Does one has to have an opinion on everything? I don’t think so. The current era requires politicians, artists and public figures of any kind to express themselves on a multitude of varied subjects which sometimes have nothing to do with their own expertise areas.
Either they are asked to, or they spontaneously speak up.
I believe that it is completely acceptable to answer “I don’t know, I haven’t learned enough about the subject to express a valid opinion” or “I don’t want to express myself on this or that”.
For two decades, the proliferation of social media has allowed people to express themselves on anything and everything. Spontaneously, of course, because in the majority of cases, no one asked the person for their opinion. The average person feels obliged to have an opinion on everything, and it’s exhausting because, in the majority of cases again, the opinion is neither balanced, nor corroborated nor sourced.
Let’s not fool ourselves, I’m also an ordinary person here. In my field of expertise, i.e. law, this is not the case – I wrote a thesis on the introduction of European currency and ongoing contracts before the euro was introduced, I have published around thirty doctrinal articles in specialized legal journals – but here, on the Internet, I am an ordinary person like any other.
That being said, as I am a lawyer but even more of an academic at heart, when I take up a subject which is not legal, I do my research, I document myself, and I try to understand the ins and outs of the subject. I try to remain factual and neutral – even if I know that it is very easy to manipulate, subtract or on the contrary highlight certain facts, certain figures or certain statistics.
I also know that each of us has cognitive biases and that they are numerous. Everything moves quickly in this world, where everyone is over-solicited and over-demanding, and where themes are multiplied thanks to social media. Fake news are legion and add to the cognitive biases that each of us may have.
The result is that the majority of us favor a system of thought which simplifies a problem to express an opinion which is not based on any reasoning, to the detriment of a system of thought based on a decomposition of reasoning which would approach as close as possible to the scientific method.
Expressing yourself as accurately as possible requires integrating all the data of a problem, understanding them fully and integrating them into reasoning which must be as neutral as possible. This implies avoiding superficiality in the gathering of information and in the analysis made of it. This requires being plastic in one’s reasoning, that is to say, agreeing to change one’s point of view and not sticking rigidly to one’s initial opinion.
I recommend reading this wonderful little work which had such an impact on me twenty years ago, “The Art of Always Being Right” in which Schopenhauer comes to the conclusion that the aim of human debate is too often that of imposing one’s point of view to the interlocutor, rather than seeking emulation which benefits each of the interlocutors and the discussion as such.
Our cognitive biases limit us all.
“Confirmation bias” is the instinctive tendency of the human mind to seek out and be satisfied with information that confirms its way of thinking and to discard anything that might contradict it. This is perhaps the great danger of our time, because the algorithm of any social media is designed to present us only with opinions that are already ours – this is one of the great revelations of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
The “Dunning-Kruger bias” is the tendency of the human mind to overestimate its confidence in an area that it does not master. The opposite is that the knowledgeable person who masters a subject will often express doubts about their ability to know and understand said subject. This is probably because the more we dig into a subject, the more we understand that the theme is neither black nor white and that it includes many subtleties.
The “authority bias”, which is illustrated by the terrible Milgram experiment, is the tendency of the human mind to grant blind trust to a recognized authority. Let’s talk for a moment about this Milgram experience, which left me, when I discovered it about twenty years ago, completely stunned: to try to understand how ordinary Germans could have participated in the Shoah, Stanley Milgram, an American psychologist working at Yale, decides to conduct an experiment between 1960 and 1962 assessing the degree of obedience of American citizens to an authority that they consider legitimate.
Milgram’s teams place advertisements to recruit subjects for a scientific experiment presented on the effectiveness of punishment on memorization. Participants are men and women aged 20 to 50 from all backgrounds and education levels.
The experience features three types of characters: the learner, who must memorize lists of words, a teacher who dictates the words to be memorized, who checks the answers and who inflicts an electric shock in case of error, and an experimenter who represents the official authority. The learner and the experimenter are two actors. It is the teacher who is in reality the only subject of the experiment (and who is not aware of it), which aims to determine his or her level of obedience or submission to authority. He or she must administer an increasingly strong electric shock over the course of the errors to the learner (who is hidden in an adjacent room and who vocally mimics the pain since the pain inflicted is obviously fictitious.
In response to the supposed jolts, the learner begins to grunt at 75 volts, complain at 120 volts, ask to be released at 150 volts, plead with increasing vigor next and let out agonized screams at 285 volts. Eventually, in desperation, the learner yells loudly and complains of heart pain. At some point the learner refuses to answer any more questions. Finally, at 330 volts the learner is totally silent (teachers are instructed to treat silence as a wrong answer and apply the next schock level to the learner).
At 150 volts, the majority of teachers express doubts and question the experimenter who reassures them, tells them that they are not responsible for the consequences and asks the teacher to continue.
If a teacher expresses the desire to stop the experiment, the experimenter gives him or her, in order, these responses: “please continue”, “the experiment requires that you continue”, “it is absolutely essential that you continue” and “you have no other choice, you must go on”.
If the teacher wishes to stop after these four injunctions, the experiment is halted. The Milgram experiment shows a rate of 62.5% of teachers administering (alleged) electroshocks at 450 volts (i.e. 25 people out of 40).
All participants had accepted the very principle of the experiment (namely inflicting pain) and had reached the (alleged) 135 volts. However, each teacher had at one time or another interrupted to question the experimenter who was, for them, an authority figure.
The experiment has many variations (with results around 65% in most cases, 80% in an European version filmed in 2010) and Stanley Milgram proposes in his book “Obedience to Authority: an Experimental View” published in 1974 a detailed analysis of his experience. He concludes that obedience is a behavior inherent to life in society and that the human being abandons a part of his or her individuality to become an agent of authority. Milgram rejects any argument relating to the internal aggressiveness of the subjects, and instead highlights the acquired elements of the human being (the family context, education, ideology and the rightness of the cause, anxiety, conformism, loss of autonomy from authority and loss of sense of responsibility which arise from all of these elements).
In such a conclusion, Milgram agrees with journalist and philosopher Hannah Arendt who believes in “Eichmann in Jerusalem: Report on the Banality of Evil” that Eichmann is more of a bureaucrat than a cruel anti-Semite.
The consequence of notoriety bias as illustrated by the Milgram experiment is that the human mind will place blind trust in an authority that it recognizes as legitimate. Depending on the times and circumstances, the authority whose legitimacy is recognized can be a government, television or now social media.
“Non-validation bias” is the trap which consists of retaining a fact, an observation, an intuition as true, without ensuring their confirmation by a serious study.
The “cognitive dissonance bias” is that which tends to want to diminish the element which contradicts our opinions in order to reduce the dissonance that this element causes to our opinion.
“Selective perception bias” encourages the human mind to select only what is familiar or reinforces it. We refer to this “something that speaks to us because we have experienced it”, which is personality traits, beliefs, favorite themes. This focusing tendency dismisses anything that is neither familiar nor comfortable and inevitably truncates the issue as a whole.
The “negativity bias” implies that we are more sensitive to negative information than to positive information.
The bias of the “internal locus” (everything I have achieved is thanks to me) and the “external locus” (“everything bad that happens to me is because of others”) disesteem the interaction between the person that we are and the environment in which we evolve, because it goes without saying that the events that happen to us are the result of this interaction between interior and exterior.
These are the main cognitive biases – there are many others (there are obviously race, gender, group, class biases) – but they all ultimately come back to the same question: the ability of each person to develop a certain mental and emotional plasticity which leaves behind the ego and acquired knowledge to try to understand a problem as a whole.
However, mental and emotional plasticity sometimes requires knowing how to be humble and knowing how to remain silent.
A few people on Instagram challenged me on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the days following the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, perhaps hoping, I don’t know, that I would speak out on the subject and that I would take the side of Israel – which was at that time the most commonly accepted because of France’s diplomatic opinion and the majority of the media and speakers’ opinions.
The truth is that I am not going to express an political opinion on this conflict.
Because I don’t have the skill or expertise to side with either antagonist.
I am not a geopolitical scientist.
I can speak about the demonstrations which took place in France because I am French, because I live in France, because I followed the parliamentary debates which lit the fire of these demonstrations, because as a lawyer, I am able to express an opinion based on legal texts and case law regarding the fundamental freedom to demonstrate.
I can talk about feminism because I have read many books, essays and academic texts on the subject and because I have debated feminist themes at length with a young woman who is my daughter who is now a doctoral student in gender issues.
But regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, although I have read for several years on this conflict which I find terribly complex, the truth is that I do not live the situation day by day, that I am not on the ground, that I only know finally very vaguely the ins and outs of the conflict taken in all its subtleties.
The truth is that I have no valid opinion on this conflict that everyone simplifies. I just know that life is rarely black or white, with absolutely perfect heroes and truly evil villains and that gray areas predominate most of the time.
The truth is that my heart goes out to the martyred populations, whoever they may be, who suffer from political decisions of infinite poverty. Every time politics and geopolitics take precedence over the security of populations, the situation becomes revolting and as long as we do not put humans at the heart of the debate, humanity can only go backwards.
This is not an opinion. It’s a feeling.
By writing this text, I see that I am myself clearly experiencing my own cognitive biases. I have spoken to you at length about the Milgram experience because the fate of the Jews during WWII obsessed me for more than thirty years, following a visit at age 11 to the Auschwitz camp which shaped a large part of the personality of the privileged catholic pre-teen I was then and which, by extension, brought me later towards the fate of oppressed minorities. I was also a terribly sad child – and seeing Auschwitz at the age of 11 was probably the most traumatic and foundational event for the adult I would become.
The current fate of people under bombs (but also of victims of mistreatment, of violence, of incest) hits me right in the solar plexus (literally: I take an emotional cannonball in the plexus which bends inwards, the emotional pain passes through the rib cage and my back becomes blocked). I never forget that we talk about human beings like me.
Another bias is obviously the gender bias which means that I will never stop expressing myself on this website on the fate of women and on feminism.
I probably experience racial bias – indirectly though, because my children are multiracial, have genetic, cultural, historical and religious heritages that make them citizens of the world and this heritage explains why the cause of any person of color (i.e. not white, not occidental) matters to me.
But talking about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? No, hell no. No one needs to read my amateurish opinion on the subject.
At this stage it would be a total lack of respect for the people concerned, that is to say all the martyred populations. Like Rabbi Arik Ascherman, whose approach is more moral than political and who helps Palestinian people, I am neither pro-Israel nor pro-Palestine, I am pro-human.
Editor’s note. It’s difficult to stay curious and informed at the moment, it’s extremely depressing. I am adding photos here because it is tradition, but you already understood that this is hardly the point of this publication. On the other hand, I recommend the two photographed books – very good ones.
Alexander McQueen cape with a Loro Piana collar – YSL shirt – Vintage belt and trousers – Tabitha Simmons shoes – Dior handbag – Face À Face sunglasses – Agnelle gloves
January 12, 2024
