Currently I'm trying to think of a way to get my father to read this without overtly telling him he needs to read this. Because that would be being a crank.
Think deeply about your father. Reflect on times when he's been funniest, had the most fun, and why you admire him. From this perspective think about how you would want to talk about this article. Maybe ask about his opinion on some of the details in the middle.
In other words rather than figuring out a strategy to get him to read it that is adversarial but somehow slips under his defenses, figure out how to get yourself in the right frame of mind to introduce ideas on how to be more effective to someone you think is important. Presumably your father is enough like you that he will be able to tell when you are treating him like someone who needs to be emotionally managed, as opposed to when you are having a two-way conversation.
Maybe one marker of managing someone is when the speaker is not focusing on themselves at all. When you talk to a friend you like you are likely concerned about how you are portraying yourself as well as whether or not you are getting your way.
Generally, every model is wrong about something. That the core difference between models and the things we model. Every description is an approximation of some sort.
However, some things are tautological. Some things may be necessary in reality, even if they are not in any model. (I wake up each morning because I have no alternative, not because it is the 'right thing to do'.) Some things are very safe to assume because our human cultural context or our biological environment is stable over multiple generations of activity. And some things are true simply because assuming otherwise contradicts the assumptions needed for language to work effectively. And sometimes we do prove things, even if we lack any meaningful ability to prove what we'd like to the degree that we'd like.
The point is, we're not always wrong in a linguistic sense. Any time you have a statement that is perfectly symmetrical and valid in every context, you do not have language which can be used to make decisions. It's only meaningful to be wrong if there are things you can be right about.
Not OP, but I think the idea is to consciously pause before taking the path that is obviously (to you) downhill. This gives you a chance to think whether it's actually downhill instead of making an assumption. It's a way to practice mindfulness
> If you can't fathom the other side and where they're coming from, you, are in fact, biased beyond listening to facts, and are likely wrong.
This one especially applies to politics. If you are one of those looking for "sanity", or "common sense", and can't imagine how the other side can possibly hold some position, then this applies to you.
it's a lot easier to dismiss political ideas that you don't like by labeling them "irrational" than it is to open your mind to the reasons why a person might rationally disagree with you.
Yes, but there is also the real possibility that your beliefs are irrational as well. Everyone thinks they're right, and everyone has a train of thought that has led to that belief.
If you believe that banning sex education in schools will decrease teen pregnancy, and it turns out that teen pregnancy rates actually increase when teens aren't educated, then your belief about sex education isn't rational.
Many - possibly most - public policy decisions are open to this kind of testing.
The fact that formal testing rarely happens, and that it's consistently ignored even when it does, suggests that politics itself is inherently pre-rational.
Arguably it's then irrational to expect it to be rational - but that's a deeper problem that doesn't just apply to politics.
A rational thought may not be a predictive thought.
Before people knew the earth was a globe, it was entirely rational to think everything that goes up goes down again.
And for all testing you can do, ie, throwing an apple up, it'll come down again.
It is entirely rational to conclude from the available evidence that everything falls down when thrown.
But recently we've discovered that things you throw up hard enough may not fall down at all.
Thusly, the rational thought was still rational but wrong.
Predictability is important when you want to evaluate scientific models (ie, assume earth is flat, assume earth is round, assume earth is a mostly round potato all have different predictive quality, though the first ones are easier and sometimes sufficient)
There's almost always a reason for those "irrational" beliefs.
I, like many, was appalled to hear the statistics on the number of people who believe news they didn't agree with was "fake news" regardless of its accuracy.
Then I heard a counter-argument: in short they're applying the rubric "fake news" to biased news, which is a whole 'nother discussion I'd rather not dive into here.
I don't think there are all that many truly irrational beliefs out there, political or otherwise. The world is a massively complex place, and I can't really blame people for letting con men tell them otherwise.
(Ok, who am I kidding: yes I can blame them, but it does no good to assume everyone who disagrees with me is stupid or a victim.)
Do you know the reasons for their beliefs? Can you articulate them? If not then you are conflating your own beliefs with the standard for rationality. You will also be really ineffective at convincing them they are wrong. Not because they aren't smart enough but because you are unable to communicate effectively to them.
What makes you think people understand the reasons for their own beliefs? How do you know the reasons they give you when asked are the correct ones? Why do you believe that challenging those statements respectfully will change their minds?
The actual requirement for persuasion is a believable narrative with a bit of moral weight, and a random selection of standard persuasive tricks that politicians and lawyers have been deploying with outrageous success for millennia.
Generally, being objectively correct is one of the least effective ways to change anyone's mind. You might have some hope in a scientific setting. But in popular debate, facts and rationality are almost completely powerless.
And irrationality is an intrinsic aspect of politics, not a problem to be solved. When two or more people agree on a desired end, rationality is relevant—rationality serves as a tool to find the most efficient way to meet the mutually desired end. But when people want mutually exclusive outcomes, application of reason can never satisfy both. In the absence of willingness to compromise their struggle must be founded upon emotional appeal, tribal identity, and power.
I agree. The best assumption that we can have about another human being is that they are rational. Most people are rational. Most people have reasons for their actions. Even addicts, even child molesters, even feminists. The point is to understand their reasons. If you disagree, that doesn't mean the other side is irrational. They could be wrong but they still have reasons. From that place of understanding, you can not only find empathy, but structure arguments in a way that is constructive based on that empathy and understanding.
I think the sad fact of politics is that demonizing and misunderstanding the other side is quite deliberate and purposeful, and getting at the truth is the least important of concerns.
It really depends on the topic, and there are times where trying to find sense in the other side’s position is the road to madness.
If you’re debating the optimal sales tax rate, yes, being unable to comprehend the other side means you’re doing it wrong. If the topic is, say, wiping out people of a particular religion, not so much.
>wiping out people of a particular religion, not so much.
As a nihilist I would disagree.
The kind of people that want to do that have a much different set of morality and ethics.
There is no objective moral framework that you can base claims for or against wiping out a particular religion. You can however use your own, personal, subjective moral framework and most people will probably have something vaguely compatible to it and agree with you that wiping out religions and it's people is bad.
I am without a doubt that white nationalists and Nazis are wrong.
Am I supposed to question myself here? Supposed to assume I'm wrong? Your line of thinking is very dangerous and not safe, it enables very bad people by making good people assume they are terrible people themselves.
White nationalists present some interesting problems, problems that are real and valid. Their lens is wrong (this problem exists, therefore I will interpret the problem in a way that I am superior and others are inferior).
Consider the fact that you are a byproduct of the endless programming and propaganda behind the War on Terror. If you have no doubts on that subject, YOU are wrong.
So, I'm endlessly programmed, therefore nazis are good?
You can critique the way we acquire information and use that to cast doubt on conclusions. But you definitely can not use those criticisms to add validity to any conclusions either. So I don't see how this world view does anybody any good.
At some point, you see nazis, you say "those are bad", and you just know you're right about it. In that sense, morals are a true compass when faced with endless doubt that can creep in if you want to be maximally scientific about things.
"Life is complicated and nobody wants to believe it. I suppose you might call it the infantilism of society. There is deep infantilism in the culture, in terms of the way they think, they can’t bear complexity. That you have to think, that there are gradations, nobody wants that. They want to be told, or they want to say: ‘This is good, this is bad’. Anything that in any way undermines that is not to be borne." - Stephen Fry
No pressing need to point out the obvious criticisms. Fry was already roundly criticized up and down for saying it. But it has become my favorite quote about the way people talk about ideologies.
I goal of killing and mistreating people of other races is morally wrong. You may mock me as someone who cant bear complexity for that, but that is just that - attempt to make me feel ashamed so that they have it easier.
I agree with you! But you've cherry-picked an issue that the majority of HN users agree with, so...
In this case, I would say that the nuance lies not in whether it is good or bad, but in understanding the constellation of factors that would lead someone to hold the objectionable viewpoint. Reducing the issue down to the question of whether it's good or bad is itself the simplistic mentality that Fry was very explicitly criticizing.
I cherry picked issue whole thread started with. That is not cherry picking, that is staying on topic.
There are plenty of reasons why one would be nazi. One is fear, other ressentment yet other that you was raised that way by parents. And yet others grown to be cruel, aggresive and sadistic and nazism makes them feel like it is good thing.
However, being clear on whether it is good or bad or even dangerous and what is cost of they get their way is practically speaking super important. Understanding that is more important then understanding poor them and having emphaty toward them. Otherwise they will use you emphaty to convert you to their case, bit by bit. It is not simplistic, it is values that you need to keep in mind lest you lose the lm.
Here, you are exploring nuance. I doubt it will cost anyone their life.
> However, being clear on whether it is good or bad or even dangerous and what is cost of they get their way is practically speaking super important.
Yes, it's important. It's important that children learn this, or sort it out by very early adulthood. That is what is meant by infantile. In my opinion, this is not a serious problem for the vast majority of civil folk. I do not understand the value in grown adults belaboring it. It's baby food. Eat grownup food.
Lol, I am not. AM not allowing nuance to confuse important points.
Actually, grown ups have bigger problem keeping this straigt. Grown ups made originally nazism happen after all. Grown ups dont want to insult nazi because of career or just trying to look nice and rational. Then again, young German soldiers were more cruel then old ones I read in historical accounts.
I don't know what you mean by eating grown up food here. There were quite a few unapologetic grown ups in history who were quite inflexible in their values.
Maybe it is another attempt to shame that has nothing to do with what actual grown ups do, for better or worst.
They are bad because you were told for decades they are bad.
The fact I even have to explain that is confirmation at how complete the indoctrination is.
Are you seriously attempting to take a morally absolutist position, as if showing an image of a Nazi to aliens would automatically make them recoil in horror as if that particular combination of attire and behavior managed to stumble upon some absolute fixed point of sensory perception? You can't be serious. How long have you been seven years old?
Are you seriously attempting to show that nazis aren't bad?
Serious question. What have I been falsely indoctrinated about? What should I have been exposed to as an alternate view on nazis? Do history books count as "indoctrination"?
To your other point, I would imagine showing aliens concentration camps would make them recoil in horror, yes.
You live in a world where the permanent scare tactics utilized to sustain the Cold War (which were originally developed during WW2) have now been moved over to the forever-nebulous "War on Terror". The enemies can be endlessly expanded now.
You have no other baseline to even compare against. You'll be chasing war propaganda boogeyman for the rest of your life and you won't even consider the fact that you are doing it WHILE you do it.
Nazis weren't the only ones using concentration camps. The people who ACTUALLY paid the real blood and treasure cost to defeat Nazi Germany (Soviet Russia) utilized such camps as well. This throws your juvenile mythology of "Good vs. Evil" obsession out the window since anything Nazi is automatically ultra-evil, ergo, anyone fighting it is ultra-good. Soviet Russia even expelled Jews.
Wait... lemme guess... the actual people who actually killed and enslaved actual Nazis are evil now, too... right? Funny how the enemy list just magically grows longer by the second with nothing more than a hand wave.
You obsess over moral games. That's what you've been indoctrinated to do. And you don't even see it. According to this idiotic game, everyone who isn't you will eventually be designated as a Nazi or an indirect supporter of one.
Only when you are labeled as a Nazi for someone elses expediency will you realize the flaw in your approach. But I'm sure you think that's not possible. You're a good citizen, right?
Lemme know when someone deepfakes your face into a "Nazi" rally and sends the video to your professional circle. That's how easy it is to take your moral preening and twist it against you.
I'm not trying to defend/support the GP/sibling commenter, but rather to provide a more sober perspective for you to contemplate.
The issue is not whether Nazis were/are bad. You can feel safe in the assumption that all but an extreme fringe minority are in consensus that Nazi philosophies and practices were horrific beyond comprehension.
What we should contemplate and discuss, however, is what were the economic and cultural conditions that led to the rise of Nazism in Europe in the 30s, and how it came to be accepted, supported and enabled/served by such a large proportion of the population.
Only by fully understanding these issues can we take effective measures to ensure such a movement never takes hold ever again, and ensure that we as individuals are equipped with the strength and judgement to avoid succumbing to populist bigotry any time we see it.
There is fairly good moral consensus that nazis are bad so it's probably not wrong to say "Nazis are bad" in most contexts.
But, IMO, morality and ethics are subjective, so for a minority of people who don't share this consensus, yes, nazis aren't bad.
An alien race that has constructed a feudal slave society might not object to concentration camps at all. They might love the idea.
Nazis, from a purely objective standpoint, are not bad. But not good either. What they did is facts.
Only when the human observer comes in, ie, you and me, we introduce morality and you and me both think that those things are bad and should not be done.
Or how Death expressed it in Discworld; "take the universe and grind it down to the finest powder and sieve it through the finest sieve and then show me one atom of justice, one molecule of mercy"
Your response seems to just take the word “bad” out of the English language altogether. Your point seems to be “badness is subjective and therefore invalid.”
Would an amended statement make more sense?
“The nazis were bad to the degree that badness is a thing.”
Although it seems a bit silly to phrase things that way.
To the degree that silliness is a thing of course.
Badness is subjective, yes. Doesn't mean it's invalid, you can still hold onto subjective notions just fine.
Personally I believe that my notion of bad, good, evil and angels is purely subjective. Doesn't mean they have less value. I merely acknowledge the value is subjective. Like how a childhood toy holds sentimental value.
Actually users flagged it, because it obviously breaks the site guidelines.
It doesn't matter what ideology you're battling for or against. It's the genre of ideological flamewar itself that's damaging here, and therefore unwelcome, and therefore will get you banned if you keep doing it.
Those rules are disingenuous, extensively ideologically partisan, and do not reflect the human condition at all. It's akin to taping a warning sign on a Skinner box that says, "Do not react" while the experimenters are perpetual baffled when subjects twitch when delivered a jolt of electricity.
By "the users", do you mean four or so hyperpartisan ideological zealots who exploit your rules to get their rush of moral supremacy by downvoting instead of commenting to refute the points?
Because downvoting is technically political activity and your rules totally allow that all day long.
No offense, but you took my words, turned them into something else, then attacked that argument.
I said, "If you can't fathom the other side and where they're coming from..." meaning, you should "seek first to understand", also known as Habit #5 from Franklin Covey.
> Your line of thinking is very dangerous and not safe, it enables very bad people by making good people assume they are terrible people themselves.
It is always healthy to examine why one is convicted about certain beliefs. Is it rooted in fact, or fear of the unknown? Since you brought up White Nationalism, this is one of my favorite success stories from a man that sought to understand the very people that hated him: https://www.npr.org/2017/08/20/544861933/how-one-man-convinc...
Daryl Davis has done great things just by listening.
any philosophy/belief system that is descriptive (as opposed to prescriptive/normative) will be _apodictically_certain_ to the extent that it is free from internal contradictions. in simple cases we can examine the ideas and be very confident that there are no internal contradictions.
for example: given "A implies B" and "A" then we can conclude "B".
essentially any time you formalize definitions to the point that a statement of equivalence becomes obvious as a tautology, then you have an idea you can be certain about.
I have a layman's and not very well informed knowledge of philosophy, so at the risk of being savagely and justifiably owned: even in the example you give, doesn't one have to make the assumption that one's rules of reasoning are sound? I don't consider it as a serious proposition, but isn't there at least in principle the possibility that one is deluded, and that modus ponens is not universally valid, for reasons one is not capable of grasping?
I'm also an autodidact and my understanding is that radically agnostic epistemology (such as you suggest) is not very useful. the idea of a delusion presupposes that one could have a correct understanding of reality, at least in theory. the most basic assertion we can make about reality is identity, that is, a thing is itself. the purpose of a logical syllogism is to reduce an apparently complicated chain of identities to a tautology. [0]
rejection of the principle of identity leaves one at the point where no further intersubjective dialogue is meaningful. which is why Avicenna said that anyone who denies the identity should be beaten until he acknowledges that "to be beaten" is not the same as "to not be beaten" and he should be burned until he acknowledges that "being burned" is not the same as "not being burned." [1]
I'm very interested in any corrections, comments, or other replies. I'm also aware that there are other approaches to logic besides the aristotelian approach I have tried to convey above. an example of a non-aristotelian attempt at communicating would be e-prime [2].
> I'm also an autodidact and my understanding is that radically agnostic epistemology (such as you suggest) is not very useful.
Oh, absolutely. I was merely suggesting that there is a difference between a lack of doubt for all practical purposes, and a lack of doubt in principle. This difference may not be terribly helpful or pertinent, of course.
Most of the ideas I hold as certain have some built-in leeway. One example that comes to mind: "A good solution now is often better than a perfect solution later."
Every 10 years or so, I look back on my life in wonderment at how clueless I was, and then congratulate myself on having finally figured everything out.
A certain amount of this boils down to, "Don't be mentally ill or have an otherwise disordered mind." I've known people who were the sort of crank he's talking about, and they were generally — though not always — unhealthily isolated people who had difficulties managing their personal lives. Most had a tenuous grasp on reality, especially the motivations of other people.
There are cranks who could respond to these rules, but I believe (though I am not a mental-health professional) that many would be unable to.
I think we can let our emotions get away from us whether we suffer from mental illness or not. Many people exhibit the behavior in the article despite being of perfectly sound mind.
Well, I don't think the article was really aimed at actual cranks (who are, more or less by definition, immune to this kind of advice). It feels more aimed at scientists, or people of a scientific turn of mind, who may have found a genuine flaw in some widely accepted result but might not have the communication skills to get it across to the scientific community.
I've also investigated bad science papers before, and blogged about it a few times. There's a lot out there. There's nothing special about getting a PhD that makes you politically neutral or morally superior. The temptation to abuse maths to make your personal views seem "scientific" is irresistible for too many. My last public attempt:
(as an aside, totally unsurprised the guy works in computing, developing an intolerance for abuse of logic is a job hazard.)
But I don't know if this perspective is helpful to be honest. "Don't be a dick" is both quite an obvious principle and also rather useless when criticising people's work: some of the authors, and some of the people who want to believe the research is true, will inevitably view any criticism as being dickish. This is doubly true if you take the obvious next step and speculate as to whether the issues are mere oversights or (far more commonly, in my view) deliberate deceptions intended to further an agenda.
One problem is that genuine, honest mistakes tend to get picked up already by the existing peer review process. The really bad papers that get through are usually bad in support of some wider social mission, usually leading the public to some policy goal, and they don't get struck down because the peer reviewers share the same goals. Thus pointing out mistakes has no effect, because they already knew the science was bad. The only thing that can work is pointing out to the people who they're trying to influence that something has gone wrong.
There is a responsibility to be harsh in these cases. Failing to do so can simply let the issues fester and compound. From the Guardian article on Brown:
There were several psychologists, versed in non-linear dynamics, who smelt something fishy about the maths in the published paper. Stephen Guastello, from Marquette University, wrote a note of mild complaint to American Psychologist, which it chose not to publish because "there wasn't enough interest in the article". Guastello feels now that he should have been more forceful in his opinions. "In retrospect," he says, "I see how I could have been more clearly negative and less supportive of what looked like an article that could move the field forward if someone would follow up with some strong empirical work."
The story describes Brown's first debunking of a paper that used lots of clever looking math to reach obviously absurd conclusions about psychology. One author of the paper admitted that she had never understood the maths and the person who did create the maths (Losada) has refused to ever respond to the debunking in any way. All the reviewers were successfully intimidated by the maths and were unwilling to criticise it, allowing Losada to get away with it:
John Gottman, a leading authority in the psychology of successful relationships, wrote to Losada because he couldn't follow the equations. "I thought it was something I didn't know about, because he's a smart guy, Losada. He never answered my email," he says.
So the critics weren't critical enough and a paper based on pure mathematical bullshit racked up 350 citations. Vast amounts of time, money and effort was wasted. What does this say about the scientific process?
By the way, in case anyone thinks computing is immune to this sort of thing, it's not. Papers about "Russian twitter bots" are a cu...
I noticed the same thing (and upvoted to push back). I am not 100% sure but I think there's a trend on HN whereby good comments are often being downvoted. I need to recheck the guidelines (on mobile now) but I thought downvote should be applied rarely. For example I don't downvote if I disagree, even when I am actively arguing in a thread. I reserve downvoting for trolling and other obviously bad faith comments.
When an article on how not be seen as a crank makes you want to post a long comment about your research into Russian bots, you should probably think again.
This is exactly wrong. It's not having an opinion on a controversial topic that makes one a crank, it's whether that opinion is well supported and respectfully expressed.
In fact, mike_hearn's first link is to a blog post where he debunks claims of evidence that Russian bots influenced the Brexit vote. (He doesn't offer evidence that that didn't happen; what kind of evidence could exist? But he does argue that the alleged evidence offered by others that there was such influence is unconvincing.)
It's become a cliche, but that kind of low effort insult is exactly how people like Trump win. You can't argue your position so you resort to calling people who challenge you "cranks". The lazy assumptions that so often pervades these debates leads directly into over-enthusiastic trust of pseudo-science.
I've been out all evening, and my post is now at +11. But if it was getting downvoted I am 99% certain it's because a lot of people really want to believe in the whole Russia/Trump/Twitter story and can't stand anything that challenges it, even incidentally. It meets their pre-existing biases and grants a feeling of moral and mental superiority: the other tribe might be brainwashed by something as trivial as a retweet, but there's no way I'd be like that.
But that's the whole point of this blog post we're discussing: lots of people have very, very strong incentives to believe in pseudo-science dressed up as the real thing. That doesn't just include scientists themselves but also journalists, politicians and so on.
The psychological paper that Nick Brown did a takedown of was cited by hundreds of papers and led to lucrative speaking careers. The underlying equations that made it seem like science vs mere opinion weren't connected to anything and boiled down to nonsense (a problem I've seen several times). Yet it took enormous efforts to do anything about it, and in the end the scientists who got caught are unrepentant: one of them didn't even bother to respond and the other agreed that the maths was nonsense but doesn't believe it really matters.
The same thing has happened repeatedly in recent years. See the story of Amy Cuddy: her 'power pose' research was thoroughly debunked but she simply refused to accept it, despite her co-authors accepting that the research was wrong. She continues to milk the speaking circuit and has even been cited by the BBC as an example of an "inspiring woman", although her career is arguably built on deception.
At this point, if you believe in Russian twitter bots influencing elections, why shouldn't you be the crank? Where is the evidence? All claims I've seen on this topic fall apart under examination. Even the premise is absurd - it relies on the belief that millions of people are so politically ungrounded their vote can be shifted merely by seeing a spammy retweet. That is a very dubious belief.
But if you believe you have a reliable study that proves the existence of armies of bots capable of swinging elections, please do show it. I will enjoy examining it. However, it is not sufficient to merely point at high-status individuals and delegate to them, because - as this entire discussion shows - bad "science" is capable of spreading and even becoming a consensus far too fast.
The article here is about the mistakes people make when trying to communicate their doubts in published science: how, even when they are right, they can come across as “cranks” and easily dismissed.
I have no idea if you’re right, and I’m not about to waste time down that particular rabbit hole. But you’re arguably doing wrong everything the article mentions. Starting with the impulse of “hold on, I’m not a crank and here are 12 paragraphs and my blog to prove it”. It’s simply off topic in this discussion.
> But you’re arguably doing wrong everything the article mentions. Starting with the impulse of “hold on, I’m not a crank and here are 12 paragraphs and my blog to prove it”. It’s simply off topic in this discussion.
I don't think it came across that way to most people. I'm a bit surprised you got that impression from it, and can't see how you'd read it that way. There's nothing in there about "I'm not a crank," for starters, and it didn't seem at all verbose.
the authors make some good points, but i have a different perspective when it comes to criticizing science.
1. criticism is easy. penetrating criticism that demands an answer beyond the evidence already presented lest the criticized appear totally defeated is hard. it's also the only kind of criticism worth doing, imo.
2. being listened to is a matter of having penetrating criticism and offering a reasonable alternative. if you destroy, you must offer a chance to rebuild afterward, or else the criticism will be too uncomfortable to respond to, and nobody will appear to listen as a result. if you are skeptical of this point (as you should be) refer to the position of string theory within the world of particle physics; its criticism of the mainstream is very difficult to recover from if accepted, and there's no real mental way forward as a result.
3. it sucks to have your work criticized in public -- it's intolerable, even. but it sometimes gets results. it also sucks to have someone be impolite to you. but i am sure we can all remember a time that someone (perhaps a teacher or parent) has corrected us impolitely when we did not deserve courtesy. you need to retain the ability to dismiss cranks out of hand once you've suitably proven that you can beat them by making a diligent argument. anything else would lead to your time being wasted rehashing the same mistakes of others in detail.
4. scientists are, very frequently, in their professional life, jerks. i am speaking from my own experiences and my own actions. the OP doesn't exactly brush on this, but sometimes being a jerk to the right people is what makes you the right friends. you don't really want to be friends with baddies anyway. this next point is super important and directly related.
5. don't be a jerk to people because they produced incorrect work. often the theories that turn out to be totally wrong are the ones that move the field forward the most by virtue of the work put into disproving them. if they're fabricating data or doing things that are methodologically unforgivable, that's a different story.
6. scientists are a stubborn lot, until they break in the face of evidence. if you are "right" and the world is "wrong," perpetually aggregating more evidence and showing it off will eventually work, especially if you make a point to summarize your findings every once in a while. this is just as true regarding criticism as it is regarding experimental results. here is a secret: if the subfield where you are directing your criticism has only made incremental progress for a long time -- which is to say, recently there have been no major breakthroughs or destructive revolutions which reshape prior understandings -- time is on the critic's side. incremental progress isn't stagnation, but it rarely adds enough evidence about fundamental assumptions to protect those assumptions from a sustained attack. if a field is making leaps and bounds forward, criticism is going to be shrugged off because there will be new understandings which are too juicy to slow down to refine. the later refining stages are where critics are the strongest.
Other would-be data whistleblowers are impressed by the duo’s success in getting journals to act. Paul Brookes, of the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York, briefly used his now-defunct blog, science-fraud.org, to highlight questionable papers anonymously. Brookes, who was outed amid legal threats in 2013 after only 6 months, says he would “routinely write dozens of emails [to journal editors], and it was common to have no response at all.”
Quote from the Science article linked to in OA. I think the OA is useful in laying out a less confrontational approach to raising issues.
I was struck by how every word of this could apply to how not to do politics and advocacy on social media. (Aside from the part where they actually advised taking all the terrible behavior to social media. It seems everyone is already doing that.)
"And death threats (and trolling, and weird online gender-flavoured violence) are not just deeply unpleasant, they’re CRIMES. If you do this, you are breaking the law AND being a shit human being, and you should either stop or walk yourself into the sun."
Death threats towards people that use death threats, really?
I don't like the article. Some people are more knowledgeable on a topic than others, "if you aren't in doubt you're probably wrong" doesn't apply there. Not even in general in my estimation.
A better alternative to "you have to sugarcoat all your thoughts by 30% before you speak them out" would be to train people to be better at taking criticism. People get spoiled by a high baseline positivity. I'd like to bring my points objectively without sugar coating, if everyone did that there would be no problem. Now i would have to either pretend to be more nice than i am ( talking behind people's back is a consequence of this), be straight to the point and get disliked by people who are used to sugar coating or keep silent. It usually boils down to the latter. Let me work alone if i can't be my critical self.
Also, this article seems to be mostly aimed at unfair criticism, let me pose the following.
If the criticism is fair and reasonable, it is justified, doesn't have to be nice, and the receiver is at fault if they dislike it.
If the criticism is not fair or reasonable, it is not justified, the criticizer should express uncertainty where applicable, they are at fault as the article suggests.
The article makes the point, quite explicitly, that you should not even call a vast conspiracy a “vast conspiracy”. Not because it’s “not PC”, but simply because people on the receiving end of such diatribes have come to associate certain terms with cranks.
You can disregard such advise, and simply launch more and more over-the-top screeches against the MSM trying to silence you. But you’re not going to change any minds.
Yes, it would be great to live in a world where everyone would judge everything on its merits alone, like you do.
Unfortunately, we don’t. Which is why we still put on pants for interviews, write in full sentences, and occasionally waste oxygen being nicer to others than warranted by the cold hard facts alone.
Well i do like warmth, just the genuine kind, not the politeness peer-pressure kind i feel is promoted in the article. Real warmth speaks from actions (patterns) and not from words, because words are forged too easily. An evil person could sugar coat twice as much and get a better job than their honest peer, hm? (virus scanners)
When you see through it you can choose to either exploit it or be fair. That's your call.
> A better alternative to "you have to sugarcoat all your thoughts by 30% before you speak them out" would be to train people to be better at taking criticism
The amount of extra effort involved in having a few people "sugarcoat" (as you call it) is tiny compared to the effort in retraining vast swathes of people out of what is after all a fairly standard human behaviour. Behaviour so standard in fact that this doesn't count as "sugarcoating" at all, really, at least not in my view - more like the process of actually assembling a persuasive argument from the unrefined raw material.
(I originally started this post with "Come on, come on, don't be silly". But then I took it out, because it felt a bit rude. But, if you don't think it will hurt, you can imagine I left it in.)
By all means, call it silly, all the more incentive to get to the bottom of it.
"more like the process of actually assembling a persuasive argument"
Why do you use "persuasive" there? If you were right you should be able to prove your point without politeness. Furthermore, if you /need/ politeness to be considered right, /then/ either they're buying bs or you're selling bs. Both are bad for this world.
In my view, people should agree with you based on logic, sane thinking, and not on "what feels good". Because true news isn't always good news, but it's always better news.
You're assuming that the way people behave is wrong, and that the way you think they should behave is right. Well, guess what: they're going to keep on behaving as they do anyway, no matter what you think. Now suppose you still want to convince people of something. Are you going to adopt a technique that works, or one that doesn't?
I don't know how much I agree with the premise of this article. People aren't resistant to retracting faulty research because the people who point out faulty research sound like cranks, they do it because their incentives are to maintain the work they've done. If you look at someone like Brian Wansink[1], what started off as unearthing methodological errors seems to have found actual fraud, although I'm sure Wansink wouldn't view it that way. And this massive peer review process not only didn't discover it, it's been an impediment to correcting it. At stake are millions of dollars in federal funding and more than a few careers. Do you think anyone involved is primarily concerned with tone? And I'm not sure how effective anyone can be at combating it by working within a crooked and broken system, where extracting rents from academic institutions for publishing their own work is the main incentive for publishers, and academics are incentivized to go along because their careers depend on numbers of publications and citations. You may have a high success rate at combating individual errors, but you aren't making any headway on the bigger issues like publication bias and the overall trend away from long, important work and towards shorted studies designed to provide an eye-catching conclusion so that you can get published and cited. It's like bailing out a boat with a drinking cup. You're still sinking.
Nice article. For the last few years, I've had concerns that parts of economics have serious problems. But it's good to get a reminder of how to criticise well: points one and two (calm down, and don't be a dick) are particularly relevant to me.
For me, the stakes feel high enough that it's easy to get worked up and spit vitriol. But I've found that I'll lose the interest of anyone I'm talking to when I do.
You definitely don't want to come across as worked up or vitriolic. I would note that the guy who wrote this article is sometimes a tiny bit dickish though, check this article out:
Sample comments: If that title leads you to expect off-brand evo psych exploring massive behavioural changes induced through the complicated medium of hairdressing… well, you’d be right.
Mmmm.
It's also worth bearing in mind your audience.
This article was written by two guys who by and large are going after junk science in psychology, nutrition, and so on, where the worst motivation can only be to advance the careers of the scientists - and quite possibly the errors are just the result of over-optimism or lack of statistical abilities.
For that sort of work it makes sense to try and fix psychology from within, by pointing out errors. There isn't much point in trying to spread the word through the wider world that psychology is full of errors: what's the best outcome, exactly? A few people stop being invited to give TED talks? Big deal. Psychology isn't going to stop being studied, nor should it be!
But in the case of economics, there are two problems:
1) Economics is absolutely riddled with not just bad individual papers but entire sub-fields that are nonsense, it's an epidemic. It probably cannot be fixed by shaming individuals who make simple errors via their own journals and hoping for the field to improve. Even when major economists like Paul Krugman or Paul Romer have gone on very serious attacks against their own field, there has been no visible impact and in Romer's case he simply lost his job.
2) Economics is routinely used to justify massive government interventions (or lack of interventions) in markets and society. Bad economics research can have a very serious impact on people's lives.
In this case, it's probably better to work at a different level and try to spread the word amongst the general public that economics is not trustworthy. Thus the audience is not journals or the authors of the papers themselves. It's the public.
This is not hard because most people who follow the news have already encountered major cases where consensus economic predictions were simply wrong. Polling shows that trust in economists is quite low as is. If and when the field reforms it can try to rebuild trust.
I would use Andrew Gelman and John Ioannidis as prototypes for the Good Critic and Bad Critic, respectively.
Gelman does real, solid work and confines his righteous takedowns to a side hobby. And his criticisms are directed at individual, specific cases, with evidence, and he reserves most of his wrath for repeat offenders rather than one-off mistakes, which are unavoidable given enough projects. He confines criticisms to his area of expertise, which is statistics.
Ioannidis' claim to fame is writing a hand-waving, philosophical argument in order to cast doubt on all research at once. Followed up shortly by a paper that implied (but didn't directly state!) that regression to the mean on replication implies error or fabrication in the original. And he has ridden this sort of tired argument into a lucrative and prestigious career and Stanford appointment. Never mind the collateral damage on funding and morale. My theory is that people pay attention to Ioannidis and wring their hands about these highly generic issues for the same reason most people pretend to be highly, highly concerned about sexual harassment/discrimination in the workplace -- they're praying that if they act concerned enough, the hammer will fall somewhere else. But indiscriminate criticism like this is highly toxic to science (or anywhere else, for that matter, and has the side effect of letting real bad actors off the hook).
A further moral of the story is that, for better or worse, I don't trust and generally ignore criticisms that do not come from someone who has invested time into a field and made useful contributions to it. 'Full-time critics' strike me as generally sleazy and opportunistic, and I doubt the sincerity of their desire to 'improve' a field if all they can do is tear down others' work and not provide any of their own.
The fact that Ioannidis stakes his claim to fame as attacks on medical research is no evidence that he is a crank: it's evidence that medical research is a target-rich environment.
No doubt it is a target-rich environment. However, his arguments are so generic that they could apply to any field studying anything multifactorial or with high variance.
Fundamentally, however, I don't believe, for example, that physicists are more scrupulous/intelligent/honest than biologists, who are more so than psychologists. The irreproducibility rates in a field have to be primarily caused by the nature of the system studied in that field rather than some inherent attributes of the researchers.
So any field will have some constant level of irreproducibility which which essentially cannot be changed. But some researchers do better than others. My fundamental point is that if you want to change what can be changed, and genuinely improve a field, you have to focus the criticisms on specific bad actors rather than target an entire field at once and leverage a near-tautology (more complex systems yield more irreproducible results) into a 20-year tirade/career.
Also, helpfully for people like Ioannidis, a statement like "field X has lots of errors and irreproducibility" is non-falsifiable, and indeed will be true no matter what, so he is taking no risk with his criticisms -- even though they do more damage to public perception, morale, and funding, and help less to change things than targeted criticisms would do.
If I sound irritated by this sort of thing, it is because my graduate advisor dabbled in "meta-science" / "error correction" and I stoutly refused to have anything to do with those projects. I thought, and still think, that it is considerably more valuable to try to build my own solid lego tower despite the difficulties rather than knocking down other people's, despite the latter being considerably easier and a fairly simple and reliable route to a high citation count. In the end, irreproducible or erroneous papers in science just get ignored rather than retracted, and I think that's fine.
> Ioannidis' claim to fame is writing a hand-waving, philosophical argument in order to cast doubt on all research at once.
It's solid probabilistic reasoning about the dominant statistical methodology, and its conclusions have been empirically demonstrated in multiple fields.
It is solid probabilistic reasoning if you accept:
- A publication bias term u that is pulled out of thin air for different scenarios.
- A parameter R that reflects the unknowable proportion of true relationships/hypotheses in a field compared to the universe of possible hypotheses. The pre-study odds he calculates are determined entirely by R.
Actually this paper provides a good framework for determining what factors will affect the PPV of a field. In that regard it was a good contribution. But the enormous leap to the title -- which can only be achieved by massive assumptions about R and u -- was baseless fearmongering and demagoguery.
If one wants to address these issues at the 50,000 feet level, it would be far better to look at something concrete, such as reproducibility rates, as indeed many have done, rather than models based on pre-study odds. If we actually knew the pre-study odds, or IOW the proportion of hypotheses in hypothesis space that are true, then we could just correct our p-values for that and be done with it. Although I suppose that many Bayesians would not see any problem with abstracting away everything we don't know into priors R and u, making wild guesses about them, and drawing conclusions.
We do have a replication crisis on our hands. But the pre-study odds, whatever they are, are unchangeable. If this paper had been framed in terms of "the lower the pre-study odds, the higher the power will need to be to compensate to get an acceptable level of reproducibility", I would accept it wholeheartedly, although then it would have been a simple and obvious statement rather than a citation-grabber.
I agree. However, nothing much better is available. I loved reading work from the Santa Fe Institute and Stuart Kauffman and so on, but the reality is that despite their best efforts, they provided nothing better. General statements about the system-as-a-whole, but no specifics about where to look for the etiology of a specific disease or process. Nobels await those who could do more.
Until such time as someone does bring theory to biology, for example, wet-labbers (not me) struggle on. I am in a little doubt as to whether general theories about complex systems could provide useful predictive frameworks, but if so, great. But until then, pre-study odds are zero if you don't do the study.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 127 ms ] threadIn other words rather than figuring out a strategy to get him to read it that is adversarial but somehow slips under his defenses, figure out how to get yourself in the right frame of mind to introduce ideas on how to be more effective to someone you think is important. Presumably your father is enough like you that he will be able to tell when you are treating him like someone who needs to be emotionally managed, as opposed to when you are having a two-way conversation.
Maybe one marker of managing someone is when the speaker is not focusing on themselves at all. When you talk to a friend you like you are likely concerned about how you are portraying yourself as well as whether or not you are getting your way.
* If you are without a doubt, you are wrong
If you can't fathom the other side and where they're coming from, you, are in fact, biased beyond listening to facts, and are likely wrong.
* Words matter
As my grandma said, "If you don't have anything nice to say don't say anything at all."
Easier to move forward with that default assumption and try to prove I'm not as wrong as I thought and that "right" is the wrong attitude to hold.
However, some things are tautological. Some things may be necessary in reality, even if they are not in any model. (I wake up each morning because I have no alternative, not because it is the 'right thing to do'.) Some things are very safe to assume because our human cultural context or our biological environment is stable over multiple generations of activity. And some things are true simply because assuming otherwise contradicts the assumptions needed for language to work effectively. And sometimes we do prove things, even if we lack any meaningful ability to prove what we'd like to the degree that we'd like.
The point is, we're not always wrong in a linguistic sense. Any time you have a statement that is perfectly symmetrical and valid in every context, you do not have language which can be used to make decisions. It's only meaningful to be wrong if there are things you can be right about.
(In ML terms, how do you apply gradient descent if every path forward is up?)
This one especially applies to politics. If you are one of those looking for "sanity", or "common sense", and can't imagine how the other side can possibly hold some position, then this applies to you.
If you believe that banning sex education in schools will decrease teen pregnancy, and it turns out that teen pregnancy rates actually increase when teens aren't educated, then your belief about sex education isn't rational.
Many - possibly most - public policy decisions are open to this kind of testing.
The fact that formal testing rarely happens, and that it's consistently ignored even when it does, suggests that politics itself is inherently pre-rational.
Arguably it's then irrational to expect it to be rational - but that's a deeper problem that doesn't just apply to politics.
Before people knew the earth was a globe, it was entirely rational to think everything that goes up goes down again.
And for all testing you can do, ie, throwing an apple up, it'll come down again.
It is entirely rational to conclude from the available evidence that everything falls down when thrown.
But recently we've discovered that things you throw up hard enough may not fall down at all.
Thusly, the rational thought was still rational but wrong.
Predictability is important when you want to evaluate scientific models (ie, assume earth is flat, assume earth is round, assume earth is a mostly round potato all have different predictive quality, though the first ones are easier and sometimes sufficient)
I, like many, was appalled to hear the statistics on the number of people who believe news they didn't agree with was "fake news" regardless of its accuracy.
Then I heard a counter-argument: in short they're applying the rubric "fake news" to biased news, which is a whole 'nother discussion I'd rather not dive into here.
I don't think there are all that many truly irrational beliefs out there, political or otherwise. The world is a massively complex place, and I can't really blame people for letting con men tell them otherwise.
(Ok, who am I kidding: yes I can blame them, but it does no good to assume everyone who disagrees with me is stupid or a victim.)
The actual requirement for persuasion is a believable narrative with a bit of moral weight, and a random selection of standard persuasive tricks that politicians and lawyers have been deploying with outrageous success for millennia.
Generally, being objectively correct is one of the least effective ways to change anyone's mind. You might have some hope in a scientific setting. But in popular debate, facts and rationality are almost completely powerless.
I do know that not challenging them respectfully is unlikely to persuade anyone least of all yourself.
If you’re debating the optimal sales tax rate, yes, being unable to comprehend the other side means you’re doing it wrong. If the topic is, say, wiping out people of a particular religion, not so much.
As a nihilist I would disagree.
The kind of people that want to do that have a much different set of morality and ethics.
There is no objective moral framework that you can base claims for or against wiping out a particular religion. You can however use your own, personal, subjective moral framework and most people will probably have something vaguely compatible to it and agree with you that wiping out religions and it's people is bad.
Am I supposed to question myself here? Supposed to assume I'm wrong? Your line of thinking is very dangerous and not safe, it enables very bad people by making good people assume they are terrible people themselves.
White nationalists present some interesting problems, problems that are real and valid. Their lens is wrong (this problem exists, therefore I will interpret the problem in a way that I am superior and others are inferior).
Your doubt should come from that understanding.
Consider the fact that you are a byproduct of the endless programming and propaganda behind the War on Terror. If you have no doubts on that subject, YOU are wrong.
You can critique the way we acquire information and use that to cast doubt on conclusions. But you definitely can not use those criticisms to add validity to any conclusions either. So I don't see how this world view does anybody any good.
At some point, you see nazis, you say "those are bad", and you just know you're right about it. In that sense, morals are a true compass when faced with endless doubt that can creep in if you want to be maximally scientific about things.
No pressing need to point out the obvious criticisms. Fry was already roundly criticized up and down for saying it. But it has become my favorite quote about the way people talk about ideologies.
In this case, I would say that the nuance lies not in whether it is good or bad, but in understanding the constellation of factors that would lead someone to hold the objectionable viewpoint. Reducing the issue down to the question of whether it's good or bad is itself the simplistic mentality that Fry was very explicitly criticizing.
There are plenty of reasons why one would be nazi. One is fear, other ressentment yet other that you was raised that way by parents. And yet others grown to be cruel, aggresive and sadistic and nazism makes them feel like it is good thing.
However, being clear on whether it is good or bad or even dangerous and what is cost of they get their way is practically speaking super important. Understanding that is more important then understanding poor them and having emphaty toward them. Otherwise they will use you emphaty to convert you to their case, bit by bit. It is not simplistic, it is values that you need to keep in mind lest you lose the lm.
> However, being clear on whether it is good or bad or even dangerous and what is cost of they get their way is practically speaking super important.
Yes, it's important. It's important that children learn this, or sort it out by very early adulthood. That is what is meant by infantile. In my opinion, this is not a serious problem for the vast majority of civil folk. I do not understand the value in grown adults belaboring it. It's baby food. Eat grownup food.
Actually, grown ups have bigger problem keeping this straigt. Grown ups made originally nazism happen after all. Grown ups dont want to insult nazi because of career or just trying to look nice and rational. Then again, young German soldiers were more cruel then old ones I read in historical accounts.
I don't know what you mean by eating grown up food here. There were quite a few unapologetic grown ups in history who were quite inflexible in their values.
Maybe it is another attempt to shame that has nothing to do with what actual grown ups do, for better or worst.
The fact I even have to explain that is confirmation at how complete the indoctrination is.
Are you seriously attempting to take a morally absolutist position, as if showing an image of a Nazi to aliens would automatically make them recoil in horror as if that particular combination of attire and behavior managed to stumble upon some absolute fixed point of sensory perception? You can't be serious. How long have you been seven years old?
Serious question. What have I been falsely indoctrinated about? What should I have been exposed to as an alternate view on nazis? Do history books count as "indoctrination"?
To your other point, I would imagine showing aliens concentration camps would make them recoil in horror, yes.
You have no other baseline to even compare against. You'll be chasing war propaganda boogeyman for the rest of your life and you won't even consider the fact that you are doing it WHILE you do it.
Nazis weren't the only ones using concentration camps. The people who ACTUALLY paid the real blood and treasure cost to defeat Nazi Germany (Soviet Russia) utilized such camps as well. This throws your juvenile mythology of "Good vs. Evil" obsession out the window since anything Nazi is automatically ultra-evil, ergo, anyone fighting it is ultra-good. Soviet Russia even expelled Jews.
Wait... lemme guess... the actual people who actually killed and enslaved actual Nazis are evil now, too... right? Funny how the enemy list just magically grows longer by the second with nothing more than a hand wave.
You obsess over moral games. That's what you've been indoctrinated to do. And you don't even see it. According to this idiotic game, everyone who isn't you will eventually be designated as a Nazi or an indirect supporter of one.
Only when you are labeled as a Nazi for someone elses expediency will you realize the flaw in your approach. But I'm sure you think that's not possible. You're a good citizen, right?
Lemme know when someone deepfakes your face into a "Nazi" rally and sends the video to your professional circle. That's how easy it is to take your moral preening and twist it against you.
The issue is not whether Nazis were/are bad. You can feel safe in the assumption that all but an extreme fringe minority are in consensus that Nazi philosophies and practices were horrific beyond comprehension.
What we should contemplate and discuss, however, is what were the economic and cultural conditions that led to the rise of Nazism in Europe in the 30s, and how it came to be accepted, supported and enabled/served by such a large proportion of the population.
Only by fully understanding these issues can we take effective measures to ensure such a movement never takes hold ever again, and ensure that we as individuals are equipped with the strength and judgement to avoid succumbing to populist bigotry any time we see it.
But, IMO, morality and ethics are subjective, so for a minority of people who don't share this consensus, yes, nazis aren't bad.
An alien race that has constructed a feudal slave society might not object to concentration camps at all. They might love the idea.
Nazis, from a purely objective standpoint, are not bad. But not good either. What they did is facts.
Only when the human observer comes in, ie, you and me, we introduce morality and you and me both think that those things are bad and should not be done.
Or how Death expressed it in Discworld; "take the universe and grind it down to the finest powder and sieve it through the finest sieve and then show me one atom of justice, one molecule of mercy"
Would an amended statement make more sense?
“The nazis were bad to the degree that badness is a thing.”
Although it seems a bit silly to phrase things that way.
To the degree that silliness is a thing of course.
Personally I believe that my notion of bad, good, evil and angels is purely subjective. Doesn't mean they have less value. I merely acknowledge the value is subjective. Like how a childhood toy holds sentimental value.
Can you expand on that? It sounds like it may contain a very interesting perspective, but I'm not quite sure what you mean.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16518364
It doesn't matter what ideology you're battling for or against. It's the genre of ideological flamewar itself that's damaging here, and therefore unwelcome, and therefore will get you banned if you keep doing it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
By "the users", do you mean four or so hyperpartisan ideological zealots who exploit your rules to get their rush of moral supremacy by downvoting instead of commenting to refute the points?
Because downvoting is technically political activity and your rules totally allow that all day long.
I said, "If you can't fathom the other side and where they're coming from..." meaning, you should "seek first to understand", also known as Habit #5 from Franklin Covey.
> Your line of thinking is very dangerous and not safe, it enables very bad people by making good people assume they are terrible people themselves.
It is always healthy to examine why one is convicted about certain beliefs. Is it rooted in fact, or fear of the unknown? Since you brought up White Nationalism, this is one of my favorite success stories from a man that sought to understand the very people that hated him: https://www.npr.org/2017/08/20/544861933/how-one-man-convinc...
Daryl Davis has done great things just by listening.
Certainty in actions, when well prepared, has a magical and transformative effect on things.
I am willing to entertain thought experiments about how I can be wrong but I know I am not about certain ideas and philosophies.
Can you give some examples?
any philosophy/belief system that is descriptive (as opposed to prescriptive/normative) will be _apodictically_certain_ to the extent that it is free from internal contradictions. in simple cases we can examine the ideas and be very confident that there are no internal contradictions.
for example: given "A implies B" and "A" then we can conclude "B".
essentially any time you formalize definitions to the point that a statement of equivalence becomes obvious as a tautology, then you have an idea you can be certain about.
rejection of the principle of identity leaves one at the point where no further intersubjective dialogue is meaningful. which is why Avicenna said that anyone who denies the identity should be beaten until he acknowledges that "to be beaten" is not the same as "to not be beaten" and he should be burned until he acknowledges that "being burned" is not the same as "not being burned." [1]
I'm very interested in any corrections, comments, or other replies. I'm also aware that there are other approaches to logic besides the aristotelian approach I have tried to convey above. an example of a non-aristotelian attempt at communicating would be e-prime [2].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllogism
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_noncontradiction#Avicen...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime
Oh, absolutely. I was merely suggesting that there is a difference between a lack of doubt for all practical purposes, and a lack of doubt in principle. This difference may not be terribly helpful or pertinent, of course.
There are cranks who could respond to these rules, but I believe (though I am not a mental-health professional) that many would be unable to.
https://blog.plan99.net/did-russian-bots-impact-brexit-ad66f...
I feel some sympathy with fellow Brit Nick Brown after reading this story about his work:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/jan/19/mathematics-...
(as an aside, totally unsurprised the guy works in computing, developing an intolerance for abuse of logic is a job hazard.)
But I don't know if this perspective is helpful to be honest. "Don't be a dick" is both quite an obvious principle and also rather useless when criticising people's work: some of the authors, and some of the people who want to believe the research is true, will inevitably view any criticism as being dickish. This is doubly true if you take the obvious next step and speculate as to whether the issues are mere oversights or (far more commonly, in my view) deliberate deceptions intended to further an agenda.
One problem is that genuine, honest mistakes tend to get picked up already by the existing peer review process. The really bad papers that get through are usually bad in support of some wider social mission, usually leading the public to some policy goal, and they don't get struck down because the peer reviewers share the same goals. Thus pointing out mistakes has no effect, because they already knew the science was bad. The only thing that can work is pointing out to the people who they're trying to influence that something has gone wrong.
There is a responsibility to be harsh in these cases. Failing to do so can simply let the issues fester and compound. From the Guardian article on Brown:
There were several psychologists, versed in non-linear dynamics, who smelt something fishy about the maths in the published paper. Stephen Guastello, from Marquette University, wrote a note of mild complaint to American Psychologist, which it chose not to publish because "there wasn't enough interest in the article". Guastello feels now that he should have been more forceful in his opinions. "In retrospect," he says, "I see how I could have been more clearly negative and less supportive of what looked like an article that could move the field forward if someone would follow up with some strong empirical work."
The story describes Brown's first debunking of a paper that used lots of clever looking math to reach obviously absurd conclusions about psychology. One author of the paper admitted that she had never understood the maths and the person who did create the maths (Losada) has refused to ever respond to the debunking in any way. All the reviewers were successfully intimidated by the maths and were unwilling to criticise it, allowing Losada to get away with it:
John Gottman, a leading authority in the psychology of successful relationships, wrote to Losada because he couldn't follow the equations. "I thought it was something I didn't know about, because he's a smart guy, Losada. He never answered my email," he says.
So the critics weren't critical enough and a paper based on pure mathematical bullshit racked up 350 citations. Vast amounts of time, money and effort was wasted. What does this say about the scientific process?
By the way, in case anyone thinks computing is immune to this sort of thing, it's not. Papers about "Russian twitter bots" are a cu...
In fact, mike_hearn's first link is to a blog post where he debunks claims of evidence that Russian bots influenced the Brexit vote. (He doesn't offer evidence that that didn't happen; what kind of evidence could exist? But he does argue that the alleged evidence offered by others that there was such influence is unconvincing.)
I've been out all evening, and my post is now at +11. But if it was getting downvoted I am 99% certain it's because a lot of people really want to believe in the whole Russia/Trump/Twitter story and can't stand anything that challenges it, even incidentally. It meets their pre-existing biases and grants a feeling of moral and mental superiority: the other tribe might be brainwashed by something as trivial as a retweet, but there's no way I'd be like that.
But that's the whole point of this blog post we're discussing: lots of people have very, very strong incentives to believe in pseudo-science dressed up as the real thing. That doesn't just include scientists themselves but also journalists, politicians and so on.
The psychological paper that Nick Brown did a takedown of was cited by hundreds of papers and led to lucrative speaking careers. The underlying equations that made it seem like science vs mere opinion weren't connected to anything and boiled down to nonsense (a problem I've seen several times). Yet it took enormous efforts to do anything about it, and in the end the scientists who got caught are unrepentant: one of them didn't even bother to respond and the other agreed that the maths was nonsense but doesn't believe it really matters.
The same thing has happened repeatedly in recent years. See the story of Amy Cuddy: her 'power pose' research was thoroughly debunked but she simply refused to accept it, despite her co-authors accepting that the research was wrong. She continues to milk the speaking circuit and has even been cited by the BBC as an example of an "inspiring woman", although her career is arguably built on deception.
At this point, if you believe in Russian twitter bots influencing elections, why shouldn't you be the crank? Where is the evidence? All claims I've seen on this topic fall apart under examination. Even the premise is absurd - it relies on the belief that millions of people are so politically ungrounded their vote can be shifted merely by seeing a spammy retweet. That is a very dubious belief.
But if you believe you have a reliable study that proves the existence of armies of bots capable of swinging elections, please do show it. I will enjoy examining it. However, it is not sufficient to merely point at high-status individuals and delegate to them, because - as this entire discussion shows - bad "science" is capable of spreading and even becoming a consensus far too fast.
I have no idea if you’re right, and I’m not about to waste time down that particular rabbit hole. But you’re arguably doing wrong everything the article mentions. Starting with the impulse of “hold on, I’m not a crank and here are 12 paragraphs and my blog to prove it”. It’s simply off topic in this discussion.
I don't think it came across that way to most people. I'm a bit surprised you got that impression from it, and can't see how you'd read it that way. There's nothing in there about "I'm not a crank," for starters, and it didn't seem at all verbose.
1. criticism is easy. penetrating criticism that demands an answer beyond the evidence already presented lest the criticized appear totally defeated is hard. it's also the only kind of criticism worth doing, imo.
2. being listened to is a matter of having penetrating criticism and offering a reasonable alternative. if you destroy, you must offer a chance to rebuild afterward, or else the criticism will be too uncomfortable to respond to, and nobody will appear to listen as a result. if you are skeptical of this point (as you should be) refer to the position of string theory within the world of particle physics; its criticism of the mainstream is very difficult to recover from if accepted, and there's no real mental way forward as a result.
3. it sucks to have your work criticized in public -- it's intolerable, even. but it sometimes gets results. it also sucks to have someone be impolite to you. but i am sure we can all remember a time that someone (perhaps a teacher or parent) has corrected us impolitely when we did not deserve courtesy. you need to retain the ability to dismiss cranks out of hand once you've suitably proven that you can beat them by making a diligent argument. anything else would lead to your time being wasted rehashing the same mistakes of others in detail.
4. scientists are, very frequently, in their professional life, jerks. i am speaking from my own experiences and my own actions. the OP doesn't exactly brush on this, but sometimes being a jerk to the right people is what makes you the right friends. you don't really want to be friends with baddies anyway. this next point is super important and directly related.
5. don't be a jerk to people because they produced incorrect work. often the theories that turn out to be totally wrong are the ones that move the field forward the most by virtue of the work put into disproving them. if they're fabricating data or doing things that are methodologically unforgivable, that's a different story.
6. scientists are a stubborn lot, until they break in the face of evidence. if you are "right" and the world is "wrong," perpetually aggregating more evidence and showing it off will eventually work, especially if you make a point to summarize your findings every once in a while. this is just as true regarding criticism as it is regarding experimental results. here is a secret: if the subfield where you are directing your criticism has only made incremental progress for a long time -- which is to say, recently there have been no major breakthroughs or destructive revolutions which reshape prior understandings -- time is on the critic's side. incremental progress isn't stagnation, but it rarely adds enough evidence about fundamental assumptions to protect those assumptions from a sustained attack. if a field is making leaps and bounds forward, criticism is going to be shrugged off because there will be new understandings which are too juicy to slow down to refine. the later refining stages are where critics are the strongest.
Quote from the Science article linked to in OA. I think the OA is useful in laying out a less confrontational approach to raising issues.
Death threats towards people that use death threats, really?
I don't like the article. Some people are more knowledgeable on a topic than others, "if you aren't in doubt you're probably wrong" doesn't apply there. Not even in general in my estimation.
A better alternative to "you have to sugarcoat all your thoughts by 30% before you speak them out" would be to train people to be better at taking criticism. People get spoiled by a high baseline positivity. I'd like to bring my points objectively without sugar coating, if everyone did that there would be no problem. Now i would have to either pretend to be more nice than i am ( talking behind people's back is a consequence of this), be straight to the point and get disliked by people who are used to sugar coating or keep silent. It usually boils down to the latter. Let me work alone if i can't be my critical self.
Also, this article seems to be mostly aimed at unfair criticism, let me pose the following.
If the criticism is fair and reasonable, it is justified, doesn't have to be nice, and the receiver is at fault if they dislike it.
If the criticism is not fair or reasonable, it is not justified, the criticizer should express uncertainty where applicable, they are at fault as the article suggests.
You can disregard such advise, and simply launch more and more over-the-top screeches against the MSM trying to silence you. But you’re not going to change any minds.
Unfortunately, we don’t. Which is why we still put on pants for interviews, write in full sentences, and occasionally waste oxygen being nicer to others than warranted by the cold hard facts alone.
When you see through it you can choose to either exploit it or be fair. That's your call.
The amount of extra effort involved in having a few people "sugarcoat" (as you call it) is tiny compared to the effort in retraining vast swathes of people out of what is after all a fairly standard human behaviour. Behaviour so standard in fact that this doesn't count as "sugarcoating" at all, really, at least not in my view - more like the process of actually assembling a persuasive argument from the unrefined raw material.
(I originally started this post with "Come on, come on, don't be silly". But then I took it out, because it felt a bit rude. But, if you don't think it will hurt, you can imagine I left it in.)
"more like the process of actually assembling a persuasive argument"
Why do you use "persuasive" there? If you were right you should be able to prove your point without politeness. Furthermore, if you /need/ politeness to be considered right, /then/ either they're buying bs or you're selling bs. Both are bad for this world.
In my view, people should agree with you based on logic, sane thinking, and not on "what feels good". Because true news isn't always good news, but it's always better news.
1) https://slate.com/technology/2018/02/how-brian-wansink-forgo...
For me, the stakes feel high enough that it's easy to get worked up and spit vitriol. But I've found that I'll lose the interest of anyone I'm talking to when I do.
https://medium.com/@jamesheathers/long-hair-dont-care-5eeba2...
Sample comments: If that title leads you to expect off-brand evo psych exploring massive behavioural changes induced through the complicated medium of hairdressing… well, you’d be right.
Mmmm.
It's also worth bearing in mind your audience.
This article was written by two guys who by and large are going after junk science in psychology, nutrition, and so on, where the worst motivation can only be to advance the careers of the scientists - and quite possibly the errors are just the result of over-optimism or lack of statistical abilities.
For that sort of work it makes sense to try and fix psychology from within, by pointing out errors. There isn't much point in trying to spread the word through the wider world that psychology is full of errors: what's the best outcome, exactly? A few people stop being invited to give TED talks? Big deal. Psychology isn't going to stop being studied, nor should it be!
But in the case of economics, there are two problems:
1) Economics is absolutely riddled with not just bad individual papers but entire sub-fields that are nonsense, it's an epidemic. It probably cannot be fixed by shaming individuals who make simple errors via their own journals and hoping for the field to improve. Even when major economists like Paul Krugman or Paul Romer have gone on very serious attacks against their own field, there has been no visible impact and in Romer's case he simply lost his job.
2) Economics is routinely used to justify massive government interventions (or lack of interventions) in markets and society. Bad economics research can have a very serious impact on people's lives.
In this case, it's probably better to work at a different level and try to spread the word amongst the general public that economics is not trustworthy. Thus the audience is not journals or the authors of the papers themselves. It's the public.
This is not hard because most people who follow the news have already encountered major cases where consensus economic predictions were simply wrong. Polling shows that trust in economists is quite low as is. If and when the field reforms it can try to rebuild trust.
Gelman does real, solid work and confines his righteous takedowns to a side hobby. And his criticisms are directed at individual, specific cases, with evidence, and he reserves most of his wrath for repeat offenders rather than one-off mistakes, which are unavoidable given enough projects. He confines criticisms to his area of expertise, which is statistics.
Ioannidis' claim to fame is writing a hand-waving, philosophical argument in order to cast doubt on all research at once. Followed up shortly by a paper that implied (but didn't directly state!) that regression to the mean on replication implies error or fabrication in the original. And he has ridden this sort of tired argument into a lucrative and prestigious career and Stanford appointment. Never mind the collateral damage on funding and morale. My theory is that people pay attention to Ioannidis and wring their hands about these highly generic issues for the same reason most people pretend to be highly, highly concerned about sexual harassment/discrimination in the workplace -- they're praying that if they act concerned enough, the hammer will fall somewhere else. But indiscriminate criticism like this is highly toxic to science (or anywhere else, for that matter, and has the side effect of letting real bad actors off the hook).
A further moral of the story is that, for better or worse, I don't trust and generally ignore criticisms that do not come from someone who has invested time into a field and made useful contributions to it. 'Full-time critics' strike me as generally sleazy and opportunistic, and I doubt the sincerity of their desire to 'improve' a field if all they can do is tear down others' work and not provide any of their own.
Fundamentally, however, I don't believe, for example, that physicists are more scrupulous/intelligent/honest than biologists, who are more so than psychologists. The irreproducibility rates in a field have to be primarily caused by the nature of the system studied in that field rather than some inherent attributes of the researchers.
So any field will have some constant level of irreproducibility which which essentially cannot be changed. But some researchers do better than others. My fundamental point is that if you want to change what can be changed, and genuinely improve a field, you have to focus the criticisms on specific bad actors rather than target an entire field at once and leverage a near-tautology (more complex systems yield more irreproducible results) into a 20-year tirade/career.
Also, helpfully for people like Ioannidis, a statement like "field X has lots of errors and irreproducibility" is non-falsifiable, and indeed will be true no matter what, so he is taking no risk with his criticisms -- even though they do more damage to public perception, morale, and funding, and help less to change things than targeted criticisms would do.
If I sound irritated by this sort of thing, it is because my graduate advisor dabbled in "meta-science" / "error correction" and I stoutly refused to have anything to do with those projects. I thought, and still think, that it is considerably more valuable to try to build my own solid lego tower despite the difficulties rather than knocking down other people's, despite the latter being considerably easier and a fairly simple and reliable route to a high citation count. In the end, irreproducible or erroneous papers in science just get ignored rather than retracted, and I think that's fine.
It's solid probabilistic reasoning about the dominant statistical methodology, and its conclusions have been empirically demonstrated in multiple fields.
- A publication bias term u that is pulled out of thin air for different scenarios.
- A parameter R that reflects the unknowable proportion of true relationships/hypotheses in a field compared to the universe of possible hypotheses. The pre-study odds he calculates are determined entirely by R.
Actually this paper provides a good framework for determining what factors will affect the PPV of a field. In that regard it was a good contribution. But the enormous leap to the title -- which can only be achieved by massive assumptions about R and u -- was baseless fearmongering and demagoguery.
If one wants to address these issues at the 50,000 feet level, it would be far better to look at something concrete, such as reproducibility rates, as indeed many have done, rather than models based on pre-study odds. If we actually knew the pre-study odds, or IOW the proportion of hypotheses in hypothesis space that are true, then we could just correct our p-values for that and be done with it. Although I suppose that many Bayesians would not see any problem with abstracting away everything we don't know into priors R and u, making wild guesses about them, and drawing conclusions.
We do have a replication crisis on our hands. But the pre-study odds, whatever they are, are unchangeable. If this paper had been framed in terms of "the lower the pre-study odds, the higher the power will need to be to compensate to get an acceptable level of reproducibility", I would accept it wholeheartedly, although then it would have been a simple and obvious statement rather than a citation-grabber.
Until such time as someone does bring theory to biology, for example, wet-labbers (not me) struggle on. I am in a little doubt as to whether general theories about complex systems could provide useful predictive frameworks, but if so, great. But until then, pre-study odds are zero if you don't do the study.