The Questioning Christian

The unreliability of eyewitness accounts - Scientific American article

From Hal Arkowitz and Scott O. Lilienfeld, Why Science Tells Us Not to Rely on Eyewitness Accounts, from the January 2010 Scientific American Mind:

The uncritical acceptance of eyewitness accounts may stem from a popular misconception of how memory works. 

Many people believe that human memory works like a video recorder: the mind records events and then, on cue, plays back an exact replica of them. 

On the contrary, psychologists have found that memories are reconstructed rather than played back each time we recall them. 

The act of remembering, says eminent memory researcher and psychologist Elizabeth F. Loftus of the University of California, Irvine, is “more akin to putting puzzle pieces together than retrieving a video recording.” 

Even questioning ... can alter the witness’s testimony because fragments of the memory may unknowingly be combined with information provided by the questioner, leading to inaccurate recall.

(Extra paragraphing added.)

Karen Armstrong: Itinerant prophet of the Golden Rule

My wife and I enjoyed hearing renowned religious historian Karen Armstrong last night at Houston’s Wortham Center, as part of a Progressive Forum of Houston lecture series. Some observations:

• Armstrong is delightful.  Her lecture style is passable; to me, though, the most enjoyable part was her living-room conversation afterwards, in the style of Inside the Actor's Studio, with Progressive Forum founder Randall Morton, who posed questions previously submitted via the Web.
• Armstrong emphasized the commonality of the Golden Rule in world religions. That resonated with me, of course (see my various postings here on the fundamental importance of the Summary of the Law in human cultural evolution).
• She claimed that it’s only been in the last few hundred years that people took the Bible’s creation accounts lit­erally. She said that those accounts used to be re­garded — correctly, in her view — as mythos, a story setting out a program for action, as opposed to logos, a description of the way things really are. (Doubtless this one-sentence summary fails to do her justice.)
• Armstrong pitched the Charter for Compassion movement that it sounds like she’s spearheading.
• She pronounces her first name CAR-rin.
• The event looked to be sold out – I saw only a handful of empty seats here and there in the Cullen Theater, probably from no-shows. We ended up sitting in the mezzanine, which I think was our first time ever in that section. The seating there is pitched incredibly steeply, more so than any stadium I’ve ever been in.
• It was announced that Armstrong would do a book-signing for her latest, The Case for God, being sold on-site by co-sponsor Brazos Bookstore. I wanted a signed book, but the line was at least 30 minutes long, so we headed home.  I’ll check with the Brazos to see if they have any signed books there.
• I’ve never seen so many Toyota Priuses in one place as there were in the parking garage afterwards; draw your own conclusions about the audience ....
• Armstrong is not without her critics – see that section of her Wikipedia entry.

Tunnel vision is the source of so many of our troubles

David Broder writes that President Obama’s quest for rational, evidence-based public policies is likely to be derailed by the tunnel vision of people acting like heat-seeking missiles, pushing and shoving in their single-minded struggles to get what they want:

… [This highly rational, comprehensive approach fits uncomfortably with the Constitution, which apportions power among so many different players, most of whom are far more concerned with the particulars of policy than its overall coherence.

The energy bill that went into the House was a reasonably coherent set of trade-offs that would reduce carbon emissions and help the atmosphere. When it came out, it was a grab bag of subsidies and payoffs to various industries and groups. Now it is stymied by similar forces in the Senate.

Schambra's essay anticipated exactly what is happening on health care. Obama, budget director Peter Orszag and health czar Nancy-Ann DeParle grasp the intricacies of the health-care system as well as any three humans, and they could write a law to make it far more efficient.

But now it is in the hands of legislators and lobbyists who care much less about the rationality of the system than they do about the way the bill will affect their particular part of it.

Everyone has a parochial agenda.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, for example, wants to be sure a new cancer treatment center in Nevada has favored status.

(Emphasis and extra paragraphing added.)

Of course, at an individual level this tunnel vision makes perfect sense. Harry Reid knows full well that his chances of reelection hinge more on his being able bring home the bacon than on whether he enacts policies good for the country as a whole.  (On a related note, see also this post about a mother whose tunnel vision enabled her to rescue her child from a polar bear.)

A theologian proclaiming the reliability of the gospel authors is like a lawyer proclaiming that first-century midwives didn’t need to wash their hands

Adapted from a comment I posted in a dialogue with “dwstroudmd,” a commenter at T19:

Setting up the analogy

Suppose that I, having only basic first-aid training, were to insist that it didn’t matter whether first-century Jewish midwives washed their hands before delivering babies. According to me (let’s suppose), the extant religious standards called for all devout Jews to wash regularly.  Surely that would have been enough to guard against infant mortality and death in childbed, right?

You, an experienced modern-day obstetrician, would smile tolerantly, or even laugh.  And rightly so:  If I’d had the benefit of your training, I’d have known that your profession has established (not without controversy) that mother- and baby-killing infections can sneak in via even the cleanest-looking unwashed hands. 

(We can’t mock first-century midwives for not knowing this, though; they lacked the necessary underlying knowledge about infectious microbes and their transmission.)

Ancient storytelling practices weren't necessarily a sufficient guard against distortion, just as ancient sanitary practices weren’t necessarily a sufficient guard against infection

Now let’s reverse the roles.  Certain modern theologians make the claim that it doesn’t matter whether the NT accounts are hearsay, or (if in fact they were eyewitness accounts) whether they were first written down decades after the witnesses’ observations, without the opportunity to dig into what the witnesses actually saw as opposed to what they claimed they saw.

According to these theologians, various first-century storytelling practices — "sanitation" practices, if you will — would have been enough to guard against distortion of the NT tales, even the most extraordinary ones.

It turns out, though, that at least so far as we can tell) these theologians have little or no training in interviewing actual, fallible human witnesses (let alone in cases having real-world consequences).

Our modern theologians apparently know little of the the vicissitudes of human perception and memory, as demonstrated convincingly by modern journalists, police detectives, and lawyers, not to mention by experimental psychologists.

That might give you an idea why I react the way I do when reasserters make such grandiose claims: When you [reasserters] make such confident assertions about first-century storytelling practices, to me it sounds just like a non-physician who claims that first-century midwives didn’t need to wash their hands.

Distortions: News anchors in Sweden aren't called 'cronkiters' after all

An Associated Press story provides us with a very recent example of the fallibility of oral tradition, and the distortions that can be perpetuated by wishful thinking:

Turns out, the anchorman who prided himself on accuracy helped perpetuate an unfounded claim that newscasters in Sweden and Holland had been nicknamed "cronkiters."

Cronkite wasn't alone in this mistaken report. Apparently, the first journalist to publish it was Pulitzer-prize-winning author David Halberstam. In a magazine piece in 1976, Halberstam wrote that Cronkite's international stature was such that, "in Sweden, anchormen came to be known as Cronkiters." It was a tidbit Halberstam repeated in his classic 1979 chronicle of the modern media world, "The Powers That Be." 

[¶¶]

When Cronkite died last month, The Associated Press published it in his obituary.

Turns out, no evidence nor accounts uncovered thus far confirm its truth. Not Cronkiters. Not cronkiters. Not with a "k" instead of a "c." Not in Holland (which was added to the mix along the way) any more than in Sweden.

That's really the way it is.

[¶¶]

But why the myth of "cronkiter" took hold is a no-brainer. Maybe literally.

• The story was not only delightful but seemed plausible enough.
• It served the narrative of Cronkite and the national respect accorded him, especially in tributes appearing at his death.
• Darned important people vouched for it.
• Most of all, it had been around long enough to seem like unassailable fact to those who had already "known" it for years.

(Emphasis and bullets added.)

The 'cronkiter' episode illustrates that this sort of distortion happens regularly, even among people who spend their lives trying to winnow fact from fiction. 

By and large, such distortions are harmless — if, that is, people don't lean on them too heavily in making life bets.

What's not so harmless is when those who fall prey to this kind of distortion insist that their wishful thinking is the only legitimate, the only plausible view.

Our collective experience helps us compensate for the fallibilities of our individual observations and insights

I've been involved in a week-long discussion at Kendall Harmon’s conservative Anglican site TitusOneNine. My online friend Todd Granger, M.D., responded to one of my comments thusly:

... all knowledge - all knowledge - involves a personal decision to commit oneself to an epistemological framework in the absence of compelling a priori evidence to make the decision. There is no Cartesian point of objectivity from which one may serenely decide between frameworks.

Here's a slightly-edited version of my response.

It seems to me that Todd is saying each of us must choose his or her epistemological framework. That strikes me as saying we must each choose our own truth. I don't think either claim is defensible.

I would argue that, so far as we can tell, there's a single reality, wrought by the Creator (though sometimes different people perceive that reality in different slices, or from different perspectives).

Likewise, there's a single epistemology, a single approach to assessing what we know and how we know it: As best we can, face the facts of reality as they’re revealed to us — keeping in mind that those facts include the limitations of our abilities to perceive, correlate, remember, and communicate.

As near as I can tell, the post-modernist view maintains that our limitations require that we abandon the notion of objective reality.  That doesn’t seem correct.

Our knowledge of reality isn’t a painting that each of us must examine in the moment, alone and in a vacuum, with no information about the depicted scene except as supplied by our imaginations.

Thanks to our gifts of "memory, reason, and skill" (Eucharistic Prayer C, if memory serves) — especially the skill of communicating with each other — our knowledge base is more like a movie: Our past experience, individual and collective, allows us to know more about the scene than could ever be depicted by a painter.

Consider that over millennia, humanity has accumulated gazillions of observations of the Creation.

Individually, each observation is subject to error in perception, recordation, transmission, and/or interpretation.

Collectively, though, our accumulated observations — including meta-observations about how we make and use observations — can give us something like a serviceable facsimile, within its limitations, of the Cartesian point of objectivity Todd describes.

In The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki tells of a surprising observation by statistician Francis Galton; as explained by an Amazon.com reviewer:

In 1906, Francis Galton, known for his work on statistics and heredity, came across a weight-judging contest at the West of England Fat Stock and Poultry Exhibition. This encounter was to challenge the foundations of his life's study.

An ox was on display and for six-pence fair-goers could buy a stamped and numbered ticket, fill in their names and their guesses of the animal's weight after it had been slaughtered and dressed. The best guess received a prize.

Eight hundred people tried their luck. They were diverse. Many had no knowledge of livestock; others were butchers and farmers.

In Galton's mind this was a perfect analogy for democracy. He wanted to prove the average voter was capable of very little.

Yet to his surprise, when he averaged the guesses, the total [sic] came to 1197 pounds. After the ox had been slaughtered, it weighted 1198.

Emphasis and extra paragraphing added.)

Surowiecki gives several other examples — including how the sunken submarine USS SCORPION was located — to illustrate the point: If each of a (sufficiently-large) number of 'observations' includes a randomly-distributed error component, and the observations are mashed together, e.g., by averaging them, then the error components tend to cancel each other out, and the resulting collective picture can be a serviceable representation of the underlying reality.

I'm now bumping up against the limits of my (scant) knowledge of epistemology. It seems to me, though, that Galton's story of guessing the weight of an ox is a useful metaphor for how our collective experience over time helps us compensate for the lack of an a priori frame of reference.

(If I'm not mistaken, what I've described above is a crude summary of the notion of critical realism.)

Confidence sometimes counts for more than being right

From New Scientist:

The research, by Don Moore of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, shows that we prefer advice from a confident source, even to the point that we are willing to forgive a poor track record. Moore argues that in competitive situations, this can drive those offering advice to increasingly exaggerate how sure they are. And it spells bad news for scientists who try to be honest about gaps in their knowledge.

In Moore's experiment, volunteers were given cash for correctly guessing the weight of people from their photographs. In each of the eight rounds of the study, the guessers bought advice from one of four other volunteers. The guessers could see in advance how confident each of these advisers was (see table), but not which weights they had opted for.

From the start, the more confident advisers found more buyers for their advice, and this caused the advisers to give answers that were more and more precise as the game progressed.  This escalation in precision disappeared when guessers simply had to choose whether or not to buy the advice of a single adviser.

In the later rounds, guessers tended to avoid advisers who had been wrong previously, but this effect was more than outweighed by the bias towards confidence.

Peter Aldhous, Humans prefer cockiness to expertise, New Scientist, June 10, 2009 (emphasis and extra paragraphing added.)

The man who could have been Bill Gates

From the Oral History Gets Distorted desk:  Hacker News * links today to a 2004 Business Week story, recounting the vastly-different accounts of how Microsoft entered into its original operating-system license agreement with IBM, which started Bill Gates on the road to being a billionaire.

Legend has it that IBM initially approached software pioneer Gary Kildall, seeking to license his widely-used CP/M operating system, but Kildall wasn’t interested (“Gary went flying instead,” goes the story). Whereupon IBM asked Gates whether MIcrosoft could do the job; Microsoft bought the rights to a CP/M workalike; and the rest is history.

But the legend leaves out some crucial details . . . .

Read it all.

* Hacker News is a legitimate and very-popular site for ‘hackers’ in the original sense of the term, which refers to highly-skilled programmers.

Harvard longitudinal study confirms the distorting effects of time on stories recalled from memory

Here’s some hard evidence showing the questionable reliability of stories that are recalled long after the fact — something that credulous New Testament scholars (like Bishop N.T. Wright) would be well-advised to keep in mind when they claim that X or Y really did happen in 33 AD:

… The Harvard data illustrate this phenomenon [of memory distortion] well.

In 1946, for example, 34 percent of the Grant Study men who had served in World War II reported having come under enemy fire, and 25 percent said they had killed an enemy. In 1988, the first number climbed to 40 percent—and the second fell to about 14 percent.

“As is well known,” Vaillant concluded, “with the passage of years, old wars become more adventurous and less dangerous.”

Distortions can clearly serve a protective function. In a test involving a set of pictures, older people tend to remember fewer distressing images (like snakes) and more pleasant ones (like Ferris wheels) than younger people.

By giving a profound shape to aging, this tendency can make for a softer, rounder old age, but also a deluded one. …

From Joshua Wolf Shenk, What Makes Us Happy? in The Atlantic, June 2009 (emphasis and extra paragraphing added).

Related posts: 

• Reasons to Question the Reliability of Scripture
• The Distortions category of this blog

Here’s a news flash: Authors will sometimes lie and defame if they think it will help advance their agenda

In today’s on-line WSJ, a piece by Mark Penn caught my attention:

The United Kingdom has just had a major scandal in which an official at 10 Downing Street had planned to leak to a friendly blogger all sorts of lurid stories about the Conservatives, complete with descriptions of secret sex tapes.

But all of it was to be made up, and the friendly blogger who was going to post it all thought it was an “absolutely brilliant” idea.

Someone blew the whistle, but had the plot gone through, this blogstorm could have played a major role in the upcoming election.

America's Newest Profession: Bloggers for Hire, Wall Street Journal, Apr. 21, 2009 (emphasis and extra paragraphing added).  I searched for more on this UK story and found a Guardian article:

Damian McBride sent the first of two emails that would cost him his job at 6.30pm on 13 January. "A few ideas I have been working on for RedRag," he wrote to Labour blogger Derek Draper. "For ease, I've written all the below as I'd write them for the site."

The email suggested a series of unfounded and puerile smears against senior Tories. Draper responded 20 minutes later: "Absolutely totally brilliant Damian. I'll think about timing and sort out the technology this week so we can go as soon as possible." …

McBride suggested spreading gossip, entirely unfounded, that [Conservative party leader David] Cameron may have suffered from a sexually transmitted disease. He wrote that Cameron should be challenged to publish his "full financial and medical records". He also suggested "inserting [a] picture of Dr Christian Jessen", who appears on the Channel 4 programme Embarrassing Bodies. There was no suggestion the two men knew each other.

For some reason this brings to mind the Gospel of John’s faintly-disparaging comments about Peter and Thomas, to say nothing of those about “the Jews.”