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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 t

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.
Matticus_Rex 6y ago
I'm not suggesting that one declare the whole book wrong. I'm suggesting the book should be treated very skeptically.
- Dylan16807 6y ago
  > I'm suggesting the book should be treated very skeptically. Well then why did you write about liking the book and whether it's good as the cause of disagreement? That's a very very different thing from whether the book is an accurate source! Even a specific section you prove to be wrong can still be good.
eckesicle 6y ago
They're not talking about extrapolating from one mistake though. They're talking about drawing one observation from a population of an unknown distribution. At that point that single observation the only estimate of the quality of the entire book. If you decide to not sample further (that is find other chapters in the book of which you are an expert) then the conclusion that the book is trash is the only rational one. (If you want to read more about this then google "single observation unbiased estimator")
- drivebycomment 6y ago
  > If you decide to not sample further (that is find other chapters in the book of which you are an expert) then the conclusion that the book is trash is the only rational one. That's exactly the wrong kind of extrapolation I'm pointing out. If you found a flaw in one chapter, the book can be trash, and the chance of it being trash is definitely higher than without any other data, but whether the absolute chance of it being trash is sufficiently high enough can only be determined based on the nature of the flaw, and even then, the confidence for that conclusion can't be really that high.
ben509 6y ago
The claim isn't really that the book as a whole is necessarily good or bad. It may be expressed as such, but Crichton was talking about the habits of readers. Determining whether a source is trustworthy is an ongoing process: you're seeing one portion where you have some expertise or evidence and then another portion where you don't. You have to extrapolate from what you can validate to whether what you can't is valid. The complaint behind Gell-Mann amnesia is that we're too quick to dismiss clear evidence that a source is untrustworthy, that we have a bias towards trust. To put it in perspective, let's imagine the opposite, call it Crank Awareness. If you see a document and it's laid out poorly, uses weird boldface, all caps, colors and blinking text, you'll, at the very least, get the impression it's written by a crank before you even start reading. > But believing they are always bad is the same logical fallacy as believing they are always good. Again, this comes back to the problem of strict logical reasoning vs. treating trust as a larger process. We have limited resources to evaluate sources, so we're stuck making fallacious generalizations when we need to make a decision based on our sources. What we want in the long run is to incentivize authors to exercise care and diligence. That would indicate we should punish known bad information by deprecating the authors. So another way of reading Gell-Mann amnesia is that readers aren't doing this. They're seeing stuff that they know is wrong and continuing to patronize the publications regardless, thus authors can be untrustworthy and still collect a paycheck.

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.

Matticus_Rex 6y ago

I'm not suggesting that one declare the whole book wrong. I'm suggesting the book should be treated very skeptically.

Dylan16807 6y ago
> I'm suggesting the book should be treated very skeptically. Well then why did you write about liking the book and whether it's good as the cause of disagreement? That's a very very different thing from whether the book is an accurate source! Even a specific section you prove to be wrong can still be good.

eckesicle 6y ago

They're not talking about extrapolating from one mistake though. They're talking about drawing one observation from a population of an unknown distribution. At that point that single observation the only estimate of the quality of the entire book. If you decide to not sample further (that is find other chapters in the book of which you are an expert) then the conclusion that the book is trash is the only rational one. (If you want to read more about this then google "single observation unbiased estimator")

drivebycomment 6y ago
> If you decide to not sample further (that is find other chapters in the book of which you are an expert) then the conclusion that the book is trash is the only rational one. That's exactly the wrong kind of extrapolation I'm pointing out. If you found a flaw in one chapter, the book can be trash, and the chance of it being trash is definitely higher than without any other data, but whether the absolute chance of it being trash is sufficiently high enough can only be determined based on the nature of the flaw, and even then, the confidence for that conclusion can't be really that high.

ben509 6y ago

The claim isn't really that the book as a whole is necessarily good or bad. It may be expressed as such, but Crichton was talking about the habits of readers. Determining whether a source is trustworthy is an ongoing process: you're seeing one portion where you have some expertise or evidence and then another portion where you don't. You have to extrapolate from what you can validate to whether what you can't is valid. The complaint behind Gell-Mann amnesia is that we're too quick to dismiss clear evidence that a source is untrustworthy, that we have a bias towards trust. To put it in perspective, let's imagine the opposite, call it Crank Awareness. If you see a document and it's laid out poorly, uses weird boldface, all caps, colors and blinking text, you'll, at the very least, get the impression it's written by a crank before you even start reading. > But believing they are always bad is the same logical fallacy as believing they are always good. Again, this comes back to the problem of strict logical reasoning vs. treating trust as a larger process. We have limited resources to evaluate sources, so we're stuck making fallacious generalizations when we need to make a decision based on our sources. What we want in the long run is to incentivize authors to exercise care and diligence. That would indicate we should punish known bad information by deprecating the authors. So another way of reading Gell-Mann amnesia is that readers aren't doing this. They're seeing stuff that they know is wrong and continuing to patronize the publications regardless, thus authors can be untrustworthy and still collect a paycheck.