50% of all published research is false, lets start there to understand why people reject 'consensus' and prefer their own interpretation of facts.
Knowledge overconfidence is associated with anti-consensus views
71–80 of 132 posts
Re: Knowledge overconfidence is associated with anti-consensus views
#72> Consuming foods with ingredients derived from GM crops is no riskier than consuming foods modified by conventional plant improvement techniques. In surveys, everything hinges on how you phrase your question. In this case, I'm compelled to agree: I don't believe there's a health risk from eating GM crops. I do think GM crops are bad, though, because they are associated with strain patenting and seedless plants; beca…
Roundup ready plants make it useful to saturate them with poison which you do eat. I don't buy organic. I am poor.
Re: Knowledge overconfidence is associated with anti-consensus views
#73It is my experience that listening to experts normally is a good idea, but the idea of a scientific journal publishing research that we should all listen to scientists and not hold anti-consensus views, has more than a little possibility for bias on the part of the researchers. Moreover, would it not be odd if those who held anti-consensus views were not overconfident? People of average or lower-than-average confiden…
This was more or less my response as well. The 'academy as monolith of truth' is so 20th century. And, of course, disagreeing with Newton is very different that disagreeing with Freud. And we certainly aren't surprised that dupes got the Dunning Kruger.
But I worry about the impact of this line of thinking as we see it repeated in mainstream contexts. "Consensus as measure of truthiness" is incredibly problematic.
Re: Knowledge overconfidence is associated with anti-consensus views
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
Education matters for the consensus (for arbitrary reasons) but in my own life, my prior experiences with food inform my next meal. Education doesn’t come into play at all. Let me pose this another way, why would you expect me to change the amount of bread i eat because of another year education? I already had 13 years of teachers telling me it should be the foundation of my diet and it didn’t stick. Why would the ne…
The modern consensus (or perhaps official, since consensus may be different) is that you should be eating more vegetables than grains. So you appear to agree with the consensus of experts that grains should not be the basis of your diet. This has been the us governments recommendation for over a decade ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MyPlate )
They probably weren't in primary schooling in the last 11 years. They were probably taught the food pyramid over my plate, and disagreed with it.
Re: Knowledge overconfidence is associated with anti-consensus views
#75What the study is describing is a psychological trait known as dogmatism. You might be familiar with the words "dogma" or "dogmatic" in their religious sense: a set of beliefs that members of a religion are expected to accept as true. But there is another, broader way that "dogmatic" is used that does not necessarily have to do with religious dogma. In psychology, dogmatism is a defined as exhibiting great certainty…
Leaving aside whether Catholics, Jews, and Muslims have "vastly different" worldviews or religious beliefs, a question like that still has meaning in the West, where religion is increasingly under attack. I think it's already the case that the practical difference between adhering to a normatively conservative religion versus not is greater and more important than the differences among such religions.
Re: Knowledge overconfidence is associated with anti-consensus views
#76I think it's pretty obvious to everyone what the downsides of people being ignorant are, I would be more interested in seeing some work trying to measure or quantify the damage done by people blindly following mainstream consensus that turns out to be incorrect
to tease out the nuance, the mechanism of mainstreaming isn't an extension of stupidity (ignorance is certainly a more accurate term), but of limited focus and stress. most people don't spend much time thinking about the wider world and how it should work very deeply, so they follow the herd on most things, because it's a decent heuristic and it has a social benefit. it's a literal luxury to have enough time and ment…
> a literal luxury to have enough time and mental space to think for more than a few minutes
Yet I observe people reaching for their phone-distractor device when confronted with a moment of free time.
Re: Knowledge overconfidence is associated with anti-consensus views
#77Is this particularly meaningful? It seems to me that a critical assumption underpinning this study having any meaning is that someone’s ability to answer consensus questions correctly is correlated to their ability to answer non-consensus questions correctly. This does not necessarily follow - a large number of the ideas which are now “objective truths” were at one point non-consensus fringe views (e.g. germ theory, non-heliocentrism, lead paint being bad, climate change, etc.), suggesting that link doesn’t exist all that strongly, in my opinion.
Re: Knowledge overconfidence is associated with anti-consensus views
#78Isn’t this tautologically true when consensus views are assumed correct? (then the consensus view will be judged as appropriately confident while the non-consensus views will be judged as inappropriately confident) It’s also interesting to consider the human psychological factor that the stronger the consensus, the more effort it takes to hold a dissonant view — and plausibly one must project greater confidence in or…
> Isn’t this tautologically true when consensus views are assumed correct? I worried that this study might be circular reasoning in that way. Instead they quizzed knowledge on related fields but not directly connected to the disputed idea. The people involved bet higher amounts on their ability to score well on objective measures of related sciences, but scored worse.
Isn’t that still circular though? Knowledge of the mainstream research isn’t the same as “knowledge of what’s correct”; the person who holds the non-consensus view may have equal or higher levels of knowledge about the path that got them to non-consensus.
At some level you might reasonably expect what you described to be tautological: the person holding the mainstream view knows more about they things surrounding that view. But do they know the alternatives?
It’d be interest to compare the knowledge level the person holding the consensus view has about the non-consensus view to vice versa.
Re: Knowledge overconfidence is associated with anti-consensus views
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
Education must come into play. Your own case illustrates this, as there is no such consensus view. And even granting the possibility that you are exaggerating for effect, it's hard to find a field of knowledge with more contention than dietary nutrition, so one has to be even more diligent about acquiring expertise and not fooling oneself.
Education matters for the consensus (for arbitrary reasons) but in my own life, my prior experiences with food inform my next meal. Education doesn’t come into play at all. Let me pose this another way, why would you expect me to change the amount of bread i eat because of another year education? I already had 13 years of teachers telling me it should be the foundation of my diet and it didn’t stick. Why would the ne…
You seem to be conflating "education", in the general sense, with education in a specific subfield.
I wouldn't expect another year of English literature, calculus, and nuclear physics courses to teach me anything about biology, civics, or textile manufacturing that I could apply to my day-to-day life, either—but a year of education in nutrition science, the practical workings of government, and traditional spinning and weaving techniques? That makes a huge difference.
Re: Knowledge overconfidence is associated with anti-consensus views
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Isn’t this tautologically true when consensus views are assumed correct? I worried that this study might be circular reasoning in that way. Instead they quizzed knowledge on related fields but not directly connected to the disputed idea. The people involved bet higher amounts on their ability to score well on objective measures of related sciences, but scored worse.
Isn’t that still circular though? Knowledge of the mainstream research isn’t the same as “knowledge of what’s correct”; the person who holds the non-consensus view may have equal or higher levels of knowledge about the path that got them to non-consensus. At some level you might reasonably expect what you described to be tautological: the person holding the mainstream view knows more about they things surrounding tha…
> It’d be interest to compare the knowledge level the person holding the consensus view has about the non-consensus view to vice versa.
That's a great question -- harking back to the idea that for the best incarnation of debate one should be able to argue one's opponent's case to their satisfaction, and then make one's own counter.
The unfortunate problem is that it's often far easier to cook up BS than to bust it, so the anticipated effort tilts the scales massively. But in cases where there are specific/highlighted competing alternatives, it would be very interesting to study this.