Many people are attracted to authority. They are eager to defend what authorities say against heretics who say otherwise. This lets them signal a willingness to conform, and gain status by associating with higher status authorities against lower status heretics.
I believe a lot of contrarian positions, but I would not say I am the least biased toward them. I believe them based on the evidence. But when you find your first contrarian position to be proved by examination of the scientific literature, say, and especially if it is a very surprising contrarian position in the sense that all right thinking people think you are nuts, then that actually gives you strong evidence that your prior bias against contrarian positions was misplaced. And when you see your second contrarian position very surprisingly yet rationally proved, well then if you are rational you look for an explanation of what exactly you had been missing about the world. And this may well lead you to a rational theory that in fact combines very many more contrarian positions into a concise, and thus occam-friendly explanation.
When I realized that the "climate scientists" were delusional about the climate literature and the Pediatricians were delusional about the vaccine literature, I realized that had a larger import.Our normal expectation that these collections of individuals have determined their beliefs and practices by a logical, scientific process, is empirically proven wrong. Instead the observed facts are explained much better by the model espoused by Gustav Le Bon in his 1895 book The Crowd, the first work on group psychology, and arguably the most insightful. Although largely forgotten today, this work has had extraordinary influence. By their own accounts it was on Theodore Roosevelt’s bedside table, and dogeared by Mussolini. Lenin and Stalin took from it, and “Hitler’s indebtedness to Le Bon bordered on plagiarism” in the words of historian and Hitler-biographer Robert G. L. Waite. Sigmund Freud wrote a book discussing Le Bon, which we will quote from below, and Edward Bernays, the father of modern public relations, acknowledged his deep debt, as Goebbels did of Bernays’ reflected insights. So this wouldn’t be the first predictive power displayed by Le Bon’s model: every one of the above luminaries was very happy with their practical applications of Le Bon.
Let me put it simpler. There is a fundamental bias that most people have which is simply wrong. If they encounter a question where the great majority confidently believes something, including typically government bodies and the like, and there is a small minority dissenting with arguments and links to scientific publications or data, their strong bias is the majority is right and the minority is wrong.In the real world, the opposite is far more often the case. The majority is invariably captive of crowd think. Crowds, even when they include the National Academy of Sciences, are incapable of logical thought.Its easy to understand why the majority are confused. They are certain they are right, precisely because of the bias we are discussing, and none of them has actually checked the logic, paying actual and specific attention to the holes the dissenters are pointing out in it. Instead they invariably argue about some strawman.Its not so easy to understand why the dissenters are dissenting, until you realize that they have checked the logic.
Another suspect assumption behind your advice to prefer contrarian questions: we should prefer to be correct.
Allow me a prediction-market analogy. Whether I speculate on one or another prediction depends on the comparison between my personal odds and that assigned by the prediction market. In other words, if I rationally believe the probability of having EMs is .1 but the market says it's .01, I should definitely invest in pro-EM predictions, despite my thinking they're unlikely.
The same logic should apply to contrarian views. If I have a well-reasoned opinion that causes me to predict at odds with the consensus, I should promote that opinion, even if I think it's unlikely. I shouldn't be trying to be correct; I should aim for the greatest possible marginal correctness (so to speak).
Where a marginal analysis might founder when applied to intellectual pursuits is in psychology rather than logic: it is hard to promote a view you believe is wrong. (Some will consider it intellectually dishonest; I think intellectual honesty lies in honest argument rather than sincere belief.) (To bridge the gap between value at the margin and truth, I've offered the distinction between opinion and belief. [See "The distinct functions of belief and opinion"--http://tinyurl.com/4r9k5g3 ])
Very interesting. One flaw could be that the 'benefit' people get from contrarianism might be connected to the outraged responses they get when they share their contrarian answers. With questions you don't get these same outraged responses, because instead of contradicting people's closely held beliefs you're just talking about a subject they hadn't thought about much. You're more likely to get people ignoring your post (as seems to be Robin's complaint about the EM article) rather than flocking to it to disagree.
"That is, it is less accurate to knowingly disagree with others unless one has good reasons to think you are more rational than they in the sense of listening more to the info implicit in their opinions."
Except that a lot of people seem to think that their contrarian nature proves that they are, in fact, more rational than the rest of the "sheeple". Witness 9/11 "truthers" who are smugly convinced that they've uncovered a conspiracy of mind-boggling proportions. The more evidence that's presented against them, the bigger the conspiracy must be - and uncovering a conspiracy that big could only by done by the cleverest of people!
Let me rephrase. We posit that academia is biased toward impressive methods. But this bias could be expressed in two ways: 1) by choosing topics suited to using high-status methods and 2) by applying high-status methods to problems that could be solved better by low-status methods.
To claim an inherent advantage for contrarian issues over contrarian methods (or contrarian solutions, which comes to the same), you must think expression by #1 dominates over expression by #2. Otherwise, contrarians can hope to avoid the conclusion's force about contrarians usually being wrong by capitalizing on the bias of academics for using (sometimes unsuitably) sophisticated methods (as opposed to choosing problems for which sophisticated methods are suited).
It parses as "... that (knowing disagreement) is irrational", not as "... that knowing (disagreement is irrational)".
It's a reference to the Aumann agreement theorem and related results, which say roughly that under certain circumstances, if two people are free to communicate with one another and genuinely seek to find the truth, they can't rationally end up by agreeing to disagree.
Terse ordinary-language statements like "knowing disagreement is irrational" are arguably *not* in fact supported by these theorems, because they assume an impossible degree of "common knowledge" (A knows that B knows that A knows that B knows ... that B knows that A knows B's opinion, etc.) or because they assume perfect rationality and "work" by means of iterated reasoning of a kind that doesn't stably work for even very-nearly-perfectly-rational agents.
I don't see why I need to believe that method selection is more biased. I talked about questions being neglected because of an emphasis on impressive methods. That is talking about a method bias.
The em scenario has standard methods but unusual assumptions. Specially about neuro tech as game change. The lower of wages seems acceptable, but the obsolescence of humans is not very palatable theme for a book. I understand why Dvorsky call that a dystopian future.
I enjoyed the article and totally agree. It's hard to not understand clearly formed information. You have presented your points in a clear, yet intelligent manner. I agree with you. Thanks for writing and sharing this article.
Sorry I had to: on a more serious note, I get the impression that in biology, researchers will investigate whatever they want, but when it comes time to apply for grants, they'll try to link their research to caner or some other big disease (no matter how insignificant the link is). In other words, they are contrarian about asking questions, but they try to appear conformist to grant writers so they can get cash. They probably are still conformist to some extent, but they are not as conformist as they appear.
Not really. The few who disagree strongly seem to place their disagreement with the field of economics as a whole. They accept that I'm mostly applying standard econ straightforwardly. I don't think believing standard econ makes me much of a contrarian.
I believe a lot of contrarian positions, but I would not say I am the least biased toward them. I believe them based on the evidence. But when you find your first contrarian position to be proved by examination of the scientific literature, say, and especially if it is a very surprising contrarian position in the sense that all right thinking people think you are nuts, then that actually gives you strong evidence that your prior bias against contrarian positions was misplaced. And when you see your second contrarian position very surprisingly yet rationally proved, well then if you are rational you look for an explanation of what exactly you had been missing about the world. And this may well lead you to a rational theory that in fact combines very many more contrarian positions into a concise, and thus occam-friendly explanation.
When I realized that the "climate scientists" were delusional about the climate literature and the Pediatricians were delusional about the vaccine literature, I realized that had a larger import.Our normal expectation that these collections of individuals have determined their beliefs and practices by a logical, scientific process, is empirically proven wrong. Instead the observed facts are explained much better by the model espoused by Gustav Le Bon in his 1895 book The Crowd, the first work on group psychology, and arguably the most insightful. Although largely forgotten today, this work has had extraordinary influence. By their own accounts it was on Theodore Roosevelt’s bedside table, and dogeared by Mussolini. Lenin and Stalin took from it, and “Hitler’s indebtedness to Le Bon bordered on plagiarism” in the words of historian and Hitler-biographer Robert G. L. Waite. Sigmund Freud wrote a book discussing Le Bon, which we will quote from below, and Edward Bernays, the father of modern public relations, acknowledged his deep debt, as Goebbels did of Bernays’ reflected insights. So this wouldn’t be the first predictive power displayed by Le Bon’s model: every one of the above luminaries was very happy with their practical applications of Le Bon.
http://whyarethingsthisway....
Let me put it simpler. There is a fundamental bias that most people have which is simply wrong. If they encounter a question where the great majority confidently believes something, including typically government bodies and the like, and there is a small minority dissenting with arguments and links to scientific publications or data, their strong bias is the majority is right and the minority is wrong.In the real world, the opposite is far more often the case. The majority is invariably captive of crowd think. Crowds, even when they include the National Academy of Sciences, are incapable of logical thought.Its easy to understand why the majority are confused. They are certain they are right, precisely because of the bias we are discussing, and none of them has actually checked the logic, paying actual and specific attention to the holes the dissenters are pointing out in it. Instead they invariably argue about some strawman.Its not so easy to understand why the dissenters are dissenting, until you realize that they have checked the logic.
Another suspect assumption behind your advice to prefer contrarian questions: we should prefer to be correct.
Allow me a prediction-market analogy. Whether I speculate on one or another prediction depends on the comparison between my personal odds and that assigned by the prediction market. In other words, if I rationally believe the probability of having EMs is .1 but the market says it's .01, I should definitely invest in pro-EM predictions, despite my thinking they're unlikely.
The same logic should apply to contrarian views. If I have a well-reasoned opinion that causes me to predict at odds with the consensus, I should promote that opinion, even if I think it's unlikely. I shouldn't be trying to be correct; I should aim for the greatest possible marginal correctness (so to speak).
Where a marginal analysis might founder when applied to intellectual pursuits is in psychology rather than logic: it is hard to promote a view you believe is wrong. (Some will consider it intellectually dishonest; I think intellectual honesty lies in honest argument rather than sincere belief.) (To bridge the gap between value at the margin and truth, I've offered the distinction between opinion and belief. [See "The distinct functions of belief and opinion"--http://tinyurl.com/4r9k5g3 ])
prolix, proxlix, nothing a pair of scissors can't fix!Nick Cave
Very interesting. One flaw could be that the 'benefit' people get from contrarianism might be connected to the outraged responses they get when they share their contrarian answers. With questions you don't get these same outraged responses, because instead of contradicting people's closely held beliefs you're just talking about a subject they hadn't thought about much. You're more likely to get people ignoring your post (as seems to be Robin's complaint about the EM article) rather than flocking to it to disagree.
"That is, it is less accurate to knowingly disagree with others unless one has good reasons to think you are more rational than they in the sense of listening more to the info implicit in their opinions."
Except that a lot of people seem to think that their contrarian nature proves that they are, in fact, more rational than the rest of the "sheeple". Witness 9/11 "truthers" who are smugly convinced that they've uncovered a conspiracy of mind-boggling proportions. The more evidence that's presented against them, the bigger the conspiracy must be - and uncovering a conspiracy that big could only by done by the cleverest of people!
I did; thanks; fixed.
"This lets them signal a willingness to confirm..."
I think you mean conform.
Let me rephrase. We posit that academia is biased toward impressive methods. But this bias could be expressed in two ways: 1) by choosing topics suited to using high-status methods and 2) by applying high-status methods to problems that could be solved better by low-status methods.
To claim an inherent advantage for contrarian issues over contrarian methods (or contrarian solutions, which comes to the same), you must think expression by #1 dominates over expression by #2. Otherwise, contrarians can hope to avoid the conclusion's force about contrarians usually being wrong by capitalizing on the bias of academics for using (sometimes unsuitably) sophisticated methods (as opposed to choosing problems for which sophisticated methods are suited).
Contrarianism is context dependent. Yup
One doesn't have to have one's own projection ofAI outcomes to note that MIRI s favourite doom scenario is highly conjunctive.
It parses as "... that (knowing disagreement) is irrational", not as "... that knowing (disagreement is irrational)".
It's a reference to the Aumann agreement theorem and related results, which say roughly that under certain circumstances, if two people are free to communicate with one another and genuinely seek to find the truth, they can't rationally end up by agreeing to disagree.
Terse ordinary-language statements like "knowing disagreement is irrational" are arguably *not* in fact supported by these theorems, because they assume an impossible degree of "common knowledge" (A knows that B knows that A knows that B knows ... that B knows that A knows B's opinion, etc.) or because they assume perfect rationality and "work" by means of iterated reasoning of a kind that doesn't stably work for even very-nearly-perfectly-rational agents.
I don't see why I need to believe that method selection is more biased. I talked about questions being neglected because of an emphasis on impressive methods. That is talking about a method bias.
The em scenario has standard methods but unusual assumptions. Specially about neuro tech as game change. The lower of wages seems acceptable, but the obsolescence of humans is not very palatable theme for a book. I understand why Dvorsky call that a dystopian future.
I enjoyed the article and totally agree. It's hard to not understand clearly formed information. You have presented your points in a clear, yet intelligent manner. I agree with you. Thanks for writing and sharing this article.
I disagree with this.
Sorry I had to: on a more serious note, I get the impression that in biology, researchers will investigate whatever they want, but when it comes time to apply for grants, they'll try to link their research to caner or some other big disease (no matter how insignificant the link is). In other words, they are contrarian about asking questions, but they try to appear conformist to grant writers so they can get cash. They probably are still conformist to some extent, but they are not as conformist as they appear.
Not really. The few who disagree strongly seem to place their disagreement with the field of economics as a whole. They accept that I'm mostly applying standard econ straightforwardly. I don't think believing standard econ makes me much of a contrarian.