7 ms·

In my circles this gets me into arguments all the time. Everyone reads a book, everyone but me likes it. I point out how one section I know a lot about is deepl

In my circles this gets me into arguments all the time. Everyone reads a book, everyone but me likes it. I point out how one section I know a lot about is deeply wrong, everyone else says versions of "well other than that part it's a great book!" I wish LW-style rationalist circles didn't attract such obnoxious people, because I don't know of any other collection of people who recognize and try to adjust for things like this.

nerpderp82 6y ago
Perhaps we should reframe how we approach new knowledge? "That was a super interesting book, it brought up lots of ideas and explanations, lets discuss what parts if any we think are true." ! Folks call out information and facts as fake news, not apply healthy skepticism but a rejection of all knowledge and then at the same time falling for hoaxes. The whole country needs to take a gap year and learn the scientific method.
- alvarlagerlof 6y ago
  They are actually extremely rigorous about this in lower Swedish education. Source criticism is part of the curriculum. It becomes evident how much of a difference it makes when comparing the behavior of the elderly population at large (were only those who went to University have been thought it) to those who have had this from the start.
Retric 6y ago
Rationalist circles make just as many horrific logical errors. If you want to dig into this stuff philosophy has dug deep, and frankly all they came up with is all sources should be treated as suspect. Aka, even if a source got the stuff you know about right, you should still be be skeptical. And yes, that includes purely logical reasoning about math. It’s not a satisfactory answer, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- Matticus_Rex 6y ago
  I have bad news about philosophy circles; I agree that some philosophers have dug deep, and most people in philosophy circles (even those who have read widely) are much worse at this than the LW folks. (I found LW/rationalism through philosophy circles, incidentally)
  - Retric 6y ago
    There’s got to be a joke about the discovery that nobody has a clue failing to generate experts who realize they don’t a clue. Sadly, I am not a comedian.
- jdsalaro 6y ago
  > Rationalist circles make just as many horrific logical errors. If you want to dig into this stuff philosophy has dug deep, and frankly all they came up with is all sources should be treated as suspect. Sharing some anecdata, because I enjoy when others do. I've got some very dear friends born in a highly prescriptive culture where credential-ism runs deep, being an intellectual is extremely valued -people are often denied leases due to their non-academic status- and authority figures and strangers get the "Mrs." and "Mr." treatment for years after you've met them. Early on in our friendship we would discuss and rant about everything and anything. We would often talk about my attitude of trusting no one and how I believe there are, truly, no experts, in the colloquial sense of the word. We've often had late-night discussions about my "stubborn and deeply misguided attitude", about how it's wrong that the only experts I trust are those who deeply distrust their own abilities, instincts and continuously attempt to disprove their own claims. Shockingly, they defended the aforementioned views until many of their countries top virologists and they themselves, often and loudly, shared their opinion on covid-19 around March, April and May: covid-19 was nothing special, national mortality trends were unaffected, their country is rich and they had a high number of ICUs, it was basically just like the flu and nothing to worry about. Then, as we all know, shit hit the fan and we saw cooling trucks being turned into mortuary vehicles. I simply told them what I've always told them, and for the first time since we're friends they nodded with some sadness in their demeanour: trust no one, acquire evidence, make your own judgments, try to find hidden risks and the only so-called experts worth trusting are the ones who, in their own words, publicly and candidly express their skepticism towards their very own claims and try to help you reproduce their methods and conclusions.
  - ytwySXpMbS 6y ago
    If it's not too personal a question, I'm curious which culture you're talking about? My guess is French?
    - KingOfCoders 6y ago
      From a friend of mine who says she never had a problem renting a flat as soon as she's says she's a "Dr." This could be Germany :-)
- bigbubba 6y ago
  I think people who are too in love with their own rationality leave themselves vulnerable to some pretty ridiculous beliefs that common sense would normally guard them against. A suspension of common sense is certainly important sometimes, because common sense can lead you astray, but at other times it will save you a lot of time and mental energy. A classic example from antiquity is Zeno's paradoxes of motion. It was not immediately clear to people trying to rationalize about these 'paradoxes' how they could be resolved. But somebody who is slightly less in love with their own rationality, who trusts their own common sense, would not waste their time wondering about a supposed paradox that can be refuted by standing up and walking around the room. Failing to balance rationalism with common sense can get you stuck in solipsist traps or worse.
  - andrepd 6y ago
    I think the point with Zeno's paradox is less "motion can't happen" and "obviously this is wrong, so where is my mistake?" Turns out the answer is math ;) more specifically stuff which didn't exist back then.
    - bigbubba 6y ago
      I'll rephrase my point then; I think Less Wrong people spend a lot of time trying to figure out how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Or: They should stop sniffing their own farts, pull their heads out of the clouds, try not to get lost up their own asses, etc. Anyway, according to Wikipedia: "Some mathematicians and historians, such as Carl Boyer, hold that Zeno's paradoxes are simply mathematical problems, for which modern calculus provides a mathematical solution.[6] Some philosophers, however, say that Zeno's paradoxes and their variations (see Thomson's lamp) remain relevant metaphysical problems.[7][8][9]" So it seems like a few people are still wasting their time with this.
drivebycomment 6y ago
It can be perfectly rational to conclude a book is great despite there's a flaw in some part. You can't simply extrapolate from finding one mistake in a book to declaring the whole book wrong. Likewise, you can't extrapolate from finding few bad publications to "everything is crap". I'm not trying to claim journalists are all good or even consistently good. But believing they are always bad is the same logical fallacy as believing they are always good.
- Smaug123 6y ago
  It's not "believing they are always bad". It's "being unable to determine whether they are good". If you simply don't know enough to evaluate a source, it is correct as a matter of epistemology to view its contents with a large dose of suspicion. Any historian will tell you this; a pretty sizeable aspect of the study of history is the weighing of sources, working out why they said what they did, what they're not telling you, and what they're wrong about - because every source is incomplete, biased, and contains simple factual errors. I might sit back from a book and go "wow, that was good", and it's possible for a book to be "great but wrong" - but I can only reasonably conclude that a source's contents are correct if I have got more evidence for its thesis than just that one source. So the situation is bad enough when I am encountering a new source. But if I'm already familiar with a source, and it's consistently wrong about the things I know, then I can only be even more suspicious of everything else they say; and sadly, an awful lot of publications do fall into that category. Finding a mistake in a book does make it more likely that it contains other mistakes, and it does make any given fact in the book more likely to be wrong.
- Brian_K_White 6y ago
  I don't think it's rational unless and until you or people who are knowledgable in all other topics covered, can assert that the other parts all check out. If you can only check one thing and it's wrong, then it is entirely and clearly irrational to assume that everything else is correct. It's not fully defensible to assume that it's 100% wrong either. Just by plain statistics you may assume almost anything must have some correct portion. What's rational is to make as few assumptions as possible, and where guessing or informed guessing is necessary, use only the information you actually have. That means back to the beginning, if you can only evaluate one part, and it has a many errors, then that is the only thing you can use to make any assumptions about the rest, unless and until you get actual credible assertions about the rest from someone else who are themselves credible in that domain.
jancsika 6y ago
> I point out how one section I know a lot about is deeply wrong, everyone else says versions of "well other than that part it's a great book!" Sometimes books about magical properties of crystals get their geology right. Sometimes they get it wrong. If I apply your superficial filter I essentially give up my ability to convey the difference to your friends. If I ignore your filter and pay attention to the entirety of each book, it's trivial for me to help them separate wheat from chaff. (Or at least chaffy-wheat from pure chaff.)
- renewiltord 6y ago
  Considering that Matticus there knows about LW and Rationalism, it seems obvious he isn't saying to zero out your coefficients. Imagine I give you a dictionary purporting to contain descriptions of the referents of the following words: (I assume you know what a sprint is, but not a bilparyoti or a zambungar) * sprint - to run at a rapid pace for a short distance * bilparyoti - a kind of bright blue butterfly, found in Congo-Brazzaville * zambungar - a muddy colour, specifically that created when a landslide enters a clear river Now, based on knowing that 'sprint' is 'correct', what is your probability, posterior to being supplied the dictionary, that you know what a 'bilparyoti' references? Now, imagine that I tell you that the 'bilparyoti' is wrong and you are able to be convinced that the 'bilparyoti' is wrong. Is your prior for the accuracy of the 'zambungar' reference the same as the posterior after being supplied the information about the 'bilparyoti'? Matticus, there, presumably laments the fact that the zambungar accuracy probability has not moved. Rationally it should move towards zero. By varying amounts, certainly, but towards zero. With his friends, P(zambungar_correct | bilparyoti_wrong) = P(zambungar_correct|bilparyoti_unknown), truly a situation worthy of wailing and gnashing of teeth.
  - Matticus_Rex 6y ago
    Thanks for putting waaay more effort into that response than I would have haha
    - renewiltord 6y ago
      Most definitely a great deal of akrasia involved there on my part.
ufmace 6y ago
This seems like something different to me. Most books, TV shows, movies, etc that do anything with technology above the most basic level usually get at least one thing incredibly wrong. It's not necessarily a deal-breaker though - almost all stories are written to present and advance an interesting plotline, and almost all of them gloss over various inconvenient realities for the sake of a better story. Consumers can usually suspend their disbelief and accept the story for its own sake. Problems only really come in when ignorant people read too many stories and start to think that how they present things is actually real. And some people who know a particular area very well may find whatever the story does too patently absurd to suspend disbelief.
Enginerrrd 6y ago
What is an "LW-style rationalist circle"?
- tialaramex 6y ago
  I assume LW here stands for Less Wrong as in https://www.lesswrong.com/ https://www.lesswrong.com/
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
ScoobleDoodle 6y ago
LW seems to stand for Less Wrong: LessWrong (also written Less Wrong) is a community blog and forum focused on discussion of cognitive biases, philosophy, psychology, economics, rationality, and artificial intelligence, among other topics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LessWrong https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LessWrong
andrepd 6y ago
"LW"?

nerpderp82 6y ago

Perhaps we should reframe how we approach new knowledge? "That was a super interesting book, it brought up lots of ideas and explanations, lets discuss what parts if any we think are true." ! Folks call out information and facts as fake news, not apply healthy skepticism but a rejection of all knowledge and then at the same time falling for hoaxes. The whole country needs to take a gap year and learn the scientific method.

alvarlagerlof 6y ago
They are actually extremely rigorous about this in lower Swedish education. Source criticism is part of the curriculum. It becomes evident how much of a difference it makes when comparing the behavior of the elderly population at large (were only those who went to University have been thought it) to those who have had this from the start.

Retric 6y ago

Rationalist circles make just as many horrific logical errors. If you want to dig into this stuff philosophy has dug deep, and frankly all they came up with is all sources should be treated as suspect. Aka, even if a source got the stuff you know about right, you should still be be skeptical. And yes, that includes purely logical reasoning about math. It’s not a satisfactory answer, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Matticus_Rex 6y ago
I have bad news about philosophy circles; I agree that some philosophers have dug deep, and most people in philosophy circles (even those who have read widely) are much worse at this than the LW folks. (I found LW/rationalism through philosophy circles, incidentally)
- Retric 6y ago
  There’s got to be a joke about the discovery that nobody has a clue failing to generate experts who realize they don’t a clue. Sadly, I am not a comedian.
jdsalaro 6y ago
> Rationalist circles make just as many horrific logical errors. If you want to dig into this stuff philosophy has dug deep, and frankly all they came up with is all sources should be treated as suspect. Sharing some anecdata, because I enjoy when others do. I've got some very dear friends born in a highly prescriptive culture where credential-ism runs deep, being an intellectual is extremely valued -people are often denied leases due to their non-academic status- and authority figures and strangers get the "Mrs." and "Mr." treatment for years after you've met them. Early on in our friendship we would discuss and rant about everything and anything. We would often talk about my attitude of trusting no one and how I believe there are, truly, no experts, in the colloquial sense of the word. We've often had late-night discussions about my "stubborn and deeply misguided attitude", about how it's wrong that the only experts I trust are those who deeply distrust their own abilities, instincts and continuously attempt to disprove their own claims. Shockingly, they defended the aforementioned views until many of their countries top virologists and they themselves, often and loudly, shared their opinion on covid-19 around March, April and May: covid-19 was nothing special, national mortality trends were unaffected, their country is rich and they had a high number of ICUs, it was basically just like the flu and nothing to worry about. Then, as we all know, shit hit the fan and we saw cooling trucks being turned into mortuary vehicles. I simply told them what I've always told them, and for the first time since we're friends they nodded with some sadness in their demeanour: trust no one, acquire evidence, make your own judgments, try to find hidden risks and the only so-called experts worth trusting are the ones who, in their own words, publicly and candidly express their skepticism towards their very own claims and try to help you reproduce their methods and conclusions.
- ytwySXpMbS 6y ago
  If it's not too personal a question, I'm curious which culture you're talking about? My guess is French?
  - KingOfCoders 6y ago
    From a friend of mine who says she never had a problem renting a flat as soon as she's says she's a "Dr." This could be Germany :-)
bigbubba 6y ago
I think people who are too in love with their own rationality leave themselves vulnerable to some pretty ridiculous beliefs that common sense would normally guard them against. A suspension of common sense is certainly important sometimes, because common sense can lead you astray, but at other times it will save you a lot of time and mental energy. A classic example from antiquity is Zeno's paradoxes of motion. It was not immediately clear to people trying to rationalize about these 'paradoxes' how they could be resolved. But somebody who is slightly less in love with their own rationality, who trusts their own common sense, would not waste their time wondering about a supposed paradox that can be refuted by standing up and walking around the room. Failing to balance rationalism with common sense can get you stuck in solipsist traps or worse.
- andrepd 6y ago
  I think the point with Zeno's paradox is less "motion can't happen" and "obviously this is wrong, so where is my mistake?" Turns out the answer is math ;) more specifically stuff which didn't exist back then.
  - bigbubba 6y ago
    I'll rephrase my point then; I think Less Wrong people spend a lot of time trying to figure out how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Or: They should stop sniffing their own farts, pull their heads out of the clouds, try not to get lost up their own asses, etc. Anyway, according to Wikipedia: "Some mathematicians and historians, such as Carl Boyer, hold that Zeno's paradoxes are simply mathematical problems, for which modern calculus provides a mathematical solution.[6] Some philosophers, however, say that Zeno's paradoxes and their variations (see Thomson's lamp) remain relevant metaphysical problems.[7][8][9]" So it seems like a few people are still wasting their time with this.

drivebycomment 6y ago

It can be perfectly rational to conclude a book is great despite there's a flaw in some part. You can't simply extrapolate from finding one mistake in a book to declaring the whole book wrong. Likewise, you can't extrapolate from finding few bad publications to "everything is crap". I'm not trying to claim journalists are all good or even consistently good. But believing they are always bad is the same logical fallacy as believing they are always good.

Smaug123 6y ago
It's not "believing they are always bad". It's "being unable to determine whether they are good". If you simply don't know enough to evaluate a source, it is correct as a matter of epistemology to view its contents with a large dose of suspicion. Any historian will tell you this; a pretty sizeable aspect of the study of history is the weighing of sources, working out why they said what they did, what they're not telling you, and what they're wrong about - because every source is incomplete, biased, and contains simple factual errors. I might sit back from a book and go "wow, that was good", and it's possible for a book to be "great but wrong" - but I can only reasonably conclude that a source's contents are correct if I have got more evidence for its thesis than just that one source. So the situation is bad enough when I am encountering a new source. But if I'm already familiar with a source, and it's consistently wrong about the things I know, then I can only be even more suspicious of everything else they say; and sadly, an awful lot of publications do fall into that category. Finding a mistake in a book does make it more likely that it contains other mistakes, and it does make any given fact in the book more likely to be wrong.
Brian_K_White 6y ago
I don't think it's rational unless and until you or people who are knowledgable in all other topics covered, can assert that the other parts all check out. If you can only check one thing and it's wrong, then it is entirely and clearly irrational to assume that everything else is correct. It's not fully defensible to assume that it's 100% wrong either. Just by plain statistics you may assume almost anything must have some correct portion. What's rational is to make as few assumptions as possible, and where guessing or informed guessing is necessary, use only the information you actually have. That means back to the beginning, if you can only evaluate one part, and it has a many errors, then that is the only thing you can use to make any assumptions about the rest, unless and until you get actual credible assertions about the rest from someone else who are themselves credible in that domain.

jancsika 6y ago

> I point out how one section I know a lot about is deeply wrong, everyone else says versions of "well other than that part it's a great book!" Sometimes books about magical properties of crystals get their geology right. Sometimes they get it wrong. If I apply your superficial filter I essentially give up my ability to convey the difference to your friends. If I ignore your filter and pay attention to the entirety of each book, it's trivial for me to help them separate wheat from chaff. (Or at least chaffy-wheat from pure chaff.)

renewiltord 6y ago
Considering that Matticus there knows about LW and Rationalism, it seems obvious he isn't saying to zero out your coefficients. Imagine I give you a dictionary purporting to contain descriptions of the referents of the following words: (I assume you know what a sprint is, but not a bilparyoti or a zambungar) * sprint - to run at a rapid pace for a short distance * bilparyoti - a kind of bright blue butterfly, found in Congo-Brazzaville * zambungar - a muddy colour, specifically that created when a landslide enters a clear river Now, based on knowing that 'sprint' is 'correct', what is your probability, posterior to being supplied the dictionary, that you know what a 'bilparyoti' references? Now, imagine that I tell you that the 'bilparyoti' is wrong and you are able to be convinced that the 'bilparyoti' is wrong. Is your prior for the accuracy of the 'zambungar' reference the same as the posterior after being supplied the information about the 'bilparyoti'? Matticus, there, presumably laments the fact that the zambungar accuracy probability has not moved. Rationally it should move towards zero. By varying amounts, certainly, but towards zero. With his friends, P(zambungar_correct | bilparyoti_wrong) = P(zambungar_correct|bilparyoti_unknown), truly a situation worthy of wailing and gnashing of teeth.
- Matticus_Rex 6y ago
  Thanks for putting waaay more effort into that response than I would have haha
  - renewiltord 6y ago
    Most definitely a great deal of akrasia involved there on my part.

ufmace 6y ago

This seems like something different to me. Most books, TV shows, movies, etc that do anything with technology above the most basic level usually get at least one thing incredibly wrong. It's not necessarily a deal-breaker though - almost all stories are written to present and advance an interesting plotline, and almost all of them gloss over various inconvenient realities for the sake of a better story. Consumers can usually suspend their disbelief and accept the story for its own sake. Problems only really come in when ignorant people read too many stories and start to think that how they present things is actually real. And some people who know a particular area very well may find whatever the story does too patently absurd to suspend disbelief.

Enginerrrd 6y ago

What is an "LW-style rationalist circle"?

tialaramex 6y ago
I assume LW here stands for Less Wrong as in https://www.lesswrong.com/ https://www.lesswrong.com/
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

ScoobleDoodle 6y ago

LW seems to stand for Less Wrong: LessWrong (also written Less Wrong) is a community blog and forum focused on discussion of cognitive biases, philosophy, psychology, economics, rationality, and artificial intelligence, among other topics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LessWrong https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LessWrong

andrepd 6y ago

"LW"?