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I don't think "Stories are bad for your intelligence" is the right conclusion here, more like "ideologically motivated thinking is bad for your intelligence". A

I don't think "Stories are bad for your intelligence" is the right conclusion here, more like "ideologically motivated thinking is bad for your intelligence". As another piece of evidence for this I can recall from Superforecasters that the ones who did the worst at forecasting were ideologically motivated people and people with "one big idea".

deleted 3y ago
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qznc 3y ago
Stories make things memorable. That is useful and not bad for intelligence. Simple example: An apple dropped on his head and so he discovered gravity. Story telling is a tool which can be misused to make wrong or bad things memorable.
Fluorescence 3y ago
It's interesting to try and define what good and bad forecasting is. When you consider the outsized calamity of black swans, it is practical to have some diversity of prediction, not unanimity around a single prediction. You don't want to over-value predicting non-extreme events, you need that Israeli 10th man to persuade others of the improbable to ensure your plan is resilient. The insightful ideologue will be right about the intentions of a Hitler... but they also predict a few too many Hitlers.
- martindbp 3y ago
  Sure, but ideologically motivated reasoning will only provide "broken clock" predictions. What good forecasters would do with hard-to-predict events like the pandemic, the next recession or political revolution is to admit ignorance and revert to the base rate (e.g. once a century on average). Truly black swan events are things we don't even know we should try to predict. An example of ideologically motivated reasoning would be "The US is about to collapse because Biden/Trump is president". Unfortunately many if not most people think like this, that's one reason why so few are good at forecasting according to the book.
  - Fluorescence 3y ago
    > will only provide "broken clock" predictions I think it's a bit more than a random prediction, it's more like a heuristic. Imagine the tree of all possibilities and all subsequent possibilities below those etc. It's just too vast to explore. The ideologue is not random a path through the tree but biased in a very human way with pessimistic assumptions about human motivations and behaviour that are sometimes true. A heuristic can be valuable without achieving more truth than fiction, just better than random. > ideologically motivated reasoning would be "The US is about to collapse because Biden/Trump is president" What I have in mind is the ideological forecaster would start with a set of assumptions and try to justify them against the odds e.g. they assume "Biden/Trump is a monster", they adopt the specific mindset of this monster and interpret the known events, which seem entirely innocuous on the surface, as contributing to a larger nefarious strategy and work through a chain of consequences to arrive at a compelling theory that hangs together. It's like exploring many moves ahead in chess without an evidence based goal function justifying continuing down a specific path. A reasonable individual might not presume others are monsters or pursue a line of reasoning so unjustified for so long. The heuristic works because sadly "X is a monster" and "innocuous actions are actually part of a nefarious plan" is sometimes true. I'm essentially defending conspiratorial thinking as a good thing in an adversarial situation so long as it's integrated sanely and not allowed to rule the day alone. If you don't have ideologues of different flavours in your intelligence unit, you might need to create them.
    - martindbp 3y ago
      I think what you're describing is a sort of ensemble. I agree sometimes "conspiratorial" thinking is right, as in the invasion of Ukraine, or Hitler. Then the difficult part becomes how to weight the different world views in this particular time in history. But I agree at the very least you need to be able to simulate the thinking of ideologues in order to understand their thinking and actions. The invasion of Ukraine is a very interesting example where people underestimated how nefarious Putin really was, but if you read his writings on Ukraine, and do a bayesian update after Georgia and Crimea/Donbas the invasion shouldn't have been all that surprising. At least we should have assigned something like 10-15% chance.

deleted 3y ago

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qznc 3y ago

Stories make things memorable. That is useful and not bad for intelligence. Simple example: An apple dropped on his head and so he discovered gravity. Story telling is a tool which can be misused to make wrong or bad things memorable.

Fluorescence 3y ago

It's interesting to try and define what good and bad forecasting is. When you consider the outsized calamity of black swans, it is practical to have some diversity of prediction, not unanimity around a single prediction. You don't want to over-value predicting non-extreme events, you need that Israeli 10th man to persuade others of the improbable to ensure your plan is resilient. The insightful ideologue will be right about the intentions of a Hitler... but they also predict a few too many Hitlers.

martindbp 3y ago
Sure, but ideologically motivated reasoning will only provide "broken clock" predictions. What good forecasters would do with hard-to-predict events like the pandemic, the next recession or political revolution is to admit ignorance and revert to the base rate (e.g. once a century on average). Truly black swan events are things we don't even know we should try to predict. An example of ideologically motivated reasoning would be "The US is about to collapse because Biden/Trump is president". Unfortunately many if not most people think like this, that's one reason why so few are good at forecasting according to the book.
- Fluorescence 3y ago
  > will only provide "broken clock" predictions I think it's a bit more than a random prediction, it's more like a heuristic. Imagine the tree of all possibilities and all subsequent possibilities below those etc. It's just too vast to explore. The ideologue is not random a path through the tree but biased in a very human way with pessimistic assumptions about human motivations and behaviour that are sometimes true. A heuristic can be valuable without achieving more truth than fiction, just better than random. > ideologically motivated reasoning would be "The US is about to collapse because Biden/Trump is president" What I have in mind is the ideological forecaster would start with a set of assumptions and try to justify them against the odds e.g. they assume "Biden/Trump is a monster", they adopt the specific mindset of this monster and interpret the known events, which seem entirely innocuous on the surface, as contributing to a larger nefarious strategy and work through a chain of consequences to arrive at a compelling theory that hangs together. It's like exploring many moves ahead in chess without an evidence based goal function justifying continuing down a specific path. A reasonable individual might not presume others are monsters or pursue a line of reasoning so unjustified for so long. The heuristic works because sadly "X is a monster" and "innocuous actions are actually part of a nefarious plan" is sometimes true. I'm essentially defending conspiratorial thinking as a good thing in an adversarial situation so long as it's integrated sanely and not allowed to rule the day alone. If you don't have ideologues of different flavours in your intelligence unit, you might need to create them.
  - martindbp 3y ago
    I think what you're describing is a sort of ensemble. I agree sometimes "conspiratorial" thinking is right, as in the invasion of Ukraine, or Hitler. Then the difficult part becomes how to weight the different world views in this particular time in history. But I agree at the very least you need to be able to simulate the thinking of ideologues in order to understand their thinking and actions. The invasion of Ukraine is a very interesting example where people underestimated how nefarious Putin really was, but if you read his writings on Ukraine, and do a bayesian update after Georgia and Crimea/Donbas the invasion shouldn't have been all that surprising. At least we should have assigned something like 10-15% chance.