A number of recent posts have dealt with aspects of reasoning and judgement. Strategic Reliabilism dealt with "epistemic excellence" directly, but Overconfidence, Finite Value, Lucidity and Whiffed were earlier posts that dealt with aspects of the issue. In Interpreting Data Don Boudreaux points out another aspect of fubar reasoning.

Cornell University psychologist Tom Gilovich makes one of the most useful observations I've encountered in some time. Here's economist Robert Frank's summary of Gilovich's observation:

As the psychologist Tom Gilovich has suggested, someone who wants to believe a proposition tends to ask, “Can I believe it?” In contrast, someone who wants to deny its truth tends to ask “Must I believe it?"

As much as I'd like to deny that Gilovich's observation applies to me, I can't. It does apply. But now being aware, I at least try to take a more critical stance toward propositions that correspond closely to my priors, and to take a more forgiving stance toward propositions that contradict my priors. . .

it's interesting how ambiguous even seemingly unambiguous pictures and charts and graphs and historical anecdotes become if you look at them critically, trying your best to see in them not what you want to see but what someone with a view very different from your own wants to see.

Even intellectually honest thinkers can deceive themselves, at least for a time, if they are not properly critical of both the data and its presentation. But there is a kissing cousin of this problem that is not intellectually honest - stealth advocacy.

"These days, one commonly asserted imperfection in the science-policy interface is that some so-called "science" is imbued with policy preferences. Such science may be labeled as normative and it is potentially an insidious kind of scientific corruption. By normative science, I mean "information that is developed, presented, or interpreted based on an assumed, usually unstated, preference for a particular policy or class of policy choices." In some forms, normative science is not obviously normative to policy makers or even to many scientists. Such "science" has become a serious problem. I believe that use of normative science is stealth policy advocacy."

Those who are willing to be duped will seize on stealth advocacy and wave it about triumphantly as if it actually made sense, relying on the "authority" of the advocate rather than the merit of the claims, but the critical thinker will ask “Must I believe it?", and find that the answer is no. You can only believe it if you believe it already and are less than scrupulous about things.

This report from Human Security Centre, Human Security Report 2005, is an example of stealth advocacy. This post by Nicole-Anne Boyer is an example of willful belief of the advocacy.

The report notes that armed conflicts worldwide have been in steady decline for decades and are now much rarer than in the past. Mainly this is due to the cessation of wars of independence that followed WWII and the end of colonialism, and the end of the cold war with its proxy wars in unstable regions. But the authors of the report were desperate to fluff up the meddler business, since they are in the meddling business and are funded by other meddlers, so they concluded without convincing evidence that it was significantly the result of efforts by the UN and international NGOs.

“Must I believe it?" You have to be myopic and still do a lot of squinting to believe that. There is at least as much evidence of harm done by these organizations as help. The UN's corruption and tacit support of terrorist states and organizations alone is a good basis for the exact opposite case. When their incompetence and wasteful squandering of resources intended to provide aid and assistance is factored in it becomes even more difficult to entertain the conclusions of the report. It fails both tests: you not only don't have to believe it even if it contradicts your priors, you can't believe it when it confirms them. It's not believable.

And yet there are believers. Boyer claims:

It finds "that the best explanation for this decline is the huge upsurge of conflict prevention, resolution and peacebuilding activities that were spearheaded by the United Nations in the aftermath of the Cold War." So the UN and other national and local interventions, however imperfect, can take some credit for these improvements -- a piece of PR they sorely need when our impressions of these institutions is lackluster at best. . .

The news that institutions make a difference in combating political violence is key information that we can use to counterbalance all of those memes that says the UN doesn't matter. And while we are at it, let's toast all of those millions of unnamed civil servants, activists, journalists, NGO workers in the trenches, and academics like Professor Mack in the trenches for helping build the foundations for a shared understanding of what is and isn't working when it comes to ensuring human security.

That is news, but it seems to have been made up, as so much "news" is these days. It's a just-so story, stealth advocacy, red meat for those who find it to be a proposition that corresponds closely to their priors, but it doesn't pass the smell test.

I should note that the Boyer post wasn't primarily about thoughtless boosterism for the report and is worth reading for its main content which focused on the problems of depression, the gloom and doom attitude of leftist intellectuals. This quoted passage from a Stewart Brand review of Arthur Herman's book, The Idea of Decline in Western History, is more representative of the post's main focus.

Big pessimism has a sordid lineage. When 19th century romanticism turned gloomy and escapist in response to the failure of the French Revolution, the rejection of the Enlightenment turned increasingly toward rejection of contemporary civilization and commerce. From then to now, elaborate, often racist, theories of history were conjured up to show how the decline of society was inevitable, being destroyed from within by Jews, or blacks (later whites), or crass bourgeois, or wimpy liberals, or businessmen, or technology, or whatever. Leading intellectuals of Europe and America adopted the pose and the notions--Jacob Burckhardt, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Henry Adams, W.E.B. Du Bois, Oswald Spengler, Arnold Toynbee, and on to Marcuse, Sartre, Foucault, Fanon, and many of my fellow environmentalists.

This may be a fit subject for a later post.