8 ms·

Confabulation in the humanities

59 points by diodorus 12y ago

tonyarkles 12y ago
Not sure if the author is around here, but the style sheet on this seems to be broken on an iPad 2 in landscape mode. It seems to be right on the edge of a CSS breakpoint, and flips back and forth between two different layouts every time I scroll. Makes it very very hard to read...
- mdlincoln 12y ago
  blerg, sorry about that! Will fix when I'm done with the dissertation.
  - tonyarkles 12y ago
    Good luck on the dissertation!
pron 12y ago
This is interesting and entertaining, but rather than a warning sign, it is just a good demonstration of the limits of our knowledge. We should not be alarmed that we can only come up with post-facto explanations for the behavior of complex, chaotic systems such as human society, because that is a direct consequence of what they are: complex systems. In fact, we should be alarmed if the opposite were true, and by analyzing current trends, current data, we were able to predict future events. If that were true, then society would be no more than a simple system, completely predictable, whose complete dynamics could possibly be described some closed-form formula.
- tjradcliffe 12y ago
  The only thing we should be alarmed about is people taking those after-the-fact explanations as being anything more than confabulations, because then people might think they actually understand the world, which is a dangerous conceit at the best of times. After-the-fact explanations have almost zero epistemic value. They create no understanding, only a feeling of understanding. Look at the financial press for endless examples of this.
narrator 12y ago
Evolutionary psychology fits this paradigm.
- RodericDay 12y ago
  "You find that people cooperate, you say, ‘Yeah, that contributes to their genes' perpetuating.’ You find that they fight, you say, ‘Sure, that’s obvious, because it means that their genes perpetuate and not somebody else's. In fact, just about anything you find, you can make up some story for it."
  - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
    What's wrong with that, if it works and is correct? What's the point made there?
    - luddypants 12y ago
      The point was probably that this is not scientific. Whatever model you come up with won't really have any predictive power. See arguments against pseudo-science, e.g. Freud and Marxist theories.
      - afarrell 12y ago
        In other words, if your theory can't help you recognize a wrong answer, it can't tell you when you've got the right one.
      - deleted 12y ago
        [deleted]
    - Dewie 12y ago
      The problem is Just-so stories[1] that have no basis in evidence, but can be moulded to sound plausible given any kind of phenomena. So imagine there are two mutually exclusive phenomena - chances are that you could come up with a plausible-sounding, "evolutionary psychology"-story for both scenarios. And how good is a framework if it can plausibly explain any and all phenomena? Useless. This might have more to do with how "evolutionary psychology"-sounding theories are presented on Web fora than how they are used in a more academic setting. You can easily run across participants on Web fora who almost admit to just making up shit on the spot that fit with the phenomena that they are presented with, based on their expert knowledge of Stone Age humans. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-so_story http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-so_story
cubano 12y ago
F.A. Hayek[0] wrote in great depth about this "confabulation" (which he termed Scientism), and, ironically enough, lectured about it directly in his Nobel Prize speech of 1974[1]. "It can hardly be denied that such a demand quite arbitrarily limits the facts which are to be admitted as possible causes of the events which occur in the real world. This view, which is often quite naively accepted as required by scientific procedure, has some rather paradoxical consequences. We know: of course, with regard to the market and similar social structures, a great many facts which we cannot measure and on which indeed we have only some very imprecise and general information. And because the effects of these facts in any particular instance cannot be confirmed by quantitative evidence, they are simply disregarded by those sworn to admit only what they regard as scientific evidence: they thereupon happily proceed on the fiction that the factors which they can measure are the only ones that are relevant." [0] http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/bios/Hayek.html http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/bios/Hayek.html [1] http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/1974/hayek-lecture.html http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/lau... [edits]
- pron 12y ago
  Since "confabulation" is our only option, Hayek warns against disguising it as science -- this is what happens in economics, he says. Most historians, on the other hand, understand the limits of their knowledge, don't try to make predictions (certainly not with the same definitiveness common to many economists), and don't disguise their narratives as physical science. The author of the article under discussion, though, seems to wish history was more like physics, which it just can't be.
  - cubano 12y ago
    I think that was Hayek's exact point...that economics cannot be like physics either, and in fact goes on to postulate that very few of the sciences can and/or should be treated as hard.
  - benbreen 12y ago
    Interesting discussion here. I don't think you're representing the author's point correctly, though, given the larger context of the work he's doing and current debates in the historical field. Here's what he says: "I suppose the point of this post is to articulate my growing concern that we are so damn good at coming up with post-facto historical explanations to contextualize any given observation, that we are particularly susceptible to confabulating these post-facto rationalizations with the idea that we somehow knew the results of this quantitative work already." The implication here, I think, is simply that historians should be open to multiple ways of testing explanations (i.e., combining qualitative and quantitative approaches, if those are available). And in the larger context of debates about digital humanities, he's swatting down the argument that DH simply tells us what we already knew, because if done right it can be used to add a new perspective on existing arguments. The point isn't that history should be science but that "scientific"/quantitative approaches can be used to test the validity of historical claims based on more traditional historical work, like finding manuscripts in archives, doing a close reading of a key text, tracing correspondence networks, tracing the material history of a painting or object, etc. I agree with him. Edited to add: also need to be careful about confusing prediction with explanation. Historians don't predict much, but we certainly try to explain things a lot! I read this post as being exclusively about the latter.
gwern 12y ago
Darn. I thought one of the 2 versions sounded more plausible, and I checked... I was wrong. It was the other.
mdlincoln 12y ago
Author here, in case anyone had questions!
- peterfirefly 12y ago
  Have you read Michael S. Gazzaniga's work on confabulation in split-brain patients? Or this paper on Equality Bias? https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3c4TxciNeJZcGJTVDZwRzNzeGM/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3c4TxciNeJZcGJTVDZwRzNzeGM...
- mjklin 12y ago
  Have you read the books Everything Is Obvious (Once You Know the Answer) by Duncan Watts, or Social Sciences as Sorcery by Stanislav Andreski? Your piece reminded me very much of both.
haddr 12y ago
A very similar example gives Kahneman in his book "Thinking, Fast and Slow" (a great read for those interested in cognitive biases). He calles it "The illusion of understanding". Using an example of Google and a number of books depicting Page and Brinn as role models and geniuses, who leaded the company into its great success by taking always the right decisions. It is of course easy to say so knowing already that Google is a successful company. It would be very hard to tell it 15 years ago. Also when you study the history of Google you learn that there was a lot of luck involved, and you won't learn how to build the next google from those books.
ElectricFeel 12y ago
I hate to say 'I told you so,' but, Geez, this is literally everything I hate about liberal arts majors.. A grad school dissertation on Medieval Printing Techniques of the 1400's?? My senior project was software work for a Fortune 500 STEM company that I interned for as a sophomore & this guy is selling Printing Techniques of the Middle Ages.. what is this world coming to??

59 points by diodorus 12y ago

Not sure if the author is around here, but the style sheet on this seems to be broken on an iPad 2 in landscape mode. It seems to be right on the edge of a CSS breakpoint, and flips back and forth between two different layouts every time I scroll. Makes it very very hard to read...

mdlincoln 12y ago
blerg, sorry about that! Will fix when I'm done with the dissertation.
- tonyarkles 12y ago
  Good luck on the dissertation!

pron 12y ago

This is interesting and entertaining, but rather than a warning sign, it is just a good demonstration of the limits of our knowledge. We should not be alarmed that we can only come up with post-facto explanations for the behavior of complex, chaotic systems such as human society, because that is a direct consequence of what they are: complex systems. In fact, we should be alarmed if the opposite were true, and by analyzing current trends, current data, we were able to predict future events. If that were true, then society would be no more than a simple system, completely predictable, whose complete dynamics could possibly be described some closed-form formula.

tjradcliffe 12y ago
The only thing we should be alarmed about is people taking those after-the-fact explanations as being anything more than confabulations, because then people might think they actually understand the world, which is a dangerous conceit at the best of times. After-the-fact explanations have almost zero epistemic value. They create no understanding, only a feeling of understanding. Look at the financial press for endless examples of this.

narrator 12y ago

Evolutionary psychology fits this paradigm.

RodericDay 12y ago
"You find that people cooperate, you say, ‘Yeah, that contributes to their genes' perpetuating.’ You find that they fight, you say, ‘Sure, that’s obvious, because it means that their genes perpetuate and not somebody else's. In fact, just about anything you find, you can make up some story for it."
- JoeAltmaier 12y ago
  What's wrong with that, if it works and is correct? What's the point made there?
  - luddypants 12y ago
    The point was probably that this is not scientific. Whatever model you come up with won't really have any predictive power. See arguments against pseudo-science, e.g. Freud and Marxist theories.
    - afarrell 12y ago
      In other words, if your theory can't help you recognize a wrong answer, it can't tell you when you've got the right one.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
  - Dewie 12y ago
    The problem is Just-so stories[1] that have no basis in evidence, but can be moulded to sound plausible given any kind of phenomena. So imagine there are two mutually exclusive phenomena - chances are that you could come up with a plausible-sounding, "evolutionary psychology"-story for both scenarios. And how good is a framework if it can plausibly explain any and all phenomena? Useless. This might have more to do with how "evolutionary psychology"-sounding theories are presented on Web fora than how they are used in a more academic setting. You can easily run across participants on Web fora who almost admit to just making up shit on the spot that fit with the phenomena that they are presented with, based on their expert knowledge of Stone Age humans. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-so_story http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-so_story

cubano 12y ago

F.A. Hayek[0] wrote in great depth about this "confabulation" (which he termed Scientism), and, ironically enough, lectured about it directly in his Nobel Prize speech of 1974[1]. "It can hardly be denied that such a demand quite arbitrarily limits the facts which are to be admitted as possible causes of the events which occur in the real world. This view, which is often quite naively accepted as required by scientific procedure, has some rather paradoxical consequences. We know: of course, with regard to the market and similar social structures, a great many facts which we cannot measure and on which indeed we have only some very imprecise and general information. And because the effects of these facts in any particular instance cannot be confirmed by quantitative evidence, they are simply disregarded by those sworn to admit only what they regard as scientific evidence: they thereupon happily proceed on the fiction that the factors which they can measure are the only ones that are relevant." [0] http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/bios/Hayek.html http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/bios/Hayek.html [1] http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/1974/hayek-lecture.html http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/lau... [edits]

pron 12y ago
Since "confabulation" is our only option, Hayek warns against disguising it as science -- this is what happens in economics, he says. Most historians, on the other hand, understand the limits of their knowledge, don't try to make predictions (certainly not with the same definitiveness common to many economists), and don't disguise their narratives as physical science. The author of the article under discussion, though, seems to wish history was more like physics, which it just can't be.
- cubano 12y ago
  I think that was Hayek's exact point...that economics cannot be like physics either, and in fact goes on to postulate that very few of the sciences can and/or should be treated as hard.
- benbreen 12y ago
  Interesting discussion here. I don't think you're representing the author's point correctly, though, given the larger context of the work he's doing and current debates in the historical field. Here's what he says: "I suppose the point of this post is to articulate my growing concern that we are so damn good at coming up with post-facto historical explanations to contextualize any given observation, that we are particularly susceptible to confabulating these post-facto rationalizations with the idea that we somehow knew the results of this quantitative work already." The implication here, I think, is simply that historians should be open to multiple ways of testing explanations (i.e., combining qualitative and quantitative approaches, if those are available). And in the larger context of debates about digital humanities, he's swatting down the argument that DH simply tells us what we already knew, because if done right it can be used to add a new perspective on existing arguments. The point isn't that history should be science but that "scientific"/quantitative approaches can be used to test the validity of historical claims based on more traditional historical work, like finding manuscripts in archives, doing a close reading of a key text, tracing correspondence networks, tracing the material history of a painting or object, etc. I agree with him. Edited to add: also need to be careful about confusing prediction with explanation. Historians don't predict much, but we certainly try to explain things a lot! I read this post as being exclusively about the latter.

gwern 12y ago

Darn. I thought one of the 2 versions sounded more plausible, and I checked... I was wrong. It was the other.

mdlincoln 12y ago

Author here, in case anyone had questions!

peterfirefly 12y ago
Have you read Michael S. Gazzaniga's work on confabulation in split-brain patients? Or this paper on Equality Bias? https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3c4TxciNeJZcGJTVDZwRzNzeGM/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3c4TxciNeJZcGJTVDZwRzNzeGM...
mjklin 12y ago
Have you read the books Everything Is Obvious (Once You Know the Answer) by Duncan Watts, or Social Sciences as Sorcery by Stanislav Andreski? Your piece reminded me very much of both.

haddr 12y ago

A very similar example gives Kahneman in his book "Thinking, Fast and Slow" (a great read for those interested in cognitive biases). He calles it "The illusion of understanding". Using an example of Google and a number of books depicting Page and Brinn as role models and geniuses, who leaded the company into its great success by taking always the right decisions. It is of course easy to say so knowing already that Google is a successful company. It would be very hard to tell it 15 years ago. Also when you study the history of Google you learn that there was a lot of luck involved, and you won't learn how to build the next google from those books.

ElectricFeel 12y ago

I hate to say 'I told you so,' but, Geez, this is literally everything I hate about liberal arts majors.. A grad school dissertation on Medieval Printing Techniques of the 1400's?? My senior project was software work for a Fortune 500 STEM company that I interned for as a sophomore & this guy is selling Printing Techniques of the Middle Ages.. what is this world coming to??