What Bayesian Statistics And Tequila Can Teach Us About Being Tolerant
If you thought the title is an elaborate clickbait, there’s an 83% chance that your beliefs might be updated (mental self-five). Let’s start with a little story, since we all love stories, eh? Only this time, this actually happened last year in my then-kitchen. The scene begins with me being semi-condescending about how pineapple on pizza isn’t a good idea even though either of them by themselves is great. Then my friend and one of my then-roommates, let’s call her Bethany, told me what led to this piece.
B: So you’ve had pineapple on pizza and didn’t like it?
Me: Nope, never had or having that. Everrrr.
B: Then how do you know you if it’s not good?
Point. So when we ordered pizza that afternoon, we slide in one with pineapple toppings. I tried that and turns out it just wasn’t my thing. But I DIDN’T hate it either. I could kinda see how many can like it- the savory ham and sweet & sour pineapple combo CAN work. So then I updated my prior belief from hating pineapple pizza to “meh, it’s alright”. I didn’t really realize it back then, but I went from blindly disliking something to being fine with something that I didn’t know of better before. And there are so many things we might blindly don’t like just because we see others doing that, and take it as a heuristic into forming our own beliefs without asking why.
And that’s where Thomas Bayes- philosopher, theologian, mathematician, comes into play. Among a bunch of other things that Bayes blessed humanity with, we are ever-so indebted to the Bayes’ theorem. In essence, Bayes’ theorem gives us a way to revise existing predictions or theories when faced with new or additional evidence (Investopedia). So to unpack the whole thing, sometimes we can’t know for sure what’s what unless we make an effort to overcome this bias-as-information heuristic that makes our brains go click-whirr* instead of thinking things through.
By now you might have found the biggest chink in my narrative. You’re probably thinking, you don’t have to try something to be tolerant of it. You could have very well disliked pineapple pizza even after trying. And this is where tequila comes in. Okay, I am not saying taking shots with pizza is the answer, but I shouldn’t have blindly disliked pineapple pizza in the first place just because some people said so. Just like the salt reduces the burn of the tequila, maybe we should take things we hear with a pinch of salt as well to reduce biases.
By that I mean we shouldn’t just blindly accept stuff we hear all the time. Our brains did not go through thousands of years of evolution to just believe everything so and so says. We should be asking ourselves, does that actually make sense? Is the source credible enough to believe them? Do they have proper expertise in that field? History, traditions, etc. are great- but we do have it in ourselves to question who’s narrative became history. We do have it in ourselves to view traditions through the lens of today’s society to see if it still makes sense. Some may do, some may not. But here’s a flashback, we did marginalize half the human population throughout history in the name of tradition in many societies. But we have come to terms that it was wrong. Even though we’re far from ideal, there are some amazing efforts to rectify that and that paints a hopeful future. As a species, we are evolving and will keep doing so, and maybe we can also evolve how we see things for the better as well.
Thomas Diefenbach, one of my favorite professors from college, introduced us to Sapare Aude. His understanding of the Latin phrase was, dare to think for yourself. It’s very natural to form and have opinions but it can be a good idea to play the devil’s advocate once in a while to see if those still make sense in light of new stuff. And even more so, when someone challenges our beliefs, we can be thankful because the person on the other end is kinda doing the work for us and helping us become less ignorant than yesterday. We can welcome dialogue on many important things that are pivotal in our society right now. Till there’s enough evidence on what’s what, we can be tolerant of things. Because, in all randomness, we might just have the same chance of being wrong about something and our beliefs may need some serious updating.
P.S. I am not promoting tequila. But I heard a rumor that Fireball is nice, it has cinnamon.
*borrowed this from Robert Cialdini- Regents’ Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Marketing at Arizona State University. Google for some great reads if interested in influence, biases, or just cool stuff about how our brains work.
