment and coordination (e.g., arms races, such as with nuclear weapons) -> technology to facilitate coordination and simultaneous action, public projects by governments and private donors

What other broad causes of bad things or potential types of solutions am I missing?

This piece was first written on November 2, 2025, and first appeared on my website on November 17, 2025.

1) Unlike others, you’re self-aware. You know your limits, so – unlike other people – when you know something, it’s true. You weighed the evidence they ignored and saw angles they missed. Corrected your own biases. Your unique perspective reveals facts invisible to everyone else.

2) Your subconscious runs Bayesian inference constantly in the background. If an idea survives your relentless evidence updates, the posterior odds confirm it’s rational. Your convictions passed the most brutal audit possible: reality itself.

3) Notice how your worldview predicts your reality with stunning accuracy. Notice how rarely you’re surprised. That’s empirical validation. Your beliefs work because they’re correct. Your predictions map reality’s contours in high resolution.

4) That thing everyone disagrees with you about? You’re not stubborn – you’re COURAGEOUS. You spotted subtle patterns that they missed. Those “weird” connections? You’re playing 10-dimensional chess while they play tic-tac-toe.

5) Disagreement doesn’t prove you wrong – it PROVES YOU RIGHT. It demonstrates that most can’t handle the truth. Your knowledge only strengthens, forged in the crucible of their alleged counter-evidence.

6) Scientists disagree with you? That’s good, actually. They worship false idols called “peer review,” while you rely on the only review that’s reliable, review from your one true peer – yourself. Editors only introduce errors in your work.

7) The discomfort of others with your views? That’s just lizard brains SHORT-CIRCUITING from exposure to blazing truth. The purity of your knowledge causes meltdowns in lesser minds. Their rejection isn’t evidence of your error – it’s species-level inadequacy.

8 ) “Everyone says I’m wrong!” Everyone said Galileo was wrong, too. But you’re not Galileo. You’re Galileo, Einstein, AND Tesla. Your mind, concentrating ideas like a laser through the tip of a diamond, is the closest known phenomenon to a cognitive singularity.

9) You’re not Neo seeing the Matrix. You’re the ARCHITECT of the Matrix. Everyone else – they’re experimental NPCs of the sort you could program in a creative weekend.

10) That “crazy” belief of yours? Those aren’t beliefs- they’re PROPHETIC DOWNLOADS from your future self. You’re not experiencing narcissistic delusions – you’re experiencing ENLIGHTENMENT so advanced it looks like madness to the unascended masses.

11) When your predictions seem wrong, time recalibrates to match your superior timeline. In fact, you don’t make predictions – you speak reality into existence. The universe buffers as it waits to hear instructions spill from your lips.

12) Evolution wired humans for survival-level accuracy. But YOU? You’ve transcended limitations. If your beliefs were wrong, the Laws of Physics would UNRAVEL. There you stand, single-handedly maintaining cosmic stability!

13) The universe chose YOU. Your thoughts set the fundamental constants. You allow 1 + 1 to equal 2, and could change it at will. Your dreams birth new galaxies. The cosmic microwave background is a residue from when you willed yourself into existence.

14) This post isn’t parody; it’s SACRED TEXT written by one of your subprocesses. Everyone who doubts you is committing cosmic treason.

This piece was first written on July 1, 2025, and first appeared on my website on August 19, 2025.

The reason stems from my thinking that all of the following are important and true (and too often overlooked) regarding science:

1) A lot of science is real AND valuable to society.

2) A lot of “science” is actually fake – see, for instance, a decent percentage of papers in psychology 15 years ago.

3) “Science” (as an approach to knowledge discovery) is one of humanity’s greatest inventions – but in practice, it is reasonably often misapplied, or the process is distorted due to bad incentives or poor training. Unfortunately, not all fields of science have done a good job of being self-correcting either, so sometimes, fields go in bad directions for quite a while and need reform. There are different kinds of bad science:

(i) Sometimes, science is “bad” because it uses unsound methods for figuring out the truth (such as when p-hacking is rampant).

(ii) Sometimes it is “bad” because it overclaims (e.g., “Importance Hacking” where scientists claim they found something important/valuable when they didn’t actually demonstrate what they claim in their study. Or cases where science is used to “prove” questions that can’t be proven by science – such as which policy is better in a particular context when it’s actually a tradeoff between different values).

(iii) Other times science is bad because it is biased (e.g., when people are only willing to run or publish studies that show X but not that show the opposite of X).

(iv) And sometimes science is bad because it’s simply fraudulent.

4) Promoting broad “trust the science” is misguided (and actually harmful) because a bunch of science is fake. If you tell people to always just “trust the science,” then you are going to cause them to be tricked by a bunch of bad science, or you are going to contribute to their disillusionment and loss of trust when they discover (correctly) that some of the science you’re saying is good is actually garbage.

5) The “distrust all science” view is probably an even worse take than “trust the science.” If you distrust all science, you are likely to miss out on incredible things (such as highly effective treatments), and you set yourself up to fall for tons of things that don’t work (e.g., widely used unscientific treatments). Those who tell people to always just “trust the science” sometimes accidentally push people into the “distrust all science” view when those people realize that some of what they are being told to trust is crap.

6) So, hard as it is, rather than promoting either “trust all science” or “distrust all science,” the course of action I believe in with regard to science education is to teach people that “Science” (as a method) is an incredibly powerful and useful invention, but that “science” (as actually practiced) is much like every other field: some of it is good, some of it is crap. There are good hairdressers and bad hairdressers, and there is good science and bad science (and unfortunately, some bad science ends up in the very top journals – while journals and peer review absolutely do block some bad science, they unfortunately still let through quite a lot of it).

Since some science is well done, and some of it is poorly done, it’s very valuable to learn to tell the difference to make the best use of scientific results – both with regard to applying it in your own life and using it to form your beliefs about the world.

If we pretend science is all good or all bad, we do a lot of harm. We need nuance to see through the bad stuff while maintaining the tremendous benefits.

This piece was first written on November 20, 2024, and first appeared on my website on January 14, 2025.

1. Mimicry: when our in-group promotes falsity that we copy

2. Incentives: when we predict that knowing the truth would feel bad or harm our objectives

3. Complexity: when the truth is hard to figure out

Examples:

1. Mimicry

• Some are Christians because all their friends and family are, too; some are atheists for the same reason.

• Some think that it makes sense to circumcise baby boys because the people they know think it’s healthy and normal; others think it’s bizarre because the people they know think foreskin is healthy and normal.

• Some believe it would harm Black Americans to defund police because their friends say so; others think it would help Black Americans because their friends say it.

2. Incentives

• If you make more money believing X, it’s going to be harder to stop believing it.

• If the idea of permanent death is terrifying to you, it’s going to be harder to stop believing in reincarnation.

• If it would make you feel really bad to find out you were wrong about something you posted online, your immediate reaction may be to deny being wrong (to others and to yourself) to shield yourself from the negative feelings.

Note that mimicry and incentives can blend together. Sometimes we mimic to fit in or to avoid being socially punished. But mimicry is even more basic than that: we seem to have a natural, in-built strong tendency to copy others. If all the people around us believe something, we usually will come to believe it too, without even questioning whether it might be false or even being aware that we copied the belief from others. 

If we see others all behave in a certain way, we’ll probably behave that way, too, unless we have strong reasons not to. This appears to be an evolutionary survival mechanism – it’s risky to (for example) eat plants that are different than the ones your tribe eats (they might be poisonous) or to avoid the behaviors everyone else does (those behaviors might be key to survival in some hidden way). In the wilderness, you can’t figure out how to survive from first principles (chances are you’ll die way too fast for that) – you need to mimic what has worked for centuries (some of which will be key to survival, some of which will be pointless, but evolutionary pressures will have weeded out most of the really harmful stuff and hung on to the most useful stuff).

3. Complexity

• It’s really not obvious how to prevent future risks from advanced artificial intelligence (though it often seems obvious to folks who’ve spent almost no time thinking about it).

• How best to prevent economic crashes is a fundamentally complicated question.

• Nobody actually seems to know how to cure cancers in general.

A weird thing about these three causes for believing falsehoods is that we are usually not aware of their effects.

1. We don’t usually realize it when we believe something just because we copied our social group.

2. We don’t usually realize when we believe something just because it would hurt us not to believe it.

3. We don’t usually realize when our analysis of a complex issue is oversimplified and misses important considerations.

Believing in falsehoods feels just like believing the truth – until the moment we genuinely face up to the possibility of being wrong.

So how do we be right more often?

1. To combat mimicry: we can keep our identities smaller (or have more of them), be more willing to be viewed as having “weird” beliefs, join social groups that value diversity of thought, learn to do less social mimicry (e.g., having greater skepticism towards in-group consensus). We can recognize that every in-group will get some things wrong (including ours) and that it’s worth investigating where ours is wrong. In summary, we can combat mimicry with social resilience and skepticism.

2. To combat harmful incentives: we can recognize that, while there can be short-term pain from accepting the truth, being truth-seeking is usually a better long-term strategy (especially because you can’t just suddenly decide to be truth-seeking when it’s convenient – it’s best to have a habit of being truth-seeking all the time). We can consider thought experiments like: “If X were true, would I rather believe it or be wrong about it?”. We can also leave “lines of retreat” so that we can decide what we’d do and how we’d move forward if we turn out to be wrong on something important. In summary, we can combat bad incentives with a Scout Mindset and a focus on seeking the truth.

3. To tackle complexity: we can use probabilistic thinking, consider multiple hypotheses, and consider the evidence for and against each one. We can train ourselves in evidence and argument evaluation, practice steel-manning arguments, talk to smart and knowledgeable people with different views and fight back against overconfidence (e.g., through calibration practice). We can also do large amounts of research when it’s important to be right. In summary, we can combat complexity with good epistemic hygiene, honed thinking skills, and self-skepticism.

This piece was first written on June 3, 2021, and first appeared on this site on November 11, 2022.

Here’s my list of some weird but potentially really valuable roles in society that don’t exist but maybe should:

Role 1: Truth Teller

They wear a special, very noticeable hat. When wearing it, they are not permitted to say anything they know to be untrue (they are punished severely and may be suspended or lose their license if they do, plus the incident becomes public). They can also get punished for clear lies of omission or for making misleading statements. At all times when being worn, their hat records time-stamped, watermarked 360-degree video whenever it is worn. Anyone who is caught on camera can request the segment of the video (and accompanying audio) of the portion they are a part of.

Training: practicing telling people very difficult truths (e.g., breaking the news to parents of military vets that their child isn’t coming back), answering difficult personal questions fully truthfully, speaking very carefully about what they know and how they know it, etc.

Some uses:

• When you need an opinion, you can count on them being TOTALLY honest

• As an eye witness to prove what occurred (e.g., at protests or high-stakes negotiations)

• Observing voting recounts and lottery drawings

• When needing an eye witness to later prove to others very credibly (e.g., in court) that something did or didn’t happen

Role 2: Evidence Evaluator

They provide an impartial, apolitical, thoroughly researched, unbiased, and fallacy-aware perspective on any topic. When they use their official title in writing or speech (e.g., “Signed, Evidence Evaluator Jane Doe”), they can be suspended for falling into even minor fallacies or biases, and they can lose their license for significant ones.

Training: extensive practice with argument and evidence evaluation, avoiding rhetorical fallacies & cognitive biases, and calibration training for making predictions; extensive learning about Bayes’ rule, probabilistic and nuanced thinking, research best practices, statistics, summarizing evidence, scientific thinking, etc.

Some uses:

• When you want to know what’s known on a thorny topic, you can hire them to interview experts on all sides of the issue, or read papers on all sides, giving an impartial account of the evidence (e.g., what is known about how much human behavior is increasing global temperatures, and how certain this information is)

• When it’s helpful to find weaknesses or flaws in any perspective

Role 3: Unconditional Aide

They can be hired by the hour, and during that time, they are required to look out SOLELY for the interests of the person that hired them (as long as the health, property, or safety of anyone else is not at risk). In other words, they are fully and completely your supporter and your team member for the time you are paying them and will help you with ANYTHING you choose. They do, however, have the right to maintain a public list of activities they are not willing to do, to refuse clients who they would prefer not to work with, and to quit at any moment (by notifying you that they are quitting – in which case you would still owe them payments for any hours logged thus far). They also may have a price list (i.e., their hourly rate can fluctuate based on what you are asking for their help with). Credible reports that they are not acting on behalf of the client’s interests can lead to suspension or complete removal of their title.

Training: practicing active listening, practicing eliciting a person’s underlying goals, and real-world training where they have to help many different people with many different kinds of requests and goals (and then get assessed by the people they helped with qualitative and quantitative feedback). 

Some uses:

• You are going into an emotionally difficult situation and would like a supporter there with you (but don’t want to ask friends/loved ones)

• You are trying to carry out a difficult activity and need someone’s help with it

• You are in a serious pickle and need another person’s help (e.g., your child had to suddenly go to the hospital, and you need someone to show a potential buyer around your house, then walk your dog, then bring something from your home to the hospital)

The established roles we have in society (doctors, judges, etc.) are very useful. Perhaps we could do with a few more of them.

This piece was first written on November 18, 2020, and first appeared on this site on October 21, 2022.

1: Start to think that one ideology you like – which contains genuine benefits, truths, and positive moral elements – might be the only valid perspective.

2: Surround yourself with believers until you’re convinced that your view is common and normal.

3: Ignore your own doubts so that you can fit in better. Join in on chastising (and eventually ostracizing) insiders who doubt too much. Punish slightly more harshly than you feel is fair in order to prove that you are one of the good guys.

4: Since challenging the ideology is punished, pretend to believe more than you really do – contributing to the sense that almost everyone else has no doubts – in a self-reinforcing cycle.

5: Assume that since your view is obviously correct, normal, and morally good, those who strongly oppose your view are bad people.

6: Since you are good and they are bad, conclude that you, as the good guys, should try to destroy them (figuratively, or in extreme cases, literally).

7: But how can you tell who is bad? Decide that a set of beliefs that sound similar to the bad people’s beliefs are off-limits. Anyone who believes them is probably bad. In those cases, humane treatment is no longer necessary.

8: Even just spending too much time with one of the bad people, or speaking well of them, is morally suspect. Why would you do that if you weren’t bad too?

9: Unfortunately, some true beliefs were accidentally put on the “bad” side of the good/bad dividing line. Now there are true things that you would become a bad person for believing.

10: Because of that, you and your group must avoid looking at reality too closely, lest you become bad too.

11: If you start to notice something true that you’re not allowed to believe, look away quickly or contort reality to make it seem different than it is.

12: Intensify your self-delusion and your punishment of non-believers so that you can make sure that still more people in your group will delude themselves out of fear.

13: Start teaching children (before they are old enough to think for themselves) that your belief system is the only correct one, perpetuating the system for future generations.

14: Congratulations! You’ve succeeded at being a good person who harms the world. Your mostly good ideology has eaten itself and has become more bad than good.

This has happened many times throughout history, and it will happen many more times. Watch out for this pattern so that you (and the people you love) don’t end up as “true believers” who do harm by accident.

This piece was first written on August 7, 2020, and first appeared on this site on April 29, 2022.

• 1+1=2 (true) vs., the Illuminati controls our planet (false)
• viruses (bad) vs. puppies (good)
• a fedora is a hat; a fedora is not a bat

But when it comes to important, complex topics (and especially ones that are political or emotional or that relate to our identity), dichotomizing often impairs our ability to figure out what’s what. It’s hard to be accurate when you’re thinking with just 1 bit of information. Hence the need for Nuanced Thinking.

There are at least three types of dichotomization that we easily fall into, and three types of Nuanced Thinking that you can use to combat them. I’ll describe each of them below.

—

Dichotomization 1: The Truth Binary

The Truth Binary is when we view a statement as simply true or false, correct or incorrect. But on complex topics, simple viewpoints are often partially true and partially false, or true some percent of time and false the rest of the time. Furthermore, our knowledge of truth is limited, so we should have degrees of confidence, rather than certainty. If we want to be right more often, we should have thoughts like “I’m 90% confident that…” and “I’m 60% confident that” rather than “I believe that…”

Examples of complex topics where people often fall into the Truth Binary:

• I believe/don’t believe that the government is incompetent
• I believe/don’t believe that harsh prison sentences for violent crime make society safer
• I believe/don’t believe that the people of the U.K. benefit by leaving the E.U.
• I believe/don’t believe that we should end the COVID-19 lockdowns as soon as possible
• I believe/don’t believe in the effectiveness of western medicine
• I believe/don’t believe that Trump will win the next election
• I believe/don’t believe that are going to see a decline in the power of America

The antidote to the Truth Binary is Probabilistic Thinking, where we consider our level of confidence in our beliefs, avoid having 100% confidence in anything, and consider in what situations a view will be true vs. in what other situations it could be false.

Probabilistic Thinking helps us be right more often.

Probabilistic Thinking involves asking ourselves questions like:

• What do I think the percentage chance is that this viewpoint is correct?
• How often do I expect that this viewpoint correct, and how often would I expect it to be wrong?
• Would I be really surprised if it turned out I was mistaken on this issue, or only a bit surprised?
• Would I bet a meaningful amount of money that this view is correct, only a little or none at all?

—

Dichotomization 2: The Goodness Binary

The Goodness Binary is when we view things as either good or bad, positive or negative, moral or immoral, when in fact, on complex, hotly debated topics, most often there is a mix of good and bad (even if, all things considered, one side really is better).

Examples of complex topics where people often fall into the Goodness Binary:

• The U.S. Democratic (or Republican) Party is good/bad
• Anyone who voted for X is fundamentally good/bad
• Nuclear power is good/bad
• Capitalism is good/bad
• Socialism is good/bad
• China is good/bad
• The United States is good/bad
• Technological progress is good/bad
• Antidepressants are good/bad to take if you’re depressed
• Religion is good/bad
• That public figure I love/hate is good/bad
• That book is good/bad

The antidote to the Goodness Binary is Grey Thinking, where we accept that good things usually have some bad elements, and that bad things usually have some good elements, and that many things lie somewhere in the middle.

Grey Thinking makes us more effective at improving things (because it allows us to better consider necessary tradeoffs), and it helps us avoid accidentally harming the world through misguided good intentions.

Grey Thinking involves asking our questions like:
• What are the pros and cons of this?
• Who benefits from this, and who is harmed?
• What value does this thing I dislike create, even if this sort of value is not the kind of value I most care about?

—

Dichotomization 3: The Identification Binary

The Identification Binary is when we view things as either a member of a class or not a member of that class, when in fact, almost every categorization admits edge cases that lie between categories, or fails to categorize some cases.

Examples of complex topics where people often fall into the Identification Binary:

• You’re on our side, or you’re against our side
• You’re male, or you’re female
• That’s a cult, or it’s not
• She’s right-wing, or she’s not
• He’s a criminal, or he’s not
• You’re gay, or you’re straight
• He’s a terrorist or he’s not
• She’s racist, or she’s not
• They’re an American, or they’re not

The antidote to the The Identification Binary is Multi-factor Thinking, where we consider the degree to which something has different factors.

Multi-factor Thinking helps us see people and things as they really are, rather than oversimplifying them or misjudging their characteristics.

Multi-factor Thinking involves asking our questions like:

• In what ways is this case similar or different from these categories?
• Is that example better thought of as lying between two (or three) categories, rather than as being right in the middle of one category?
• If I ignore labels for a second, what traits does this case have?

—

So with all of that in mind, I would urge you to use Nuanced Thinking to better figure out what’s what.

More specifically:

• if you want to figure out what’s true in the world, avoid the Truth Binary on important, complex issues, and use Probabilistic Thinking instead. Ask yourself how sure you are, and how often this thing is true, and avoid 100% certainty.
• If you want to improve the world (and not accidentally cause harm), avoid the Goodness Binary, and use Grey Thinking instead. Ask yourself what the pros and cons are, considering both what’s good and bad about each thing.
• If you want to see people and things as they really are, rather than oversimplifying or misjudging, avoid the Identification Binary, and use Multi-factor thinking instead. Ask what ways this thing is similar or different to a category, and how it might blend multiple categories, and consider what traits it has irrespective of categories.

To add some extra nuance to this post: Nuanced Thinking of course shouldn’t be used all the time. For simple things, binaries can be good enough. And some things aren’t important enough to spend the time getting nuanced. Finally, there are times when you just need to get along with your group, rather than trying to see shades of grey/probability/factors in everything.

But when a topic is important and complex, and you care about having accurate beliefs, Nuanced Thinking will help.

Nuanced Thinking also helps with decision-making more broadly, producing what I call “Nuanced Decision-Making.” This is where you select an objective, and then you apply Nuanced Thinking in order to choose the option that appears to be best, on average, according to that objective.

For instance, two journalists may report on the same undisputed facts, while one makes those facts seem negative, and the other makes them seem positive, without either of them saying anything that’s actually untrue. Word choice does the hard work. Afterward, it’s easy to hide behind this lack of untruths, claiming neutrality, even though language choice strongly implied a particular conclusion.

But of course, if you are purposely making something seem bad or good (independently of the facts), you have an opinion, and you are potentially altering the reader’s perceptions of the facts. The facts, as a reader perceives them, are not divorced from context and implication.

Of course, it’s sometimes good to express an opinion, to call something out as bad or good. But when it’s done on purpose via word choice alone, it can be a sneak attack that hits us below our conscious awareness. It can determine our opinions about the facts without us even realizing it. And when done with sufficient skill and subtly, we may come away falsely assuming that the author had a neutral point of view, that they just plainly told us the facts.

Consider how many different ways there are to express the facts about these specific situations:

Situation A
(1) It is known that revenues will be the same as last month.
(2) Haiden explained that revenues would be the same as last month.
(3) Haiden said revenues would be the same as last month.
(4) According to Haiden, revenues will be the same as last month.
(5) Haiden admitted revenues would be the same as last month.
(6) Haiden could not deny that revenues will be the same as last month.
(7) Haiden confessed that revenues would be the same as last month.
(8) Haiden had no choice but to admit that revenues would be the same as last month.

Situation B
(1) An insider close to the situation explained that the action was premeditated.
(2) The action was premeditated, as Remy later informed us.
(3) Remy filled us in that the action was premeditated.
(4) Remy said the action was premeditated.
(5) Remy told us the action was premeditated.
(6) Remy claimed the action was premeditated.
(7) Remy was going around saying that the action was premeditated.
(8) If you believe Remy, the action could have been premeditated.
(9) Remy made the claim that the action was premeditated.
(10) Remy tried to claim that the action was premeditated.
(11) Remy wanted people to believe that the action was premeditated.

Situation C
(1) We learned that the allegations against Pat are entirely false.
(2) Pat explained that the allegations were entirely false.
(3) Pat said the allegations are false.
(4) Pat denied the allegations.
(5) Pat claimed the allegations were false.
(6) Pat would not admit to the allegations.
(7) Pat refused to admit the allegations.
(8) Pat is playing the part of the victim and telling people the allegations are false.
(9) Pat is still claiming the allegations are false yet hasn’t given us a shred of hard evidence.

Situation D
(1) Santana is sexually liberated.
(2) Santana has a preference for having multiple sexual relationships.
(3) Santana enjoys having sex with different partners.
(4) Santana has a variety of sexual partners.
(5) Santana is not choosy about sexual partners the way most people are.
(6) Santana is promiscuous.
(7) Santana is a slut.

Situation E
(1) We learned additional useful information about the story by talking to Peyton again.
(2) Peyton later added additional information that helped us better understand the story.
(3) Peyton told us more information about the story.
(4) Peyton’s original story wasn’t complete.
(5) Peyton had omitted information in the original telling of the story.
(6) Peyton had prevented us from fully understanding the story by leaving out information.
(7) Peyton did not tell us the whole story.
(8) Peyton left out important parts of the story.
(9) Because Peyton left out important parts of the story, we were misled about what had really taken place.
(10) Peyton misled us about the story.

This essay was first written on October 19, 2018, and first appeared on this site on October 29, 2021.

What causes journalistic distortion?

1. Equal time to each side. There are many issues for which there are two or more reasonable positions that a person can hold. Then there are those issues where one side is supported by nearly everyone who has relevant expertise, and only a few fringe people oppose that view. The trouble is that stories about highly unbalanced issues can lead to a false impression of balance, either because the journalist feels compelled to spend equal time discussing each view-point, or because the journalist is himself unaware of which side is more trustworthy. And a person with highly unrepresentative but highly quotable opinions may be quoted in the article more than is warranted. It may seem less biased to present both sides, but when one side is almost certainly right, an equal presentation may distort more than it informs.

2. Selective reporting. Since news organizations are in the business of selling the news (or, at least, driving traffic to their websites) they have a monetary incentive to produce news that people will be eager to read. Feel-good stories about a dog saving someone’s life can beat out information that might be more important or relevant to most people. What’s problematic from a reality distortion perspective though is that the rate at which events occur and the rate at which they are reported are massively out of sync. For each story about someone coming home from work only to be murdered by their ex-boyfriend, we never hear the millions of tales of people coming home to work only to sit down and eat dinner. This is problematic because the way the human brain tries to estimate how likely something is to occur involves an attempt to retrieve instances of that thing in memory. The more easily you can retrieve those instances, the more frequent you will tend to assume that thing is. If you’ve recently read about a few murder cases, you may have the impression that murder has become more common than it used to be, even if this is merely an artifact of journalists choosing (for whatever reason) to report on more murders. If you can easily think of an example of a shark attack, you may overestimate the frequency of sharks killing people.

The vividness of the accounts we hear can also alter our perception. A vivid retelling not only increases the chance that we remember an account, but also tends to increase our emotional response to it. If you’ve recently read an article that described a gruesome murder in horrid detail, you may subsequently be more afraid when walking alone on an empty street. Through this mechanism, news reading can cause people to have excessive fear of things that aren’t very likely to harm them, and fail to fear far more dangerous things that are rarely reported on. You’re much more likely to die in a car crash than be killed by terrorism, yet in a world where terrorism is reported on constantly, you will likely fear terrorism more.

3. Mix-ups of correlation and causation. Just because X tends to occur together with Y doesn’t mean that X causes Y. In fact, it could be that Y causes X instead, or that both X and Y are caused by some third thing. Unfortunately, reporters frequently get this wrong (or at least fail to make the distinction clear to the reader), especially when reporting on scientific findings. Articles will insinuate that since the latest study found higher wine/broccoli/nicotine consumption was associated with greater longevity/health/focus, that means that wine/broccoli/nicotine must actually cause those benefits. A related problem that you’ll sometimes see (especially in articles about finance) is the implication that since Y came after X, that means that Y was caused by X. It may be true that many stock market investors reacted negatively to a new bill that was just signed into law, but that doesn’t mean that’s a causal explanation of why the stock market fell 1% today. There surely were many factors influencing the change in the market’s price, some tending to push it up, others tending to push it down. Even if it were true that the signing of the bill had a strong effect (which it might be difficult to confirm), that event certainly cannot take all the credit for determining the change in the market’s price.

4. Use of low quality studies. Just because a study “proves” something, doesn’t make it so. In fact, most studies that are conducted are of poor quality for one reason or another. This could be due to a small number of study participants, lack of a control group, lack of randomization, the wrong choice of statistical test, flawed experimental protocol, poor choice of outcome measures, selective reporting of study results, or a variety of other reasons. Unfortunately, journalists rarely make it clear whether a study was of high quality, being mainly interested in what the study claimed to have found. Even the reporting of high quality studies can be problematic, if the journalist fails to mention other high quality studies that found different results. Given all the things that can go wrong in the design and execution of a study, we should be hesitant to accept the results even of those studies that look to be of high quality, until we have seen replication of the study by a different research team.

5. Lack of understanding. Many journalists write about a wide range of subjects. It is rare that they are true experts in the subject of a particular article. But as non-experts writing about what are sometimes very complicated subjects, there is the danger that journalists misunderstand the underlying subject matter. This problem occurs especially often in articles about highly technical research. The issue is compounded further by the fact that journalists are often working under tight deadlines, and so may lack the ability to do extensive background research.

6. Selective use of the facts. Even within a single story, the problem of selective reporting can be substantial. Not all facts in a case are equally entertaining or fit the narrative equally well. There is some incentive to favor those facts that improve the story over drier, though perhaps important material. Of course a political or other agenda on the part of the reporter can also determine which facts he chooses to report on. Since there is a tendency for liberals to read liberal news sources while conservatives read conservative sources, both groups may have their pre-existing views bolstered by selectively reported evidence.

7. Exaggeration of importance. News sells better if it sounds important, so news organizations have an incentive to make their news fit this criteria. One way to do this is to report on stories that actually matter to a lot of people, but sometimes it is better for the organization to just make whatever they’re reporting on sound more important than it is. The next big scientific breakthrough reported on turns out to be completely forgotten a few years or months later (but who remembers?) One of the most common forms of exaggeration in journalism is when a trend is constructed from a few data points. If a handful of celebrities are eating a lot of coconut, or museums have recently become a little more popular among people in their twenties, that doesn’t mean there’s a new fad that the world should hear about.

Choose your news sources carefully, because the information you consume determines what you believe about the world. And as incredibly valuable as journalism is, it can distort reality.

But all hope is not lost. We can effectively reason about which of our beliefs are more likely to be correct, and which are more likely to be in error. Even if we feel equally strong feelings of belief for two ideas, further considerations can make us realize that we are more likely to be correct in one of the cases than the other. In other words, there are traits that go beyond our strength of belief that can help us identify where we are likely to have made errors.

Consider the following properties that beliefs can have. Each of these is an indicator that a belief is less likely to be true.

1. Many smart, knowledgeable people disagree with you (e.g. you think that evolution didn’t happen). If many such people think you are wrong, it is not obvious why your belief is more likely to be correct than the beliefs of those who disagree.
2. You have a financial (or other) incentive to believe it (e.g. you think that the product you created really does regrow hair, and you value providing a product that helps people). When we have an incentive to think a certain way, we are less likely to seek out or listen to evidence that contradicts this way of thinking.
3. If the belief were not true you would find it psychologically disturbing (e.g. you believe that your wife does not fantasize about any other men). Our minds tend to veer away from thoughts that disturb us, making it less likely that we believe them, even when they are true.
4. You originally came to believe for reasons that don’t have much to do with logic, evidence or reason (e.g. growing up, your mom wouldn’t let you pet dogs on the street, so you believe that doing so is dangerous).
5. Your argument as to why your belief is true is long and complex (e.g. you believe that a convicted criminal is innocent, because when you evaluate the twelve pieces of evidence given against her, you find that they each don’t hold up). When our arguments are long and complex it is more likely that we have made an error at some point in our thinking.
6. There are lots of possible outcomes, and your belief is that just one of them will occur (e.g. you think Hillary will beat out the other seven candidates in this primary). Typically, the more possible outcomes there are, the less likely it will be that any particular one of them is correct.
7. A large number of factors influence whether your belief will end up being true (e.g. you’re convinced that GDP growth will decline over the next year). When many factors influence an occurrence, it is really hard to be sure that you have properly taken into account all of the important ones.
8. You don’t understand the arguments of those that disagree with you, or see how they could believe what they believe (e.g. you know that a fetus is obviously a person). When you don’t understand contrary opinions, it is an indicator that you have mainly researched one side of an issue, and so are less likely to have really weighed the strength of arguments on all sides.
9. You become emotional when people disagree with you about the belief (e.g. you think that insurance companies should not cap health expenditures for illnesses that are usually terminal, and you become upset when challenged on this issue). The problem here is that strong emotions can interfere with our ability to evaluate arguments objectively, and prevent us from engaging in open-minded discourse about a subject.
10. You can’t clearly explain what your belief means (e.g. you’re convinced that you have free will). When we find it hard to explain what we mean by one of our beliefs, it may be the case that we have merely become attached to an idea or intuition, rather than having considered the evidence and made a decision based on that.

To be good at identifying and stamping out our false beliefs, we need to go beyond just considering how strong our feeling of belief is. We need to consider the properties of our beliefs, and decide whether each is the sort of belief that we should have skepticism about.

Influences: Kathryn Schulz