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The Truth About Having Opinions: “Abortion is Wrong” & “Vaccines Save Lives”
Our Beliefs May Be True, but Why?
“Blind belief in authority is the greatest enemy of truth.”
― Albert Einstein
One way to halt our tendency for confirmation bias is to attempt to restate why exactly someone believes what they do. In the 1950s, the brilliant scientist, Alan Turing, came up with the Turing Test which was a test to see whether machines can exhibit a level of intelligence that would be indistinguishable from our own.
An outside observer would communicate with the machine and then guess whether they were communicating with a human or not. A similar experiment called the “Ideological Turing Test” was proposed by the economist, Bryan Caplan. The test’s purpose is to establish whether we can distinguish a person’s ability to relay something with their actual belief in the matter.
Abortion is Wrong
Think of abortion as an example. Those who are pro-choice often have very little sympathy for anyone who is against abortion. They shrug in disbelief over the misogyny of pro-life advocates.
Understandably so.
