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What if I’m wrong? (2023)

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Re: What if I’m wrong? (2023)

#21

Post by pixl97 »

XorNot wrote: post #4
ggm wrote: post #3

I've grown used to being corrected, to the point that it's a pleasant surprise to be told I might be right. What I notice more and more, is the "you're wrong" is used to buttress opinion masquerading as fact. If you preface "I think that.." to asserts it doesn't stop the "you're wrong" but it at least puts the discussion into the realms of conjecture about things, including facts, rather than simple asserts of facts…

"best-practice" is a specific, over-used term in the tech industry. People instinctively give opinions and say "well best-practice is..." to fortify it against being criticized, and then lean heavily on the fact that if you actually ask them to support that notion then they imply or accuse the questioner of being hostile. "It's best practice" should invite the question of "according to who, in which publications? Wha…

I mean, not writing your own encryption library is best practice.

Re: What if I’m wrong? (2023)

#22

Post by digbybk »

paulpauper wrote: post #6
ggm wrote: post #3

I've grown used to being corrected, to the point that it's a pleasant surprise to be told I might be right. What I notice more and more, is the "you're wrong" is used to buttress opinion masquerading as fact. If you preface "I think that.." to asserts it doesn't stop the "you're wrong" but it at least puts the discussion into the realms of conjecture about things, including facts, rather than simple asserts of facts…

I have grown accustomed to being wrong a lot as well, especially online, but it would be nice being right more often too. It's like "Am I really that far off the mark? Maybe I am. Downvotes coming." I like to think my opinions are not that bad. Yet when it comes to investing in other aspects in life ,where money is at stake or making income, I have been right more often than not. So I guess I right where it matters m…

> I like to think my opinions are not that bad.

I find this sentence kind of funny. If you thought your opinions were bad wouldn’t you change them?

Re: What if I’m wrong? (2023)

#23

Post by tempaway11751f »

svat wrote: post #16

What is his life's work / major insight that he's referring to here? > I had found— and partly invented— a prodigious explanation- device that reliably devoured difficulties, day after day. The insights (if that is what they were) that I had struggled so hard to capture in my dissertation and my first book have matured and multiplied, generating answers to questions, solutions to problems, rebuttals to objections, an…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_drafts_model

Re: What if I’m wrong? (2023)

#24

Post by aspenmayer »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #15
aspenmayer wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A weasel word, or anonymous authority, is a word and phrase aimed at creating an impression that something specific and meaningful has been said when in fact only a vague, ambiguous, or irrelevant claim has been communicated. The terms may be considered informal. Examples include the phrases "some people say", "it is thought", and "researchers believe". Using weasel words may allow one to later deny any specific me…

There's a spectrum isn't there, between weasel words that are avoidant and non-attribution which is done out of respect or kindness. News is full of passive prose; "A source claimed yesterday", because anonymous sources need protection. A barrister might say in court; "It has been said that...", not to invite libel or misidentify a witness. Or a teacher might say "It's been brought to our attention that some children…

These are good points. Here are some links I found relating to legitimate points you have raised:

Why does The New York Times use anonymous sources? https://www.nytimes.com/article/why-new-york-times-anonymous...

A Look at Journalists' Use of Anonymous Sources https://www.voanews.com/amp/journalists-use-anonymous-source...

Society of Professional Journalists Ethics Committee Position Papers: Anonymous Sources https://www.spj.org/ethics-papers-anonymity.asp

Everything-but-the-kitchen-sink: a guide to confidential sources https://ethics.journalism.wisc.edu/2018/12/07/the-everything...

https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikinews:Avoid_weasel_words

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Avoid_peacock_terms

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Word...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puffery

Re: What if I’m wrong? (2023)

#25

Post by mtlmtlmtlmtl »

Daniel Dennett is still the only modern philosopher I know of that is capable of explaining his ideas to non-philosophers without it devolving into meaningless(to me) babble, or even worse, an endless cataloguing of all the possible views one could hold on something, along with their names.

Re: What if I’m wrong? (2023)

#26

Post by JonChesterfield »

svat wrote: post #16

What is his life's work / major insight that he's referring to here? > I had found— and partly invented— a prodigious explanation- device that reliably devoured difficulties, day after day. The insights (if that is what they were) that I had struggled so hard to capture in my dissertation and my first book have matured and multiplied, generating answers to questions, solutions to problems, rebuttals to objections, an…

Plausibly that described in the previous paragraph under distributed understanding, where he takes the consensus of some nominally informed group to be truth. See "Reddit as reality" for the failure mode of that strategy.

Re: What if I’m wrong? (2023)

#27

Post by dataflow »

aspenmayer wrote: post #11
delichon wrote: post #2

Ptolemy was wrong. But he was wrong with a large pile of actual measurements of celestial bodies, and a falsifiable theory. That made him wrong in the positive sense of wrong in the phrase "not even wrong", where wrong is just the first step of the ladder. I wish I could say the same about Freud, but that ladder is distressingly horizontal.

> "Not even wrong" is a phrase often used to describe pseudoscience or bad science. It describes an argument or explanation that purports to be scientific but uses faulty reasoning or speculative premises, which can be neither affirmed nor denied and thus cannot be discussed rigorously and scientifically. The phrase "not even wrong" is synonymous with "unfalsifiable".[0][1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_…

I'm not sure "not even wrong" actually means the same thing as "unfalsifiable" like Wikipedia claims? I thought "not even wrong" means the asker is so confused that their question doesn't make sense. As I understand it, "ghosts exist" (or even "the universe is infinite") may well be impossible to falsify, but it doesn't signal any sort of confusion on the part of the asker. But if the statement was "ghosts exist because the universe is infinite", then I thought that would fall into the "not even wrong" bucket.

Re: What if I’m wrong? (2023)

#28

Post by bbor »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #17
FrustratedMonky wrote: post #14

I actually got a little suckered in, and thought this might be Dennett opening up to being wrong and giving some new account of what he might now think is correct. Especially after all the debates on free will with Sapolsky. Instead it ended up being backhanded self complement, more like, "a lot of other great people agree with me, so maybe I'm wrong, but probably not". "Descartes’s theory of everything is, even in h…

I had an interesting email exchange with Dennett in the 90s. He had just brought out his book "Consciousness Explained". I read it and emailed him a short note saying that I thought the book was mistitled - the contents were an explanation of what we were conscious of not how we could be conscious. I expected him to write back with some eloquent or witty or pithy defense of the link between the title and the contents…

The beauty and flexibility of radical skepticism :). Minsky, another noted skeptic of idealist claims (from the opposite angle?), had a quote that stuck with me from one of his YouTube lectures on Society of Mind. I can’t find it at the moment but it was along the lines of; “when you write your own cognitive theory, leave room in the edges for it to grow. You never know what parts will be proven wrong, and you shouldn’t let that stifle the overall exercise.”

In other words, any attempt to break down the mind into component parts is better than declaring it a lost cause and hypothesizing your favorite alternative instead (god, soul, one-ness, consciousness as an essential property, etc).

Re: What if I’m wrong? (2023)

#30

Post by killthebuddha »

aspenmayer wrote: post #11
delichon wrote: post #2

Ptolemy was wrong. But he was wrong with a large pile of actual measurements of celestial bodies, and a falsifiable theory. That made him wrong in the positive sense of wrong in the phrase "not even wrong", where wrong is just the first step of the ladder. I wish I could say the same about Freud, but that ladder is distressingly horizontal.

> "Not even wrong" is a phrase often used to describe pseudoscience or bad science. It describes an argument or explanation that purports to be scientific but uses faulty reasoning or speculative premises, which can be neither affirmed nor denied and thus cannot be discussed rigorously and scientifically. The phrase "not even wrong" is synonymous with "unfalsifiable".[0][1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_…

Hmm. I always thought "not even wrong" meant "correct, but answering the wrong question" or more generally "correct but irrelevantly so".
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