Truth and Bias
First Universalist Unitarian Church ~ www.uuwausau.org
February 19, 2012
Rev. Paul Beckel

Good morning. It is week four, we’re almost through! We affirm and promote a free and responsible search for truth and meaning. So much so that we’re in the midst of a five week series on truth and meaning. What it means to be human messengers, interpreters, caught here between concrete reality and the imagined realm of pure ideas. What it means to have imperfect inconclusive evidence and to stand up anyway for the ongoing quest instead of succumbing to preordained dogmatic conclusions. What it means to live in a digitally edited world. And now this week: Bias. Can we trust anything presented by someone else, since they have biases? And if we did receive some pure truth, wouldn’t it just get biased on the way in and through our own filters?

GATHERING SONG     I Wish I Knew How          #151
MESSAGE, Part I
Today is the anniversary of the Salters’ Hall Conference. February 19, in 1719, almost 300 years ago, the Salters’ Hall Conference was a gathering in London among those being kicked out of the Church of England because of their anti-trinitarian views. This was the beginning of the nonsubscriber movement. Are you a nonsubscriber? You might be! The word we use in 21st century Unitarian Universalism is creedlessness, but 18th century non-subscribers basically had the same idea: that religious community—and religious inquiry—should not be constrained by creed or dogma or pre-ordained answers to life’s persistent questions.

There still is a group of congregations who call themselves the Non-subscribing Presbyterian Church of Ireland. The movement is made up of thirty-one congregations with Presbyterian in their name and 2 that call themselves Unitarian (in Cork, and this one [slide] in Dublin). Over the centuries, liberal Christian churches in England, Scotland, and Ireland have gathered under a variety of names. The main group is now called the General Assembly of Unitarian and Free Christian Churches. At one time it was “The National Conference of Unitarian, Liberal Christian, Free Christian, Presbyterian and other Non-Subscribing or Kindred Congregations.”

And I thought we had a long name! What’s the big deal? Is it really worth all this effort to come up with a label? I’m not sure, but the determination not to be bound by creed does have major implications. So I am grateful to those heretics of years gone by, and I too refuse to subscribe to a creed today, for three reasons:

1.    Inclusiveness: Even within the diversity of my community I am committed to finding common ground rather than marking off sharp creedal boundaries for who is in and who is out.

2.    Humility around knowledge: and in that humility around knowledge, prioritizing what I do over what I think I know.

3.    I refuse to have the scope of my ongoing search narrowed by answers predetermined by dogma—without evidence to back them up.

But is all this just wishful thinking? Are preconceptions an inevitable part of the human condition? Despite all my bluster, are my thoughts predetermined anyway by the shape and number of synaptic connections in my brain? Has my experience predisposed me to see and to believe only what affirms what I already think is true? Should I just embrace my biases and give up on the quest for truth?

==
I thought about lying this week. Again.

I have a document on our website called the children’s focus bibliography. It’s a list of about 350 children’s picture books, categorized by topic and annotated with brief descriptions. I created the bibliography as a free online resource almost 15 years ago. It was a labor of love to help my ministerial and religious education colleagues find appropriate stories. So a few days ago a colleague emailed me saying, “Your bibliography was last updated in 2005, do you have a newer version?” So I’m thinking about simply removing the date. Because right now it’s just not a priority for me to actually update and revise the bibliography. But I’ve put a lot of work into it and I’ve heard from many people that it’s useful. Still, some probably see “2005” on the front page and think—Oh, that’s old, I’ll look somewhere else. (I’d probably do that myself.) So in fact it becomes less useful simply because of how it is perceived.

Especially because it’s not even people who are making the judgment half the time. Machines are deciding for us now what is and isn’t relevant. Search engines are magnificently designed to give us the newest and best information available. We rely on their algorithmic biases to sort through what would otherwise be an overwhelming flood of information.

So this brings us to the first of several varieties of bias I want to address today. Now for each kind of bias we might consider, we need to be aware that it plays out two ways: both through the sender of the message, and through the receiver of the message. Online, I am biased in my receipt of news and entertainment that suits my preferences. And I re-enforce that bias with every choice I make to return to my preferred sources of information. Those who convey their message online also engage in bias—through “search engine optimization.” Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a huge and growing part of marketing today. It’s about shaping your message so that it might be noticed by search engines in the midst of billions of competing messages. Optimization requires skill, money, or at the very least it requires close attention. And this really bothers me because this is something I don’t want to pay attention to. There are so many other areas where I would rather devote my precious time and psychic energy.

So it’s tempting to put on blinders and say I’m not going to play that game. Especially because I don’t know how to play that game. I’m going to go into this more next week: about the ethics of influence and whether or not we should play the game, but let’s face it, anyone who wants to express themselves today, or keep themselves from being duped, needs to know the tools and the rules of the game.

So, just a quick taste of Search Engine Optimization. There are two basic fields, white hat SEO and black hat SEO. White hat optimization is generally understood as legitimate legal decent and fair competitive marketing practices – getting people’s attention by providing something of value or at least something they want. Black hat optimization is about gaming the system with technical tricks and hidden traps and irritants. In many ways these same con games have been played for centuries, and in some ways they’re new. But whether we find it fascinating or just aggravating, we need to know that these guys are battling it out constantly to gain our attention and our trust.

INTERLUDE
MESSAGE, Part II
I suppose I should define “bias” before I go into all of the different types. Bias is a predisposition that may guide us too directly toward a particular conclusion. In science, at its best, for example, we reject mythical and commercial influences that might skew our investigation. I say “science at its best” because it’s certainly not perfect. Sometimes we fall prey to our own biases or others’ biases. The scientific process, however, enables us over time to discover and correct such errors. This of course will be a never-ending process, as both intentional and unintentional errors will always interfere.

So, for example, science rejects “intelligent design” not because scientists hate religion but because “intelligent design” and Creationism, and so called “creation science,” are various disguises for a flawed process in which the conclusion is predetermined by “God’s irrefutable truth in the Bible” (or more specifically my tribe’s interpretation of the bible).

==
And then there’s media bias. I won’t go into, today, the question of liberal or conservative media bias, which we could argue out to infinity (you think media has a liberal bias because you have a conservative bias...well, you think I’m biased because You’re biased......)

Still, we can look at a few other areas of media bias that are generally recognized to exist. These are described in Brooke Gladstone’s wonderful description of the media (which she calls “The Influencing Machine”): commercial bias, bad news bias, status quo bias, access bias, visual bias, narrative bias, and fairness bias. Let’s briefly look at each of them. They are important to recognize whether you want to use them to manipulate the truth, or whether you’d like to protect yourself from those who do.

By commercial bias I am not talking about the influence held by advertisers over media outlets. Nor am I talking about the influence that media owners have over the content of their reporting. Though both of these exist. No, by commercial bias I mean specifically that media IS business. So media need an audience. So there will always be some bias toward getting an audience...that is, toward presenting what is interesting or shocking or new. There’s not much of an audience for what’s boring. Boring truths will always have a harder time getting our attention.

As a preacher, of course, I am subject to this kind of bias. If every Sunday you got repetition and monotony, you would tend not to return. So like any teacher, salesperson, caregiver, parent or manager attempting to convey a message effectively, I try to be both relevant in topic and appealing in presentation. If there is not some element of sparkle in that you will soon be asleep.

Bad news bias: This exists simply because we’ve evolved to pay attention to threats. For thousands of years bad news bias served humanity well. But now with access to so much information, it leads us to perceive the world as more scary than it actually is. It’s still good for business though.

Status quo bias: this is the tendency of human beings to see only what we’ve always seen to be true, and its our tendency to accept the status quo as it is, because, hey, this system got us this far, right, so why change it?

Access bias is a temptation for those in the media who have worked their way to the point of being able to talk with people in power. These journalists may feel reluctant to report in such a way that they lose that access.

Visual bias is our tendency to notice pictures more than text. For example, there were reports of the abuse of prisoners by the U.S. military long before the Abu Ghraib story came out. But it was when we saw the pictures that we really got the message and felt the horror.

Narrative bias is our preference for a story over raw facts. A story is catchier and easier to remember. So much so that if we have just a piece of a story we will tend to jump to a conclusion—just so we can have that satisfying feeling. As I mentioned last week about visual manipulation, it’s easy to lie even with a REAL picture simply by adding a caption. True or false, a caption turns a picture into a narrative, making it seem more real.

And finally, fairness bias. This is not a bias toward fairness, but a bias toward the Appearance of fairness. This is such a strong bias that media outlets often present stupidity, just to give an opposing view to intelligence.

==
All of these biases will always exist. We can and we must attempt to soften the impact of other huge biases, like the influence of money in politics, the influence of advertising on our perceived needs, the lure of the culture of desire, and the influence of our personal identification with those who share our age, race, gender, class or sexual orientation. We also need to be aware of our preferences for answers that provide us with personal benefits.

Why? Because the consequences of being manipulated are staggering. We were lured into the Spanish American War through a fabricated story about the Maine, an American warship. We accepted as inevitable our entrance into World War I when the Lusitania, with a load of rifle ammunition headed to Europe was torpedoed and we pretended to be shocked! We were lured into World War II by the cries of unprovoked surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, even though it was anything but a surprise. We were lured into Vietnam by fabricated stories about the Gulf of Tonkin. We were lured into Kuwait with the assistance of a professional PR firm. We were lured into Iraq by staged and repetitive statements about the “facts,” not the possibilities but the facts of Weapons of Mass Destruction. Later, when these were proven not to exist, this was simply shrugged off as irrelevant.

But for all this we are not doomed. We are not doomed to the impossibility of truth; we are not doomed to the inevitability of manipulation. Each new era has its challenges and its new tools that can be used to manipulate or to fight for the truth. For us today, the internet is not our salvation. But if we utilize and protect its genius, it will disturb the status quo and once again give truth a fighting chance. In the wake of dangerous concentrations of media ownership the internet provides nearly infinite new outlets for dissenting perspectives. This will mean, of course, a lot of idiotic dissenting perspectives, but this also provides us with new opportunities to stay informed, ways to check into the sources of stated truths, and unprecedented opportunities to engage critically, and collaboratively, in this quest.

==
A teacher in the congregation emailed me last week with a story about media influence. He wrote, “On and off throughout my adult life my family and I have gone for long stretches without a TV.... Amazingly we’ve survived. But I have sometimes mentioned this to my students when they ask, “Did you see ___ on TV last night?” and I must respond in the negative. Last year I had a 3rd grader who got really hung up on the idea of me not having a TV. It really bothered him. He talked about it and asked about it a lot. Then one day at the school lunch table he asked the most telling question. He said (this is a direct quote), “If you don’t have a TV...how do your kids know what toys to buy?”

It’s breathtakingly real, this question. Because I go to media all the time to figure out which toys to buy. It’s often print media of Consumer Reports, but increasingly websites to look for product reviews. So from whom do we learn what is most precious, move valuable, most worthy of our time and attention?

Well, from the company we keep, the friends we choose, the media we consume, all of these will shape us.

So I think it’s the wrong question to ask: “Should we be influenced by media, or not?” Because even those who foreswear the TV, radio, newspaper, internet and ipad will be influenced by the rest of us, who are not so pure. So what we need to ask is HOW will we listen? HOW will we be influenced? And how aware will we be of our own biases and the biases of those who produce what we consume?

SILENCE / DIALOGUE
SENDING SONG             Once to Every Soul & Nation      #119
COMMUNITY FOCUS COLLECTION        for The Women’s Community
BENEDICTION