From the "Truth in a Blog Title" Files
March 08, 2006

I bring you the "Mike's Noise" page and this wonderful excerpt, which underscores the writer's own recognition about how aptly titled his page happens to be:

"MSNBC News reports that two students from Birmingham-Southern College were arrested last night in their college dorm rooms, in connection with the string of arsons that damaged or destroyed nearly a dozen Baptist churches in rural Alabama last month... So far, authorities have declined to discuss motive or any other details of their investigation....And here is a possibility for motive.. [I}t is not inconceivable that the psychotic hatred of Christians in general by gay activists, coupled with Prof. Speigner's murder, may have precipitated these crimes."

It's also not inconceivable that the Easter Bunny fell off the wagon, went on a bender, and freebased cocaine at the scene of each of these arsons, thus setting the fire and causing the disastrous results. As long as we're pulling explanations out of our asses, we might as well go with the fluffy one.

See, there's this thing called a Confirmation Bias,

a type of selective thinking whereby one tends to notice and to look for what confirms one's beliefs, and to ignore, not look for, or undervalue the relevance of what contradicts one's beliefs.

For example, if you believe that during a full moon there is an increase in admissions to the emergency room where you work, you will take notice of admissions during a full moon, but be inattentive to the moon when admissions occur during other nights of the month.

A tendency to do this over time unjustifiably strengthens your belief in the relationship between the full moon and accidents and other lunar effects.

that can trip up even the most careful of us.

In cases such as the one I linked, where no care was taken in generating thie post, I prefer to call it the "You're An Idiot" bias. This variant of the Confirmation Bias has the added bit that the author wouldn't know the truth if it skipped up to him, twisted his nipples and gave him $20 bucks for his time.

Education is supposed to teach people about these things, especially people who tout their advanced degrees as a sign of their knowledge and source of their certaintude.

Education ain't what it used to be.

Posted by Jody at March 8, 2006 01:45 PM

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