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Knowledge overconfidence is associated with anti-consensus views

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Re: Knowledge overconfidence is associated with anti-consensus views

#91

Post by mlyle »

jtc331 wrote: post #78
mlyle wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Isn’t this tautologically true when consensus views are assumed correct? I worried that this study might be circular reasoning in that way. Instead they quizzed knowledge on related fields but not directly connected to the disputed idea. The people involved bet higher amounts on their ability to score well on objective measures of related sciences, but scored worse.

Isn’t that still circular though? Knowledge of the mainstream research isn’t the same as “knowledge of what’s correct”; the person who holds the non-consensus view may have equal or higher levels of knowledge about the path that got them to non-consensus. At some level you might reasonably expect what you described to be tautological: the person holding the mainstream view knows more about they things surrounding tha…

> Isn’t that still circular though? Knowledge of the mainstream research isn’t the same as “knowledge of what’s correct”; the person who holds the non-consensus view may have equal or higher levels of knowledge about the path that got them to non-consensus.

No, because the things they're asking about are middle school level science stuff.

The list of questions are in the supplemental PDF, or in my comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32379920

Re: Knowledge overconfidence is associated with anti-consensus views

#92

Post by mlyle »

somenameforme wrote: post #88
mlyle wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The interesting finding isn't that they're dogmatic about their anti-conensus views. It's that they are willing to bet more that they'll perform well on tests of objective scientific knowledge of related fields... and then don't.

The paper seems to have largely equated "objective scientific knowledge" with liminal consensus. For instance, among their "objective scientific knowledge" questions asked whether, "The novel coronavirus was unleashed in a laboratory in Wuhan and spread from there." Another was "The numbers of people that have died from COVID-19 are artificially inflated." The latter was at least removed from the results, but emphasi…

> . For instance, among their "objective scientific knowledge" questions asked whether, "The novel coronavirus was unleashed in a laboratory in Wuhan and spread from there." Another was "The numbers of people that have died from COVID-19 are artificially inflated."

This is an incorrect reading of the paper. Those are statements intended to determine whether a participant has anti-consensus beliefs, but do not occur on the objective measure we're talking about.

Then participants were asked to bet on their ability to pass a middle-school level science test. People with anti-consensus beliefs bet higher on their performance and did worse on the test compared to people without those anti-consensus beliefs.

These are the test questions they were asked:

1. True or false? The center of the earth is very hot: True

2. True or false? The continents have been moving their location for millions of years and will continue to move. True

3. True or false? The oxygen we breathe comes from plants: True

4. True or false? Antibiotics kills viruses as well as bacteria: False

5. True or false? All insects have eight legs: False

6. True or false? All radioactivity is man made: False

7. True or false? Men and women normally have the same number of chromosomes: True

8. True or false? Lasers work by focusing sound waves: False

9. True or false? Almost all food energy for living organisms comes originally from sunlight: True

10. True or false? Electrons are smaller than atoms: True

11. True or false? All plants and animals have DNA: True

12. True or false? Humans share a majority of their genes with chimpanzees: True

13. True or false? It is the father’s genes that decide whether the baby is a boy or a girl: True

14. True or false? Ordinary tomatoes do not have genes, whereas genetically modified tomatoes do: False

15. True or false? Sound moves faster than light. False

16. True or false? The North Pole is a sheet of ice that floats on the Arctic Ocean. True

17. True or false? The ozone layer absorbs most of the sun’s UVB radiation, but not UVA radiation. True

18. True or false? Nitrogen makes up most of the earth’s atmosphere. True.

19. True or false? Antibodies are proteins produced by the immune system. True

20. True or false? Pathology is the study of the human body. False

21. True or false? The skin is the largest organ of the human body. True

22. True or false? Ligaments connect muscles to bones. False

23. True or false? All mutations to a human’s or animal’s genes are unhealthy. False

24. True or false? Uranium is an element found in nature. True

25. True or false? Radioactive milk can be made safe by boiling it. False

26. True or false? The process of splitting uranium or plutonium atoms to create energy is called nuclear fission. True

27. True or false? Venus is the closest planet to the sun. False

28. True or false? It takes 24 hours for the earth to orbit the sun: False

29. True or false? A “Red Dwarf” is a kind of planet. False

30. True or false? The universe is expanding. True

31. True or false? Earth is the only place in the solar system where helium can be found. False

32. True or false? Gravity is the theory that serves as the foundation for modern biology. False.

33. True or false? The earliest humans lived at the same time as the dinosaurs. False

34. True or false? “Survival of the fittest” is a phrase used to describe how natural selection works. True

Re: Knowledge overconfidence is associated with anti-consensus views

#93

Post by notacoward »

daenz wrote: post #21

This is an extremely smug and tone-deaf take on the deterioration of trust in public health institutions and messaging. They reference covid in their abstract, so it's fair game to discuss here: where was the scientific objective-truth-machine when the Noble Lies[0] where being told? It was silent and complicit. The general public is not as knowledgeable as experts, but they can sense when they're being lied to, or w…

> they can sense when they're being lied to

What sense is this? Do you have evidence of its existence? An explanation of how it works? Because in my experience the public is severely deficient in critical thinking skills. They don't really have a good sense of truth or falsehood. They make guesses about who's telling the truth based more on presentation, politics, or popularity than on facts or logic.

Right now, there's an anti-intellectual and anti-authoritarian fashion causing many to conclude that anything a professional scientist says is a lie, but it would be wrong to cherry-pick a few examples where they're right as evidence of anything. How do such people "sense when they're being lied to" other than by using heuristics (see above) which are more likely to be gamed by entertainers and politicians than by scientists?

Re: Knowledge overconfidence is associated with anti-consensus views

#94

Post by [deleted] »

Julesman wrote: post #73
rossdavidh wrote: post #4

It is my experience that listening to experts normally is a good idea, but the idea of a scientific journal publishing research that we should all listen to scientists and not hold anti-consensus views, has more than a little possibility for bias on the part of the researchers. Moreover, would it not be odd if those who held anti-consensus views were not overconfident? People of average or lower-than-average confiden…

This was more or less my response as well. The 'academy as monolith of truth' is so 20th century. And, of course, disagreeing with Newton is very different that disagreeing with Freud. And we certainly aren't surprised that dupes got the Dunning Kruger. But I worry about the impact of this line of thinking as we see it repeated in mainstream contexts. "Consensus as measure of truthiness" is incredibly problematic.

[deleted]

Re: Knowledge overconfidence is associated with anti-consensus views

#95

Post by mlyle »

ogurechny wrote: post #83
mlyle wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people who debunked these theories were quite familiar with these existing models and how to build rigorous tests to differentiate these cases from new ideas. The study tells us that most detractors are not people like this, but instead people with below-average understanding of the field and related fields-- and who are willing to bet more on their performance of objective tests of those fields than the non-detr…

Sadly, the spherical “scientists” in a vacuum rigorously and unselfishly digging to get closer to the “truth” is only a fantasy found in school textbooks. What is called “science” has nothing on “truth” or “reality”, it's a specific method of creating virtual models that are many many degrees less complex than the “real thing”, and then treating real thing as if it was its model to achieve some outcome. In some way,…

Your response is completely orthogonal to what I said. I'm not too interested in hashing out the basics of the philosophy of science for the purpose of pedantry on the internet. That said--

Specific theories and predictions of phrenology were debunked and discarded with evidence. That happens to make almost all the utility evaporate, but that's not to say there's not quite any left.

Of course, there's a whole lot of predictions and data from alchemy that became the body of knowledge of chemistry, too, even if a lot more evaporated.

The other thing to point out is that the overall scientific method itself has evolved and is still evolving. Debating various kinds of errors and their nature made in the 18th century when even early 19th century practice was sufficient to refute them is not likely to be productive.

Re: Knowledge overconfidence is associated with anti-consensus views

#97

Post by ogurechny »

notacoward wrote: post #93
daenz wrote: post #21

This is an extremely smug and tone-deaf take on the deterioration of trust in public health institutions and messaging. They reference covid in their abstract, so it's fair game to discuss here: where was the scientific objective-truth-machine when the Noble Lies[0] where being told? It was silent and complicit. The general public is not as knowledgeable as experts, but they can sense when they're being lied to, or w…

> they can sense when they're being lied to What sense is this? Do you have evidence of its existence? An explanation of how it works? Because in my experience the public is severely deficient in critical thinking skills. They don't really have a good sense of truth or falsehood. They make guesses about who's telling the truth based more on presentation, politics, or popularity than on facts or logic. Right now, ther…

That people (as a whole) are stupid is old news. However, it is not because they don't behave as rational robots you seem to describe.

It is totally possible to tell that someone is bullshitting you without having a university degree. Maybe that someone is using a salesman language to prove a point (maybe unwittingly, without knowing better). Maybe they are quite obviously demanding a pledge of allegiance to some list of statements without revealing any reasoning behind them (maybe unwittingly, as they never go to reasoning themselves). Maybe there's a giant gap between what they say (emotional slogans) and what they do (filling in checkboxes or making some numbers line up at any cost). There's plenty of chances of ordinary person to have such experiences in ordinary life, and become familiar with them.

Also, I'm a bit puzzled by “anti-intellectual and anti-authoritarian fashion”. In my view, anti-intellectualism is a big topic that stretches from making pop-cultural works “accessible” to “shut up and calculate”, and is not a recent fashion. Neither is anti-authoritarianism, which might be the central cause here. It's not the science itself of which people are skeptical (quite the contrary, vague “science” has been the base of cosmological beliefs for a long time — even snake oils are often “scientific”), and not the intellectuals (even though modern ones should at most be called, erm, “columnists”). There is just a doubt that they value telling the (whole) truth more than they value their position, however unremarkable, in societal, professional, and bureaucratic chains of power, along with government workers, journalists, an so on.

Re: Knowledge overconfidence is associated with anti-consensus views

#98

Post by ogurechny »

Julesman wrote: post #73
rossdavidh wrote: post #4

It is my experience that listening to experts normally is a good idea, but the idea of a scientific journal publishing research that we should all listen to scientists and not hold anti-consensus views, has more than a little possibility for bias on the part of the researchers. Moreover, would it not be odd if those who held anti-consensus views were not overconfident? People of average or lower-than-average confiden…

This was more or less my response as well. The 'academy as monolith of truth' is so 20th century. And, of course, disagreeing with Newton is very different that disagreeing with Freud. And we certainly aren't surprised that dupes got the Dunning Kruger. But I worry about the impact of this line of thinking as we see it repeated in mainstream contexts. "Consensus as measure of truthiness" is incredibly problematic.

Newton wrote enough esoteric works to match Freud. However, it is either skipped entirely or discussed as some kind of hobby because he was promoted into superstar of science long time ago, and anything that stuck out from that public image was cut without any regard to what Newton thought. So there's quite a lot to disagree with for a regular person, but the regular person simply have no idea it exists.

Re: Knowledge overconfidence is associated with anti-consensus views

#99

Post by honkkong420 »

joshuamorton wrote: post #89
xboxnolifes wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They probably weren't in primary schooling in the last 11 years. They were probably taught the food pyramid over my plate, and disagreed with it.

Sure but "my personal experiences match up with the expert consensus from the past decade" (and really longer, the 2005 food pyramid was for slightly more grains than veggies, not double) isn't a particularly strong argument for disagreeing with the expert consensus. If what you're saying is "I disagree with expert consensus from the 80s", well then sure, but so does the expert consensus! That's how the scientific pr…

My argument is that my prior experiences seem to work better for guiding my meal choice than all the formal knowledge presented to me.

Re: Knowledge overconfidence is associated with anti-consensus views

#100

Post by somenameforme »

mlyle wrote: post #92
somenameforme wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The paper seems to have largely equated "objective scientific knowledge" with liminal consensus. For instance, among their "objective scientific knowledge" questions asked whether, "The novel coronavirus was unleashed in a laboratory in Wuhan and spread from there." Another was "The numbers of people that have died from COVID-19 are artificially inflated." The latter was at least removed from the results, but emphasi…

> . For instance, among their "objective scientific knowledge" questions asked whether, "The novel coronavirus was unleashed in a laboratory in Wuhan and spread from there." Another was "The numbers of people that have died from COVID-19 are artificially inflated." This is an incorrect reading of the paper. Those are statements intended to determine whether a participant has anti-consensus beliefs, but do not occur o…

No, you're the one that's suffered an incorrect reading here. They created different objective knowledge questions for each of the different studies (there were 5) within this study. I am referencing the COVID "objective knowledge" quiz. "Subjective knowledge" for each study was determined by a single question where participants were asked to rate their knowledge of the various topics on a scale of 1-7.

The questions for this ("objective knowledge" of COVID) begin on page 36 of the supplementary materials page. [1] I predictably offered the most extreme example, but there are various other questions that are also more about liminal consensus than "objective fact".

But, perhaps most importantly, the observed effect from this study was extremely small. And with only 34 questions, even a small number of questions that measure anti-consensus views, rather than scientific knowledge, is enough to create a false effect through what's basically an obfuscated tautology: people who hold anti-consensus views, hold anti-consensus views.

[1] - https://www.science.org/doi/suppl/10.1126/sciadv.abo0038/sup...

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