Reasoning can take us to almost any conclusion we want to reach, because we ask “Can I believe it?” when we want to believe something, but “Must I believe it?” when we don’t want to believe. The answer is almost always yes to the first question and no to the second.
I remember reading the idea expressed in this quote in an old LW post, older than Haidt’s book which was published in 2012, and it is probably older than that.
In any case, I think that this is a very good quote, because it highlights a bias that seems to be more prevalent than perhaps any other cognitive bias discussed here and motivates attempts to find better ways to reason and argue. If LessWrong had an introduction whose intention was to motivate why we need better thinking tools, this idea could be presented very early, maybe even in a second or third paragraph.
I think psychologist Tom Gilovich is the original source of the “Can I?” vs. “Must I?” description of motivated reasoning. He wrote about it in his 1991 book How We Know What Isn’t So.
For desired conclusions, we ask ourselves, “Can I believe this?”, but for unpalatable conclusions we ask, “Must I believe this?
--Jon Haidt, The Righteous Mind
I remember reading the idea expressed in this quote in an old LW post, older than Haidt’s book which was published in 2012, and it is probably older than that.
In any case, I think that this is a very good quote, because it highlights a bias that seems to be more prevalent than perhaps any other cognitive bias discussed here and motivates attempts to find better ways to reason and argue. If LessWrong had an introduction whose intention was to motivate why we need better thinking tools, this idea could be presented very early, maybe even in a second or third paragraph.
I think psychologist Tom Gilovich is the original source of the “Can I?” vs. “Must I?” description of motivated reasoning. He wrote about it in his 1991 book How We Know What Isn’t So.