Reality and Bias

 A new book purports to find evidence of widespread liberal "bias" in the media.

"In at least one important way journalists are very different from the rest of us—they are more liberal. For instance, according to surveys, in a typical presidential election, Washington correspondents vote about 93-7 for the Democrat, while the rest of us vote about 50-50 for the two candidates.
What happens when our view of the world is filtered through the eyes, ears, and minds of such a liberal group?
As I demonstrate—using objective, social-scientific methods—the filtering prevents us from seeing the world as it really is. Instead, we only see a distorted version of it. It is as if we see the world through a glass—a glass that magnifies the facts that liberals want us to see and shrinks the facts that conservatives want us to see."

A longstanding critique from the right, the left's snarky rejoinder: “reality has a liberal bias”.  Yet this is often demonstrably true, not only in terms of whether liberal claims can be substantiated, but in the very way in which the left traditionally approaches truth questions.  Liberalism is biased towards expertise, towards scientific inquiry, critical deconstruction of cultural norms and dominant paradigms.

The extent to which any of these are the paths to truth, then truth can be said to have a liberal bias. Although that’s not really accurate. Better said, liberalism has a bias towards truth. So, for instance, when a journalist points out that a business is polluting a river, is it liberal bias? When most illegal aliens are found to be exploited when all they wanted was a chance at a better life, is it liberal bias? When global warming is found to likely have devastating effects, is it liberal bias? When evolution is found to be absolutely true, is it liberal bias? When gays are – newsflash! – found to be normal, healthy people, is that liberal bias?

Conservatism is ultimately about common sense. And sometimes common sense is right; even a broken clock is right twice a day. But to the extent that conservatism is biased against expertise, or critical analysis, or relativism, or the deconstruction of tradition – in other words the machinery of free thought – then conservatism is biased against truth. As Buckley put it, to “stand athwart history and yell stop”, even alas, when that history is truth.

In the end, there is no such thing as a bias towards truth, only away from it. To be biased is to be operating outside the parameters of truth-finding. To the extent that conservatism rejects the very process of truth-finding, preferring instead to rely on such subjective and non-rational epistemologies as tradition or common-sense, it is biased against truth. And to the extent that the media is concerned with truth, then conservatism is often biased against the media itself.

McCain's Need for Closure

Apparently John McCain doesn't think the Times Square bomber should be read his rights.

"Obviously that would be a serious mistake...at least until we find out as much information we have...Don't give this guy his Miranda rights until we find out what it's all about." 

He goes on to suggest the man should probably get the death penalty.

An obvious reason for McCain's bluster is that he's been trying to walk back his moderate image for years.  But he's also simply joining a chorus of conservatives for whom taking the most severly righ-leaning position is de rigeour.

Taking a long view, you could see this as a function of electoral politics. You could say that mid-nineties conservatism was a far-right reaction to moderate liberalism, but to elect Bush Republicans had to move back leftward, who was more moderate in many ways. With the election of Obama, the right is now able to say that Bush wasn’t far enough to the right. All of which would make fertile ground for party discipline/epistemic closure, where every conservative needs to demonstrate his batshit cred.


This dynamic exists on the left, but there has just never been the sort of fealty to a nut base as there is on the right today. The 9/11 Truthers or Haliburton paranoids were never a very big influence on the left. And there is no thought machine on the left like there is on the right. You could say that this is Journalism and Academia, which are overwhelmingly liberal. But that’s absurd – they aren’t institutions like talk radio or Fox news, or the various conservative outlets. There is no ideological power objective – just a bias toward a liberal analytical framework. And built-in mechanisms for objectivity – peer review and journalistic standards – at least attempt to transcend dogma.

The broader conservative movement has moved further and further from an ideological reaction to the actual left, and towards an emotional reaction to its own bastardized view of the left.  McCain doesn't want to avoid reading this guy his rights.  He wants to avoid appearing to sympathize with a notion of the left as soft on crime.  The McCain of the past, along with many other reasonable conservatives, might have found no incongruity between conservatism and an embrace of the rule of law.  But to admit as much in today's conservative climate would be evidence of "siding with the enemy".  There is a freight train bound for glory, and you are either with them, or against them.

Epistemology and Practical Morality

Freddie De Boer has an interesting piece up on Sam Harris and the New Atheist reliance on scientific materialism to solve real-world problems.  A response to Harris' turn at TED, in which he argues that science can answer moral questions, DeBoer's thesis is basically that we should always be skeptical of our own certainty because of the limitations of consciousness. 

I've always felt that the kind of skepticism that is most valuable, that is to our pragmatic benefit, is the skepticism that begins the skeptical enterprise at the human mind, the classical Greek skepticism that regarded any real certainty as dogmatism. Not because it is true, or even because it is superior, but because epistemological modesty seems to me to be an entirely under appreciated tool for the practical prosecution of our lives and our arguments.

That's true as far as it goes.  But it is also untrue as far as it goes.  The main problem I have with the essay is that without examples with which to work, it is difficult to agree or disagree with any of it.

The problem lies in describing exactly what types of certainty we are talking about.  Some things we can be very certain of, and others we cannot.  Thus how much confidence we have in any given thing is contextual.  But what matters is the epistemological tools we use to determine how much certainty there exists, and how adequate they are to the task.

For instance, I know to a high degree of certainty that if I punch my neighbor in the face, he will experience pain, as I have a high degree of experiential as well as objective data that tells me this will be so.

Yet I have very little certainty that he will mind if I knock on his door at 8am instead of 9am.  People wake at various hours in the morning. However if I knock on his door at 3am I can very confident I will bother him.  Very few people wake that early.

I think what worries so many about post-modernism is not when it is a serious and precise philosophical discussion of why epistemology matters, but when it is a way of thinking about the world that seeks to diminish epistemology. What this often results in is a sort of selfish fealty to whatever passion one might currently be feeling. 

We find this all over the political religious, and cultural spectrum.  As a liberal, I've found this frequently in discussions with conservatives.  Trying to get to the root of why they believe what they believe, which somewhat by definition entails an appeal to tradition, the ultimate answer is often, "Well, I don't know".  For instance, when asked about the conservative emphasis on individualism and personal responsibility, and where it might come from aside from genetic and social determinism, the answer is a simple shrug of the shoulders.  Yet trillions of dollars of social policy are at stake!   No matter how I try and make my case, no matter how many studies I cite or arguments I present, a simple shrug of the shoulders can wash it all away.

Now, I'm not sure what I was dealing with was a conscious invocation of post-modernism.  But I was certainly dealing with an argument that gets much of its strength from a social tradition that encourages the embrace of appeals to emotion rather than reason.  The tradition is obviously old - vastly more so than our traditions of science and reason.  The most obvious reason for this is that the epistomological tools of science and reason were not readily available.   Yet to the extent that they now are, I see no reason why we should be afraid to use them.

Now, how much confidence we have in our ability to use science and reason to get at truth will always vary.  Experience also tells us that we overestimate its authority at our peril.  But this is at least as true as when we underestimate it.  The dangers of relying on things other than science and reason are far greater. 

Yet while compromise is in order, the trick is in knowing what we know, and where to place our confidence.  Science has an excellent mechanism for doing this in the most objective and efficient way: consensus.  Due to the degree of complexity and specialization involved in scientific progress, professional consensus is integral to the scientific process.  Were any inaccuracies allowed to corrupt the process, they could not linger long for subsequent results would be unrepeatable.  In this way, scientific progress itself demands a high level of objective honesty.  Consensus of course, can always be wrong.  But not for very long, and it is no more susceptible to error than nonscientific reasoning.

What matters in all of this is context.  Scientific reasoning is not a dogmatic belief that science will always provide the answers we seek - but rather that scientific results should be taken very seriously, and should at a very minimum be held as the gold standard in knowing truth.  This does not mean that results are not open to interpretation, and that scientific inquiry can't be used to draw incorrect inferences.  But we should not be afraid to embrace scientific results that add to our sum of knowledge, especially when they appear to contradict our prior assumptions. 

More and more, it has become the case that expert opinion must be relied upon to make judgments on important issues.  Post-modernism, while a bright reminder to always remain skeptical of our sources of knowledge, must not in skepticism of things he isn't comfortable knowing allow man to substitute his own lack of knowledge for the combined wisdom of his much more able peers.  This is a difficult and humbling place to find one's self in to be sure.  But we can no longer conceive of ourselves as geocentric arbiters of all that is true.  Instead we must seek to strengthen those institutions of society  - be they government or academic -  that ensure that the expertise is not only broad and robust, but accountable and self-critical.  For it will be these institutions that we entrust with our continuing knowledge.