Unbiased

The original comic resides here: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/bias

I like this comic, but I wonder if the obvious caricature of a faux-open-minded person allows us project this attitude onto other people, yet not see it in ourselves. I understand that I have to be careful of falling into the trap of protecting the things that I believe by demanding higher standards of evidence for contrary opinions. But I also understand that there's very little benefit in being open about that, because the difference between asking for slightly more evidence than one otherwise would and asking for mountains of impossible to obtain data tends to be academic to a person who sees both requests as equally motivated by bias and/or bad faith.

Of course, for many people, they're simply decided not to be so open-minded that their brains fall out, as the saying goes, and there is a certain amount of wisdom in the axiom that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof."

And so the trick, as I understand it, is not so much to never be closed, but to understand why one is closed. Were someone to come up to me tomorrow and claim the Earth is hollow, a simple photograph might not do the trick, whereas I might believe a simple photograph that purported to show that an animal had escaped from the zoo at some point, and was now wandering around wild, depending on the animal in question. It might take more than one photo to convince me that an elephant could be on the lam in the greater Seattle area, for instance. But I'm not really sure why I care more about being right about the Earth being solid than I do about whether a zoo animal of some description may be wandering around Wallingford. After all, the simple fact that I though one thing yesterday and another today rarely has any real impact on my life. There is no action to be taken on most of it.

Credibility is like respect, we give it to some, and withhold it from others as it suits us. Yet as reasonable as that might sound, it's considered biased. There is vulnerability in belief, and so it makes sense that we wouldn't grant credibility lightly. Admitting that we are wrong, or even simply ignorant of certain topics, is more dangerous than we give it credit for, and perhaps what makes reality difficult to discern from caricature is that while we may recognize that someone fears being wrong more than the think they should, the difference between being slightly and extremely more afraid than may be warranted is mostly academic.

Being biased, like being wrong, is often treated as a moral failing, rather than a simple error of knowledge or logic. And maybe that judgement carries more weight that it should, and in so doing, cements the very thing that we say we want to do away with by encouraging us to hide it within ourselves.