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What if I’m wrong? (2023)

behavioralscientist.org

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Re: What if I’m wrong? (2023)

#71

Post by Jensson »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #59
efitz wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with opinions is not that they are good or bad, it’s how difficult they are to change. Other people who are unwilling to change “bad” opinions in the face of contradictory evidence is easily observed. If you find yourself never changing your own opinions, then you probably have a problem.

The odd thing is, and I think this is Socrates, that it's hard to tell. Having been won over by the gentle force of the better argument what were once not your ideas feel like your ideas. In fact, now they are your ideas, and feel like they always were.

> In fact, now they are your ideas, and feel like they always were.

Some people don't remember what opinions they had in the past? Remembering all the time I was wrong and learned something new or changed my mind etc is embarrassing, not sure how you could forget all that.

Like, people must remember which candidates they voted for in the past, right? So if they switch side during an election, do they really fool themselves into thinking that they always supported their new side? I don't really believe that. I'd rather believe that they lie about their past because it is embarrassing to have been wrong.

Re: What if I’m wrong? (2023)

#72

Post by roenxi »

HideousKojima wrote: post #70
roenxi wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the topic of opinion masquerading as fact - if you check the dynamics there it quickly gets quite interesting. Political arguments are unusual if they involve an expert. On the big ones (economics, medical, military and technical policy) it is relatively rare to see an expert and doubly rare to find one who isn't pushing some sort of agenda. There tends to be a tiny pool of people doing a speaking circuit that tur…

>The biggest economic miracle of our time is China's industrial policy and it isn't particularly obvious what the facts about that are. Is it though? China's economic growth doesn't seem that far off (per capita) from that of South Korea or Taiwan.

My understanding is that China modelled itself on Singapore too, so I'm not expecting any radical policies. But part of the miracle is the scale of the thing, not just what happens per capita. If we go small enough, one man can go from whoever to billionaire in one generation. Getting a billion people up to a nice standard of living is harder than that.

Re: What if I’m wrong? (2023)

#73

Post by neilv »

> This inspired me to adopt the same strategy with my books: I invite Tufts students to help me write my books by sharing the penultimate draft with them in a seminar, where they are all encouraged to point out errors, challenge arguments, demand more clarity, and in general complain about anything that strikes them as amiss.

Two professors from whom I was fortunate to learn, who did something like this in classes:

* Marvin Minsky (MIT) -- While he was researching The Emotion Machine, class sessions would often be him talking about whatever he'd been working on earlier that day, and related thoughts from his formidable knowledge, and people would ask questions and share information. For example, one day, general anesthesia came up, and a physician/surgeon who was sitting in on class that day added to that (something about, in some cases, the patient is conscious but doesn't remember after, which was a memorable idea to hear).

* Peter Wegner (Brown U.) -- He was working on theory of interactive models of computation (e.g., whether interacting objects were reducible to Turing Machines), and some days would put up drafts of a paper on a projector, for class discussion around them. IIRC, he'd first read sections of the paper, and then ask questions of the class around that. Of course, we learned more than he did, but perhaps we were also a helpful rubber duck on some ideas he was thinking through.

Also, drafts of textbooks are a thing: Leslie Kaelbling (then Brown U.) arranged to use draft copies of Norvig & Russell's intro AI book, which were two comb-bound volumes with unfinished bits, and IIRC we could feed back comments.

Which reminds me of the time I was taking classes at the community college, and the author of one of the textbooks was in the department (though not my instructor), so I wrote down some comments as I worked though the book. The author seemed kind and delighted to be getting book feedback from a student, even though I assume now that my comments weren't of any help.

Re: What if I’m wrong? (2023)

#74

Post by FrustratedMonky »

bbor wrote: post #18
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…

Yeah but he’s engaging seriously with self-doubt. Which I think is admirable. I also find his “explaining away” of the rest of the field tiresome, but I don’t think calling it self-complimentary is necessarily fair. After all, this is a retrospective/polemic, not a revelation of some new discovery

Yeah, he is a huge figure in the field.

It's just from the title, I thought there was going to be some 'inciteful about face', like he had some new 'other way to think about things' that just couldn't wait for the next book. So had hopes up more.

Re: What if I’m wrong? (2023)

#75

Post by Jensson »

efitz wrote: post #53
ben_w wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Analogies are like a box of chocolates: overused clichés, but we hand them out and gobble them down with delight.

Analogies are decorative writings, not arguments.

They can be arguments, for example if you want to show that the other person has inconsistent views due to feelings or bias an analogy between the two inconsistent scenarios can make that clearer. I've changed my mind thanks to analogies many times.

Re: What if I’m wrong? (2023)

#76

Post by svat »

JonChesterfield wrote: post #26
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.

I don't think so -- as he tells it, the "distributed understanding" is a shortcut he's using in his later life (if something is important someone will tell/explain it to him), which he contrasts with the diligence/conscientiousness he had earlier. The distributed understanding is a working style, orthogonal to the insight/program he's talking about.

Re: What if I’m wrong? (2023)

#78

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

I live by a life philosophy that tells me to own my defects and shortcomings, and promptly admit them.

I remember being told once, "Congratulations! It's your fault!". The thinking is that, if it's some[one|thing] else's fault, there's nothing I can do to change it, but if it's my fault, then I have the power to amend the situation.

In every conflict in my life; even when I am clearly in the right, and the other party is clearly in the wrong, I always have something to address, on my end. Sometimes, I may even need to apologize for it; which can really suck.

In my coding, I have found that writing unit tests always finds bugs. Happened to me yesterday, in fact. Since the test ran through 35,000 records, and took almost an hour, it was painful. I can't remember the last time that I wrote unit tests that didn't find bugs in the CuT.

But I am now satisfied that the code I wrote is top-shelf.

Re: What if I’m wrong? (2023)

#79

Post by gwd »

I think the more important question is, "How would I know if I were wrong?" As a thinking Christian, and I've thought very carefully on what kind of evidence could be presented to me to show that Christianity was wrong; I'd be interested in what kind of evidence Dennet would accept to show him that his atheism was wrong.

Re: What if I’m wrong? (2023)

#80

Post by RaftPeople »

bongodongobob wrote: post #41
XorNot wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

Nah. Best practice usually means "assume a spherical cow". The idea is to point in the right direction because there are no one size fits all solutions for anything. It's a starting point that isn't stupid and is backed by the blood of poor bastards from the past.

But frequently, in technology, the term "best practice" is used where it's not really settled whether it's a good practice 80% percent of the time or only 20% percent of the time.

If you look at the history of industry trends over the last X decades, most of which were replaced by the next trend due to the pain that was eventually discovered, you will find many people claiming the new trend was "best practice" typically mid-way through the hype cycle and before the actual trade-offs become well known.

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