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How You Know

paulgraham.com

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Re: How You Know

#211

Post by ademarre »

mherdeg wrote: post #173
jayro wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Research shows that even when news reports have been retracted, and we are aware of the retraction, our beliefs are largely based on the initial erroneous version of the story. This is particularly true when we are motivated to approve of the initial account." - http://mindhacks.com/2011/05/04/why-the-truth-will-out-but-d... Original Paper: http://pss.sagepub.com/content/16/3/190

I've always wanted a short name for this phenomenon, where a lie takes hold and never leaves no matter how thoroughly it is debunked. Maybe the 'swift boat effect'?

Cached confirmation bias

Re: How You Know

#213

Post by agentultra »

walterbell wrote: post #195
chubot wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not really sure what PG had in mind -- his comments are a bit vague, although perhaps a good starting point for a conversation. I think if you just use this system for awhile, tons of ideas will come out. In fact you can generate a lifetime of work from it :) PG always talks about making something for which you are the customer. EverNote is of course a company in this space. I used them for awhile; it's nice that…

An interchange format will be needed for independently-developed deep apps.

Plain-text and a file system? See emacs' org-mode. It has many of the features parent listed.

update I'd even add perhaps the solution is really to take the best ideas out of org-mode and give it a platform-integrated UI. It does basically what everyone here has been asking for and more... it's just buried in Emacs which is definitely not for everyone.

Document sharing across devices is easy if you're comfortable sharing your content with a third-party like Evernote or Dropbox. I'd be more comfortable with something that's decentralized, encrypted, and versioned like a Git + Freenet backing store.

Re: How You Know

#214

Post by philwelch »

aswanson wrote: post #200
jayro wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Research shows that even when news reports have been retracted, and we are aware of the retraction, our beliefs are largely based on the initial erroneous version of the story. This is particularly true when we are motivated to approve of the initial account." - http://mindhacks.com/2011/05/04/why-the-truth-will-out-but-d... Original Paper: http://pss.sagepub.com/content/16/3/190

This is what makes so many people getting "breaking" sensational headlines from partisan blogs so dangerous. It becomes calcified reality for the vast majority of people; most folk are not hygenic with their belief structures. I actively seek disconfirmation of my beliefs, but most people seek reinforcement only.

This tends to happen to an exceptional degree when news has a strong emotional impact, which is of course what sensationalized headlines try to emphasize (whether out of partisanship or because emotionally charged information is more viral).

People's belief systems about the relative threats of terrorism and pedophiles is thus distorted by the media because the amount of time they spend watching terrorist attacks or episodes of "To Catch A Predator" is massively disproportionate to the actual level of risk posed by those kinds of things, and so especially is the emotional impact of that media.

Re: How You Know

#215

Post by adam419 »

The funny thing is I had just posted on hear to ask about how others help improve their reading retention, since I've been feeling bad about forgetting thing after I read them.

Re: How You Know

#216

Post by sopooneo »

Regarding the retention from books, it's often the case that I could fill a dozen pages with correct answers to questions that I only know from having read a particular book, even if I could only fill one page with unprompted recollections.

Re: How You Know

#217

Post by rezaur »

" The same book would get compiled differently at different points in your life. Which means it is very much worth reading important books multiple times." -- I loved this statement most.

Re: How You Know

#219

Post by philwelch »

programmarchy wrote: post #124
nilkn wrote: post #10

There's also a danger associated to this phenomenon. If the source of your mental model is later debunked, you may not realize that you need to revise your model precisely because you don't remember what your source was. You may even read about the debunking of the source but fail to draw the connection and realize the implications that it has for your own view of the world. I think that perhaps very squishy subjects…

This is why it is imperative to build your model up from first principles. Before adding anything to your model, it should be filtered through proper logic. This makes it easier to build stable models without contradiction in the first place, and also makes it easier to follow a chain of reasoning about a complex viewpoint back to first principles. "Philosophizing in midstream" leads to incoherent thought with unchec…

> This is why it is imperative to build your model up from first principles.

The main problem with this approach (I'll call it the Cartesian approach because it was most famously used by Descartes) is that human beings are less than 100% reliable at logical reasoning. If you make an error anywhere in your chain of reasoning, your conclusions are going to be off and there's not going to be any way to check them. It's just like writing 10,000 lines of code without ever actually compiling it, let alone testing it. You also develop a sort of foolish confidence about the correctness of your own beliefs, which makes it even easier to be wrong. If you make enough wrong turns, you become Ayn Rand.

That's why empiricism is so good. It's not that empiricists don't make mistakes too, but when they do, they find that they are surprised by concrete facts that they observe, and know when to go back and reevaluate.

Another helpful trick is to understand that there are degrees between 0% and 100% confidence. I can entertain an proposition as being possible or likely rather than simply true or false based on the recognition that I have incomplete information. If you tried to take this approach you couldn't derive anything logically because you would just have a multitude of possibilities in front of you. Formal logic only works with statements that are 100% true. Otherwise you're stuck with Bayesian reasoning, which is even more mentally taxing to derive information from.

(Or, as an alternative response)

Please derive for me, from "first principles", why it is imperative to build one's mental model from first principles.

Re: How You Know

#220

Post by philwelch »

robrenaud wrote: post #151
programmarchy wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why it is imperative to build your model up from first principles. Before adding anything to your model, it should be filtered through proper logic. This makes it easier to build stable models without contradiction in the first place, and also makes it easier to follow a chain of reasoning about a complex viewpoint back to first principles. "Philosophizing in midstream" leads to incoherent thought with unchec…

Do you really follow this? It seems like someone following these rules would rarely be wrong, but that they'd be paralyzed by the cost of making decisions.

Somebody following those rules could easily be wrong. Even smart, logically trained people make errors in logic all the time. That's why they introduce bugs when they try to write code, or errors into mathematical proofs or philosophical systems that sometimes don't get pointed out for years.
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