"I Know."

We like to think we know things, and that isn't an inherently incorrect assumption that we make about ourselves, but in his TEDTalk "Why you should love statistics," data visualization expert Alan Smith describes the discrepancy that often reveals itself when it comes to analyzing what we know versus what we think we know.

Smith illustrates a few main points, one being our society's deficiency in quantity of people well-versed with numeric data, and another being the frank disparity between what particularly populations believe they know as opposed to what they actually know.  He discusses a web app he developed, a survey people could take to compare their assumptions about their communities to actual data about the area in which they lived.  Smith used data collected from this survey to show how inaccurate assumptions about even familiar environments tend to be.

But Smith's presentation provides us with more than just a display of frequent human inaccuracy when it comes to interpreting the world around us; it presents us with a lesson on the nature of argument in itself.

We need to be informed if we are to participate in argument properly.  Problem is, we tend not to be, and one line Smith highlights in his presentation puts this into words perfectly. "We can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness," says economist Daniel Kahneman, and this statement embodies the sort of ignorance humans tend to adopt when building their own systems of beliefs. Though we may feel qualified to speak on certain topics—the characteristics of our own cities, for example—without proper research and an open mind, we can render ourselves blind to the world's realities. We declare our assumptions rational enough to be close to the truth.

Assumption, or at least skewed perspective, shouldn't cut it when it comes to argument, though.

And that's not to suggest we intend to be ignorant in conversation; we never do.  We do, however, subconsciously reject information we find to contradict our own beliefs, and that's also why our views in argument often are rather skewed.  We don't seek out the information we aren't interested in; rather, we highlight the information that concerns us as individuals more directly.

Providing viewers with information compiled from public surveys, Smith essentially illustrates how skewed perspective tends to be.  Englanders could not accurately estimate the religious composition or home-owner percentage even in their own communities, areas people thought themselves to be knowledgable about.  We may think ourselves informed, but we aren't, not really, unless we make the genuinely effort to be.  We need to do research, or at least keep our minds open, if we wish to participate in arguments where we will assert our beliefs or instincts to be true, and that includes considering information that may not fall into our areas of interest, or even into our own belief systems.

- Sarah Kernal