Levin on Confirmation Bias

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I personally think the sources of our party differences lie at least as much in different philosophical outlooks as in different material interests or natural dispositions (though those do matter, surely). I think our Left and Right, very broadly understood, are each implicitly attached to a different set of ideas about human perfectibility and human limits, different notions of what the shape and purpose of society are, and different understandings of what kinds of knowledge could be available to us to address social problems. . . . But I think these different outlooks incline us to emphasize different kinds of questions and prioritize different kinds of goods in the effort to improve our society, and that this means the Left and Right often talk past one another in our political debates. It also means that both are very deeply vulnerable to confirmation bias.

My view of that subject leads me to think that arguments (and facts and figures and other information) do matter a great deal in politics, though maybe not as much as any of us might like. But it also leads me to think that the permanence of the limits of human reason and the fact that every party only sees part of the whole means no one — not even people who agree with me — is ever likely to be entirely right when it comes to big, complicated social questions. In terms of the structure of our governing institutions, it therefore leads me to the same conclusion Madison reached, which is that we need a system that keeps all sides from getting too much power and forces them to confront and compromise with one another in practical terms. However much we might regret it, this is a system that assumes we will never fully persuade one another in politics, and indeed that assumes we are probably all wrong — which we probably are. . . .

American progressives have long contended that as social science enables us to overcome some of the limits of what we know, it should also be permitted to overcome the constitutional limits on what government may do. They take themselves to be an exception to the rule that all parties see only parts of the whole, and therefore an exception also to the ubiquity of confirmation bias, and so they demand an exception to the rule that no party should have too much raw power. This is basically what Paul Krugman was getting at.

But the progressives’ understanding of how social science can come to know society and of how such knowledge might be put into effect has itself been a point of great contention with conservatives — who tend to think that a society’s knowledge exists mostly in dispersed forms and therefore that public policy should work largely by enabling the dispersed social institutions of civil society, local community, and the market economy to address problems from the bottom up through incremental trial-and-error learning processes.

Source:  Yuval Levin, "Confirmation Bias and Its Limits," National Review, April 9, 2014