A Balanced Approach

We live in a world in which it is becoming increasingly easy to lock yourself into a bubble of ideas & information that agree with your views (Pariser, 2011). Balance has never been more important.

At the recent European Grand Prix this issue was tackled deftly, with reference to the methods used to create the high performance and highly technical Grand Prix cars. The Virgin Racing team recently parted company with its technical director, Nick Wirth and his design firm on the grounds that development was not progressing fast enough (BBC, 2011). Wirth had pioneered the sole use of CFD, a simulation based design software, instead of the multi-faceted (and vastly expensive) testing measures involving the use of large facilities such as wind tunnels.

Virgin's decision is in essence not a rejection of the CFD technique. Rather it expresses what Grand Prix driver Anthony Davidson described as the need to gather as much information as possible, from as many sources as possible, in order to generate the best assessments possible and from them to be able to develop the best results possible. Limiting your potential sources of data would be like 'trying to complete a puzzle with pieces missing' (Davidson in BBC, 24 June 2011).

This forms a big part of the best scientific practices. If you want facts, accurate and evidential assessments of how things are, you must gather and test all the facts in all valid ways.

This reflects a matter of importance in society. Eli Pariser warns us about the risks of becoming enveloped by what social psychologists call 'confirmation bias' (Oswald & Gorsjean, 2004). This is where we allow information that agrees with our preconceptions to take precedence over ideas and evidence that disagrees. Our technology is increasingly allowing us to reinforce this effect by artificially shutting ourselves off from the sources of that information.

Ideology is a particular aspect of our lives in which we find difficultly in exposing ourselves to conflicting beliefs. Yet it is an aspect in which collecting information from diverse sources would offer us real benefits, helping us to develop more nuanced views. The benefits of such exposure are at the heart of the freedom of speech. In his work 'On Liberty', John Stuart Mill stresses the importance of the freedom of speech and particularly notes its curious relationship with the truth:

'The conflicting doctrines, instead of being one true and the other false, share the truth between them, and the nonconforming opinion is needed to supply the remainder of the truth of which the received doctrine embodies only a part.'

In practice this means gathering information from many media sources, in order to find the facts by process of elimination. Particularly through developing a sensitivity to the narratives media outlets from the right or left of the political spectrum are trying to weave around the facts. This means reading newspapers from liberal AND conservative sources in order to find the common facts and remove the subjectivities of the source; subjectives being things such as opinions, bias and situational or circumstantial influences.

As the Arctic Monkey's Alex Turner quoted, 'don't believe the hype'.

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References:
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+ Eli Pariser's 'Beware online "Filter Bubbles"'; May 2011;

+ BBC's 'Virgin Racing fire technical director Nick Wirth'; 2 June 2011;

+ BBC's 'European Grand Prix - Practice One'; 24 June 2011;
 David Croft & Anthony Davidson on Virgin Racing at 1.05.00;

+ Margit E. Oswald & Stefan Grosjean's 'Confirmation Bias'; in Rudiger F. Pohl's 'Cognitive Illusions: A Handbook on Fallacies and Biases in Thinking, Judgement and Memory';  Hove, UK: Psychology Press, pp. 79–96; 2004.

+ John Stuart Mill's 'On Liberty'; 1859.