I will duplicate some of my longer comments on OB here on my blog, as I’m not sure if all my readers are reading OB on a regular basis, and tracking comments there is difficult anyway.
The post concerned (it’s not long):
Overcoming Bias: Tyler Vid on Disagreement
The sentence I disagree with is this:
but on any truly controversial question among intelligent people, you should never think its 95 to 5 in your favor.
My comment:
Tyler has a much too optimistic attitude on people’s reasoning skills, thinking that when most people agree on something they should be right more probably. It is rather that we are evolved to agree, so disagreeing is difficult even if you have good reasons.
That Tyler’s view is wrong can be seen easily: imagine a person versed in the cutting edge of modern science is instantiated in the stone age: he will find himself disagreeing with most people in the tribes, but surely he will be right on more things than them? (Believing not is a very postmodernist attitude, against which so much can and has be said that it need not repeated here).
Of course, Tyler would say that the information that the future person has is different from the one the stone-agers have. But exactly this is the case in modern science: if you find yourself disagreeing with 95% of people on a subject, this is probably because you are familiar with often very counter-intuitive results of a highly specialized field - and the information has not gone public yet.
On Cosmic Variance something even more troubling is discussed:
A commenter says:
Great discussion. I particularly note Sean’s reminder that quite a lot of physicists don’t want to admit that there is a problem with the arrow of time. The underlying motivation is all too often a kind of childish machismo: that’s philosophy, and philosophy is bad. Sadly, the truth is that physicists needed philosophers like Huw Price to keep on telling them what ought to have been extremely obvious: the arrow of time is a real mystery, and our failure to explain it fully is a very strong hint that there is something major missing from our whole understanding of the early universe.
So should one really go believing that everything is ok just because the majority of physicists do? No. The social factors working against posing new difficult questions are much too evident here. So we see that even highly sophisticated disciplines have a problem: they do not take dissenters seriously enough. So much for disagreeing with intelligent people.
As to assigning a concrete number to being right or wrong about a certain belief: in absence of empirical evidence giving some numbers to plug in, that’s just begging for a false certainty of exactness - don’t do it.
Check the reasoning and evidence behind arguments, apply some evolutionary psychology, avoid cached thoughts, and you’re well on your way.
Addendum: On the disagreeing with physicists part: this presupposes of course that you have comparable knowledge. It is a bad idea to disagree if you’re a n00b, but if you’ve weighed the evidence and see that they are missing a problem, then disagree!
1 response so far ↓
1 guenther // Jun 24, 2008 at 18:22
Further addendum to the above post (I add it here in the comment section:
Hal,
of course it depends on which people you are talking to: if you talk to ill-educated people, you should tell them to agree with most of the stuff they read in the next science book: it will be an improvement to their previous knowledge. (Of course, even better were to teach them critical thinking, but that is a time consuming process.)
My comment was, as you conjectured, addressed to scientists on scientific issues (or to OB readers :-)).
I am not so optimistic that these cases of wrong dissent are so rare. Most people work in a system (and paradigm; with system I mean to include their social connections/authority relations/career issues). And a system/paradigm is always more stupid than a single critical thinker, because a paradigm is fixed, not so flexible when presented with new evidence and new ideas.
You will probably learn more of the real problems in a field by hallway discussions in scientific conferences than by the current published papers: why that? Because here people speak their true opinions, and about stuff that they simply dare not publish yet because it’s not backed up by enough evidence to topple the reigning paradigm or which contradicts some “well-known” assumptions.
Take String Theory for example; physics has been dominated by this approach for the last decades, and dissenters (read: grad students) were actively discouraged from pursuing other avenues (I do not want to take a position on the String Theory issue: it is just an example). That kind of behaviour is not conducive to scientific progress.
So if we start encouraging the only people who try to do critical thinking (scientists, intellectuals etc) to go with the crowd, that would be reinforcing the wrong side. A critical thinker is by nature _uncertain_ in his beliefs. This uncertainty is an achievement, still too sparsely sprinkled among humankind to already start paddling in the other direction again.
Of course, Tyler in the interview above says we should be less certain about things (the dissent thing was only a secondary point); so isn’t he paddling in the right direction?
Maybe he and I would find that we agree when discussing things out carefully in person; but I only have access to the interview, and responding to that, I think he is moving in the direction of self-defeating skepticism: if you start being _too_ uncertain, then “anything goes”. ESP? Spaghetti Monsters? and what have you… (see his proposed massive reduction of uncertainty in the atheism question) Why fund scientific education and not some New Age festival when we are so uncertain?
I always try to be open to new arguments, which probably implies that I am very “uncertain” of my knowledge. But that does not preclude me from saying that other propositions are probably even less likely to be true (sometimes even if they be current mainstream; that does not mean that I have a better answer, only that I think some assumptions are premature/biased by our human form etc).
So what I am trying to say is this: being uncertain is ok and good, but not if it lets you fall into some kind of general “anything goes” skepticism (which I have often witnessed happening in people when skepticism is adopted).
I think the approach offered by critical rationalism is a fine heuristic, and evades the problems of extreme skepticism; and probably the idea that “extreme skepticism is a good thing” is only a belief in belief; and that it is in practice actually only used to shoot down novel theories (as in: “I don’t believe these theories of yours are right, they contradict my intuition and my 30 year old education”) versus being used to shake up belief in some deeply held conviction (that would be a good thing, so seldom seen!).
And in practice, we should adopt those stances which are most conducive to progress.
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