To What Extent Are We Blind?

Mr. O'Connor, our AS teacher posed this question to us on Monday in class: to what extent are we blind? This was in reference to a discussion on Arthur Miller's The Crucible, in which many of the characters are willfully ignorant of the faults in their logic. He promised a later discussion on this subject, but I just cannot wait. This question hits on one of my favorite hobbies: learning how much of an idiot I am, and how little I control who I am. One of my favorite corners of the internet is the blog You Are Not So Smart, which, the author explains, "is a blog I started to publicly explore our self delusions." I have previously discussed one major focus of the blog, the idea that we create narratives to explain actions we see ourselves making and that we really are just a story we've told ourselves to explain our unconscious mind here.

My answer to the question "to what extent are we blind?" Is "in nearly every extent possible". Although I could write tons of blog posts about this, I'll write one about the most famous example: confirmation bias. Working from the post on it from my beloved You Are Not So Smart, available here, the illusion of confirmation bias is that your opinions are based on "rational, objective analysis." This is not at all the case. In reality, your "opinions are the result of years of paying attention to information which confirmed what you believed while ignoring information which challenged your preconceived notions." We are all blind to anything that contradicts our opinions. And you know what is so amazing about this bias? Most of you are reading this saying "yeah, I can totally see how that would be true of most other people, but I really do like to pay attention to the other side and really to change my opinions based on evidence." Your brain does not want to acknowledge the bias. It would much rather you be blind to it, that's much easier for you. But guess what? Every single one of us has it, and does it. Every single one of us does is blind to everything, basing our opinions off of a world run through thousands of biases and fallacies and narratives in our own brain.

I would ask your opinion on this, but it wouldn't really be based off of anything more than your own false biases, and I'd probably ignore it anyways if it contradicted me because I clearly am the only one free of these faults, so why bother?