20 ms·

I cringe reading "belief in well-supported scientific conclusions is not optional." Belief is always optional, if you want people to believe you have to get th

I cringe reading "belief in well-supported scientific conclusions is not optional." Belief is always optional, if you want people to believe you have to get them to opt-in to believing. Telling them they must believe rarely accomplishes this and is endemic of the type of the scientism that has displaced real science. Of course, the thing this clown was telling us we didn't have the option of disbelieving turns out not to be true. I suppose now he's willing to grant us that option. How exactly does Kahneman expect people to distinguish "well-supported" science from not "well-supported" science when he himself is obviously wholly incapable of doing so?

EnFinlay 9y ago
Belief should not be optional in the face of well-supported scientific conclusions. The problem is it's easy to mistake un-supported conclusions for well-supported conclusions.
- BearGoesChirp 9y ago
  >Belief should not be optional in the face of well-supported scientific conclusions. What if I don't trust the scientists doing the work, or the larger system that they work in? What if I find the common incarnation of the entire field lacking? I do not trust much published by sociology, regardless of how many studies show results, because of the political nature of the field. On the other hand, physicist who say they found a new particle? I don't have an once of doubt (though maybe I should have a little). Part of the problem is that the very language used in sociology is crafted to reached the desired findings. Once the integrity of an entire field has been lost, what can be done to restore it?
- thehardsphere 9y ago
  Part of the way we go from "un-supported conclusions" to "well-supported conclusions" is by the optional nature of belief. Because belief is optional, the proponents actually have to go to the effort of supporting their conclusions with evidence. When believing something becomes non-optional, the incentive to do that goes out the window, and conclusions generally become weaker.
  - jdoliner 9y ago
    To wit, it shouldn't be too surprising that the "scientist" who tells people that belief in his work is non-optional is the one who didn't bother to check if it's actually true.
- jdoliner 9y ago
  > Belief should not be optional What does that mean in real terms? What do you propose doing to those people who take the option of not believing? If the answer is nothing then belief is indeed optional.
  - tepe1 9y ago
    You simply stop talking to them. In the real world when people begin spouting nonsense they are ejected from the community almost immediately. At elite institutions claims to not "believe" the Western synthesis are met with global permaban. (You literally have to leave the West and go to Russia or Africa.) Online of course the situation is very different. Bans ate impossible and people are free to believe everything.
  - smhost 9y ago
    disinvited to social events, placed lower on the mate selection hierarchy, opinions not taken seriously, media makes fun of them, all the normal ways culture shapes behavior.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
- MichaelBurge 9y ago
  I'm not really sure what you mean by "not optional", but my interpretation is "Anyone who disagrees with the reigning philosopher-kings will be fined, jailed, or shot". I suppose there's ostracism for a non-state solution. So if you're a business, maybe once a year you make all of your employees measure some toads, and if they can't apply a Kolmogorov-Smirnov test correctly on the first try they're immediately fired and added to a shared blacklist. How exactly are you handling enforcement?
  - jdoliner 9y ago
    More likely they'll be branded as "not believing in science" and unpersoned. But yes, this comment is spot on.
- smsm42 9y ago
  Then the rule is "you should unquestionably believe in claims from the set A, but not from the set B, and there's no way we can tell for each case to which set it belongs. But we will always claim it's A". Not a very objective or useful rule.
- DonbunEf7 9y ago
  I will believe as soon as you justify the correct answer to the demarcation problem. If you don't have an answer, then I'm free to interpret scientific results in my own way, including disbelief. C'mon, use logic and reason.
- njarboe 9y ago
  Good scientists have a well tuned sense of how much to doubt and believe various ideas. Some things can be determined to be true to high confidence and are most certainly true. Physicists try to get five or six sigma. For the LIGO black hole merger detection you get a statement like, "The signal was observed with a matched-filter signal-to-noise ratio of 24 and a false alarm rate estimated to be less than 1 event per 203 000 years, equivalent to a significance greater than 5.1σ." And then the physicists fight/debate over how good this estimate of uncertainty is. Technology is created based on using facts discovered by physicists - layer, upon layer, upon layer of very precise and constant use of fundamental ideas of physics. If unexpected things keep happening, it gets investigated and sometimes "new physics" is discovered. On the other extreme (of what some call science) there is the social sciences and psychology. A study with a p=0.05 (95%) claim to being true. Lots of problems with p-hacking and replication. Scientific experiments are either unethical or impossible. Here is a cute cartoon about the spectrum (https://www.xkcd.com/435/ https://www.xkcd.com/435/), although I would title it, "Fields arranged by certainty of truth". I work in geology research where the certainty of truth of the ideas/theories we promote vary across the whole range. This can be quite fun, but one needs a very well developed sense of how true the ideas you hold are to make progress. The subtleties on the probability of an idea being true and over which domain it applies to is why people consult "experts". Hard to choose an expert when you are not an expert.
- Zarath 9y ago
  Belief is not binary.
- KGIII 9y ago
  I politely disagree. People are free to believe what they want. Belief should be optional. Reality doesn't much care what people believe. I'm not big on forcing people to think a certain way, nor am I sure how one would enforce such.
- curun1r 9y ago
  Belief should always be optional. Behavior based on that belief shouldn't. I'm fine with anyone who wants to question climate change, evolution or even something as accepted as gravity. Questioning is how we refine our thinking. Where I get less okay is when people use their questioning to justify behaviors that, should they be wrong, are detrimental to society and the world. Question climate change all you like, but stop polluting until you've convinced the majority of climate scientists. Question evolution, but stop preventing schools from teaching it or forcing them to give creationism an equal standing until you've got something that is, at least, equally supported. Science rarely does black and white, but you can still get a lot of benefit from altering behavior based on a scientific prediction that is 60%, 80%, 90%, 99% or 99.999% likely/accurate. Forcing belief doesn't honor that small bit of doubt that's inherent in any scientific study. But betting against what science believes to be likely when there are negative consequences to being wrong is stupid and we need to stop doing it.
  - tbrownaw 9y ago
    Belief should always be optional. Behavior based on that belief shouldn't. Question climate change all you like, but stop polluting until you've convinced the majority of climate scientists. Just because they're all convinced it's completely our fault things are changing, doesn't mean that the prescribed remedies will actually work. What if the models are wrong on the low side, and we're wasting resources trying to stop the inevitable when we should be figuring out how to survive it?
    - njarboe 9y ago
      There is no real "inevitable" with climate change. More CO2 in the atmosphere will cause higher temperatures. There may be a "tipping point" where a little more CO2 will cause the system to shift dramatically to a higher temperature. But we sure don't know where that is. To give up trying to do anything about climate change (lower emissions, geoengineering, etc.) because it is inevitable we will have 2 degrees of temperature rise no matter what, is to loose track of the fact that 2 degrees would be much better 5 degrees which is much better than 10 degrees.
smsm42 9y ago
Yes, that gave me a stop too. I mean, a prominent researcher, Nobel laureate no less, writes this, what is the conclusion? Anybody who doubts it is a quack, a charlatan, at best - and a "denier", an underminer of science, an evil incarnate at worst. And then turns out - oops, these conclusion are not well-supported and not that scientific in fact. And those who doubted it were actually correct. Does it mean anybody who doubts anything is correct? Surely not. Does it mean we should be a bit more careful with statements like "belief is not optional" and following condemnation of those who fails to comply? I think yes.
- s_kilk 9y ago
  > I mean, a prominent researcher, Nobel laureate no less, writes this, what is the conclusion? That even smart people can be dumb.
  - BurningFrog 9y ago
    “Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.” ― George Orwell
- KGIII 9y ago
  I don't have a better way to say this. Trust me, I've tried to find one. Science has, in many ways, taken on some of the characteristics of religion. You either believe or you're a heretic. Which, sort of, I agree with. If you don't believe in the results of the scientific method, you may wish to reexamine your life. However, a lot of what is published under the name of science hasn't actually followed the scientific method. You get people who believe in the strangest things. A recent example was someone who told me that the oceans were going to rise by 57' by 2050. Now, I'm firmly in the belief of AGW camp. I pointed out that they were wrong and that no models suggested such a thing and that their citation had no citations, other than an article in some newspaper. I provided link after link. I explained that I am not a climate scientist, but a mathematician. I explained that I'd actually run the models locally, just to learn more. I explained the process, the data collection methods, and even why the data is adjusted. They decided I was a 'denier' and a Trump voter - quite literally, they called me a 'science denying Trump voter.' I was baffled. Later, I'd bump into them again, at the same site. This time, I explained that science was a philosophy. Of course, I provided the citation for this and even went so far as to take the time to explain what Ph.D. actually means. They went ballistic, so to speak. Oh, the names they called me. This is not an isolated case, they had others chiming in. It wasn't until several days later when someone finally noticed and chimed in to support me, but it was of no use. That person is a science believer. I can't tell them to stop believing in science. However, it has the hallmarks of a religion, it's certainly a belief system. No, being a belief system isn't a bad thing. I don't have the answers, but this is a problem. Sorry for the verbosity, but I haven't a better way to describe it, nor a better descriptive term than religion.
pureGuano 9y ago
One good heuristic to use when evaluating scientific research is the Lindy Effect. Essentially, the longer a finding has stood without being falsified, the longer you can expect it to continue to stand without falsification. This runs contrary to what I was taught in high school science classes, which was that newer science is more reliable than older science. The truth is that the old stuff that still stands is really where it's at. Most "novel" scientific findings are not true. A smaller portion will be thought true for a while, then discarded. Only a very small amount of research will stand for a long period of time. Another thing to consider is that the scientific method and its modern, institutionalized implementation is not very old at all. You cannot exclude the possibility that some of our fundamental scientific understanding is totally flawed, and we've yet to discover how.
- brianberns 9y ago
  > You cannot exclude the possibility that some of our fundamental scientific understanding is totally flawed, and we've yet to discover how. Much of modern technology is built on modern scientific findings. Since that technology unarguably works, the findings on which it is based cannot be "totally flawed".
  - pureGuano 9y ago
    It can work, but for reasons different to our positive scientific understanding, no?
    - brianberns 9y ago
      No. The odds of, say, the GPS in your mobile phone working by accident are effectively zero.
      - pureGuano 9y ago
        How large is the preimage of conclusions that would lead to the mathematics of relativity? Is it improbable in light of that? I should also say that physics has a better track record than softer sciences. But even in physics, things change.
justin66 9y ago
I cringe reading "belief in well-supported scientific conclusions is not optional." Belief is always optional, if you want people to believe you have to get them to opt-in to believing. Kahneman is describing part of a larger framework for human beings to cope with their own flawed human thought processes. You're talking about the art of persuasion. If "you want people to believe" the most effective way to accomplish that is generally to lie to them in a clever way. That's a whole other discussion.
calebm 9y ago
"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." (Richard Feynman)
dionian 9y ago
agreed. why rely on evidence when we can trust the 'experts'? no thanks...
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
emmelaich 9y ago
Your mention of scientism reminded me of this good, recent article from the Australian "The Skeptic" magazine. Skepticism, Science and Scientism https://yandoo.wordpress.com/2017/09/12/skepticism-science-and-scientism/ https://yandoo.wordpress.com/2017/09/12/skepticism-science-a... Have a read! I also submitted to HN at the top level. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15235291 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15235291)
svat 9y ago
> if you want people to believe you have to get them to opt-in to believing There's a very nice article I read recently [1], on a situation in educational research (as in, how learning happens). The authors point out a situation where a group of 30 scientists published a letter informing teachers about a persistent myth about students. They go into a beautiful examination of the impact of this, what the scientists (possibly) miss, and what effective persuasion may look like. The authors' recommendations, suitably generalized, are a great read for our times, when polarization and tribalism are high, with a startlingly low tolerance for people with “different” ideas. Highly recommended: [1]: https://deansforimpact.org/why-mythbusting-fails-a-guide-to-influencing-education-with-science/ https://deansforimpact.org/why-mythbusting-fails-a-guide-to-...
ianamartin 9y ago
One approach is to never believe anything. Belief is a problem, in my opinion, in every situation. By definition, a belief is something you accept as true with insufficient evidence. It's kind of the opposite of knowing things. So why believe at all when you can both think and know. Beliefs are garbage and the number 1 source of problems in this country.

EnFinlay 9y ago

Belief should not be optional in the face of well-supported scientific conclusions. The problem is it's easy to mistake un-supported conclusions for well-supported conclusions.

BearGoesChirp 9y ago
>Belief should not be optional in the face of well-supported scientific conclusions. What if I don't trust the scientists doing the work, or the larger system that they work in? What if I find the common incarnation of the entire field lacking? I do not trust much published by sociology, regardless of how many studies show results, because of the political nature of the field. On the other hand, physicist who say they found a new particle? I don't have an once of doubt (though maybe I should have a little). Part of the problem is that the very language used in sociology is crafted to reached the desired findings. Once the integrity of an entire field has been lost, what can be done to restore it?
thehardsphere 9y ago
Part of the way we go from "un-supported conclusions" to "well-supported conclusions" is by the optional nature of belief. Because belief is optional, the proponents actually have to go to the effort of supporting their conclusions with evidence. When believing something becomes non-optional, the incentive to do that goes out the window, and conclusions generally become weaker.
- jdoliner 9y ago
  To wit, it shouldn't be too surprising that the "scientist" who tells people that belief in his work is non-optional is the one who didn't bother to check if it's actually true.
jdoliner 9y ago
> Belief should not be optional What does that mean in real terms? What do you propose doing to those people who take the option of not believing? If the answer is nothing then belief is indeed optional.
- tepe1 9y ago
  You simply stop talking to them. In the real world when people begin spouting nonsense they are ejected from the community almost immediately. At elite institutions claims to not "believe" the Western synthesis are met with global permaban. (You literally have to leave the West and go to Russia or Africa.) Online of course the situation is very different. Bans ate impossible and people are free to believe everything.
- smhost 9y ago
  disinvited to social events, placed lower on the mate selection hierarchy, opinions not taken seriously, media makes fun of them, all the normal ways culture shapes behavior.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
MichaelBurge 9y ago
I'm not really sure what you mean by "not optional", but my interpretation is "Anyone who disagrees with the reigning philosopher-kings will be fined, jailed, or shot". I suppose there's ostracism for a non-state solution. So if you're a business, maybe once a year you make all of your employees measure some toads, and if they can't apply a Kolmogorov-Smirnov test correctly on the first try they're immediately fired and added to a shared blacklist. How exactly are you handling enforcement?
- jdoliner 9y ago
  More likely they'll be branded as "not believing in science" and unpersoned. But yes, this comment is spot on.
smsm42 9y ago
Then the rule is "you should unquestionably believe in claims from the set A, but not from the set B, and there's no way we can tell for each case to which set it belongs. But we will always claim it's A". Not a very objective or useful rule.
DonbunEf7 9y ago
I will believe as soon as you justify the correct answer to the demarcation problem. If you don't have an answer, then I'm free to interpret scientific results in my own way, including disbelief. C'mon, use logic and reason.
njarboe 9y ago
Good scientists have a well tuned sense of how much to doubt and believe various ideas. Some things can be determined to be true to high confidence and are most certainly true. Physicists try to get five or six sigma. For the LIGO black hole merger detection you get a statement like, "The signal was observed with a matched-filter signal-to-noise ratio of 24 and a false alarm rate estimated to be less than 1 event per 203 000 years, equivalent to a significance greater than 5.1σ." And then the physicists fight/debate over how good this estimate of uncertainty is. Technology is created based on using facts discovered by physicists - layer, upon layer, upon layer of very precise and constant use of fundamental ideas of physics. If unexpected things keep happening, it gets investigated and sometimes "new physics" is discovered. On the other extreme (of what some call science) there is the social sciences and psychology. A study with a p=0.05 (95%) claim to being true. Lots of problems with p-hacking and replication. Scientific experiments are either unethical or impossible. Here is a cute cartoon about the spectrum (https://www.xkcd.com/435/ https://www.xkcd.com/435/), although I would title it, "Fields arranged by certainty of truth". I work in geology research where the certainty of truth of the ideas/theories we promote vary across the whole range. This can be quite fun, but one needs a very well developed sense of how true the ideas you hold are to make progress. The subtleties on the probability of an idea being true and over which domain it applies to is why people consult "experts". Hard to choose an expert when you are not an expert.
Zarath 9y ago
Belief is not binary.
KGIII 9y ago
I politely disagree. People are free to believe what they want. Belief should be optional. Reality doesn't much care what people believe. I'm not big on forcing people to think a certain way, nor am I sure how one would enforce such.
curun1r 9y ago
Belief should always be optional. Behavior based on that belief shouldn't. I'm fine with anyone who wants to question climate change, evolution or even something as accepted as gravity. Questioning is how we refine our thinking. Where I get less okay is when people use their questioning to justify behaviors that, should they be wrong, are detrimental to society and the world. Question climate change all you like, but stop polluting until you've convinced the majority of climate scientists. Question evolution, but stop preventing schools from teaching it or forcing them to give creationism an equal standing until you've got something that is, at least, equally supported. Science rarely does black and white, but you can still get a lot of benefit from altering behavior based on a scientific prediction that is 60%, 80%, 90%, 99% or 99.999% likely/accurate. Forcing belief doesn't honor that small bit of doubt that's inherent in any scientific study. But betting against what science believes to be likely when there are negative consequences to being wrong is stupid and we need to stop doing it.
- tbrownaw 9y ago
  Belief should always be optional. Behavior based on that belief shouldn't. Question climate change all you like, but stop polluting until you've convinced the majority of climate scientists. Just because they're all convinced it's completely our fault things are changing, doesn't mean that the prescribed remedies will actually work. What if the models are wrong on the low side, and we're wasting resources trying to stop the inevitable when we should be figuring out how to survive it?
  - njarboe 9y ago
    There is no real "inevitable" with climate change. More CO2 in the atmosphere will cause higher temperatures. There may be a "tipping point" where a little more CO2 will cause the system to shift dramatically to a higher temperature. But we sure don't know where that is. To give up trying to do anything about climate change (lower emissions, geoengineering, etc.) because it is inevitable we will have 2 degrees of temperature rise no matter what, is to loose track of the fact that 2 degrees would be much better 5 degrees which is much better than 10 degrees.

smsm42 9y ago

Yes, that gave me a stop too. I mean, a prominent researcher, Nobel laureate no less, writes this, what is the conclusion? Anybody who doubts it is a quack, a charlatan, at best - and a "denier", an underminer of science, an evil incarnate at worst. And then turns out - oops, these conclusion are not well-supported and not that scientific in fact. And those who doubted it were actually correct. Does it mean anybody who doubts anything is correct? Surely not. Does it mean we should be a bit more careful with statements like "belief is not optional" and following condemnation of those who fails to comply? I think yes.

s_kilk 9y ago
> I mean, a prominent researcher, Nobel laureate no less, writes this, what is the conclusion? That even smart people can be dumb.
- BurningFrog 9y ago
  “Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.” ― George Orwell
KGIII 9y ago
I don't have a better way to say this. Trust me, I've tried to find one. Science has, in many ways, taken on some of the characteristics of religion. You either believe or you're a heretic. Which, sort of, I agree with. If you don't believe in the results of the scientific method, you may wish to reexamine your life. However, a lot of what is published under the name of science hasn't actually followed the scientific method. You get people who believe in the strangest things. A recent example was someone who told me that the oceans were going to rise by 57' by 2050. Now, I'm firmly in the belief of AGW camp. I pointed out that they were wrong and that no models suggested such a thing and that their citation had no citations, other than an article in some newspaper. I provided link after link. I explained that I am not a climate scientist, but a mathematician. I explained that I'd actually run the models locally, just to learn more. I explained the process, the data collection methods, and even why the data is adjusted. They decided I was a 'denier' and a Trump voter - quite literally, they called me a 'science denying Trump voter.' I was baffled. Later, I'd bump into them again, at the same site. This time, I explained that science was a philosophy. Of course, I provided the citation for this and even went so far as to take the time to explain what Ph.D. actually means. They went ballistic, so to speak. Oh, the names they called me. This is not an isolated case, they had others chiming in. It wasn't until several days later when someone finally noticed and chimed in to support me, but it was of no use. That person is a science believer. I can't tell them to stop believing in science. However, it has the hallmarks of a religion, it's certainly a belief system. No, being a belief system isn't a bad thing. I don't have the answers, but this is a problem. Sorry for the verbosity, but I haven't a better way to describe it, nor a better descriptive term than religion.

pureGuano 9y ago

One good heuristic to use when evaluating scientific research is the Lindy Effect. Essentially, the longer a finding has stood without being falsified, the longer you can expect it to continue to stand without falsification. This runs contrary to what I was taught in high school science classes, which was that newer science is more reliable than older science. The truth is that the old stuff that still stands is really where it's at. Most "novel" scientific findings are not true. A smaller portion will be thought true for a while, then discarded. Only a very small amount of research will stand for a long period of time. Another thing to consider is that the scientific method and its modern, institutionalized implementation is not very old at all. You cannot exclude the possibility that some of our fundamental scientific understanding is totally flawed, and we've yet to discover how.

brianberns 9y ago
> You cannot exclude the possibility that some of our fundamental scientific understanding is totally flawed, and we've yet to discover how. Much of modern technology is built on modern scientific findings. Since that technology unarguably works, the findings on which it is based cannot be "totally flawed".
- pureGuano 9y ago
  It can work, but for reasons different to our positive scientific understanding, no?
  - brianberns 9y ago
    No. The odds of, say, the GPS in your mobile phone working by accident are effectively zero.
    - pureGuano 9y ago
      How large is the preimage of conclusions that would lead to the mathematics of relativity? Is it improbable in light of that? I should also say that physics has a better track record than softer sciences. But even in physics, things change.

justin66 9y ago

I cringe reading "belief in well-supported scientific conclusions is not optional." Belief is always optional, if you want people to believe you have to get them to opt-in to believing. Kahneman is describing part of a larger framework for human beings to cope with their own flawed human thought processes. You're talking about the art of persuasion. If "you want people to believe" the most effective way to accomplish that is generally to lie to them in a clever way. That's a whole other discussion.

calebm 9y ago

"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." (Richard Feynman)

dionian 9y ago

agreed. why rely on evidence when we can trust the 'experts'? no thanks...

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

emmelaich 9y ago

Your mention of scientism reminded me of this good, recent article from the Australian "The Skeptic" magazine. Skepticism, Science and Scientism https://yandoo.wordpress.com/2017/09/12/skepticism-science-and-scientism/ https://yandoo.wordpress.com/2017/09/12/skepticism-science-a... Have a read! I also submitted to HN at the top level. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15235291 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15235291)

svat 9y ago

> if you want people to believe you have to get them to opt-in to believing There's a very nice article I read recently [1], on a situation in educational research (as in, how learning happens). The authors point out a situation where a group of 30 scientists published a letter informing teachers about a persistent myth about students. They go into a beautiful examination of the impact of this, what the scientists (possibly) miss, and what effective persuasion may look like. The authors' recommendations, suitably generalized, are a great read for our times, when polarization and tribalism are high, with a startlingly low tolerance for people with “different” ideas. Highly recommended: [1]: https://deansforimpact.org/why-mythbusting-fails-a-guide-to-influencing-education-with-science/ https://deansforimpact.org/why-mythbusting-fails-a-guide-to-...

ianamartin 9y ago

One approach is to never believe anything. Belief is a problem, in my opinion, in every situation. By definition, a belief is something you accept as true with insufficient evidence. It's kind of the opposite of knowing things. So why believe at all when you can both think and know. Beliefs are garbage and the number 1 source of problems in this country.