This article really doesn't have an audience, because there are no beginners when it comes to motivated reasoning: we're all experts. After all, we've been doing it all our lives.
Motivated reasoning is the process of picking and choosing our way through the forest of facts so that we come out at a specific place, no matter how twisty and narrow the path. If you've ever spent time in the bush you'll be aware that any patch of ground has multiple ways forward. There's game trail that leads this way, but the slope of the land leads that, and some smaller animals have clearly left the sign of their passing in a quite different direction. We can choose what seems the most desirable way forward using different criterion.
Bayesian epistemology is the process of looking at the road ahead and following it, step by step, which sounds like it should be easy. It turns out it isn't, and one of the biggest reasons for that is our desire to turn aside and end up somewhere other than where the wider road is going.
Sometimes this is a good thing: we may be dedicated to the idea that it really is possible to build saleable electric cars, or use computer imaging to guide surgeons, or to put a simple, automated laboratory for detecting pathogens in water into a box so that anyone can operate it. In those cases finding the road less travelled, fighting our way through a narrow pass that no one else thought worth the trouble of navigating, can lead us to interesting places, although the odds are we'll get lost a few times along the way.
But as they say about laughing and Bozo the Clown: just because explorers get lost doesn't mean that being lost makes one an explorer.
By the time you read this, on New Year's Eve 2021, you will have been saturated with motivated reasoning with regard to omicron, in the form of an endless stream of articles along the lines of: "Omicron is milder", "Omicron has lower hospitalizations", "Omicron is here but hospitalization are still low", "Is omicron showing signs of 'decoupling'?", "Omicron hospitalizations are rising but ICU numbers have yet to follow", "No increase in deaths from Omicron says BC top doctor", and so on.
Every one of these paeans to motivated reasoning will be shared and discussed by people in its grip, and the conclusion they are reasoning toward is: "It's not so bad."
They are doing this despite the arc of headlines bending toward the path that experts have sketched: exponentially increasing cases followed some days or weeks later by exponentially increasing hospitalizations followed some days or weeks later by exponentially increasing ICU admissions followed some days or weeks later by exponentially increasing deaths.
A story that says, "Hospitalizations are now rising but ICU admissions are still flat" is not good news. It says: the experts who are predicting our health care system will be overwhelmed are on track so far.
But a lot of people seem to be taking such stories as good--or at least hopeful--news, when they are precisely the opposite.
If you've found yourself doing this, you have a wonderful opportunity to learn from it. Sit for a bit and contemplate your inner being as you think about those headlines, those stories, those discussions. Reflect on how you feel. What's the essence of it?
If you can catch a glimpse of that eager feeling of "this must be true", not as something that follows via updating from the evidence but as something alien and Other, something that does not belong in your mind, you're at a place where wisdom begins. While it's easy to over-hype mindfulness, the practice of stepping back and trying to catch a glimpse of our own inner workings can pay very large dividends if it's carefully and selectively directed.
Why do we choose to read those stories? Why do we lean toward those conclusions, rather than follow the road where the facts are leading?
The answer can't be found in the facts of the outside world, because those facts are pointing quite clearly to: "Yeah, it is pretty likely very bad."
At least that's what I'm saying, as are most other experts who are professionally competent to look at the facts out there in the world and draw robust inferences from them based on their quantitative structure.
Non-experts are necessarily picking and choosing between the editorial opinions of various media outlets and private pundits, some of whom are pushing the "It's not so bad" narrative harder than others.
No news outlet or pundit is entirely reliable--they are all competing for clicks, one way or another--but some are more reliable than others, and it's worth developing a discipline of focusing on the more reliable ones in good times and bad. In Canada, I've found the CBC News website a surprisingly good source, and Penny Daflos at CTV News has been one of the very few journalistic voices in British Columbia to call the province on at least some of its lies and prevarications.
Now, we can always find an expert who disagrees with the majority, and sometime such people are right. But the question is: "Why do we find that disagreeable expert persuasive and not the majority?"
As a non-expert, choosing between expert opinions is a hard problem, and in the current atmosphere of earned distrust in public institutions it's even harder. I don't have a great solution to this problem. "Listen to me!" obviously won't work because that's what every charlatan says. Don’t discount the possibility that I could be one of them.
I'm reminded of a conversation I had with a devout Suffi Muslim who was insistent that the problem with Islam was that everyone thought there own reading of the Quran was uniquely correct, whereas clearly it was his interpretation (that there were many ways to interpret the text) that was right and everyone else's was wrong. I could not get him to see that this attitude was a meta-instance of the problem he had so clearly identified (in others.). It's something about beams and motes, I think.
But one useful technique for choosing among experts is a healthy degree of suspicion when they say something we find comforting.
Human beings, like cats, are comfort-seeking creatures, and the world is full of facts that are apt to make us uncomfortable.
We mythologize some of those facts away, creating comprehensive narratives that we claim represent "the real truth." The existence of these narratives allows us to dismiss or discount facts and occurrences that deviate from the narrative as anomalies, as not reflective of "who we are" or "how it is" when operationally they could hardly be anything else.
Conversely, there are those who would reject the superficially comfortable myth for an equally comfortable anti-myth, because there is very little more comfortable than self-righteousness.
To take an example from politics, a reasonable overall statement is: Canada is a peaceable kingdom governed by the rule of law that systemically neglects and abuses the descendants of the people who were here before Europeans arrived. Treating either part of that statement as "the real truth" is a lie, but mythologizers and anti-mythologizers will insist that only the first or second part is reflective of "real reality", which is somehow different from what actually exists: it is conceptual reality. Imaginary reality. Perhaps not reality at all.
So here is an uncomfortable fact: "Omicron is proceeding along the path toward disaster than experts have said is most likely, which will very probably result in the health care system being overwhelmed and require a kind of generational renewal that we don't really trust anyone in power today to have the vision or competency to manage."
Critically, we only have room in our minds for a handful of facts at once, and this is the real secret to the success of motivated reasoning at keeping us comfortable, or at least not too uncomfortable.
If we focus intently on the narrative that says "Hospitalizations/ICU admissions/deaths aren't rising", it can crowd out the other conclusion, the conclusion that the broad path of fact and probability leads to: they will be rising soon, just as hospitalizations rose after a couple of weeks of supposed "decoupling".
Experts could and did predict the rise in hospitalizations in Eastern Canada based on data from Europe. We are also predicting a rise in ICU admissions, and eventually a rise in deaths.
Here is an extremely simple-minded projection I put together for hospitalizations in British Columbia, where I live. It really "dumb as rocks" but despite that it's smarter than the result of any casual glance at the numbers. And it predicts we won't see a rise in hospitalizations until early in the New Year. Then they'll jump hard.
Could this be wrong?
Sure.
But what facts in the outside world justify a focus on that possibility, as opposed to "This could be right?"
These are not difficult predictions to make, any more than it's difficult to make the prediction that the rate of new cases in Canada will crash dramatically in early-to-mid January: given the observed dynamics of omicron, it will infect almost everyone almost everywhere, and then stop--likely after a period where the number of new cases bounces up and down dramatically from day to day--because how can there be exponentially growing new cases when almost everyone is already infected?
Yet we can be sure that when that crash in new case numbers comes, there will be motivated reasoners who spin it as a good thing, even as ICU admissions start to rise around the same time, and deaths take their first uptick that's large enough for non-experts to detect.
And given the probable consequences of being wrong in one direction vs the other, this is one of those cases where motivated reasoning can kill by leaving us complacent and under-prepared for the most likely future.
Motivated reasoning allows us to avoid discomfort by exhausting our limited attention by way of a focus on an implausible but comfortable narrative, to the neglect of more plausible but less comfortable one.
We're all subject to it. I've nailed my colours to mast on the seriousness of omicron, and if the data really shows it's no big deal in Canada it'll hurt to tear them down. Because of that, I'll likely be slower than some others to do so. But I will, because my strongest motivation is to keep my beliefs up to date with what I know of external reality. When faced with contrary facts I've abandoned beliefs I cared about a lot more than "omicron is a serious threat to our health care system".
We're all experts in motivated reasoning, but with practice and discipline we can unlearn and overcome it to a useful and potentially life-saving degree. The first step is taking the time to step back and be mindful, and see if we can catch ourselves in the act.
It isn't a comfortable feeling when we do that, but comfort is something best left to cats. They're much better at it than we are, and a cat seeking comfort rarely does half so much damage as a human doing the same.
Why Do You Think That?
Love the line “cat seeking comfort rarely does half so much damage as a human doing the same.” I have those same feeling about climate change. (I have denier friends who I too felt were doing so for reasons of personal comfort but will forever think of these friends as “comfort seeking cats.”)
With omicron this comfort seeking blind spot will lead to an excess of deaths and economic disruption in 2022. With climate change that same attitude will lead humanity to a meteorological disruption that could do the same on a planetary level for not just one year but hundreds or thousands of years.
That same thinking is the theme of the Netflix movie “Don't Look Up” … humans would rather go on with the comfortable lives than acknowledge the virus/comet/climate crisis about to hit us. Thanks for being someone not afraid to sound the clarion, even if the cats are too comfortable (or complacent) to pay attention or act.