[HN Gopher] Epistemic Minor Leagues
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Epistemic Minor Leagues
Author : zby
Score : 69 points
Date : 2021-10-27 06:49 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (astralcodexten.substack.com)
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| bobthechef wrote:
| Expertise is not such a cut-and-dry matter. Pretense is more
| rampant than one would like to admit. And what good does it do
| you that someone else knows something? It only becomes YOUR
| knowledge when YOU know it.
|
| In any case, seeking knowledge isn't a race. It's about YOU
| personally trying to grow in wisdom. You don't read Aristotle
| because you'll "beat" someone at philosophy. Millions of people
| have read him before you were even born. You read him so that YOU
| become a better human person. Our lives are a journey of coming
| to know the truth, or at least they ought to be, and that means a
| steady resolution of our initial confusion. This requires the
| cultivation of virtue because vice corrupts motives and moves
| them away from the steadfast pursuit of truth toward lesser
| things in an improper way.
|
| Life isn't about measuring dicks. It's about happiness which is
| about becoming more fully what you are as an individual human
| being. Is the life of a simple carpenter who does the best he can
| worthless because he isn't Michelangelo?
|
| So get rid of your pride and the need to be special and you will
| be set free from countless miseries. Compared to infinity, all
| dicks are small and only the prideful man would fall into despair
| over that realization. He wants fame or adulation from everyone.
| Focus on your own life and the world around you. Be the salt of
| the earth to those around you and profit from their good. Stop
| chasing illusions.
| anonu wrote:
| > It's the feeling that you have something to contribute to the
| great project of figuring out the secret structure of the world,
| and that other people in a shared community of knowledge-seeking
| will appreciate you for it.
|
| QAnon exists, in part, because of the metaverse. The metaverse
| can be viewed as some augmented reality version of of the real
| world. Conversations and ideas that foment and thrive in the
| metaverse eventually make their way back to reality. You can
| (mostly) thank Facebook for that...
| pmdulaney wrote:
| > Their only hopes of being taken seriously as an Expert - a
| position our culture treats as the height of dignity - is to
| create a complete alternate system of knowledge, ungrounded in
| any previous system, where they can end up as an expert on the
| Lizard Papacy.
|
| This is true, but I'm not sure that viewed from the larger
| perspective this is an unalloyed good. Sure we can do without
| crackpots. But do we really want the only voices that matter to
| be those belonging to persons with "PhD" attached to their names?
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I am not sure if the article is presenting it as an unalloyed
| good, but I certainly agree with you.
|
| We need to be thoughtful about how we design "epistemic
| communities." The current approach centered around normal
| institutions/academia I think is flawed (although I do think
| professional scientists are very important).
|
| You can look at some philosophers of science who have thinking
| very much along these lines, ie.
| https://www.liamkofibright.com/research.html
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > politics: that rare area where there are no real experts, and
| it's every man for himself
|
| There are experts, but things are so politicized that everyone
| dislikes them (the acts don't agree with anyone's partisan
| position) and reads what is appealing. I think that was the OP's
| point, but it's a dangerous notion to think we all know politics
| roughly equally well.
|
| Political science can be highly informative and predictive, as
| can research in adjacent fields such as international relations.
| It transforms my understanding of what others are saying (with
| partisans being reliably absurd).
| lordnacho wrote:
| Maybe a better way to put it is politics is an arena where
| every person can have an opinion that's contrary to what is
| common, and still have good reasons (even after we look
| closely) for it being so. We can both believe that the world
| works in a certain way but have differing views on what to do,
| simply from having different values.
|
| For example, we can both think that higher taxes harm business,
| or that higher taxes can be used to equalize opportunities, but
| have differing views on what is good to do.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| I agree, and I think the reason that works, and is necessary,
| is that only we know our very localized situation (often too
| intuitively to articulate or to recognize as not applying to
| everyone else).
| AmericanChopper wrote:
| Political "science" can help you understand politics, but it
| can't endow you with an expert opinion on which policies to
| implement. Prioritising or selecting policy agendas is largely
| an exercise in choosing what to value, and there is no
| scientifically correct perspective on human values.
|
| Also, if you want to implement a democratic process, then the
| goals of your policies should be to align with what people
| want, even if you think people want stupid things. All other
| forms of government are authoritarian, including technocracies
| run by "experts".
| mpalczewski wrote:
| I don't get it.
|
| In what sense does it help you understand? Is it just that
| you can tell a story(non-predictive) about what has happened?
| strulovich wrote:
| Who are some of those experts in your opinion? Sounds like an
| interesting read perhaps.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| The Monkey Cage column at the Washington Post is written by
| political scientists (generally, afaik), and will reference
| others. https://www.washingtonpost.com/monkey-cage/
|
| The Duck of Minerva is a good blog, with contributors who are
| at the level of full professors at leading universities
| https://www.duckofminerva.com/
|
| Political Science Quarterly can be fantastic, though being a
| quarterly, won't be tackling news from the last 24 hours (but
| I think we have enough of that).
|
| For a different perspective, the Lowy Interpreter blog at
| Australian think tank The Lowy Institute, has excellent,
| expert analysis from a often strikingly different
| geopolitical point of view:
| https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter
|
| Other non-partisan think tanks can be a great source. U of
| Pennsylvania has a ranking of them which, while I wouldn't
| take verbatim, can provide a good starting point.
| mpalczewski wrote:
| What makes these people experts?
|
| It looks like some of this is that they are professors, or
| they cite each other, which is rather circular.
|
| Are there testable predictions, or some utility to those
| who aren't political scientists?
| hogFeast wrote:
| I studied politics and history. In my experience, there is also
| a bias towards writing exceptionally partisan things. I used to
| write things that were hedging, and which were summaries of the
| argument. Invariably, these papers scored significantly lower
| than papers which took a position (whether that was accurate or
| not).
|
| Of course, university isn't reality. But my point is that
| people do not find realistic opinions that interesting. Saying
| "I don't know" or "both sides have merit" is sometimes accurate
| but never interesting. Society selects for this.
|
| I also worked in finance which exposes you to a reasonably fast
| feedback loop between opinion and reality. I met people who had
| multi-decade records of crushing it, and they usually had very
| anodyne takes. You come in expecting they have access to some
| higher form of truth...in reality, they are just better at
| seeing what is already there.
|
| You see this, particularly, when a famed investor says the
| market is over-valued. Inevitably, they will get lambasted
| publicly. But you realise that their view is usually one that
| works long-term, that is quantifiable, that uses
| reason...everyone else just wants emotion.
|
| The difference isn't knowledge. You can have huge knowledge,
| you can be rewarded heavily for being right, you can be a media
| "expert"...but if you aren't interested in reality, it doesn't
| matter.
|
| I don't think it is about avoiding having strong views either
| but it has to be strong views, weakly held. With time I think a
| minority of the population realises that some people will have
| the same opinion regardless of what facts are presented to
| them. What is frustrating is that society reproduces so much of
| this nonsense.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| One of the better posts I've read on HN, thank you.
|
| > Saying "I don't know" or "both sides have merit" is
| sometimes accurate but never interesting.
|
| That's fine but IMHO the real work is to go beyond that, to
| the next step. Find a solution, make a contribution, under
| that condition.
| hogFeast wrote:
| Yep, I have been there. Example (sorry to use another
| finance story): the market today is overvalued by any
| logic. Valuation, 0% returns for next ten years. Equity
| risk premium, max 2% real. Contributions that are valued
| most heavily are complex and surprising. If you say the
| market is overvalued when it has gone up 15%/year for a
| decade then people are expecting something very big...not
| some nerd talking about equity risk premia.
|
| I think this is the difference between how humans reason
| emotionally and how humans reason logically.
|
| Finance is a bad example because most people lose it when
| money is involved. But you see this in other areas where it
| is very hard to make a contribution if that contribution
| isn't surprising, controversial, or shocking in some way.
| It has to have emotional valence. This isn't universal.
| Some areas of study don't have that culture, some
| organizations have clear decision-making processes that try
| to stop this...but everyone is prone to emotional
| reasoning.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| This seemed so idealistic and a bit silly when I was a
| kid, but now (especially now) ... If
| you can keep your head when all about you Are
| losing theirs and blaming it on you; If you can
| trust yourself when all men doubt you, But
| make allowance for their doubting too; If you can
| wait and not be tired by waiting, Or, being
| lied about, don't deal in lies, Or, being hated,
| don't give way to hating, And yet don't look
| too good, nor talk too wise; If you can
| dream--and not make dreams your master; If you
| can think--and not make thoughts your aim; If you
| can meet with triumph and disaster And treat
| those two impostors just the same; If you can
| bear to hear the truth you've spoken Twisted
| by knaves to make a trap for fools, Or watch the
| things you gave your life to broken, And stoop
| and build 'em up with wornout tools; If you
| can make one heap of all your winnings And
| risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss, And lose,
| and start again at your beginnings And never
| breathe a word about your loss; If you can force
| your heart and nerve and sinew To serve your
| turn long after they are gone, And so hold on
| when there is nothing in you Except the Will
| which says to them: "Hold on"; If you can
| talk with crowds and keep your virtue, Or walk
| with kings--nor lose the common touch; If neither
| foes nor loving friends can hurt you; If all
| men count with you, but none too much; If you can
| fill the unforgiving minute With sixty seconds'
| worth of distance run-- Yours is the Earth and
| everything that's in it, And--which is more--
| you'll be a Man, my son!
| FFRefresh wrote:
| I am a fan of systems/tools which reward those with better
| models of objective reality and the likely future.
|
| I am intrigued by prediction markets as a way to give
| feedback to people's models of reality and how accurate they
| are in extrapolating trends, and to reward those who are
| better able to predict the future. It's a potential way to
| introduce 'skin in the game', both from a reputational and
| financial perspective.
|
| Is that 'media expert' claiming Country X will be a
| dictatorship in 2 years because their political opposition
| won an election? Define terms and ask them to make a bet, and
| let's see how that plays out.
|
| After awhile, you can start to see people's track records,
| and the skin in the game pressure may incentivize better
| epistemics before making claims.
| hogFeast wrote:
| I don't think prediction markets make sense. The
| information about whether a country will become a
| dictatorship is usually private, and impossible to obtain.
| It isn't like a betting market where the relevant
| information is public.
|
| I probably agree with your aims. I think that systems
| should exist to make better decisions but there is limit
| because no-one can make perfect decisions (and it is
| probably more important to consider robustness at that
| point). I think attempting to reward predictions makes no
| sense, everyone is prone to these biases. I don't think
| rewarding a certain group of people makes that any better.
|
| One part of markets that people often get wrong is that
| sometimes markets are totally wrong. With Enron, the
| information that the company was fraudulent was publicly
| available, and relatively easy to find. But the price for
| the stock was set by people who didn't want to find it.
| Mayweather vs McGregor...crazy odds. In 2012, the US
| prediction market Intrade had wildly inaccurate odds for
| the Presidential election, this was a market that was
| trading hundreds of thousands per day. Markets work most of
| the time, they don't work all the time (I would say
| financial markets are the best evidence of this, you see
| stuff that makes no sense almost all the time because
| investors have such different aims...you think no-one is
| this stupid, then you see it happen in a megacap stock
| worth hundreds of billions, and your perspective on human
| reasoning changes significantly).
| FFRefresh wrote:
| For the record, I don't think prediction markets are
| perfect and solve all problems.
|
| I also don't think solutions/tools should be discarded
| because they are not perfect.
|
| From your examples, it seems like your knock against
| prediction markets are the fact the aggregated
| predictions don't end being correct at times? Of course
| that's going to happen, and I don't necessary see
| instances of the wrong aggregated predictions of a market
| as a bug, but a feature. Human populations are wrong
| about things all the time in the aggregate. What better
| way to get better at decision-making than getting
| feedback on how we are wrong?
|
| My argument for prediction markets was not for generating
| knowledge in the aggregate from all of the individual
| users' predictions. It was centered on the _individual_
| front as a way to reward individuals who are better able
| to predict the future. The uber context in which I was
| commenting was around who should be considered an expert.
| Prediction markets are one potential tool (albeit not
| perfect) to measure individual 's conception of current
| reality and future reality.
| lliamander wrote:
| The point is not that we all know politics equally well.
|
| Thr point is that, in politics, a credentialed expert doesn't
| really have any advantage in predictive power over a reasonably
| well-informed layman.
|
| Statistician and market researcher Jim Manzi made this point
| roughly ten years ago. It's not a knock against the social
| sciences either. The point is that you can't generalize in the
| social sciences the way you can with harder sciences because
| the causal factors are so complex.
| pmyteh wrote:
| For prediction? No. For understanding (some of) the dynamics
| of what is going on? Hopefully. That's what much of our
| discipline is actually aimed at. (Source: am political
| scientist)
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > (Source: am political scientist)
|
| Cool! Any recommendations (beyond what I listed below)?
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29031783
|
| > For prediction? No. For understanding (some of) the
| dynamics of what is going on? Hopefully.
|
| For some reason, it seems to me that social scientists
| undersell themselves (why is that? it seems like they
| almost go along with anti-intellectualism rather than have
| to deal with the conflict). Understanding the dynamics
| leads to better predictions and thus better outcomes; it's
| hard to overlook that mechanism.
| pmyteh wrote:
| A major difficulty is that understanding one part of a
| complex system does not necessarily lead to testable
| predictions about the system as a whole. Take elections,
| for example: we have really good models for voter
| behaviour under different conditions, so can make good
| estimates for how, say, a sitting President's votes will
| vary as a function of employment, or the differential
| effect of various changes on results in states with
| different demographics. But what is the electoral
| consequence (say) of Bill Clinton being impeached?
| There's no real way to know in advance: individual
| political scientists will have intuition, but it's too
| novel a situation with too little existing data for solid
| model building or prediction. And it turns out that
| politics is _rammed full_ of new situations, unexpected
| events, or changes in the environment. How will voting
| patterns in the South change as a result of GOP
| realignment after civil rights? What will happen to the
| British government 's popularity when the Queen dies?
|
| A case in point: a couple of years ago I made an HN
| comment about parliamentary manoeuvring over Brexit and
| the likely outcomes [0]. I am skilled and knowledgeable
| about British parliamentary culture and history, many of
| the subtleties of the Standing Orders (which were
| suddenly relevant), and had been closely following the
| proceedings and thinking hard about the implications. I
| missed the actual outcome completely, by factoring in the
| possibility of no deal, or of different kinds of
| compromise, or of the rebels winning a second referendum.
| But I didn't consider that Johnson could knife Theresa
| May, supplant her as PM _and then successfully sell a
| clearly defective alternative (and 'harder') deal as a
| triumph_. Even though I knew lots about Conservative
| politics, and the strengths of populist rhetoric in
| changing public perceptions. I assumed that if May was
| deposed her successor would be in the same bind. But
| Johnson changed the terms of debate unexpectedly
| successfully and escaped it. My mostly-rationalist
| colleagues basically missed calling it too.
|
| FWIW I'm big on intellect, but I'm also big on epistemic
| modesty. There are _lots_ of things we can show are
| basically true or false (the 'filter bubble' hypothesis
| for online political information has been basically
| debunked, for example) but too many unknowns for our mere
| opinions to be provably correct.
|
| The same is equally or more true of basically everyone
| else, of course, which is why I find the false
| certainties of the newspaper opinion pages so depressing.
|
| [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19372349
| dash2 wrote:
| Anthony Downs just died. His Median Voter Theorem
| organises a lot of understanding about political
| competition. Short version: elections get won in the
| centre.
| hogFeast wrote:
| That is what has always confused me about "prediction
| markets".
|
| The reason why non-experts perform as well as experts is
| because there is a huge level of randomness in actual
| outcomes, and very little information that can help predict
| beyond randomness.
|
| And prediction really isn't the goal in practice, but
| robustness. Even if you were a "superforecaster", you are
| still going to be wrong most of the time. So surely it is
| more important to be robust to outcomes and stop trying to
| predict something that can't be predicted.
|
| (To compare this with large skill gaps to
| expertise...sports betting, these events are random, some
| are more random than others but the gap with expert
| knowledge exists because there is information that exists
| that will help you predict outcomes. That gap doesn't exist
| in politics because there is no real information that can
| help you...it is just totally different, it makes no sense
| to compare them imo).
| FFRefresh wrote:
| I replied on the other post regarding prediction markets.
| But going to reply here as well because you're
| highlighting something I find interesting.
|
| When you use the term 'random' or 'randomness', are you
| using that as a synonym for 'complexity that is difficult
| to understand'? Or something else?
| TeeMassive wrote:
| > Their only hopes of being taken seriously as an Expert - a
| position our culture treats as the height of dignity - is to
| create a complete alternate system of knowledge, ungrounded in
| any previous system, where they can end up as an expert on the
| Lizard Papacy.
|
| I couldn't help but notice the resemblance with how postmodernism
| and critical theory and their derivatives have infiltrated
| Academia.
| dash2 wrote:
| Thomas Hobbes got there first, he called curiosity "a lust of the
| mind".
| jkingsbery wrote:
| I often here the analogy to sports when it comes to expertise.
| And if it often applies, but not always.
|
| Epistemology is simply the study of "the nature, origin, and
| scope of knowledge, epistemic justification, the rationality of
| belief, and various related issues." [1] We all do epistemology,
| all the time, whether we choose to think about it or not. In
| sports, we have minor leagues, where the stakes are lower. As the
| political climate (and the unfortunate affect of things like
| QAnon) demonstrates, the stakes aren't always lower just because
| epistemology is done poorly.
|
| Something similar can be said of rhetoric. I applaud this article
| for not falling a trap we have also seen too often recently, the
| Appeal to Authority [2]. The author judges someone else's
| argument solely on the merits, rather than that person's
| background. To steal the original authors metaphor: Babe Ruth
| still had to go up to the plate and take a swing. Babe Ruth was
| an expert baseball player because he hit a lot of home runs. It
| would bizarre if the opposite were true - that is, if Babe Ruth
| was given a lot of home runs because he was an expert. And yet,
| we have experts that try to dismiss plausible (perhaps likely,
| perhaps unlikely, but nevertheless plausible) scenarios without
| any explanation as to why they choose to do that. [3][4] And it
| is incumbent of all of us in a free society to be able to read
| something presented to us and realize, though we may not be
| experts, even if the conclusion is right, the argument along the
| way isn't.
|
| > My point is we're all engaged in this kind of desperate project
| of trying to feel like we're having new important insights, in a
| world full of people who are much smarter than we are... Partly
| this is all for the greater good... I would argue "intellectual
| exercise" is a better term.
|
| I've come to the conclusion that even if it's not read by many
| people, public professions are still valuable. As an American who
| is generally more "conservative" but also finds Trump abhorrent,
| I wish I had written more random internet posts in the summer of
| 2015 about how, even from a traditional conservative perspective,
| Trump is terrible, for the World, for the US, and for
| Conservatism. Perhaps it would have changed a few people's minds.
| Maybe it wouldn't have changed anyone's minds, but planted a seed
| of doubt in people's blind faith for that man. I'm a complete
| amateur when it comes to all the relevant subjects. Yet, it still
| seems like it would have been a good thing to do.
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology 2.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority 3.
| https://apnews.com/article/who-report-animals-source-covid-1...
| 4. https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-world-news-health-
| scien...
| TruthsIsBad wrote:
| Perhaps the alternative is that if you know anything abrasive
| will be ignored or derailed by others then you'll automatically
| not share knowledge and then you don't learn.
|
| If people who are intelligent can't handle ideas that aren't
| "palatable" to them, what's the fucking purpose of your academy?
| lol. It's like asking atheists to care about your church's rules.
| You're just stupid for not understanding that they aren't
| participating with you any longer.
| jrm4 wrote:
| This rather long article saying nothing (weird, because I love
| his other stuff) reinforces my continually growing belief that
| "general knowledge" is not a particularly clear or useful
| construct, especially beyond a certain threshhold. (This is also
| why A.I. is wildly and absurdly overblown.)
|
| There are groups and pockets of people who believe sets of
| things; some are more robust than others probably because they
| get tested via skin-in-the-game means.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > (weird, because I love his other stuff)
|
| Mind an example? I'm curious, because I so far have not been
| blown away by the writing of the rationalist-adjacent
| subcommunity.
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