Kathryn Schulz's Evidence

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“Limited Information is really how we err. But it is also how we think.” The act of actively combating our inductive bias in Kathryn Schulz’s Evidence
In Kathryn Schulz’s essay, “Evidence”, the argument of the essay follows various situations brought up by Schulz, showing that people should take a positive approach to being wrong, and accept our error-prone nature, rather than obsessing with a perfect inadvertently-free ideal. Schulz ties together a lot of strong evidence, but fades back from a clear conclusion, steering the readers toward a relationship between error and the self. She further studies moral transformation on conversations, our attachment to a view wrongly identified due to our pre conceived opinion off prior experience. Schulz …show more content…

Each person develops “Specific and formal ideas about it-what kind of information qualifies, how to gather it, how to evaluate it”(364). Schulz uses Augustine’s words in the essay as Augustine has a similar way to perceive evidence. “Believing things based on paltry evidence is the engine that drives the entire miraculous machinery of human cognition”(364). Schulz adds a interesting multiple choice quiz into the chapter prove a point between man and machine: “Human beings… have no trouble answering these questions because we don’t care about what is logically valid and theoretically possible. We care about what is probable… we choose the most likely answer to any given question based on the kinds of things we have (and haven’t) experienced in comparable situations before” (366). That test shows how us humans use our pre-conceived notions through our inductive reasoning to predict the output of a situation. Inductive reasoning is a careful understanding of evidence, but because it is so quick, it opens the window for error. What makes our minds great is also what makes us …show more content…

With inductive reasoning, jumping to conclusions is what the process calls for, but what Schulz is getting at is not the problem of jumping to conclusions; it is the problem of not overturning the false accusations of the assumption, thus creating stereotypes. Schulz expresses the frustration with the stubbornness behind stereotypes by exclaiming, “If the stereotypes we generate based on the small amount of evidence could be overturned by equally small amounts of counterevidence, this particular feature of inductive reasoning wouldn’t be terribly worrisome” (371). This problem that’s birthed from inductive reasoning is what Schulz wants us to “actively combat our inductive biases: to deliberately seek out evidence that challenges our beliefs, and to take seriously such evidence when we come across it”(373). Schulz wants us to challenge evidence when confronted rather than fall into the pitfalls of ignorant assumptions. Nearing the end of the chapter, Schulz warns that with attending to counterevidence is not hard, its conscious cultivation that’s the important key, without that key, “our strongest beliefs are determined by mere accidents of fate”(377). There is a threshold of new evidence above which our opinions would be amended, but what Schulz repeatedly brings us is that in many cases, that the threshold is not

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