A very similar example gives Kahneman in his book "Thinking, Fast and Slow" (a great read for those interested in cognitive biases). He calles it "The illusion of understanding". Using an example of Google and a number of books depicting Page and Brinn as role models and geniuses, who leaded the company into its great success by taking always the right decisions.
It is of course easy to say so knowing already that Google is a successful company. It would be very hard to tell it 15 years ago.
Also when you study the history of Google you learn that there was a lot of luck involved, and you won't learn how to build the next google from those books.
Confabulation in the humanities
21–30 of 46 posts
Re: Confabulation in the humanities
#22I hate to say 'I told you so,' but, Geez, this is literally everything I hate about liberal arts majors.. A grad school dissertation on Medieval Printing Techniques of the 1400's?? My senior project was software work for a Fortune 500 STEM company that I interned for as a sophomore & this guy is selling Printing Techniques of the Middle Ages.. what is this world coming to??
Re: Confabulation in the humanities
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
Since "confabulation" is our only option, Hayek warns against disguising it as science -- this is what happens in economics, he says. Most historians, on the other hand, understand the limits of their knowledge, don't try to make predictions (certainly not with the same definitiveness common to many economists), and don't disguise their narratives as physical science. The author of the article under discussion, thoug…
Interesting discussion here. I don't think you're representing the author's point correctly, though, given the larger context of the work he's doing and current debates in the historical field. Here's what he says: "I suppose the point of this post is to articulate my growing concern that we are so damn good at coming up with post-facto historical explanations to contextualize any given observation, that we are parti…
Anyone concerned with this stuff should read: "Everything is Obvious (once you know the answer)" by Duncan Watts. http://www.amazon.com/Everything-Obvious-Common-Sense-Fails/...
It isn't a great book, but it does clearly identify the difference between explanatory and predictive accounts, and makes a strong case that explanatory, after-the-fact, accounts are simply noise. The exercise the author engages in here, of "making sense" of two contradictory datasets can be done with almost any phenomenon.
The more systematic and inclusive data gathering is, the more strongly any explanation is going to be tied to the phenomenon it is going to explain, and historians--like any science--should always be asking themselves, "How can I test this explanatory idea? If it is true, then what else ought to be true?"
Otherwise, when you "explain things a lot" you are doing nothing but generating noise. The financial press provides strong evidence for this: tens of thousands of words of "explanation" every single day, and not a single person made rich by any of the predictions the same people make. When you can explain everything and predict nothing, you had better be able to test your explanations by indirect means if you want to be taken more seriously than a fabulist.
The latter part is important: historians and others like them expect us to take their pontifications seriously. But we know the untested explanation is almost certainly nothing but a confabulation. So why should we take anything historians say seriously?
The history of science--which I define inclusively as "publicly testing ideas by systematic observation, controlled experiment and Bayesian inference"--is one of realizing we've been doing it wrong, that ideas we believed and took seriously were actually rather silly. Blood circulates. Geese don't come from barnacles. Bad air or moral turpitude don't cause plague. And so on.
If historians are starting to ask, "Are we doing this wrong?" that's a good thing, and based on my understanding of what science is and how it works I predict that over the next few decades the "digital humanities" will make a lot of traditional beliefs look untenably foolish, and there will be a general shift of the field toward Bayesian methods that will alienate and annoy a great many people whose freedom to confabulate will be greatly curtailed. It will change the face of the humanities to the extent that they will have as little to do with their historical roots as modern psychology has to do with the story-tellers of the early 20th century who gave it its start.
Re: Confabulation in the humanities
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting discussion here. I don't think you're representing the author's point correctly, though, given the larger context of the work he's doing and current debates in the historical field. Here's what he says: "I suppose the point of this post is to articulate my growing concern that we are so damn good at coming up with post-facto historical explanations to contextualize any given observation, that we are parti…
I agree with everything you say (although I read this article differently), but historians should be careful to steer away from Hayek's "scientism". History's underlying mathematical assumption -- an assumption that is almost surely correct -- is that society is a complex system, and therefore cannot be subject to predictions (or very few, qualitative predictions) in the long run. If historians feel quantitative anal…
Agreed. A big part of why I enjoy thinking about historical problems so much is that it's virtually impossible to supply a definitive explanation for anything (we're still arguing over the Roman empire's demise one and a half millennia on). I think the author's point - or at least the stance I take, which I suspect he aligns generally with too based on his work - is that quantitive data can only be used in historical arguments in what is effectively a qualitative way, i.e. as part of a larger, holistic assessment based on many perspectives rather than as a definitive "proof" of anything. But it's an exciting addition because historians typically haven't taken this approach at all prior to the last decade, excepting some forays into punchcard computing in the 60s and 70s by people like Lawrence Stone and the Annalists.
Incidentally, I'd point to Pinker's "Better Angels of Our Nature" book as an example of the risks of putting too much stock in a scientific/econometric approach to history. I actually think his argument is (in broad outlines) convincing, but the way he marshals his evidence drives academic historians crazy because it ignores that history is a complex system, as you say. (i.e., he does things like saying "x tribe in New Guinea is a 'stone age' tribe and according to one or two studies has a high murder rate, therefore all humans in 'the stone age' had a murder rate comparable to that tribe.")
Re: Confabulation in the humanities
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting discussion here. I don't think you're representing the author's point correctly, though, given the larger context of the work he's doing and current debates in the historical field. Here's what he says: "I suppose the point of this post is to articulate my growing concern that we are so damn good at coming up with post-facto historical explanations to contextualize any given observation, that we are parti…
I agree with everything you say (although I read this article differently), but historians should be careful to steer away from Hayek's "scientism". History's underlying mathematical assumption -- an assumption that is almost surely correct -- is that society is a complex system, and therefore cannot be subject to predictions (or very few, qualitative predictions) in the long run. If historians feel quantitative anal…
Predictions can be sideways as well as forward. If one gives an explanatory account of some phenomenon, the existential claims made as part of that explanation should in general have implications for other parts of the same place and time, so by asking if those implications are plausibly supported by what we know of that place and time is a way of testing the idea that "phenomenon X is explained by Y" while still being in a position where it is impossible to make predictions about the future, or other places and times.
Re: Confabulation in the humanities
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with everything you say (although I read this article differently), but historians should be careful to steer away from Hayek's "scientism". History's underlying mathematical assumption -- an assumption that is almost surely correct -- is that society is a complex system, and therefore cannot be subject to predictions (or very few, qualitative predictions) in the long run. If historians feel quantitative anal…
Predictions can be sideways as well as forward. If one gives an explanatory account of some phenomenon, the existential claims made as part of that explanation should in general have implications for other parts of the same place and time, so by asking if those implications are plausibly supported by what we know of that place and time is a way of testing the idea that "phenomenon X is explained by Y" while still bei…
Yes, the problem is that complex systems are complex "sideways" as well (i.e. in all dimensions). Sorry, but that's the nature of non-linear dynamics. They defy quantitative study.
That's not to say that it isn't interesting or worthwhile to come up with comparative analysis to explain, say, the "European Miracle", but it can never have the same definitiveness as Newton's laws.
Re: Confabulation in the humanities
#27This is interesting and entertaining, but rather than a warning sign, it is just a good demonstration of the limits of our knowledge. We should not be alarmed that we can only come up with post-facto explanations for the behavior of complex, chaotic systems such as human society, because that is a direct consequence of what they are: complex systems. In fact, we should be alarmed if the opposite were true, and by ana…
The only thing we should be alarmed about is people taking those after-the-fact explanations as being anything more than confabulations, because then people might think they actually understand the world, which is a dangerous conceit at the best of times.
After-the-fact explanations have almost zero epistemic value. They create no understanding, only a feeling of understanding. Look at the financial press for endless examples of this.
Re: Confabulation in the humanities
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
Since "confabulation" is our only option, Hayek warns against disguising it as science -- this is what happens in economics, he says. Most historians, on the other hand, understand the limits of their knowledge, don't try to make predictions (certainly not with the same definitiveness common to many economists), and don't disguise their narratives as physical science. The author of the article under discussion, thoug…
Interesting discussion here. I don't think you're representing the author's point correctly, though, given the larger context of the work he's doing and current debates in the historical field. Here's what he says: "I suppose the point of this post is to articulate my growing concern that we are so damn good at coming up with post-facto historical explanations to contextualize any given observation, that we are parti…
Yes, I am guilty of writing the post for an audience already largely familiar with the context.
I should probably add that the types of "explanations" I put forward in this post are actually not of central concern to me - certainly not explanations derived solely from parsing quantitative results. I'm far more interested in the descriptive evidence this kind of measurement can provide. It can give wider context to what tends to be a very case-study-centric discipline (e.g. oh, this guy happened to work a lot with Italian publishers in this period? We didn't realize it before just looking at 5-10 artists per article/monograph, but actually that is quite exceptional/normal for this period...)
Then again, proposing these kinds of explanations is also something of a disciplinary norm, for better or worse.
Re: Confabulation in the humanities
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting discussion here. I don't think you're representing the author's point correctly, though, given the larger context of the work he's doing and current debates in the historical field. Here's what he says: "I suppose the point of this post is to articulate my growing concern that we are so damn good at coming up with post-facto historical explanations to contextualize any given observation, that we are parti…
I agree with everything you say (although I read this article differently), but historians should be careful to steer away from Hayek's "scientism". History's underlying mathematical assumption -- an assumption that is almost surely correct -- is that society is a complex system, and therefore cannot be subject to predictions (or very few, qualitative predictions) in the long run. If historians feel quantitative anal…
This is true, but not entirely relevant. Life-based complex systems often share a propensity for punctuated stability specifically due to their own nature, because of the same circularity inherent in evolution (those that can survive to replicate, do). In this case, systems whose parameters tend towards stabilization persist specifically because they tend towards stabilization. The least self-undermining regularities persist (attractors).
Societies formed and persisted because they were good at it, because they were a stable attractor in a larger system. We might not necessarily be able to formally describe the entire system, but our propensity towards stabilization (at the biological level, the human level, the societal level) means we can do clever things at the stability points, like develop medicines that work, design groceries which are more likely to sell certain products, and predict the outcomes of presidential elections.
Now, whether or not the explanation given for the systemic outcomes are "accurate" descriptions of the underlying mechanisms is in question here, and it's an important one, but it's not a lost cause. When Copernicus set the world in orbit, there was a big argument of whether he was providing an actual explanation of the way the world works, or just a convenient mathematical shorthand for making accurate predictions. It turned out that the most parsimonious shorthand was also (ahem) less wrong than earlier mechanistic theories. So too can historians find explanations that, if not accurate representations of underlying mechanisms, can still be explanations which fit better to systemic tendencies than earlier explanations.
Edit: Which is just saying that the blog author's point is still a useful one, whether or not we can ever achieve complete mechanical account of human activity.
Re: Confabulation in the humanities
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting discussion here. I don't think you're representing the author's point correctly, though, given the larger context of the work he's doing and current debates in the historical field. Here's what he says: "I suppose the point of this post is to articulate my growing concern that we are so damn good at coming up with post-facto historical explanations to contextualize any given observation, that we are parti…
Anyone concerned with this stuff should read: "Everything is Obvious (once you know the answer)" by Duncan Watts. http://www.amazon.com/Everything-Obvious-Common-Sense-Fails/... It isn't a great book, but it does clearly identify the difference between explanatory and predictive accounts, and makes a strong case that explanatory, after-the-fact, accounts are simply noise. The exercise the author engages in here, of "…
You are doing nothing but generating noise if you try to treat this knowledge the same as hard scientific knowledge. You generate something very valuable if you treat it as a different kind of knowledge.
I like to give this example: the statement, "the moon is made of cheese" is false when treated as a scientific statement of fact. It can -- and, in fact, has -- been falsified. On the other hand, if taken as a literary statement, it can hold some truth -- or maybe many truths. Except that is a different kind of truth. It can teach us something about human imagination, human desire, human whimsy. Maybe even something deeper, once you analyze the significance of "moon" and that of "cheese".
History -- my favorite field of study alongside math -- is somewhere in the middle, a perfect spot between science and literature. It is as scientific as possible when it comes to the what and how stuff happened (which is most of what historians do); when it gets to the why (which doesn't happen as often) history is more literary (and doesn't make any claims of definitiveness). History tries to leave the definitive answers to religions.
Finally, I think you're putting too much faith in human ability to defy the math of complex systems. If anything, I predict a different sort of confabulation: that we have managed come up with a scientific theory to something that is provably impenetrable to hard scientific quantitative theory. I have every faith in our ability to convince ourselves that we can somehow use math (and data) to beat math.
Is there a data-driven religion being born? It would be one that believes that anything not quantifiable is not worth knowing, and would try to plug any missing holes in our knowledge with data and quantitative theory, even if that's mathematically impossible.
Hell, just the other day I had a discussion with some people on Reddit who believed we could somehow beat the Halting Theorem or, at least, make it irrelevant in practice. But just like we'll likely never write a computer program that can fully reason about other computer programs, we will probably never be able to explain human history enough to make definitive explanations/predictions on most things. I am perfectly OK with that. I am also well aware that not being OK with that, and trying to beat the odds is how (some -- not all) progress is made :)