In every field of human intellectual endeavour one is bound to find a disagreement between experts. As individuals, we’re all subject to limits in our knowledge and experience. This is a proposition most of us don’t find difficulty acknowledging and accepting. What’s more challenging for us to accept is that our limits of knowledge and experience are further exacerbated by cognitive biases. It’s one thing to be shown data you had missed. That would be a fact external to you, and it, therefore, doesn’t feel like a personal attack. However, highlighting that your reasoning process about an issue was flawed because of one or a few cognitive biases that led you to commit a number of logical fallacies you didn’t realize you were making feels more like a personal attack. In contrast to the external world of data, this is about your internal processing of them. Pointing out a flawed process in reasoning feels too intimate. So, it makes sense we would initially want to defend our cognitive integrity. Doing so can take many forms.
We could straw man the refutation against us, creating a weak version of it that is more flimsy than a spider’s web and then taking it down to make ourselves look like a formidable intellectual who saw all angles of the argument before we arrived at our f̶l̶a̶w̶e̶d̶ correct conclusion. It wasn’t that I fell for the availability bias, but that the evidence I didn’t realize I ignored or relevant questions I didn’t ask don’t matter because my conclusion just feels right.
More often, we bring up red herrings that divert attention and force the conversation into a different subject altogether, which has nothing to do with the actual point we were trying to make but were shown to lack the support we thought it had. It’s not that I had no idea Andrew Wakefield was found to have fabricated his data and had his fake study linking autism with the MMR vaccine retracted by the journal after an extensive investigation. It’s that vaccines are being increasingly imposed by governments for the benefit of Big Pharma in a plot to sterilize us and our children are sicker because of them so we keep buying their drugs. Also, Bill Gates wants to microchip us all using vaccines.
Anchoring bias, bandwagon effect, choice-supportive bias, fundamental attribution error, recency effect, in-group preference bias, and the halo effect are only a few of the common cognitive biases we’re all subject to. And we haven’t even gotten to the cognitive distortions bit, which lead to a misrepresentation of reality. So, not only do we have the potential to make errors in reasoning, but we can also have a distorted perception of the external world that doesn’t match with reality. Now imagine erroneously reasoning through cognitive biases using perceptions of the world not matching reality because of cognitive distortions.
Before you hyperventilate, this is not to cast complete doubt into everything you hold dear in beliefs. Rather, it’s to recognize the necessity for intellectual humility and warranted suspicion of the absolutist in his or her grandiosity claiming something when most experts in that field say otherwise.
That is not to say a group is always right. Indeed, there are cognitive biases and distortions that groups can fall into. However, when dealing with an external source of data where a number of independent groups are in agreement about how this data is perceived in raw form, we can be confident that it’s highly unlikely that they’re all misrepresenting reality. Furthermore, if all these groups arrive at the same conclusions about what these raw data indicate, it’s highly unlikely they’re all reasoning incorrectly as they independently converge on the same conclusion.
It’s important to note here that they could all be shown to have been wrong if more data becomes available. In such a case, it’s a matter of judgement based on available evidence. A wrong judgement doesn’t mean we were wrong to place our trust in the group. In fact, if the group changes positions as more evidence comes in, this is more reason to trust that the group is following a sound process of reasoning because the conclusion changed as more information became available.
But why trust groups over the individual?
There’s variability to the susceptibility to cognitive biases and distortions between individuals. Each one of us has our own cognitive proclivities, and these proclivities don’t expose themselves to us on their own accord. We need others to point them out. Hence, if I happen to fall for the availability bias because of something I had just come across or been researching for a while, another individual can turn my attention to whatever mountain of evidence I neglected, which may lead to a more likely conclusion contradicting mine. A third person may turn both our attention to another aspect of the argument we hadn’t realized we were ignoring. This is the wisdom of the Islamic practice of Shura, i.e. mutual consultation. The more minds the better.
What about those times when one person happens to be right and everyone else is wrong?
Invariably, the ascendency of the individual’s contrarian opinion against the dominant position happens because it was confirmed by groups who tested it out. But more importantly, it’s never an opinion based on a cognitive distortion but on a stronger argument that takes into account more relevant data. This is why it’s important to have a contrarian in a group who gets assigned the task of asking, “What have we missed?” and “What if we’re wrong?” to point everyone back to the process and identify gaps in reasoning that could be catastrophic if left unbridged.
In the current pandemic, we have a number of individuals, previously well-known for their…let’s call them “contrarian” opinions on public health measures, who are making the rounds in social medial on various platforms where they offer their take on what coronaviruses are (or are not), what COVID-19 is, and how sinister are the intentions of anyone who is having anything to do with the current measures taken to limit the mortality and morbidity rates.
The most interesting phenomenon about these figures for me is not what they have to say, but the odd response by some Muslims, especially those in positions of religious leadership as imams or scholars and muftis. The Muslim community has its share of individuals with “contrarian” opinions going against the established majority ruling on some issue. Assuming what is promoted as the “established majority opinion” happens to actually be so (and far too often it’s popularized as such when traditional Sunni scholars had differences in the matter), the response against such “contrarianism” is perfectly reasonable:
“You mean to tell us that in spite of the apparent meanings of the verses in the Quran and authenticated Hadiths, statements of the Companions about this matter, and after more than 1400 years of scholarship spanning not just the four madhhabs but also the extinct ones where some of their opinions are on record, you’ve decided that all these people who understood Arabic better than you and I and practiced Islam in a world where Allah, not the Nation-State, was the Sovereign, didn’t know what constituted a valid hijab?”
The issue at hand is not about the contrarian declarations being made per se. It’s about the process through which the conclusions are arrived it for those declarations to be made. Is the argument a sound one? If the majority of experts are not “speaking out”, what’s more likely? That the declaration is wrong, or that they’re afraid of being killed or losing their jobs? Unless of course, shape-shifting aliens are running the entire world and Bill Gates has all these doctors across multiple countries in different environments, most of whom are nowhere even close to a 5G network, implanted with chips that he can use to kill anyone who dares to “expose the truth” by tapping their icon on his Microsoft Surface Pro at Eteon.
It’s not enough for someone to be introduced by the title “Dr.” before their name to have their statements given the same consideration as those coming from the majority of experts in that field. If you’re not going to accept Sa’d ad-Dïn al-Hilalī dismantling the Sharia even though he’s an Azhari scholar who teaches comparative Fiqh, why would you accept the statements of an engineer “exposing the truth about COVID-19”, or a physician who’s not currently practicing in a hospital setting and has never published anything on epidemiology or virology “revealing how coronavirus is a bioweapon”?
And no, being of a darker complexion and having ethnic, and especially Muslim-background sounding names is not enough to be credible, just as it’s not enough to simply offer an opposing account that runs counter to public health measures you don’t like. It’s also not enough to have written a book or ten that haven’t been reviewed and recognized as authoritative by those who have researched the specific topic these books are purportedly about their entire lives. This isn’t an appeal to authority as such, but to a coherent evaluation process that minimizes the role of cognitive biases and distortions.
The promotion of such individuals is a form of misplaced rebellion against the authority of expertise that leads to intellectual chaos because it’s not rooted in any sound methodology that can lead to coherent thought or consistency in decision-making. Given its lack of rationality, not only will such an approach by Muslims fail to be a foundation for the rebuilding of a God-conscious civilization, but it will also fail at being a check against any wrongs because it can’t even properly identify them or rationally defend what it claims to be the good.
