11–20 of 59 posts
The problem is that you shouldn't intrinsically believe arguments, at all. You should believe facts . You should believe logical inference from facts. You should believe arguments insofar as they corroborate or refute facts. And, if an argument can't be tested, it's not a very good argument.
This guy sounds absolutely insufferable.
Any expert in a field other than pure math, will tell you that in order to evaluate an argument or evidence, you need experience and intuition, not just argumentation. Arguments are not a formal process that can definitively arrive at conclusions. The same applies to mathematical models. Economists often complain in private about the need to dress up their ideas as mathematical models, even when the model adds nothing to the discussion. This is especially annoying in empirical work, when no one is actually interested in the model, just the empirical results.
Any expert in a field other than pure math, will tell you that in order to evaluate an argument or evidence, you need experience and intuition, not just argumentation. Arguments are not a formal process that can definitively arrive at conclusions. The same applies to mathematical models. Economists often complain in private about the need to dress up their ideas as mathematical models, even when the model adds nothing to the discussion. This is especially annoying in empirical work, when no one is actually interested in the model, just the empirical results.
If I find myself being convinced by the argument, does that mean I should adopt Epistemic learned helplessness in response or not adopt Epistemic learned helplessness in response? I'm partly being facetious, but it would be interesting to try to use a non-argumentative approach to persuade to use one, I'm just not exactly sure what that would look like. As a kid I remember being told "brush your teeth in circles, it'…
I'd imagine that this really only works as long as your intuition is in constant check, though.
Not gullible, he just needs to read Kahneman's "Thinking Fast and Slow".
The intuitive mind is unable to distinguish between consistency and truth. That is, a consistent story will always seem "proven" to the intuitive mind.
"Seeming practically proven" means little. You need to use the more logical part of your mind to crosscheck it.
The problem is that you shouldn't intrinsically believe arguments, at all. You should believe facts . You should believe logical inference from facts. You should believe arguments insofar as they corroborate or refute facts. And, if an argument can't be tested, it's not a very good argument.
Lol. And what precisely is a fact, but an argument about the state of the world being a specific way?
Thankfully not. A "fact" is something that can be measured in such a way that even if you are totally antagonistic to my arguments, we will get the same result.
Now your "argument" may attempt to prove the irrelevancy or inadequacy of my facts, but the facts themselves should be unfudgeable.
If I find myself being convinced by the argument, does that mean I should adopt Epistemic learned helplessness in response or not adopt Epistemic learned helplessness in response? I'm partly being facetious, but it would be interesting to try to use a non-argumentative approach to persuade to use one, I'm just not exactly sure what that would look like. As a kid I remember being told "brush your teeth in circles, it'…
If I find myself being convinced by the argument, does that mean I should adopt Epistemic learned helplessness in response or not adopt Epistemic learned helplessness in response? I'm partly being facetious, but it would be interesting to try to use a non-argumentative approach to persuade to use one, I'm just not exactly sure what that would look like. As a kid I remember being told "brush your teeth in circles, it'…
If they are holding out hope for more skillful brushing, tant pis pour eux!
That is an excellent essay and it scares the crap out of me, because I see it play out every day in both directions and it often does feel exactly like epistemic learned helplessness. There are so many biases that affect individuals (hindsight, hyperbolic discounting, confirmation, etc) that to get correct answers, you have to look at and trust other accounts. You have to do studies, you have to trust those studies,…
I don't know if the right answer is to be generally more open to changing your mind. There are far too many things to be worried about: the danger of AI, religion, the environment, other political views, the results of scientific papers in dozens of fields... epistemic learned helplessness is a defence against wasting literally all of your time taking every argument seriously. At the end, the author notes that we sho…
There's some new physics result about how black holes interact with the quantum foam? I can't build anything practical with it, so beyond "that's interesting" it doesn't really matter to me.
Some food is suddenly found to cause cancer in rats? Unless it's fairly new, the effect on humans can't be all that strong or we'd have noticed by now. Something else will probably kill me first (like whatever the medical term for "old age" is these days).
Someone's claiming that some particular aspect of modern diet causes obesity? It would have to either make you feel lethargic (lower calories out) or make you hungrier (raise calories in). Both of which are directly observable and easily correlated to the contents of recent meals, without having to argue over mechanisms and confounders and personalized gut bacteria and such.
There's a new higher estimate for the percent of scientific results that are fake or poorly done or just statistical noise? This does help for knowing how not-seriously to take everything, but beyond "that's too damn high" the exact numbers aren't all that relevant (unless you're testing a fix).
Someone wants money to research AI risk? Are they looking at how to build safe AI, or how to prevent anyone either carelessly or deliberately building unsafe AI? Only the second is worth looking into further.