Back in the '80s, astronomer and science communicator Carl Sagan put together what he called a "Baloney Detection Kit", intended to make it less likely for people to be fooled by lies and fakery.
The list--which is nine items long--includes, "Wherever possible there must be independent confirmation of the 'facts'," and "Try not to get overly attached to a hypothesis just because it’s yours" and "Quantify."
My hypothesis: these rules are fairly useless. There are too many of them, they're too complicated, and they don't get at the central problem with people's thinking.
We know today--which was not well-understood in Sagan's time--that we have room for about three, or at most five, things in our brain at once. That's the entire scope of our attention.
This alone is the source of a great deal of dysfunctional thinking. For example, consider the following claims about reading the Bible literally:
Although we take the Bible literally, there are still figures of speech within its pages. An example of a figure of speech would be that if someone said "it is raining cats and dogs outside," you would know that they did not really mean that cats and dogs were falling from the sky. They would mean it is raining really hard. There are figures of speech in the Bible which are not to be taken literally, but those are obvious. (See Psalm 17:8 for example.)
So OK. In context, Psalm 17:8 reads:
6 I call on you, my God, for you will answer me;
turn your ear to me and hear my prayer.
7 Show me the wonders of your great love,
you who save by your right hand
those who take refuge in you from their foes.
8 Keep me as the apple of your eye;
hide me in the shadow of your wings
9 from the wicked who are out to destroy me,
from my mortal enemies who surround me.
Well and good. "apple of your eye" is a figure of speech. But what about a passage a little later on:
13 Rise up, Lord, confront them, bring them down;
with your sword rescue me from the wicked.
14 By your hand save me from such people, Lord,
from those of this world whose reward is in this life.
Uh... so God has hands? Literally. And a literal sword?
That's as close to a literal reading of that verse as I can get.
But then the same article quoted above goes on to say:
Finally, when we make ourselves the final arbiters of which parts of the Bible are to be interpreted literally, we elevate ourselves above God. Who is to say, then, that one person’s interpretation of a biblical event or truth is any more or less valid than another’s? The confusion and distortions that would inevitably result from such a system would essentially render the Scriptures null and void. The Bible is God’s Word to us and He meant it to be believed—literally and completely.
Except the parts He doesn't.
In plain language, taken literally, this article is saying we are free to decide that any part of the Bible is a figure of speech, but we are not free to decide which parts of the Bible we are to take as figures of speech.
There is no other literal interpretation of this language: "obviousness" is the standard that the author wants us to apply to judge which parts of the Bible are figures of speech and which parts are not. He has literally stated the standard to be used, and then denied that we should use any standard.
The only reason anyone can get away with saying anything like this is that he's used two different and opposite terms for literality: "figure of speech" and "literal". That small switch is enough to carry our lazy brain over a literal contradiction, because thinking is hard and keeping even three things in mind at once is really hard.
We think linearly. "Figures of speech are obvious"--which means literally "we should make ourselves arbiters of what parts of the Bible to take literally based on the standard of obviousness"--is followed by "we must not make ourselves arbiters of what parts of the Bible to take literally."
So we have two things: "figures of speech in the Bible are obvious" and "we must not make ourselves arbiters of which parts of the Bible to take literally" that are in contradiction, but because they are separated by a small change in language and a logical negation ("figure of speech" means "not literal") it is enough for the average brain to not notice the contradiction.
Systematically working to bring the poles of the contradictions we take for granted to the surface and into contact with each other is required to detect baloney.
Doing that requires that we want to do it.
And for the most part, we don't.
I'm talking, of course, about the baloney that we believe, ourselves. That's what matters. Other people can take care of themselves. Or not. Anyone focused on the baloney other people believe is missing the point.
We don't care about the contradictions we believe because we're lazy, and thinking is hard work, and it hurts. And this is universal: there's nothing unique about thinking.
We don't care about the contradictions we believe for precisely the same reasons we don't care about how fit we are or the quality of the food we eat. The reason is not what we’d like to think it is, though. We’d like to think that fitness or diet or thinking takes time and effort, and most of us are just trying to get through the day.
I don’t think that’s the most important reason though. I think it’s pro-sociality that makes staying fit and eating well and thinking in a non-contradictory manner hard.
Consider: staying fit takes time and money, if one buys into the hype of the fitness-industrial complex that says we need to go to the gym and the like.
It's way easier if we figure out how to do it at home or work it into our lifestyle. By adding twenty-five minutes to my daily commute—back when I still had a daily commute—I got a 5K walk in every work-day: the bus I took required 30-40 minutes, depending on traffic, and walking took me a little under an hour. Low cost, high benefit.
This isn't always possible, but with a little creativity it's far more possible than is often thought. HIIT (high intensity interval training) workouts are an effective way to use body-weight to increase fitness at home: no equipment cost, relatively small time investment. I know a software guy who does it during compiles.
But mostly we don't do that.
Likewise, eating well supposedly takes a lot of time, money, and discipline, especially when we're surrounded by cheap, fast, tasty garbage. But it's also possible.
I'm a big fan of intermittent fasting, which is cheap, fast (as it were) and takes minimal discipline once people get over the false belief that there's something difficult about it. These days I do a sixteen hour fast three days a week, skipping breakfast and lunch but still snacking a bit the evening before because I'm lazy. This has the side-benefit of cutting down on the amount of animal protein I eat, as I only eat meat at lunch. Win-win.
It's easier to control what we eat by not eating than it is to moderate our diet with a regular eating schedule. Our evolutionary history as hunter/gatherer/scavengers means we are tuned up to eat intermittently, and it's common for people living in small villages in the last remaining wildernesses of the world to skip eating now and then just to harden themselves up for lean times.
But instead of practising intermittent fasting, which is cheap, easy, and not particularly high-discipline--especially once we get into the habit--we mostly pay bundles of money to the diet industry to try to eat in totally unnatural ways, because we have this idea that eating three meals a day is "proper" and everything else is "weird", and we'd rather be unhealthy than weird.
And like home fitness, intermittent fasting is asocial: it depends on no one but yourself.
So that's fitness and diet sorted. Simple, eh?
What about thinking?
Like exercise and eating, thinking is frequently a social activity. One big reason why people don't do the simple, cheap, relatively easy things listed above is because doing them alone is what makes them weird. Go to a soccer field sometime and run around like mad by yourself. You'll look like a lunatic. Do the same during a pickup game and you'll make friends.
Humans evolved to be pro-social. You're wired to form groups, tribes, gangs, nations, corporations, ethnicities. It's your super-power, and your greatest weakness. If neurotypical humans weren't radically pro-social they wouldn't have wars. Collective punishment wouldn't exist. Football (soccer) hooligans wouldn't be a problem, but then, football wouldn't be a game.
And I'm talking about "you" here rather than "us" because I'm not. Pro-social, that is. I'm an autistic introvert whose early childhood development was further damaged by emotional neglect that covered at least the time between seven and fifteen months of age, when the "interpersonal self" would normally develop in response to multi-modal interaction with other people. Having missed that developmental window, I adapted by becoming hyper-verbal, which has served me pretty well, but the whole group-identity thing is something I can barely discern through the veil of my own ignorance, which makes me a damned awkward fit with any group of humans I've ever encountered. I've learned to mask well enough to get along, mostly, but I still struggle, and dealing with humans I don't know well takes an enormous amount of energy.
So ascocial exercise and eating come pretty naturally to me, but probably won't to most people. Same with thinking.
Untethered from group norms, without any pro-social signposts to guide them, neurotypical humans go adrift.
And baloney-merchants snap them up, selling real-world equivalents of the “legally edible” “bone rolled pig institutional meat food” in the fake ad above.
Which leaves us where?
Here's my recipe for setting out on the road to better thinking: do more stuff alone. It doesn't matter what it is. Go to a movie or a play or a concert by yourself. Go to the beach or for a hike by yourself. Go kayaking or skiing by yourself. Go to a restaurant, a fancy restaurant, with food you want to try, something unusual for you... by yourself. Maybe leave that ‘til after you’ve had some practice.
Thinking is hard. Much harder than eating or exercising. And we won't find the contradictions in our own thinking by thinking in groups: that leads to what is called "group-think" for good reason. The groups we think in are bound by precisely the contradictions they are willing to accept.
“Bible believing” Christian literalists are bound by their tacit acceptance of the contradiction between “the standard of non-literal text is obviousness metaphor” and “there is no standard we can use to identify non-literal text.” Socialists are bound by the contradiction between “we are for human freedom” and “we are for the total state”. Libertarians are bound by the contradiction “we are for human freedom” and “we are against any institutions that can defend human freedom”. And so on.
Thinking in groups will never free us from contradictions, which are fundamental to baloney: they look like thought in the same way that baloney looks like meat. But they aren’t. I’ve never met a group of self-declared “free thinkers” who didn’t demand rigid adherence to some set of more-or-less contradictory beliefs, who wanted certain questions to not be asked. Right or left, theist or atheist, educated or otherwise: if it’s a group, it almost certainly has core contradictions it doesn’t want questioned, and if it’s a group that appeals to you, you almost certianly share in those contradictions.
We have to do the hard, anti-baloney, thinking alone. And to do that, we have to get good at doing things alone. And to do that we have to practise doing things alone.
I'm not suggesting everyone become like me and live a solitary life in the company of an introverted artist, a couple of cats, and a few good friends. But carving out a space for yourself, that is yours alone, gives you a place to find out who you are when no one else is around. And when you're alone, what you find yourself thinking when you're done unpacking a contradictory belief won't offend anyone who shares that contradiction.
Until they find out about it, of course… at which point you’ll find out how open minded, tolerant, and accepting your friends actually are.