51–60 of 232 posts
Why is it assumed that someone who is convinced by arguments is prone to wrong ideas? Wouldn't that type of person become iteratively closer to the truth every time they hear a new argument and compare to the others they've heard?
Take a shot anytime a “rationalist” invokes Bayes. Long article for him to basically say nothing insightful. Crazy people will say seemingly true things that attract more crazy people. OK. Thanks I guess. The two paragraphs about how good at arguments he is and how other educated people might be able to out argue him in topics if they’re specialists _maybe_ was so stupid I closed the tab, but then I decided to be adu…
Why is it assumed that someone who is convinced by arguments is prone to wrong ideas? Wouldn't that type of person become iteratively closer to the truth every time they hear a new argument and compare to the others they've heard?
> This is the correct Bayesian action: if I know that a false argument sounds just as convincing as a true argument, argument convincingness provides no evidence either way. I should ignore it and stick with my prior. If two diametrically opposed arguments are equally convincing, it's not intuitive to me that the "correct" solution is a middle ground. Especially if both argument state that a middle ground is not poss…
I have to admit a weakness for reading not-quite-crackpot-but-likely-wrong theories. In particular, big fan of Julian Jaynes and The Development of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bi-cameral Mind, and the aquatic ape hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquatic_ape_hypothesis I get that they're probably not true, but I do enjoy reading novel thinking and viewpoints by smart people with a cool hook.
And I would agree with "likely" wrong. Some of them probably aren't entirely wrong and may even be more correct than the mainstream. Figuring out which is the real trick, though. Related to the original article, I tend to scale my Bayesian updates based on my ability to test a theory. In the case of something like the Breakdown of the Bi-cameral Mind, it ends up taking such a deduction as a result of that heuristic that it is almost indistinguishable from reading a science fiction book for me; fun and entertaining, but doesn't really impact me much except in a very vague "keep the mind loose and limber" sense.
I have done a lot of heterodox thinking in the world of programming and engineering, though, because I can test theories very easily. Some of them work. Some of them don't. And precisely because it is so easy to test, the heterodoxy-ness is often lower than crackpot theories about 10,000 years ago, e.g., "Haskell has some interesting things to say" is made significantly less "crackpot" by the fact that plenty of other people have the ability to test that hypothesis as well, and as such, it is upgraded from "crackpot" to merely a "minority" view.
So my particular twist on Scott's point is, if you can safely and cheaply test a bit of a far-out theory, don't be afraid to do so. You can use this to resolve the epistemic learned helplessness in those particular areas. It is good to put a bit down on cheap, low-probability, high-payout events; you can even justify this mathematically via the Kelly Criterion: https://www.techopedia.com/gambling-guides/kelly-criterion-g... If there is one thing that angers me about way science is taught, it is that it is something that other people do, and that it is something special that you do with either the full "scientific method" or it's worthless. In fact it's an incredible tool for every day life, on all sorts of topics, and one must simply adjust for the fact that the lower effort put in, the less one should trust it, but that doesn't mean the total trust must necessarily be uselessly low just because you didn't conduct your experiment on whether or not fertilizer A or B worked better on your tomatos up to science journal standards.
This article talks about learned helplessness in a learning context. I talked about it in a work context, and the two could be linked. I think social media is training people for everything to be quick, but learning + work aren't necessarily quick. > This insistence on constant availability disrupts the essence of focused work. Rather than encouraging employees to tackle complex problems independently, there’s a tren…
For instance, I was stuck on figuring out how to send an email through AWS. Turns out we have a lambda function that handles all the authentication and security things that are specific to our company. Once I asked my coworker and found out about this function, it was trivial.
Why is it assumed that someone who is convinced by arguments is prone to wrong ideas? Wouldn't that type of person become iteratively closer to the truth every time they hear a new argument and compare to the others they've heard?
>Why is it assumed that someone who is convinced by arguments is prone to wrong ideas?
To put this a different way, if humans actually behaved in this manner in any significant numbers then humanity should have discovered the sciences and been uplifted a long time ago.
Instead that's not what we see at all. A more likely reason is Bullshit Asymmetry, that is, humans throw out so much made up crap that using arguments alone will burn the observable universe away in a puff of entropy.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a tech lead I would rather see a team member ask me questions early than never. Nudging them in the right direction before they waste 3 days going down a path that’s never going to work is at least half my job. But it’s important that they’ve done enough research to formulate the question. A little struggle helps the learning stick.
I agree, but in practice now I've come to see that this is an extremely difficult point to discern. As the vast majority of findings flow in as a trickle, there often isn't a large enough delta to identify as a launching point for asking for help. For example, if one continues to search, they will keep finding breadcrumbs leading them to the solution. It is painful to me when someone spends 3 days looking for a solut…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This is the correct Bayesian action: if I know that a false argument sounds just as convincing as a true argument, argument convincingness provides no evidence either way. I should ignore it and stick with my prior. If two diametrically opposed arguments are equally convincing, it's not intuitive to me that the "correct" solution is a middle ground. Especially if both argument state that a middle ground is not poss…
I guess if I encountered two diametrically opposing arguments of equal validity I would increase my uncertainty, not just stick to my prior. That's super different to just ignoring new arguments, right? Like going from "I think X is the best candidate" to "I don't know who the best candidate is".
What if the conclusion forces behavior though? For voting, you can abstain from voting if you're unclear, but what if you're in a position where you have to choose two distinctly different options.
In this case, I think you pretty much have to stick with your prior, but I'm curious if you have a more nuanced approach here.