BELIEF: AN OWNER’S MANUAL
ARTICLE 8
A CLOSER LOOK AT AMBIGUITY
PART 1: AMBIGUITY’S NATURE AND IMPORTANCE
In Article 7, we took a closer look at the nature of the needs we look to our beliefs to satisfy. We learned how to identify those needs and why it was essential to be aware of them. In the next few articles, we’ll be doing the same thing for ambiguity. So, let’s start out by taking a closer look at two fundamental questions: “What is the nature of ambiguity?” and “Why does ambiguity matter?”
TWO DEFINITIONS OF AMBIGUITY
What’s ambiguity? From one perspective, ambiguity is the breadth of observations consistent with a belief.
The more ambiguous a belief is, the broader the range of observations that support it and the narrower the range of observations that challenge it. As we noted in Article 5, if you’re playing roulette, the least ambiguous belief you can have is, “On the next spin, the ball will land in a specific pocket.” A more ambiguous belief would be, “On the next spin, the ball will fall into one of the wheel’s eighteen red pockets (or one of the wheel’s eighteen black pockets).” And the belief that the pocket that the ball lands in will reflect divine will – a belief that is consistent with all possible outcomes – is more ambiguous still.
The ambiguity of a belief can also be thought of as the difficulty of falsifying it – that is, how hard it is for believers to recognize that the belief is incorrect, if it is. Sometimes second-order precepts (the ways believers are expected to allow themselves and others to think and talk about their beliefs) can make it hard to recognize the flaws of those beliefs.
During my career I ran quite a few alcohol and drug treatment programs. All of them encouraged patients to attend AA, NA, or other self-help groups. In the interest of maintaining good relationships with those groups, I was expected to be uncritical of their claims and philosophies. That was challenging because I viewed some of those claims as misguided.
For example, AA and NA claimed that “the program works if you work the program.” That is, they claimed that if you did what they suggested, you’d stay “clean and sober.” While that assertion sounds precise and falsifiable, its second-order precepts protected it from falsification by explaining away failures.
It was always possible to claim that those who relapsed failed to “work the program.” Believers could argue that relapsers should have gone to more meetings, spent more time with their sponsors, been more sensitive to their thoughts and feelings, or done a better job of avoiding relapse triggers. Thus, relapses could be blamed on failure to comply with the program rather than limitations in the program’s effectiveness.
On the other hand, if someone was doing well, their brothers and sisters in recovery were less attentive to similar flaws in the ways they “worked the program.” These habits of thought created plenty of evidence that those who relapsed failed to “work the program” and little evidence that those who succeeded might be doing so even though their programs were also imperfect.
The second-order precepts that encouraged attention to flaws in the “programs” of those who relapsed and inattention to deficiencies in the “programs” of those who maintained sobriety protected the belief that “the program works if you work the program” from falsification, rendering it highly ambiguous in practice.
WHY DOES AMBIGUITY MATTER?
As you will discover in the following articles, the more precise a belief that addresses a range of phenomena, the more that belief, if accurate, can help you understand, predict, and manage the issues it addresses.
Ambiguous beliefs, by contrast, offer less specific, less powerful, and less reliable guidance than more precise beliefs. However, ambiguity grants beliefs the power to convince believers that they understand things they don’t and can control things they can’t.
These illusions of understanding and control encourage believers to rely on ambiguous beliefs for guidance in preference to more precise beliefs. For examples of this phenomenon, we need look no further than political discourse and decision-making – areas in which believers often embrace data-refractory narratives in preference to more precise models that address the same issues.
If we wish to choose the right cognitive tools for the tasks that confront us and to use those tools effectively, we need to be realistic about the guidance that beliefs offer us and to guard against the misconceptions that beliefs can all to easily create. Explicit attention to the ambiguity of our beliefs and their alternatives can help us choose our beliefs wisely. We’ll see how in the following articles.
EXERCISE 8: ENHANCING AWARENESS OF THE CONSEQUENCES OF TREATING AMBIGUOUS BELIEFS AS IF THEY WERE PRECISE
1) Read “The Trouble with Truth,” which you can find at the top of the Welcome Page. Answer the following questions, preferably in writing:
a) What do advocates of The Law of Attraction claim to believe?
b) Considering the belief-specific precepts that advocates of The Law of Attraction invoke, what do they actually believe?
c) How do those belief-specific precepts affect the precision of the predictions The Law of Attraction inspires?
d) How do those belief-specific precepts defend The Law of Attraction from falsification?
e) What are the likely consequences of treating The Law of Attraction as if it offered more precise guidance than it does?
2) Read about Lysenkoism. (Feel free to choose your own sources, but two, however imperfect, that suffice for our purposes are https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trofim_Lysenko.) Answer the following questions, preferably in writing:
a) What were Lysenko’s claims?
b) Superficially, how precise did those claims appear to be?
c) How were Lysenko’s claims were protected from falsification?
d) Was Lysenko’s conception more precise or less precise than the (more conventional) conceptions that the Soviets suppressed?
e) What were the consequences of treating Lysenko’s claims as more precise, accurate, and reliable than they were?