If you haven’t read The Undoing Project, you should.
Adversarial Collaboration
71–80 of 224 posts
Re: Adversarial Collaboration
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
> for those students who come to Yale, we expect them to be versed in issues of social justice. We encourage them to be vocal when they see an opportunity for change in our institution and in the world. Would you want anything less in an academic institution? That's the entire point of places of higher learning.
Social justice is not an innocent word. It is charged with a political agenda.
Of course justice involves political agendas. How do you think poll taxes and literacy tests were eliminated? We don't even have to go that far back -- the legal recognition (& protection) of same-sex marriages is something even zoomers have a memory of.
People opposed to social justice aren't apolitical or morally neutral. Banning books, getting educators fired, and forcibly de-transitioning children are all charged political agendas in and of themselves. They all fall under the umbrella of "anti-SJW/woke" brigadism.
Re: Adversarial Collaboration
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
Social justice is not an innocent word. It is charged with a political agenda.
So was "abolition". You can decide you -disagree- with the ideas of 'social justice', or the implementation, or whatever, but I think you'll need a stronger case than "it's political" to warrant the dismissal of an educational institution trying to incorporate the term.
The problem with wokeism is that it’s more like a religion than an effective movement for change. Being seen to believe/say the right things is vastly more important than actively helping.
Woke Racism is a really good book about that. Don’t worry it’s written by a black guy who’s been fighting for social justice for decades. The fact I have to say that is one of his points/arguments.
Re: Adversarial Collaboration
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If someone is a member of a group, it is almost not worth listening to their arguments, especially arguments in support of views held strongly by that group. Who isn't a member of a group? We're all members of a number of groups. It's refreshing that Kahneman honestly admits that he doesn't change his mind either, and his tastes were formed when he was relatively young. He's not putting himself above the rest of hu…
> who isn't a member of a group? We're all members of a number of groups. Not everyone is brainwashed to accept group think no matter in what cirles they have to evolve in. There are individuals and then there are the parrots who mindlessly repeat what the group says.
Being aware of cognitive biases doesn't render you immune to them. Others shape and inform our beliefs about the world just as our own experiences do.
You might be a "rational, fully self-realized, and atomized" individual but your behaviors and thoughts are certainly influenced by those around you. Here's a simple example: https://dictionary.apa.org/social-facilitation
Re: Adversarial Collaboration
#75One of the most disappointing things that I have learned is that most people hold opinions in order to be part of some group. If someone is a member of a group, it is almost not worth listening to their arguments, especially arguments in support of views held strongly by that group. They are arguing in order to maintain their group membership, not to find the truth. It appears this is true of academic and scientific…
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Care to elaborate at all?
Re: Adversarial Collaboration
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then it shouldn't have been titled as so.
The actual title is "Adversarial Collaboration: An EDGE Lecture by Daniel Kahneman". "People don't change their minds" is just the tagline, and he doesn't even actually say it in the lecture. The focus is much more on adversarial collaboration and why he thinks it is a positive thing for science. ...does that change your mind? ;)
Except he says things like:
> To a good first approximation, people simply don't change their minds about anything that matters.
> Let's start from the main domains where we know people don't change their minds — politics or religion.
Perhaps people familiar with his work interpret his statements differently. It's also understandable if this was a lecture for peers. But I'm a layperson whose only context is this article and the things he says sound absolute.
It's already an era of misinformation and low attention. We don't need content published in a way that may add to it. If there are conditions and nuances involved here, I think writers, especially scientists and professionals, and editors should include them and avoid saying anything that risks misinterpretation.
Re: Adversarial Collaboration
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
I hear you, but I'm also the type of person to admit my own uncertainty. And the people around me get way more uptake of their ideas by just leaving out those words, even when they have less or terrible foundations.
It's a cultural thing. The cultural norm in academic or technical circles is extreme precision as well as fear of being held to account by enforcers of that norm. It's a spillover of rigorous academic publishing norms into general conversation. It's a fool's errand given that speech is intrinsically imprecise, and given that everyday speech is just a communication tool and not a vehicle for perfect applied epistemolo…
I know very little about it, but it's my understanding the conlang Láadan has ways to express degrees of certainty and degrees of "handedness" to the information (first-hand, etc).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1adan
Check out the tenses, things like, "Known to speaker because perceived by speaker, externally or internally" vs "Assumed true by speaker because speaker trusts source".
Re: Adversarial Collaboration
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If someone is a member of a group, it is almost not worth listening to their arguments, especially arguments in support of views held strongly by that group. Who isn't a member of a group? We're all members of a number of groups. It's refreshing that Kahneman honestly admits that he doesn't change his mind either, and his tastes were formed when he was relatively young. He's not putting himself above the rest of hu…
Maybe I'm uncommon in this aspect, but I don't feel like I'm a member of many groups. I'm not religious, but don't really consider myself an atheist. I'm not for any particular party. I don't care about sports. I'm Canadian, but don't live there and don't feel like I belong there either. I suppose you could say I'm part of the group of Caucasian males by birth or part of the group of software engineers by trade, but…
Those with most priviledge are usually the least aware of it.
I've come to realize that "white male software engineer" is one of the groups with the highest ratio of priviledge versus priviledge awareness.
(Disclosure: I belong to that group as well.)
Re: Adversarial Collaboration
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
The most important thing I learned from my graduate advisor: anyone can have a worthwhile idea. I watched him for years coming into weekly colloquia and seeming to tune out reading papers. But, occasionally there would be a speaker that was less than credible, and you could feel the entire hall close off. But, my advisor would hear a tidbit of a good idea (even amongst loads of bunk), and look up from his journals an…
My hobby is to look for a physics theory of everything (ToE). I have virtually no chance at succeeding at this, but it's fun reading through random junk on ArXiV. I noticed something similar: You can find papers by clearly crazy people that have nuggets of good ideas in them. Odd bits of mathematics they reference might be an interesting rabbithole to go down, even if it ultimately leads nowhere. The whole thing remi…
Have you taken a look at Wolframs ToE? I found it pretty intriguing.
Re: Adversarial Collaboration
#80One of the most disappointing things that I have learned is that most people hold opinions in order to be part of some group. If someone is a member of a group, it is almost not worth listening to their arguments, especially arguments in support of views held strongly by that group. They are arguing in order to maintain their group membership, not to find the truth. It appears this is true of academic and scientific…
There's a book called How to Win Friends and Influence People -- pay attention to the order :-) first become a group member, in the eyes of the other person, and then there's a chance he/she will be open to something new > almost not worth listening to their arguments At the same time, their arguments are likely the-least-dumb / most-intelligent things they've been able to come up with, to rationalize their group's i…
You make it sound so simple. Becoming a group member in this context means corrupting oneself. You are what you do. You are the last action you take. If you deceive the other externally while holding different positions internally, you are those external positions, and the internal is the deception. Those that lie to themselves this way have nothing to offer the group and will certainly never "make a change from the inside."