Exiled wrote:How does anyone know they aren't riddled with biases regarding anything?
They ought to realize they are, because we all are. The starting point for beginning to think critically about something demands first confronting this reality.
How do you know your opinions aren't so infected that you cannot independently arrive at conclusions? Are you saying that no one can independently think,
If I thought I was exempt, I'd be a fool. Am I saying no one can think independently? Well, what would that even look like? How is it even possible to be independent of the preconceptions, biases, and cultural background that informs the way one approaches a question?
It's not about being independent. It's about recognizing we aren't, so one approaches issues with that recognition from the outset. If I don't acknowledge I'm biased when I approach a subject, I'll never be able to claim I was even attempting to think independently. The best one can do is approach an issue from the perspective of a person with this opposing view and try to genuinely see it the way they do. And that requires extending good faith their way and looking at their arguments with enough of an open mind that one can see where they are honestly coming from rather than the strawman foundations we are most inclined to attribute to those who think differently.
My impression is you are making the claim for independent thinking based on belief you are outside of the pocket of an establishment source for information. That being the equivalent of being outside of the LDS church's influence like the world operates in that manner. There's inside and outside, sheeple and self-realized people. But that's basically being oblivious to the pocket you ARE in. Any time spent in reading up on human psychology should expose a person to the nature of bias in our behavior and thinking. Any class on critical thinking ought to have laid out the need to approach information from multiple sources with competing views for good reason. It's not something I'm tossing out there to try and defend an argument on the internet.
In a world where everyone is infected with bias, who comes up with the original thoughts?
Anyone can come up with original thoughts. The issue is how reliable they are and how one goes about holding them up to whatever dim light one has available to examine in a world where biases are the norm, information is slanted, we are imperfect receivers of imperfectly transmitted information, and anything that appears true today could be overturned by new evidence tomorrow.
Believing oneself to be independent and somehow privileged with access to the right information while everyone else is stuck under the thumb of some manipulative authority is juvenile. Literally. It's how adolescents view the world. "Mom, dad and everyone in charge are fuck-ups, and I'm going off to be my own person and show them how things should be done because I'm independent." At some point, reality is supposed to chip off the edges of that and instill an understanding the world isn't binary, there aren't easy obvious answers, and most people have good reasons for doing what they do even if it's not what we wish they did. Kids figure out their parents were well-meaning, probably right to some degree, and doing the best they could under difficult circumstances the kid was making harder by being a know-it-all dope. People graduate from college and find out the real world looks different than their professors told them it should be, not because everyone is out to “F” everyone else over, but because idealism works in a classroom and only in a classroom.
