[HN Gopher] Epistemic Learned Helplessness (2019)
___________________________________________________________________
Epistemic Learned Helplessness (2019)
Author : gHeadphone
Score : 186 points
Date : 2024-01-12 14:49 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (slatestarcodex.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (slatestarcodex.com)
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Philosophy is so hard that most people don't ever start
|
| In fact in my experience people who can push past this
| "epistemological learned helplessness" also tend to have
| significant problems with day to day living
|
| In a manner of speaking, I boil this down to how often you spend
| in different levels of thinking. I'm gonna go ahead and share a
| back-and-forth chat I had with ChatGPT on this precise topic the
| other day:
|
| https://chat.openai.com/share/03302643-5efc-41e0-a681-6d1699...
|
| To me it boils down to an intersection of raw IQ and experience.
| If you're generally "thinking fast" in Kahneman-language then
| that would be "type1" thinking that most people do most of the
| day.
|
| Much beyond that and thinking becomes exponentially harder with
| every level of "simulation" your brain has to do with more
| complex, multi variable simulations walking up the abstraction
| stack.
|
| The downside to that, however, is that if you don't have accurate
| perceptions, or there are flaws in reasoning, then you come to
| conclusions that don't fit because your perceptions are off. This
| is the other side of genius, which is typically some kind of very
| iconoclastic position on something political social or personal.
|
| I think it fits with what the author said to conclude:
|
| " It seems to me that although these people are more likely to
| become terrorists or Velikovskians or homeopaths, they're also
| the only people who can figure out if something basic and
| unquestionable is wrong, and make this possibility well-known
| enough that normal people start becoming willing to consider it."
|
| Most people however have neither the IQ nor the experience to
| actually have coherence for almost anything at the 4th or 5th
| order.
|
| Usually only in one area of their life like work or a hobby do
| anyone actually have the attention and focus to get to that level
| of coherency - and worldwide that's extremely rare as most people
| aren't secure enough to have the time and resources to gain the
| experience needed.
| bongripper wrote:
| Broke: Reading books or attending classes on philosophy and
| cognitive science to learn from hundreds of years of combined
| research from the world's greatest minds.
|
| Woke: Pulling up a new theory of intelligence and for why
| everyone else is too damn stupid for "fourth order thinking"
| out of thin air, talking to it about an LLM and deeming it so
| important it has to be shared with an online community.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| What would indicate that the former is not also true?
| jfengel wrote:
| I have a hard time engaging deeply with philosophy. I've tried
| to get a good overview, but whenever I read the real scholarly
| work I find an assumption I hate on page 3 and cannot bear to
| engage with that assumption for a thousand further pages of
| close reading.
|
| I don't want to be the philosophical equivalent of those guys
| who pester physics professors with "I've unified gravity with
| quantum mechanics and I just need you to add the math". But I
| can't pick up Kant or Hegel or Sartre without screaming.
| riversflow wrote:
| > I can't pick up Kant or Hegele or Sartre
|
| Ah, there's your problem, at least in my opinion/experience.
| You have to start at the beginning, read Plato's Republic
| followed by Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. When you read
| them don't take them as fact but as a "living" historical
| foundation that will help you set the stage for reading
| increasingly more recent books.
| jfengel wrote:
| That's part of it. I feel like I can't even start without
| reproducing 2,000 years of back work. I know it's not the
| same as science, but if someone said "you can't do basic
| mechanics without reading Archimedes in the original
| Greek", I'd laugh at them.
| Vecr wrote:
| What do you think about _Good and Real_ by Gary L. Drescher?
| I wrote about it at
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38789146, so it's not
| perfect, but I haven't found anything that is.
| bongripper wrote:
| >I don't think I'm overselling myself too much to expect that I
| could argue circles around the average uneducated person. Like I
| mean that on most topics, I could demolish their position and
| make them look like an idiot. Reduce them to some form of "Look,
| everything you say fits together and I can't explain why you're
| wrong, I just know you are!" Or, more plausibly, "Shut up I don't
| want to talk about this!"
|
| > And there are people who can argue circles around me. Maybe not
| on every topic, but on topics where they are experts and have
| spent their whole lives honing their arguments.
|
| He is admitting he might lose an argument against experts with
| decades worth of experience in their topic (most humble
| rationalist.)
| emmelaich wrote:
| Not sure if your comment is positive or sarcastic. Are you
| familiar with Scott Alexander's writings?
| bongripper wrote:
| Yeah, I read some of his essays. I like some of the ones
| where he stayed in his area of expertise, like "Ontology Of
| Psychiatric Conditions: Taxometrics" (
| https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/ontology-of-psychiatric-
| con...). The other ones I've read are big fancy word salad
| unfortunately. Can you recommend others like the series I
| linked above?
| cortesoft wrote:
| The one I enjoy the most is
|
| https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-
| ma...
| helicalmix wrote:
| If anything, Scott is underselling himself, and could probably
| argue circles against the average educated person.
|
| Debates are the rationalists bread and butter, and you should
| expect them to be better at you the same way you would expect a
| trained boxer to beat you in a fistfight.
| bannedbybros wrote:
| lmao
| bitzun wrote:
| I've been to dozens of rationalist meetups (I don't know
| why), people are constantly talking out of their ass while
| constantly referencing contrived rhetorical devices. A lot of
| "just asking questions", confidently asserting solutions to
| e.g. palestine, cartels, etc. and contending with things TV
| pundits say.
|
| I like some of Scott Alexander's writing, but "rationalists"
| in general online or IRL have not been very impressive to me.
| helicalmix wrote:
| Haha yeah, I've been to rationalist meetups too, and have
| come to the same conclusion that I don't like them very
| much. Too much IQ stroking for my tastes.
|
| Scott specifically though, has an established history of
| thinking through arguments that I find much better than
| most, and I still think someone who trains at this stuff
| will do better.
|
| To extend my analogy a little further from before, if you
| go to a boxing gym or boxing enthusiast meetup, there will
| be plenty of people there who like the idea of fighting,
| but don't know how to fight. That doesn't mean that a
| trained boxer still won't be tough in the ring though.
| staticman2 wrote:
| With boxing you know who won because the judges say so.
| If Scott argues something at a party, and the other
| person says "I don't know why you are wrong but you are."
| Who is to say who "won"? Scott comes away thinking he's
| an amazing thinker. The other person comes away thinking
| he is a contrarian good at inventing plausible sounding
| nonsense. Who won here?
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| I think part of the trouble many here are having is that
| they don't even understand why Scott goes to the party,
| or argues, or wants to convince people of his arguments.
|
| Surely, if no one reading my comment here ever agrees
| with me, my life doesn't change for the worse at all. And
| if people do agree with me, again, my life doesn't change
| for the better. I'm mostly here to learn from you people,
| you sometimes say interesting things I am unaware of, or
| introduce interesting perspectives I might not have seen
| for myself.
|
| I have noticed among humans though, that you argue and
| debate like this, because you're basically monkeys and
| monkeys do the social monkey thing. You're trying to
| achieve higher status by climbing above the other
| monkeys, whose status will lower (if only a little). This
| is not as entertaining as violent fights, but much less
| risky (at least in some cultures). You're posturing.
|
| It has little appeal to me. I am unable to determine if
| it holds appeal for the rest of you, or if you just can't
| help yourselves.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Consider the idea that some people feel that they benefit
| internally from having the experience of becoming less
| wrong than they were at some earlier time.
|
| There are many ways of attempting to become less wrong,
| and without doubt many of those who follow those ways
| have other motives. But I do think that there is room for
| people for whom there is an intrinsic motivation in
| seeking out the experience of discovering that what they
| used to think is less correct than something they've just
| been introduced to.
| naasking wrote:
| > Consider the idea that some people feel that they
| benefit internally from having the experience of becoming
| less wrong than they were at some earlier time.
|
| And helping others become less wrong by sharing one's
| perspective that was shaped by experience and accumulated
| knowledge.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> Scott specifically though, has an established history
| of thinking through arguments that I find much better
| than most_
|
| He has an established history of _writing down detailed
| articles_ about arguments, yes.
|
| Unfortunately, a significant number of his articles
| contain schoolboy errors that anyone who wants to claim
| they are better at thinking through arguments than the
| average person should never have made.
|
| I'll mention just one such article:
|
| http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/12/01/empireforest-fire/
|
| Scott says:
|
| "...democratic nations, like the US and UK, which have
| gone three hundred or so years with only the tiniest
| traces of state-sponsored violence (and those traces,
| like the camps for the Japanese during WWII, have not
| come from the Left)."
|
| The two obvious, egregious schoolboy errors here are:
|
| (1) Don't wars count as "state-sponsored violence"? The
| US and UK certainly haven't gone three hundred years
| without wars. And some of those wars were civil wars, so
| even the lame excuse of "well, wars are violence, but not
| against the state's own people" doesn't count.
|
| And even if we let that pass, what about the US's
| treatment of Native Americans? What about the UK's
| treatment of Ireland? And so on. To say that the US and
| UK have gone three hundred years with "only the tiniest
| traces of state-sponsored violence" shows a level of
| historical ignorance that is just staggering.
|
| (2) But even if we let _all_ of the above pass: doesn 't
| Scott know that the President who interned Japanese
| citizens in WWII was from the Left?
| digital-cygnet wrote:
| While Scott does make errors, I've found he works hard to
| avoid making them and forthright when he does (e.g., not
| everyone has a Mistakes page in the main navigation bar
| of their site[1])
|
| What you're missing in your example is that, in context,
| the state-sponsored violence he's talking about is
| "against one's own people" (e.g., he also refers to it as
| a "reign of terror" a few times, like those of
| Robespierre, Stalin, Pol Pot, etc). I think there's a
| difference of kind between say the 19th century US's
| (awful) treatment of Native Americans (who were
| explicitly treated as "other" very consistently) and
| Stalin's (also awful) dekulakization (in which one-time
| typical members of Russian society were declared enemies
| of the state and purged).
|
| So his point isn't that the UK and US have done no wrong,
| it's that despite having democratic systems for centuries
| that haven't gone through _the kind of reign of terror
| that Scott 's interlocutors claim they should have_
|
| [1] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/mistakes
| pdonis wrote:
| _> he works hard to avoid making them_
|
| He does so when he sees that there is a potential mistake
| to be made, yes. But he doesn't seem to me to work hard
| at all at questioning things that he appears to think are
| too obvious to need questioning. And yet those things are
| where he makes the egregious mistakes.
|
| _> forthright when he does_
|
| Yes, I agree with this: once he recognizes he's made a
| mistake, he's much better than most at acknowledging it.
|
| _> What you 're missing in your example is that, in
| context, the state-sponsored violence he's talking about
| is "against one's own people"_
|
| I don't buy the hairsplitting distinction he's making
| there, but even leaving that aside, I already addressed
| this point in my post. The UK fought a war against its
| own people in the American Revolution. The US fought a
| war against its own people in the US Civil War. The US
| fought against Native Americans. The UK fought against
| Ireland. And so on.
|
| _> I think there 's a difference of kind_
|
| I think this is even more of a hairsplitting distinction
| that I don't buy. But again, leaving that aside, if Scott
| wanted to make an _argument_ for such a difference in
| kind, he should have made one. Just taking it as so
| obvious as not to need any argument is not justified. And
| the need for making such an argument doesn 't even seem
| to be on Scott's radar. I find that either astoundingly
| obtuse, or astoundingly disingenuous.
| pdonis wrote:
| Btw, I noticed another egregious error: "France, where a
| reign of terror five years after the Bourbon monarchy is
| clearly contrasted with a hundred fifty terror-free years
| since it became democratic in 1870." Um, what? France is
| now on its _Fifth_ republic, and the transitions haven 't
| always been peaceful. Not to mention Indochina, Algeria
| (France's own leaders explicitly described what the
| French did to subdue Algeria as "terrorism"), etc. And
| many of the people who were terrorized in Algeria were
| French citizens.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> haven 't gone through the kind of reign of terror that
| Scott's interlocutors claim they should have_
|
| I'll comment on this separately because it goes deeper
| into the central claim of the arrticle. If you're going
| to make _this_ claim, you need to ask whether the UK and
| US have actually avoided such things, or merely made sure
| they happened in other countries instead.
|
| The US under Woodrow Wilson enabled the Soviet Union to
| exist by failing to support the Kerensky government, even
| though the US had troops in the area, and by discouraging
| the other allied powers from helping on the grounds that
| everybody was already too exhausted after four years of
| war. (Not to mention that Communism wasn't of Russian
| origin; it was _exported_ to Russia by American and
| British intellectuals, such as Jack Reed. And one of
| their reasons for doing so was that Communism was
| supposed to be more "democratic".)
|
| The US, UK, and France created the conditions for the
| Nazis to take power in Germany by imposing such harsh
| terms in the Treaty of Versailles (terms which were
| nothing like what the Armistice had implicitly promised).
|
| The UK under Chamberlain, along with France, enabled
| Hitler's Germany to conquer Eastern Europe by pursuing a
| policy of appeasement.
|
| The US under FDR allowed Stalin to take over all of
| Eastern Europe at the end of WW II (which, btw, made WW
| II a failure in Europe since the stated objective was to
| free Eastern Europe from tyranny, and Stalin by any
| measure was a worse tyrant than Hitler) because FDR
| wanted to suck up to Stalin and be his friend. (For
| example, read the historical book _Stalin 's War_.) And
| even before that, FDR and his administration (and the
| press, such as the New York Times) systematically lied to
| the American people about the true nature of Stalin's
| regime, which was well known to the US government (and to
| reporters who were there) in the 1930s. If the American
| people had known what was actually happening in Stalin's
| Russia, they would never have agreed to having the USSR
| as an ally in WW II or allowing the USSR to take over
| Eastern Europe.
|
| The US allowed Mao and his Communists to take over China
| by withdrawing support for Chiang Kai-Shek. If the US had
| supported Chiang, the entire country of China would have
| a government that's basically the government Taiwan has
| now (since Taiwan is where Chiang and his supporters went
| when Mao drove them out of China). Imagine how much
| better the geopolitical situation would be if that were
| the case.
|
| Sure, if you want to make hairsplitting distinctions,
| none of these counted as "state-sponsored violence"
| against the people of the US or UK. But Scott's central
| claim in the article is that it is repressive monarchy,
| not "democracy", that causes reigns of terror. Before
| making such a claim and exonerating "democracies", one
| should at least examine the possibility that the
| "democracies" actually _enabled_ the reigns of terror.
| And when you examine that claim historically, you find
| that, yep, "democracies" were doing exactly that.
| wharvle wrote:
| I think you'd have to make some outlandish claims if you
| wanted to connect most of the material you're trying to
| bring in _to the direct topic of this piece_. Re-read the
| pieces Scott is responding to if you want to see what I
| mean--the topic of this piece is fairly narrow, and most
| of what you 're proposing to bring in is non-sequitur
| without some pretty wild connective tissue added, which
| connective tissue I doubt you'd want to try to defend.
| Stuff like "leftward-trending liberal democracies tend to
| become more and more permissive of egregious domestic
| political violence _in other countries_ over time " would
| be the minimum to make any kind of even oblique sort-of
| connection to the actual topic of the piece, and...
| surely not, right?
| pdonis wrote:
| _> I think you 'd have to make some outlandish claims if
| you wanted to connect most of the material you're trying
| to bring in to the direct topic of this piece._
|
| I disagree. See the other comment I just posted upthread
| about what happens when you compare the actual historical
| events in the cases Scott cites to the two models he
| describes, the "Reactionary model" and his "alternate
| model". The fact that the particular "liberal
| democracies" Scott references, the US and UK, do their
| "state-sponsored violence" by proxy instead of directly
| is not a coincidence: it is what _allows_ those countries
| to claim that they are "liberal democracies" and don't
| have "state-sponsored violence" for the benefit of their
| voters, while blaming those "repressive regimes" for all
| of the mayhem in the world--when in fact the "liberal
| democracies" themselves are just as much to blame.
|
| _> Stuff like "leftward-trending liberal democracies
| tend to become more and more permissive of egregious
| domestic political violence in other countries over
| time"_
|
| While I think this is actually true (the US has caused
| far more mischief recently in the name of "spreading
| democracy" than it did in the 19th century, for example),
| it is not the argument I was making. The argument I was
| making is simpler than that, and is summarized above.
| wharvle wrote:
| But the argument you'd prefer to focus on isn't connected
| to the topic in Scott's piece, because Scott's writing to
| address specific claims with predictive power (as in: we
| can "replay the tapes" of history and see if what we'd
| expect to see, if they're true, is evident--and they're
| strong and confident claims, so we'd expect it to be
| _pretty clear_ if it is) in a couple other pieces, to
| which pieces the argument you want to make _also_ isn 't
| connected.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> Scott 's writing to address specific claims with
| predictive power_
|
| Which his model _does not have_. That was the point of
| the post of mine upthread that I referred you to. The
| actual cases he cites (French Revolution, Russian
| Revolution, Chinese Revolution) are a much better match
| for the Reactionary model (though with a caveat that I
| gave in my upthread post--the final "monarchy" step in
| these cases, e.g., Putin's Russia, is not an improvement)
| than they are for his alternate model. (His justification
| for his alternate model matching the Russian Revolution
| better is that Khruschev and Gorbachev were "more mellow"
| than Stalin, but step 6 of his alternate model says that
| the government "does pretty okay", which was not true of
| Gorbachev's USSR any more than it was of Khruschev's--not
| to mention Putin's Russia, as I said above.)
|
| So _why_ is Scott so confident of his alternate model, if
| it actually is _worse_ , on net, than the Reactionary
| model he criticizes? Because he fails to realize that the
| US and UK (and other countries in the British
| Commonwealth like Canada and Australia) are _not_ the
| historical norm, but are historical outliers. They have
| managed to settle into "liberal democracy" which might
| be "mellow" and doing "pretty okay" at home only by
| exporting all of the "state-sponsored violence"
| elsewhere, where their voters can ignore it and their
| politicians can pretend it's the fault of those other
| "repressive regimes".
|
| In other words, the egregious historical errors Scott
| makes in this article, which was what I originally called
| out in my first post in this discussion, _are_ closely
| connected to the main point of his article: he is only
| able to even entertain that point, much less write an
| entire article about it, because of the false historical
| narrative he has.
|
| Here's another example, where Scott restates the
| article's central claim (from which its title is taken):
|
| "A monarch who voluntarily relaxes their power before
| being forced to do so by the situation - like the
| constitutional monarchs of Europe or the King of Thailand
| - is performing a controlled burn, destroying the
| overgrowth that would otherwise cause a fire and skipping
| directly from 1 to 6."
|
| Tell that to Tsar Nicholas II, who voluntarily abdicated
| when his high officials convinced him that it was for the
| good of the country. Russia not only did not "skip
| directly" from Scott's 1 to 6, it never reached his 6 at
| all (see above). Since this was one of the examples Scott
| explicitly chose, you'd expect him to at least _check_ to
| see whether the actual historical facts matched his
| narrative.
| wharvle wrote:
| The claims he's addressing are, boiled down:
|
| 1) That leftist movements inevitably become more prone to
| violence (purges, genocide, violent repression of
| opponents in general, "reigns of terror") over time, and
|
| 2) Democracies have a strong-bordering-on-inescapable
| tendency to incubate such leftist movements, and to grow
| more leftist over time.
|
| What we should expect to see, then:
|
| 1) Radical, violent leftist movements that gain power get
| ever-more violent over time.
|
| 2) Democracies become more unstable and prone to those
| specific sorts of violence, over time, and this unabated
| increase pushes ever closer to crisis points .
|
| What we see instead is:
|
| 1) The worst leftist violence tends to be immediately
| preceded by authoritarian governments (which is what
| these fringe folks Scott's responding to _want more of_
| --this is a very specific and out-there movement making
| very specific and out-there claims, not the entire field
| of criticism of leftism or democracy), rather than to be
| preceded by democracy; to reach their fever-pitch very
| quickly; and to _cool off_ over time rather than doing
| what we 'd expect based on what was claimed to be true,
| which would be for them to typically get worse the more
| time passed.
|
| 2) Meanwhile, democracies seem... fairly stable,
| actually, without a clear, inevitably-trending-upward
| trend line on leftist-induced violence and chaos, or what
| have you. Fluctuating, sure, but where's the trend line
| for _specifically_ that? Where are the ones ending in
| leftist reigns of terror? All of them are _supposed to
| be_ heading toward a fever-pitch of leftist purges and
| genocide. Like, _that specific thing_ is what was
| claimed. Does it look that way? LOL no.
|
| I think what's key to following this is that the thing
| he's arguing against is a _pretty fringe_ political view.
| He 's not addressing some more-tame, more-mainstream
| criticism or model-for-the-development of either the
| left, or democracies, that might be stronger. He's trying
| to suss out whether the above, specifically, appears to
| describe actual, observable tendencies of leftism and
| democracies in the real world.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> The claims he 's addressing are, boiled down_
|
| As I said in my post upthread that I referred to, I am
| not arguing _for_ the claims that Scott is arguing
| against. (I do say that Scott 's "Reactionary model" is a
| better historical fit to the cases he cites, but only
| with the key caveat I gave about the final step, and that
| caveat directly _opposes_ the claims that Scott 's
| "reactionaries" make based on that model.)
|
| I am arguing _against_ the claims that _Scott_ is making
| about his "alternate model". His article is not just
| rebutting his version of "Reactionary". He is making
| claims of his own. Those are what I am addressing. I have
| already explicitly quoted claims that he makes that are
| historically false. Those claims are what support his
| "alternate model", which his article is arguing for.
| pdonis wrote:
| Your claim 2) does not imply your "expect to see" 2).
| Why? Because democracies don't have to incubate leftist
| movements _in their own country_. They can incubate them
| elsewhere. Which, indeed, they do, as I have said.
|
| This, in itself, is not an argument _for_ the
| "reactionary" claims Scott is arguing against, for
| reasons I have already given. But it _is_ an argument
| _against_ Scott 's "alternate model".
|
| Also, democracies can grow more leftist over time (which,
| I would argue, they have) without becoming internally
| unstable, as long as a majority of voters continue to
| vote for policies that move further and further left.
| Which I think is a fair description of what has happened
| in "democracies" over the past century or more. Whether
| this tendency can continue indefinitely is a different
| question.
| wharvle wrote:
| These are interesting claims and points, perhaps, but
| remain disconnected from the original material. In
| particular:
|
| > They can incubate them elsewhere. Which, indeed, they
| do, as I have said.
|
| This needs an _immense_ amount of development to _maybe_
| qualify as both connected-enough to this topic to belong
| in Scott 's piece, and a strong enough claim to be worth
| either explaining and refuting, or adopting and
| defending. You're claiming that things like declining to
| prosecute a war against the USSR after WWII is an example
| of an action that acted as an outlet for what would
| otherwise have become domestic US leftist political
| violence in the US. There are, like, _several_ things
| about that, and your other examples, that need to be
| filled in before it might be clear that makes any sense
| at all, _plus_ some kind of pattern of this kind of thing
| increasing over time needs to be established that can 't
| easily be explained by other, more-straightforward
| factors. Notably an awful lot of these examples are
| _failures_ to act--what 's that about? How's that an
| outlet for a kind of "energy" that would otherwise push
| the US closer to a reign of terror? Why should we think
| that sort of thing can act as such an outlet? What's the
| _connection_ between those things? I see none whatsoever
| --it _is not_ obvious this should be entertained as a
| relevant and strong line of inquiry.
|
| > Also, democracies can grow more leftist over time
| (which, I would argue, they have) without becoming
| internally unstable, as long as a majority of voters
| continue to vote for policies that move further and
| further left.
|
| Maybe! But it doesn't appear to make them ever-more
| violent _in the specific way in question_. The real
| events and trends we have before us really don 't appear
| to fit--not to fail to fit _your_ claims, but by the
| claims made by the folks Scott wrote the piece to
| address. (This isn 't me arguing against you--I follow
| that you do get that what you're aiming at is Scott's
| alternative model, not that you're arguing in support of
| the Reactionaries)
|
| You have proposed some reasons different from Scott's
| that this may be the case, and fault him for not
| addressing your proposed reasons, but it remains unclear
| to me that there's a strong line of argument there,
| specifically as it relates to the topic at hand. It's not
| clear to me that he should have brought it up, or that it
| makes his argument weaker that he did not, let alone that
| it's part of some set of "schoolboy mistakes" to have not
| done so.
|
| What I don't find any of this back-and-forth convincing
| about, is that this piece of Scott's is in error for
| failing to address this stuff. I definitely am not
| convinced that failing to entertain (or even mention)
| some kind of, "the 'temperature' of US leftist domestic
| political violence has, perhaps, remained cool only
| because we did stuff like not do much to help Chiang Kai-
| shek" explanation, constitutes an elementary error.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> haven 't gone through the kind of reign of terror that
| Scott's interlocutors claim they should have_
|
| There's another point about this as well. Scott claims in
| the article that his "alternate model" makes better
| predictions than his "Reactionary model" (which is
| something of a straw man, but let that pass). But if we
| look at the cases he cites, here is how they actually
| stack up against the models:
|
| French Revolution: Ended up with Napoleon taking power as
| Emperor, i.e., a monarch. Sure looks more like the
| Reactionary model to me.
|
| Russian Revolution: While the USSR did end up falling
| apart of its own weight after decades of terror gradually
| morphing into somewhat less terrifying bureaucracy, what
| has happened to Russia since looks more like "repressive
| monarchy" than "government mellows out and does pretty
| okay".
|
| Chinese Revolution: I suppose that the fact that the
| Chinese Communist Party has adopted some features of
| capitalism in order to allow the country to actually have
| some economic growth might count as a sort of "mellowing
| out", but it would still be very hard to make a case that
| China's government is closer to "doing pretty okay" than
| it is to "strong repressive monarchy".
|
| In other words, even if we agree that the US and UK have
| reached Step 6 of Scott's "alternate model",
| historically, those countries (and other countries in the
| British Commonwealth, like Canada and Australia) are the
| _only_ cases where that has happened. Historically,
| reigns of terror brought on by repressive regimes have in
| all other cases led to new repressive regimes.
|
| (Btw, this is not to say that the Reactionary model's
| claim that the new monarchy in its last step is an
| improvement, is correct. The actual historical facts are
| that the new repressive regimes are often _worse_ than
| the old ones.)
| hindsightbias wrote:
| > the Left?
|
| You mean the GOPs modern definition of a leftist, or the
| vast majority of the times definition of a leftist?
|
| https://encyclopedia.densho.org/Norman_Thomas/
| pdonis wrote:
| The Democratic party in the US, at least since Woodrow
| Wilson, has been on the Left. I don't think that is a
| matter of any serious dispute.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| It's a matter of very serious dispute if you were to read
| people who are actually on the left, or who live outside
| the USA.
|
| The stated policies of the US Democratic Party barely
| correspond to those of leftist parties worldwide. Their
| actual policies when in power are even further from those
| of leftist parties worldwide.
|
| So .. are they left of the US Republican Party? No
| question. Are they "on the left" in any broader sense?
| That depends very much on your conception of the nature
| and scope of the political space. For most people in most
| parts of the world, the US Democratic Party is a
| completely centrist party that would never be termed
| "leftist".
| hindsightbias wrote:
| Americans have little knowledge of their history, can't
| imagine an era when there were actual socialists,
| marxists, communists, fascists and literal nazis in
| uniforms holding conventions in NYC.
|
| All choices must be binary.
| helicalmix wrote:
| Have you considered that it's possible that both you and
| Scott are particular good at reasoning, and it's everyone
| else that is much worse at this stuff?
|
| You're pointing out a bunch of errors, but it's not clear
| to me that they're schoolboy errors (i.e. errors a
| schoolboy wouldn't have made). I would also venture to
| guess that the average educated person would make much
| more egregious mistakes.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> it 's not clear to me that they're schoolboy errors
| (i.e. errors a schoolboy wouldn't have made)_
|
| If this is the case, IMO it's more a reflection of the
| awfulness of the schooling in our time than anything
| else. No schoolboy in the US of a century ago would have
| made such egregious historical errors, because they would
| have been taught some actual history instead of what
| students in the US today get taught.
| helicalmix wrote:
| My tongue in cheek response is that you are correct,
| because a century ago, WWII didn't happen yet.
|
| Can you provably demonstrate that education quality was
| better a century ago? I'm not outright trying to refute
| you, so much as I have a belief that people tend to
| overstate the "good old days", so I usually prefer more
| concrete data points.
| naasking wrote:
| > To say that the US and UK have gone three hundred years
| with "only the tiniest traces of state-sponsored
| violence" shows a level of historical ignorance that is
| just staggering
|
| Scott is not ignorant, therefore it seems more plausible
| that you should reconsider whether Scott is making the
| point that you think he's making.
| wharvle wrote:
| My current hot take, as a longtime casual outside observer
| of the movement, is that the Rationalism movement is
| basically just Mensa with no membership requirements.
|
| And if you know Mensa's reputation....
| nerpderp82 wrote:
| Debates aren't about arriving at the truth. They are
| rhetorical combat to 'win' an argument. Most people don't
| understand that.
| 0xdeadbeefbabe wrote:
| It's funny he says circles so much.
| Smaug123 wrote:
| What, twice, in an "I can do X to Y, you can do X to me"
| structure?
| peppermint_gum wrote:
| Being an expert doesn't necessarily make you a good debater.
| Debates aren't about who's "right", they're about who has made
| a more convincing argument.
|
| The article used alternative history cranks as an example of
| someone good at conjuring up seemingly convincing arguments,
| despite being pretty much the opposite of an expert.
| caditinpiscinam wrote:
| The 10 Principles of Rationality:
|
| 1. Your beliefs and assumptions are facts and logic; other
| people's beliefs and assumptions are emotions and biases
|
| 2. If someone describes an experience you can't relate to, it's
| an anomaly and you should ignore it
|
| 3. You know more than other people (except for third-parties
| who agree with you: they are an unquestionable authorities)
|
| 4. Never engage with issues in the context of real events; only
| examine issues in contrived, hypothetical scenarios
|
| 5. Avoid debates with real people; instead, make up imaginary
| people and argue against the make-believe opinions you give
| them
|
| 6. If you do debate a real person, your primary goal is to make
| them look foolish (not to change their mind, or yours)
|
| 7. Your understanding of other people's feelings and beliefs is
| more accurate and nuanced than their own
|
| 8. Your wild guesses and baseless estimates are valid
| statistical data
|
| 9. It's ok to bend the truth when necessary to prove a point
|
| 10. If someone disagrees with you, it's because they're less
| rational than you
|
| The 10 Decrees of Rationality:
|
| 1. A person's wealth is a direct measurement of their
| contribution to society
|
| 2. The best way to help people is by getting rich as fast as
| possible (it doesn't matter how)
|
| 3. When helping people, it's best to ignore their input and
| feedback (if they had sound judgement then they wouldn't need
| help)
|
| 4. When someone does something good, they're probably secretly
| doing it for terrible reasons
|
| 5. When rich people do something terrible, they're probably
| secretly doing it for good reasons
|
| 6. Believing in your favorite unproven conspiracy doesn't make
| you a "conspiracy theorist"
|
| 7. Stereotypes are based in truth, except for the ones that you
| find personally offensive
|
| 8. When people say your research is bogus, it means your
| research is really so profound that they're scared of its
| implications
|
| 9. Super-intelligent AI is the greatest threat to humanity
|
| 10. Capitalism is a natural, fair, and sustainable system that
| makes our world a better place
| c1ccccc1 wrote:
| This comment is interesting in that it itself exemplifies
| principle #5.
|
| (And also principles #6, #7, #9 to some extent.)
| johnobrien1010 wrote:
| (2019)
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| (2013)
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| Take a shot anytime a "rationalist" invokes Bayes.
|
| Long article for him to basically say nothing insightful.
|
| Crazy people will say seemingly true things that attract more
| crazy people.
|
| OK. Thanks I guess.
|
| The two paragraphs about how good at arguments he is and how
| other educated people might be able to out argue him in topics if
| they're specialists _maybe_ was so stupid I closed the tab, but
| then I decided to be adult and read the rest to see if there was
| anything redeeming.
|
| There wasn't. Don't bother.
|
| Why do people read this guy's crap? Did he not bother to share
| this with a trusted friend first to see if he sounded like an
| idiot?
| subjectsigma wrote:
| This is strangely reductive. The article isn't very well
| written but I think the key point is insightful.
|
| The article was written in 2019, so before COVID, which was
| very prescient. During the pandemic the only really reasonable
| option was to follow CDC guidelines even though they seemed to
| be unreasonable, constantly changing, and even sometimes
| conflicting. There were large parts of the population that were
| smart enough to realize something odd was going on, and so they
| searched for their own answers, and sometimes the ones they
| came up with were pretty bad. Obviously we would like to do
| something about this, but what? What do you think should be
| done?
| melkor73 wrote:
| I noticed this too. People that casually drop "Bayesian priors"
| into conversation seems to be a strong signal for someone who's
| up their own arse. Sam Bankman-Fried did it a lot.
| EamonnMR wrote:
| It's a shibboleth for the Rationalist community, that's why.
| tehnub wrote:
| Well I thought the offhand remark about Bayesian priors was
| actually the real answer to his question of why we don't
| accept arguments. I'm not going to accept some argument that
| contradicts a lot of what I previously thought was true
| unless it is very convincing (that can be achieved in a
| variety of ways). The remark about Bayes should have been
| front and center.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| > Why do people read this guy's crap?
|
| I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that it's because they
| disagree with your assessment, and think that he _does_ have
| something insightful to say.
| joshmarinacci wrote:
| It is 100% a safety valve. Humans have an inherent
| negativity/risk-aversion bias. Those who didn't were weeded out
| of the gene pool. If someone comes up to you with a crazy
| sounding idea it is far more likely that they are wrong and you
| shouldn't trust them. It's one reason why obvious seeming
| innovations take so long to become widespread.
| debacle wrote:
| This feels like it belongs on /r/iamverysmart.
|
| Most people don't argue within moral frameworks. Most people
| don't live logic-based lives. Most people prefer happiness to
| correctness, peace to progress, and quietude to justice. This is
| a very difficult thing, and not a very good thing, for those who
| want change.
| sjfjsjdjwvwvc wrote:
| I would argue it is a very good thing. Most "bad" things
| historically have been created by those clamouring for progress
| and justice.
|
| Like Bukowski said
|
| those who preach peace do not have peace
|
| beware the preachers
|
| beware the knowers
|
| beware those who are always reading books
|
| I would extend it as
|
| those who preach justice are not just
|
| those who preach rationality are not rational
|
| those who preach correctness are not right
|
| And those who preach progress are against change
|
| /edited for readability
| TOMDM wrote:
| Every new good or bad thing is by definition a change.
| trgn wrote:
| Hobbes called it. Fully coming to terms with the downstream
| implications of this assessment, which Hobbes also did, is less
| palatable.
| wait_a_minute wrote:
| > Most people don't argue within moral frameworks. Most people
| don't live logic-based lives.
|
| Yes they do. You may contest aspects of the foundation of their
| logical and moral framework of choice, but most people on earth
| adhere to a moral or religious framework. Those are logic-based
| and that is what apologetics and natural theology and
| philosophy are for.
| nineplay wrote:
| >engineering trains you to have a very black-and-white right-or-
| wrong view of the world based on a few simple formulae, and this
| meshes with fundamentalism better than it meshes with subtle
| liberal religious messages.
|
| Back in the usenet days it was taken as given that any
| creationist was also an engineer. Creationism was nice and neat
| and logical unlike that handwavy big bang thing that was probably
| dreamed up by woolly headed academics with no practical
| experience.
| 0xdeadbeefbabe wrote:
| > Creationism was nice and neat and logical
|
| Also requires less faith
| stuaxo wrote:
| How?
| peteradio wrote:
| God exists or he doesn't, 50/50 chance.
| nineplay wrote:
| To some degree the idea of a Creator is easier to wrap one's
| head around than the idea of nothing-->something.
|
| Of course it really just rolls the question uphill since
| you're now faced with 'Where did the Creator come from?'.
| Happily there are no academic theories on this matter so
| there's no need to engage with it. Ultimately satisfaction
| doesn't come from the belief itself, satisfaction comes from
| the feeling of being Right while others are Wrong.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| > Of course it really just rolls the question uphill since
| you're now faced with 'Where did the Creator come from?'.
|
| Creationists aren't actually faced with that question - not
| Creationists who believe in a God who is eternal, anyway.
| Things without beginnings don't _have_ origins.
|
| If you want to actually attack that belief, you need to
| either 1) show that God isn't eternal, or 2) show that
| eternal things are impossible. Or you have to do the hard
| work of 3) persuading them that a purely naturalistic
| process fits the available evidence better than a Creator
| does.
| nineplay wrote:
| I'm just suggesting that Creationism requires more faith
| than one might think at first glance.
|
| Creationist beliefs
|
| - a Creator
|
| - things which are eternal
|
| - an Eternal Creator
|
| Whether those things are easier or harder to believe than
| naturalistic processes is up to the reader.
| 0xdeadbeefbabe wrote:
| > Happily there are no academic theories on this matter
|
| Why happily? Evolution seems like a good academic theory.
| Is Pascal's wager academic enough? What about Occam's
| razor?
| nineplay wrote:
| To clarify, there are no academic theories about where
| the Creator came from. Academic research on the matter
| would have to pre-suppose the existences of a Creator,
| and so far as I know there is no research group willing
| to take that as given.
| naasking wrote:
| > To some degree the idea of a Creator is easier to wrap
| one's head around than the idea of nothing-->something.
|
| Of course that's a mistake, because there wasn't literally
| nothing, there was just _something else_.
| scotty79 wrote:
| Fantasy always requires less thinking than knowledge.
| jewayne wrote:
| I think of it as lowering the cognitive dissonance. Highly
| analytical individuals are going to tend to be more highly
| sensitive to any contradictions in their belief system. On
| which side you land might be remarkably random -- one might
| become an atheist, and another a Christian fundamentalist. The
| key is getting to a place where they see no contradictions.
| FredPret wrote:
| Don't know about this one. Engineering taught me that reality
| is complex and nuanced and that success is defined on a
| spectrum, not zero or one.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Back in the usenet days everybody using it was either an
| engineer or a physicist, and every single one of those people
| had a bias about one of those groups being wrong more often
| than the other.
| nineplay wrote:
| I wouldn't necessarily disagree with that. There were also
| professors of all stripes, and of course first-year students
| which were wrong more often than everybody.
| scooke wrote:
| So where is gHeadphone on this? I'd like to read why they shared
| this.
|
| The writer though may actually be less egotistical than it seems.
| By the end of post they are saying that their ability to not
| believe a good sounding argument is exactly the same approach an
| uneducated person has... Saving them both from believing the
| wrong things. The funny thing is he gives up trying help the
| reader discern just what the right thing might be.
| RationalDino wrote:
| I am strongly reminded of
| https://thingofthings.substack.com/p/rationalists-and-the-cu...,
| which concluded that the kind of person who believes complex
| irrational arguments is also the kind of person who falls for
| conspiracy theories, weird cults, and various kinds of whacky
| beliefs.
|
| That said, I would advocate a more systematic version of the
| article's conclusion that we should accept that we can't think.
| Instead borrow an idea from _Superforecasting_. One way to get
| better at predictions is to start by constructing an outside
| view, and an inside view.
|
| Suppose we want to predict the odds of a thing happening. First
| we make a tally of roughly comparable situations. In how many did
| the comparable thing happen?
|
| The inside view is a detailed analysis of how the thing could
| happen this time. You can analyze this to a Bayesian analysis.
|
| The problem with the inside view is that, confronted with a way
| something could have happened, we overestimate all of the
| probabilities. We wind up too certain that it did. Conversely if
| we don't think of a way that it could happen, we wind up being
| too certain that it could not.
|
| So the inside view has too much variance. We fix that by
| adjusting the inside view towards the outside view. How much you
| should do this takes some practice to figure out. But actually
| doing this makes your predictions more accurate.
|
| Instead of calling this epistemic learned helplessness, I would
| call the need to adjust to the outside view as estimated
| epistemic uncertainty. And yes, people who practice doing this
| really do become a lot better at predicting what will prove to be
| true in uncertain circumstances.
| philip1209 wrote:
| This article talks about learned helplessness in a learning
| context. I talked about it in a work context, and the two could
| be linked. I think social media is training people for everything
| to be quick, but learning + work aren't necessarily quick.
|
| > This insistence on constant availability disrupts the essence
| of focused work. Rather than encouraging employees to tackle
| complex problems independently, there's a trend, especially among
| junior staff, to quickly seek help upon encountering any
| obstacle. The fear is that being "blocked" under-utilizes an
| expensive team member. However, the nature of knowledge work is
| solving ambiguous, complicated problems - so the expectation of
| constant availability can lead to a culture of learned
| helplessness, which shunts professional development.
|
| https://www.contraption.co/essays/digital-quiet/
| Swizec wrote:
| As a tech lead I would rather see a team member ask me
| questions early than never. Nudging them in the right direction
| before they waste 3 days going down a path that's never going
| to work is at least half my job.
|
| But it's important that they've done enough research to
| formulate the question. A little struggle helps the learning
| stick.
| arcbyte wrote:
| Agree. I think about 4 hours is a good rule of thumb for how
| long you should be stuck before getting help.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| My problem is I see this most frequently with debugging. It's
| like no one knows how to debug anymore. Read a runbook,
| google an error, try a few things.. no, just pester a senior.
|
| When I find myself responding to juniors/mids with the same
| list of rote, problem agnostic, runbook responses .. and it
| actually helps them, it's unnerving. It's like the socratic
| method of debugging without them actually learning anything
| from the experience.
| freedomben wrote:
| I agree, but in practice now I've come to see that this is an
| extremely difficult point to discern. As the vast majority of
| findings flow in as a trickle, there often isn't a large
| enough delta to identify as a launching point for asking for
| help. For example, if one continues to search, they will keep
| finding breadcrumbs leading them to the solution. It is
| painful to me when someone spends 3 days looking for a
| solution to a problem that is very custom and unique to our
| system (so they're not gonna find the answer anywhere on the
| internet), and one I could solve in 5 minutes, but you don't
| know what you don't know, so as a new person learning it is
| almost never clear at what point it is ideal to ask for help.
| Compounding all of this is that many personalities don't like
| to be bothersome to other people, and that can cause them to
| hesitate to ask for help, which further sends them on the
| search between small deltas. It's a very hard problem.
| tomjakubowski wrote:
| The sort of problem that is often best solved by hanging
| out around the water cooler, mixing and kvetching with
| random coworkers, ones you might not see at your regular
| meetings.
| esafak wrote:
| You need to socialize the problem; to broadcast that you
| are trying to solve something. Some sort of internal
| discussion board could work. It serves the same purposes as
| the water cooler.
|
| If anyone can think of a way to make software better serve
| this end I'd love to hear.
| mncharity wrote:
| > think of a way
|
| An app was recently mentioned in hn comments, for "live
| blogging" as PIM - a texting-like personal record of your
| questions and findings as they go by - research notebook
| meets chat UI. With a trace like that, or even just a
| browser trace, an AI might, without interrupting,
| summarize "what's Joe working on" and perhaps "how's that
| going?", or even "Hey Bob, maybe come chat with Joe?".
| And it could be nice to have a PIM that helped you
| maintain distilled clarity of objectives and state of
| play. Less nice the vision of a micromanager mesmerized
| by the dashboarded real-time state of his team.
|
| A physics peer-instruction app, in support of "instructor
| puts up a question; everyone individually commits an
| answer; discussion with a neighbor; answer again", told
| students _which_ neighbor to talk with, optimizing for
| fruitful discussions, knowing seating and the
| (mis)understandings implied by answers. LLMs open a lot
| of possibilities for the old dream of computer-supported
| cooperative work.
|
| When github was band new, I'd hopped it would grow far
| more social/meetup/hackathony than it ended up. Wander
| by, see who's around and what people were banging on;
| stop by the beginner tables and see if anyone was stuck
| or struggling; maybe join a push; maybe pair or group;
| interest profiles, matchmaking (eg round-robin pairing,
| or "oh! a category-theoretic type system in-the-style-of-
| a-conference-bar discussion!"). Like a team or small
| community discord with bots, but scaled. Perhaps AI can
| make something like that more tractable.
| meindnoch wrote:
| Cool! I'll send them to you then :-)
| evnc wrote:
| Yeah, it's a balance. I love being able to help, and I am
| generally in favor of asking questions early, but not ones of
| the form "hey so I ran this code and it errored. Help?"
|
| "... did you read the stack trace? Did you look at the code
| referenced by the stack trace?"
|
| This is where I've learned responding with "Sure! What have
| you tried so far?" is relevant.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| Yes, and I think some of the neediest juniors (or seniors who
| behave like juniors) have now substituted in ChatGPT for some
| of their nagging.
|
| The ones I see doing this most heavily are not really
| developing themselves and improving in any meaningful way.
|
| At least a stack overflow thread will be filled with
| alternative solutions, arguments, counterpoints and caveats.
|
| ChatGPT leaves the questioner with the illusion that they have
| received the 1 good answer.
| astura wrote:
| This just has not been my experience at all.
|
| I've never had a problem with a junior asking too many
| questions. Never.
|
| I have, however, had issues with them not asking enough
| questions.
| kdmccormick wrote:
| I have had both problems. As it turns out, unsurprisingly, it
| varies from person to person.
|
| It can also vary within a single person. They might, for
| example, ask questions too quickly when stuck on a technical
| question that could be solved by reading docs, but ask
| questions too slowly when stuck on an ambiguous product
| requiment that can only be personally answered by the PM or
| UX person.
| spenczar5 wrote:
| Right. I never got upset with a question. The only issue is
| getting the _same_ question multiple times.
|
| Not necessarily the same question verbatim, by the way. When
| I answer a question, I am trying to "teach to fish," and so
| there is some system that I am explaining. My hope is that
| the asker will show curiosity - ask follow-up questions - and
| then be able to generalize. "I learned there was a lambda for
| sending emails, in the sysops repo. Maybe there is a lambda
| for sending slack messages in there too?"
|
| Software systems are imperfect so the generalizations might
| break. In this case I want another question quickly, like "I
| couldn't find a slack message sender like the email one. Does
| one exist?"
| spencerchubb wrote:
| As a junior dev, sometimes I've been blocked for hours because
| I want to show that I can solve problems independently. But
| I've definitely had cases where I should've asked questions
| early. A question that takes 1 minute to answer could have
| saved hours.
|
| For instance, I was stuck on figuring out how to send an email
| through AWS. Turns out we have a lambda function that handles
| all the authentication and security things that are specific to
| our company. Once I asked my coworker and found out about this
| function, it was trivial.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| The distinction between trying to solve a problem yourself vs
| ask for help is: are you figuring out a new problem, or
| figuring out the system?
|
| If you're trying to figure out the system, you should
| probably ask for help ASAP and build up some knowledge. Over
| time you'll need to ask questions about the system less
| frequently.
|
| If you're trying to figure out a new problem related to your
| work, slogging away at it for a while is more ok because it's
| value-add and a good learning experience.
|
| The lines are a bit blurry, but that's how I tend to think
| about this.
| smeej wrote:
| I had a manager when I was a new hire who had no concept of
| this difference at all, and it led to his firing me in my
| 4th week because I "should have been coming in with more
| knowledge."
|
| He actually told me I should have just come in and started
| doing things whatever way seemed best to me, like he did,
| when he was the first employee in the company in the role.
|
| Never mind that it was a compliance-heavy role in risk
| analysis and I was the 5th person on a 5-person team.
|
| Sure, I knew plenty of _ways_ to solve the problems. What I
| didn 't know were what systems they had (or, in most cases,
| didn't have) in place to document investigations, which
| absolutely must be done.
|
| I know plenty about what _I 'm_ doing. What I need to know
| is how _you_ want it recorded. And in fact he had
| reinvented the entire documentation system during my 2nd
| week, on a whim.
|
| Firing me that fast was the best gift that company could
| have given me, because things would _not_ have improved
| between us.
| eminence32 wrote:
| As you get more and more experience, I think this will become
| easier. You'll eventually get a feel for what types of
| questions you should just work through yourself, and which
| types of questions you should ask someone else about, and the
| threshold for moving between the two (you'll develop a sense
| of "let me investigate theory A, B, and C, and if I still
| can't figure it out, I'll ask for help").
|
| Some of this will probably be via an increased understanding
| of the types of problems you can and can't solve. And some of
| this will probably be because you'll eventually know more
| people who can help (something like "oh yeah, I know Sam
| worked on a similar problem last month, let me see if they
| found a solution")
| switchbak wrote:
| There's also a minimum bar of seeking that you need to have
| both performed and can demonstrate - this shows you're
| doing your due diligence, and not just wasting the more
| senior developer's time. It also provides you the context
| you need to understand the solution. The last thing you
| want is a LMGTFY moment from someone who was interrupted
| from deep focus on a hard problem (or worse: a series of
| them).
| NhanH wrote:
| The nuance here lies within the "hours" quantifier.
|
| A junior member being blocked for 3-8 hours semi-regularly is
| expected. Once every other month you probably should be
| blocked for several work days as well.
|
| In your example, the challenge would have been realizing you
| wouldn't have been the first one trying to send an email in
| the team. Recognizing that and it is very easy to know that
| you should just ask the question right away. It's not a
| technical skill, but something a bit more meta.
| wins32767 wrote:
| This is really bad advice. Don't let yourself be blocked
| for several days. Try for 2-3 hours and ask for help.
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| I'd say that's excessive. An hour max would be more
| reasonable otherwise you're just creating a discouraging
| workplace. Note that would be an hour of real effort
| though, not half arsed googling. Making a genuine effort
| is more important than the time taken.
| c0pium wrote:
| The amount of time is entirely dependent on what kind of
| work it is and what kind of blocked you are. Can't get
| your build to succeed? Ask for help quickly. Can't get
| your research model to produce useful results on the
| first try? Maybe try a few things first.
| SkyBelow wrote:
| If you lost hours digging through the code and trying things
| to solve the problem, they aren't really lost. The knowledge
| you gain from this, the code you dug through, etc. all help
| builds up the experience that leads to one day no longer
| being a junior. Being given the answer is fast, but it
| doesn't lead to as much learning, especially in a career
| where knowing how find answers is more important long term
| than knowing the answers.
| nerpderp82 wrote:
| Blocked for hours is you learning and totally OK if you are
| learning. If one is operating open loop and stabbing at
| configuration options in a brute force manner to "make
| something work quickly" that isn't learning. Not saying you
| did this, but I do see this in a number of folks. They don't
| learn, and they don't form a model of the system. Those folks
| can be replaced by an LLM and Z3.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Flipping the script a bit:
|
| As a senior developer, avoid cultivating learned helplessness.
| You can push back on this in a couple ways:
|
| 1) Instead of answering questions, give a nudge to where the
| solution is documented ("Hey I'm swamped, but I'd recommend
| checking X for more info. If you haven't read through X yet,
| that's a good resource to skim"). Keep tabs on how much your
| junior team members are expected to know, nudge them harder if
| they aren't taking the time to ingest the gestalt of what's
| there (it feels like a waste of time to do so sometimes...
| Reading isn't getting code written. But knowing what's already
| there saves work in the long run).
|
| 2) When something isn't documented... _review_ the docs a
| junior team member writes, don 't write them yourself. This
| both encourages them to have ownership over the system and will
| probably generate better docs in the long run (everyone has a
| notion of what docs should look like, but communication is two-
| way: seeing what someone writes down clues you into what you
| missed is necessary to record. Can't tell you how many docs
| I've seen for cloud systems, for example, that _assume the user
| is logged in with proper credentials_ when that step alone
| usually requires handshaking across three services and maybe an
| IT team).
|
| 3) Prefer mistakes to silence. Don't bash a team member for
| making a correctible mistake, even in production; use it as a
| learning opportunity both for them and for you (if that mistake
| was possible, you're missing a guardrail). Actively communicate
| to junior members that wrong code that exists is preferable to
| no code; wrong code can be talked about, no code is work yet to
| be done. And be aware that for a lot of junior devs, the
| reaction to making a visible error is like touching a hot
| stove; cultivate a soup-to-nuts environment that minimizes that
| hot-stove reflex.
| tstrimple wrote:
| I agree with all of this with one minor quibble. I'd never
| tell someone I'm in a position to mentor / coach / lead like
| this that I'm swamped. It's probably true, but that's my
| problem not theirs. I don't want them to avoiding talking to
| me because they think I'm too busy. I know that was in an
| example statement and not necessarily something you're
| endorsing, but I thought the point worth bringing up.
| spenczar5 wrote:
| This is just all excellent. There are a lot of strange
| attitudes elsewhere in this comment section, ones that I
| don't recognize from good senior engineers. Good ones realize
| that a lot of their job is improving the whole team. If
| junior engineers are constantly asking trivial questions,
| maybe they need to be taught to learn!
| thadt wrote:
| > The medical establishment offers a shiny tempting solution.
| First, a total unwillingness to trust anything, no matter how
| plausible it sounds, until it's gone through an endless cycle of
| studies and meta-analyses.
|
| Isn't this just... science? We learned from the ancient
| philosophers that really smart people can reason powerfully about
| a whole lot of things. But - if we want to know whether that
| reasoning holds up, it has to be tested. Modern science is the
| current unit testing framework for philosophy. At least, for the
| thoughts that lend themselves to unit testing.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| It does seem like odd phrasing. It's correct to not fully trust
| anything until it's gone through a long verification process.
| ketzo wrote:
| Don't you have to put _some_ amount of trust in an idea to
| even consider verifying?
|
| And have even more trust in the idea to perform your
| experiments in the first place?
|
| Even in medicine, there has to be _someone_ willing to
| challenge status-quo ideas, or there 's nothing to feed into
| the "long verification process" in the first place. How do
| you decide when to be that person?
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| You seem to be responding to a different comment?
| helicalmix wrote:
| One counterexample for why I think it's not always the best
| approach is that there are sometimes disproportionate rewards
| for being right when everyone else is wrong.
|
| Doing so, however, requires you to take an idea seriously
| before it has gone through analyses so extensive that everyone
| else believes the same idea too.
| ilovetux wrote:
| You are correct, it is science.
|
| The differentiator that I see is that the medical community are
| under pressure to apply the most cutting edge science in real
| life-and-death scenarios, so they are uniquely positioned to be
| burned by trusting a new hypothesis which appears correct but
| is subtly but completely wrong which could absolutely cause
| someone to lose their life.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| But the alternative, waiting to apply new-but-actually-
| correct hypotheses until totally, absolutely proven, _also_
| causes lost lives.
|
| And as is usual with "Type 1" vs "Type 2" errors, saving
| lives by avoiding one problem costs lives due to the other
| problem. The trick is to sit in the minimum of "lives lost
| due to Type 1 errors plus lives lost due to Type 2 errors".
| Unfortunately, that's not an analytic function with a known
| formula and computable derivative...
| scotty79 wrote:
| Medical thickheadedness sometimes makes them performing
| useless, harmful procedures for many years after the harm
| became known. So it's not a virtue the article postulates.
| bloaf wrote:
| Right, and I think the distinction he draws between this and
| engineering is interesting.
|
| My experience (as an engineer) is that engineers get paid to
| manipulate the world around them in precise, predictable ways.
| As such, they tend to cultivate a core set of relatively simple
| principles (e.g. heat and material balances) which they _take
| seriously_ by using to plan /design/etc their manipulations of
| the world. The engineer's creativity lies in finding new ways
| to combine the known-reliable principles, and stake their
| reputation on the result.
|
| Scientists, on the other hand, are expected to come up with new
| principles. If they take too many ideas seriously, there is no
| room left for creative new explanations.
|
| Medicine lies somewhere in between, insofar as doctors are
| trying to manipulate patient's health with the best principles
| they can find, but they also have to wear a scientists hat via
| diagnosis, i.e. figuring out which principles to apply to a
| patient.
|
| And so the reaction to e.g. fundamentalism makes sense:
|
| An engineer likes having a fundamental set of universal
| principles, and is comfortable using them to make plans for
| manipulating the world. They expect the religious world to work
| the same way as they do, and take those principles seriously.
|
| A scientist wants to know "well I've got a new idea for a
| fundamental principle, how can we find out if I'm right?" And
| the fundamentalist has no answer.
|
| A doctor will want to know how certain the fundamentalist is,
| and how they know those principles even apply to _current
| situation,_ and the fundamentalist will have no answer.
| broscillator wrote:
| This is all very noble on paper.
|
| Yes, people can be persuasive to twist the truth.
|
| And testing is good for arriving at proof.
|
| But what the ancient philosophers didn't count on, is that
| there is a machine in charge of what gets tested and how, and
| that choosing what and how things get tested can _also_ be
| twisted to be persuasive. I can develop and thoroughly test my
| own drug, and then persuade you that a much cheaper chemical is
| not tested enough (because I blocked all attempts at testing
| it), and then I would point to the noble principles of ancient
| science as to why things need verification.
|
| In other words, the current world is teaching us that really
| powerful corporations can test selectively about a whole lot of
| things.
| josh_cutler wrote:
| Yes, but not all "scientific" disciplines adhere to this the
| same way that medicine does. Take for example Psychology,
| Political Science, or some of Economics where unreplicable
| studies in prestigious journals almost immediately become
| cannon for new grad student seminars.
|
| N.B. I have direct experience with this in Political Science,
| the other disciplines I have just anecdotes about so apologies
| if they are mischaracterized.
| twelfthnight wrote:
| Why is it assumed that someone who is convinced by arguments is
| prone to wrong ideas? Wouldn't that type of person become
| iteratively closer to the truth every time they hear a new
| argument and compare to the others they've heard?
| krapp wrote:
| Because the most convincing argument is not necessarily the
| most correct, nor does comparing one argument to another
| discriminate truth from lies.
| naasking wrote:
| Not necessarily, but it's arguably as good as you can get
| after aggregating over a set of people independently
| analyzing the same question.
| helicalmix wrote:
| > This is the correct Bayesian action: if I know that a false
| argument sounds just as convincing as a true argument, argument
| convincingness provides no evidence either way. I should ignore
| it and stick with my prior.
|
| If two diametrically opposed arguments are equally convincing,
| it's not intuitive to me that the "correct" solution is a
| middle ground. Especially if both argument state that a middle
| ground is not possible.
| twelfthnight wrote:
| I guess if I encountered two diametrically opposing arguments
| of equal validity I would increase my uncertainty, not just
| stick to my prior. That's super different to just ignoring
| new arguments, right? Like going from "I think X is the best
| candidate" to "I don't know who the best candidate is".
| helicalmix wrote:
| Oh, that's a good point, and I think you're idea is a
| better behavior model vs. the "stick with prior" idea.
|
| What if the conclusion forces behavior though? For voting,
| you can abstain from voting if you're unclear, but what if
| you're in a position where you have to choose two
| distinctly different options.
|
| In this case, I think you pretty much have to stick with
| your prior, but I'm curious if you have a more nuanced
| approach here.
| twelfthnight wrote:
| > I think you pretty much have to stick with your prior
|
| Yeah, at least to me that makes sense if you're forced to
| make a choice. Although in some ways if you really have
| no clear evidence it doesn't matter what choice you make,
| since both are equally reasonable.
|
| > I'm curious if you have a more nuanced approach here
|
| Not really :D. I do think things are often more
| complicated than "you must choose two options", for
| example you might have to choose between two candidates
| (in the US at least), but if you are more uncertain maybe
| you don't put a giant poster in your front yard or get
| upset at neighbors if they have a different opinion.
| pixl97 wrote:
| In general this is not how biological life has evolved and
| not how most decisions work within that framework.
|
| Most decisions you'll ever make are "You have ___
| seconds/minutes/hours to make a choice". And depending on
| the pressures you're under you will skip the expensive
| logical/rational processing as needed and fall back to
| heuristics.
| zaphar wrote:
| I think at some level for certain topics and areas there is a
| minimal level of knowledge and information you need to know in
| order to evaluate or even understand advanced arguments about
| the topic. In a sense you won't become closer to the truth
| until you reach that minimum level of understanding and before
| that you will just ping pong between positions without a real
| understanding of whether you are correct or not.
|
| Many arguments especially advanced ones are building on a
| presumed level of knowledge that many people do not have or are
| even aware that they should have. Doing the work to adequately
| evaluate an argument in every domain is probably not worth
| their time.
| twelfthnight wrote:
| > you won't become closer to the truth until you reach that
| minimum level of understanding
|
| This might be my misunderstanding of the article. How do you
| gain knowledge at all without considering new arguments you
| hear?
|
| > Doing the work to adequately evaluate an argument in every
| domain is probably not worth their time
|
| Sure, but why not admit you just don't know then instead of
| "sticking to your prior" and believing something you have no
| evidence to believe?
| zaphar wrote:
| If you "admit" you don't know then you by definition aren't
| convinced by the argument and thus not falling into the
| trap. But it doesn't help you make decisions any easier for
| stuff that is relevant to you and therefore requires you to
| make a decision. In that case you are going to have take a
| leap of faith so to speak. And choosing the way you leap
| might be better informed by consensus by experts in the
| field rather than speculative investigations on the fringe.
|
| You might still be wrong but your chances are probably
| improved in the correct direction most of the time.
| makeworld wrote:
| Comparing them requires sometimes rejecting new ones. This is
| different than being someone who is convinced by all arguments
| they hear.
| photonthug wrote:
| If the people are convinced by all arguments they hear, at
| that point it comes down to which argument they heard most
| recently, so let's hope the media is autonomous, ethical,
| independent, & responsible
| pixl97 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law
|
| >Why is it assumed that someone who is convinced by arguments
| is prone to wrong ideas?
|
| To put this a different way, if humans actually behaved in this
| manner in any significant numbers then humanity should have
| discovered the sciences and been uplifted a long time ago.
|
| Instead that's not what we see at all. A more likely reason is
| Bullshit Asymmetry, that is, humans throw out so much made up
| crap that using arguments alone will burn the observable
| universe away in a puff of entropy.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > Bullshit Asymmetry
|
| If we could solve the Bullshit Asymmetry problem, imagine the
| progress we could make as a species.
|
| Someone reads that "ACKCHYUALLY, if you're operating a car
| for personal reasons, and not for hire, then you're not
| actually 'driving', you're just traveling, and you're not
| legally required to have a driver's license or car
| registration! The cops and the courts have it wrong!" just
| one time, and it's now a permanent belief, and _absolutely
| nothing you do or say_ can convince them otherwise, and now
| you 've got another Sovereign Citizen.
|
| That's just one example. Flat Earthers, various conspiracy
| theories, _some_ anti-vax beliefs...
| jancsika wrote:
| Keep in mind that the normal learning process involves
| students asking questions out of left field, surprising and
| frustrating even long-time experts who might need some time
| to consider how to answer _even if_ the expert has the
| knowledge to notice the fallacy.
|
| If removing bullshit puts an undue burden on that learning
| process that causes students to refrain from asking the
| questions that will help them understand the topic, then
| you didn't ACKCHYUALLY remove it, you only _moved_ it. :)
| thriftwy wrote:
| If you are an ordinary person, this is the way to go. You are not
| in business of evaluating arguments. You need to live your life
| and for that accept the most reasonable view on everything,
| verified by your peers.
|
| However, if you have a shot at being intellectual elite of your
| society, having epistemic helplessness renders you unfit. And we
| see a lot of people who look like intellectual elite, paid for
| taking its place, but not doing any reasoning, evaluating and
| believing of their own. That's why we seemingly only get problems
| piled up on us.
|
| Imagine a judge who have a popular preoccupation of who is right
| and who is wrong, before hearing the actual case and using their
| own experience.
| JackFr wrote:
| I have to admit a weakness for reading not-quite-crackpot-but-
| likely-wrong theories. In particular, big fan of Julian Jaynes
| and The Development of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bi-
| cameral Mind, and the aquatic ape hypothesis
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquatic_ape_hypothesis
|
| I get that they're probably not true, but I do enjoy reading
| novel thinking and viewpoints by smart people with a cool hook.
| thriftwy wrote:
| I can read a novel idea, get excited by it, remember it and
| return to it later without being convinced.
| jerf wrote:
| I think if you want to start down that sort of road, it's
| important to read _lots_ of them. Read zero, you 're probably
| fine. Read lots of them, you're probably fine. "One or two" is
| where the danger is maximized.
|
| And I would agree with "likely" wrong. Some of them probably
| aren't entirely wrong and may even be more correct than the
| mainstream. Figuring out which is the real trick, though.
| Related to the original article, I tend to scale my Bayesian
| updates based on my ability to test a theory. In the case of
| something like the Breakdown of the Bi-cameral Mind, it ends up
| taking such a deduction as a result of that heuristic that it
| is almost indistinguishable from reading a science fiction book
| for me; fun and entertaining, but doesn't really impact me much
| except in a very vague "keep the mind loose and limber" sense.
|
| I have done a lot of heterodox thinking in the world of
| programming and engineering, though, because I can test
| theories very easily. Some of them work. Some of them don't.
| And precisely because it is so easy to test, the heterodoxy-
| ness is often lower than crackpot theories about 10,000 years
| ago, e.g., "Haskell has some interesting things to say" is made
| significantly less "crackpot" by the fact that plenty of other
| people have the ability to test that hypothesis as well, and as
| such, it is upgraded from "crackpot" to merely a "minority"
| view.
|
| So my particular twist on Scott's point is, if you can safely
| and cheaply test a bit of a far-out theory, don't be afraid to
| do so. You can use this to resolve the epistemic learned
| helplessness in those particular areas. It is good to put a bit
| down on cheap, low-probability, high-payout events; you can
| even justify this mathematically via the Kelly Criterion:
| https://www.techopedia.com/gambling-guides/kelly-criterion-g...
| If there is one thing that angers me about way science is
| taught, it is that it is something that _other_ people do, and
| that it is something special that you do with either the full
| "scientific method" or it's worthless. In fact it's an
| incredible tool for every day life, on all sorts of topics, and
| one must simply adjust for the fact that the lower effort put
| in, the less one should trust it, but that doesn't mean the
| total trust must necessarily be uselessly low just because you
| didn't conduct your experiment on whether or not fertilizer A
| or B worked better on your tomatos up to science journal
| standards.
| scotty79 wrote:
| Is there solid evidence against aquatic ape? The only argument
| I've seen was that it's unnecessary because multitude of
| previous explanations of every single feature work just fine,
| thank you very much.
| ineptech wrote:
| Same. I found a book back in college claiming (on the basis of
| some theory about the Egyptian pyramids) that if you made a
| pyramidal shape with certain dimensions out of cardboard, it
| would make plants grow faster and keep your razorblades sharp.
| I didn't _believe_ it, but I did make one for fun. All my
| physics-major friends made fun of me for being gullible. I was
| like, isn 't testing stuff what we're supposed to be doing
| here?
|
| (It didn't work)
| Aurornis wrote:
| > I've heard a few good arguments in this direction before,
| things like how engineering trains you to have a very black-and-
| white right-or-wrong view of the world based on a few simple
| formulae,
|
| Whenever the rationalist writers start talking about engineering,
| programming, or machine learning in technical terms I have a
| sudden Gell-Mann Amnesia realization that these people's primary
| domain is writing and pontificating, with little to no actual
| experience with engineering, programming, or machine learning.
|
| I don't know any engineers who would characterize the world as
| being simply defined by "a few simple formulae"
|
| Meanwhile, the rationalist community has an abnormally large
| reverence for engineers, programmers, and machine learning
| experts as if they were superhuman:
|
| > But to these I'd add that a sufficiently smart engineer has
| never been burned by arguments above his skill level before,
|
| Really? Sufficiently smart engineers have never encountered
| arguments above their skill level? Are we to assume that
| engineers are at the peak of logic and reasoning and skill? Is
| this an attempt to pander to an engineering audience? Or an
| actual belief that engineers have superhuman levels of logic?
|
| Finally, I'm growing tired of the way rationalist writings go out
| of their way to self-congratulate rationalists while placing the
| rest of the population into the unenlightened normie category
| that we're all supposed to look down upon:
|
| > The people I know who are best at taking ideas seriously are
| those who are smartest and most rational
| pixl97 wrote:
| I call this the "Rationals spend a whole lot of time and effort
| ignoring their irrational parts"
| SkyBelow wrote:
| To further expand on the "a few simple formulae", many of those
| experienced in these fields will note that complexity can
| emerge from simplicity. Conway's Game of Life is my go to
| example. Following some of about the simplest rules you can
| have, you can create a fully Turing complete system able to
| emulate itself.
| EduardLev wrote:
| Thanks for finding the exact words for how I also feel about
| the rationalist community.
|
| Source: sufficiently smart chemical engineer
| KineticLensman wrote:
| Yes, I think that an engineer who can navigate (to some extent)
| human and organisational minefields will be much more effective
| than one who is merely super-smart
| naasking wrote:
| > I don't know any engineers who would characterize the world
| as being simply defined by "a few simple formulae"
|
| I'm an electrical engineer. The Standard Model of particle
| physics governs literally all of existence, minus gravity, and
| it can fit on a single page [1]. Gravity is another few
| equations that can also squeeze onto that same page. This is a
| set of fairly simple formulae compared to the unbelievable
| complexity of existence.
|
| A universal Turing machine can compute any computable function
| and it's description is even shorter.
|
| In other words, unimaginable complexity can follow from "a few
| simple formulae". I don't know many engineers that would
| dispute this. Your problem is that you have some conception of
| "simple" that does not match what rationalists mean.
|
| [1]
| https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/sites/default/files/images/...
| brlewis wrote:
| The world's lack of good tools for assessing the truthfulness of
| arguments is my fault. Some things came up that stopped my work
| on the next iteration of https://howtruthful.com/ but only
| temporarily. Expect some big changes in 2024.
| esafak wrote:
| If you think you have good ideas write a position paper and
| open it up for comments. A wiki even.
|
| Your site currently has little food for thought.
| brlewis wrote:
| There's an "intro" link to a video at the bottom of the site.
| Comments can also go on this essay:
| https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/f2CftRRndH97RpAwL/how-i-
| got-...
| monsecchris wrote:
| Everyone is convinced they arrived at their ideas rationally.
| scotty79 wrote:
| Everyone is not right. Yet again, some are.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| One downside of the specialization in a service economy is that
| people no longer are as resourceful as the older generations.
|
| Older people could fix and build anything. To me some of the
| things they do is totally McGyver level shit.
| pixl97 wrote:
| I think there is some partial issues here... It is not just
| about people, it is also about devices.
|
| Most of these people you're talking about today, if given an
| old device and a simple set of instructions could fix said
| device.
|
| Now, I like to think I can pull off some McGyver level shit,
| but when the first step of fixing a modern device is "Heat the
| device to 250F to break the epoxy bond and then take it to your
| solder station" then actually fixing this stuff is closer to
| galaxy level brain.
| rini17 wrote:
| It's the rule of excluded middle misapplied to everyhing. When
| you think you have to decide an argument is either completely
| true or completely false, while in reality no argument is.
| naasking wrote:
| > When you think you have to decide an argument is either
| completely true or completely false, while in reality no
| argument is.
|
| Hmm, that sounds suspiciously like an argument that is either
| completely true or completely false...
| more_corn wrote:
| This is a terribly negative take on a very useful skill. Perhaps
| a better description would be: "Recognizing the limits of our own
| powers of discernment"
|
| We have to acknowledge that we don't have sufficient
| understanding and expertise to differentiate truth from bullshit
| in all fields. It is reasonable therefore to turn to scientific
| consensus and to disregard the arguments of bullshitters.
| picometer wrote:
| Summary: Scott Alexander recounts his gullibility to various
| well-reasoned crackpot arguments on a topic, and describes how he
| to decided to trust experts instead of investing time into
| learning enough to assess the topic for himself. Then he reflects
| on the nature of argument-accepting and its relation to
| rationality.
|
| I don't think the term "learned helplessness" fits well here. It
| suggests a lack of agency, whereas he exercised much of it,
| employing his skill of critical thinking to arrive at the right
| epistemic stance.
|
| A better term might be "bounded agency", to pair with the concept
| of "bounded rationality". We recognize that we cannot know
| everything, and we choose how to invest the capability and
| resources that we do have. This is far from any type of
| "helplessness".
| bluetomcat wrote:
| He talks about the pitfalls of pure rationality. There can be
| competing explanatory frameworks for the same thing, and they
| often contradict each other. Rational arguments may seem
| rigorous like math, but are in practice standing on shifting
| sands.
|
| It ultimately comes down to what you decide to believe in. This
| is where traditional values and religion come at play.
| fooop wrote:
| I, for one, am glad that the rationality-bubble is popping.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| Yes, It's not "gullibility", it's believing things in terms
| of the mechanism of standard argumentation.
|
| The basic thing is that arguments involve mustering a series
| of plausible explanation for all the visible pieces of
| evidence, casting doubt on alternatives, etc. Before Galileo,
| philosophy had a huge series of very plausible explanations
| for natural phenomena, many if not all of which turned out to
| be wrong. But Galilean science didn't discover more by
| getting more effective arguments but by looking at the world,
| judging models by their simplicity and ability to make
| quantitative predictions and so-on.
|
| Mathematics is pretty much the only place where air-tight
| arguments involving "for all" claims actually work. Science
| shows that reality corresponds to mathematical models but
| corresponds only _approximately_ and so given a model-based
| claim can 't be extended with an unlimited number of
| deductive steps.
| picometer wrote:
| A further thought that is too much for an edit... one of
| Alexander's final conclusions is:
|
| > I'm glad that some people never develop epistemic learned
| helplessness, or develop only a limited amount of it, or only
| in certain domains. It seems to me that [...] they're also the
| only people who can figure out if something basic and
| unquestionable is wrong, and make this possibility well-known
| enough that normal people start becoming willing to consider
| it.
|
| I think there's better framing here as well: he is glad that a
| few people direct their own bounded resources towards what I'd
| call _high-risk epistemic investments_.
|
| I'm also thankful for this. As species, we seem to be pretty
| good at this epistemic risk/reward balancing act - so far, at
| least.
| scotty79 wrote:
| Strongly disagree.
|
| > Anyone anywhere - politicians, scammy businessmen, smooth-
| talking romantic partners - would be able to argue them into
| anything.
|
| Epistemically helpless people are the easiest targets because
| conmen don't try to convince you to something you don't believe.
| They use what you already believe against you.
|
| The vaccine against bad arguments is not ignorance. It is
| curiosity and inquisitiveness. It's always searching for debunks
| against every well argued thesis you encounter. And evaluating
| both the thesis and the debunks. After few such excercises about
| varied subjects you start to notice the patterns and you can
| learn to separate personal charm and attractiveness of the idea
| from the truth.
|
| People lie and con and speak absurds the same way all the time
| about everything. You can learn to spot it if you put your mind
| to it.
| shove wrote:
| Didn't this guy get outed basically admitting that he launders
| racist ideology into something more palatable to liberals?
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26305570
| javajosh wrote:
| The real tie-breaker is experiment. It's telling that his primary
| example of "epistemic learned helplessness" is historical
| narrative. Historical narratives are solutions to a boundary
| value problem where the boundary is simply "the world at
| present". There are infinite numbers of plausible stories that
| are consistent with "the world at present", but they can't be
| tested unless they overtly predict something, and even then they
| generally can only be tested over relatively long periods of
| time.
|
| The disturbing trend that I see is that stupid people stubbornly
| cling on to falsifiable beliefs, like flat Earth theory, to
| satisfy some external incentive, like the need to belong, or the
| need to push against consensus. This is both an expression of
| Isaac Asimov's famous quote "There is a cult of ignorance in the
| United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-
| intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way
| through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false
| notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as
| your knowledge." That is, an attack on knowledge itself. It's
| harmless enough until it generalizes. Meanwhile, smart open-
| minded people run the terrible risk of a similar generalization,
| which _also_ ends up functioning like an attack on knowledge
| itself.
|
| The solution is to weight knowledge in inverse proportion to
| proximity to you in time and space. That is, I can know what is
| near to me, but far things are less known. If you adopt this
| posture toward knowledge then you can approximately partition
| rational learned helplessness, associate it with far away things,
| and yet maintain a rational confidence in knowledge that is close
| to you. And if you run across an historian that speaks with utter
| confidence about a historical narrative, run.
| latchkey wrote:
| Discussions on similar submissions:
|
| _Epistemic Learned Helplessness_
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32369238 (August 6, 2022 --
| 17 points, 1 comments)
|
| _Epistemic Learned Helplessness (2013)_
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20118865 (June 6, 2019 --
| 146 points, 60 comments)
| Retr0id wrote:
| I'm curious what the author really means by "average uneducated
| person". It's rare for someone to be truly uneducated. Less
| knowledge of the domain(s) in question?
| speak_plainly wrote:
| After spending many years studying philosophy I think that the
| right approach is that you don't need to come to any conclusions
| about anything.
|
| Aristotle often started with common peoples' viewpoints on any
| given topic, along with looking at what experts thought and built
| his own ideas from there, and of course was very successful with
| his methodology.
|
| Arguments are interesting and obviously some are more correct
| than others but everyone has good reasons for what they argue for
| and there is a genius to the collective thoughts of humanity even
| if it seems like insanity most of the time.
|
| The best starting point is one of ignorance and asking other
| people what they think, you don't need consensus but you should
| be looking for clues, solid ground, and inspiration.
|
| Everyone should get more comfortable andmitting to and saying
| that they truly 'don't know'. Taking a position of ignorance will
| open the doors to real possibilities and actual progress.
| ineptech wrote:
| This is probably true, but not very helpful. We can shrug over
| historical curiosities, but in a lot of cases we have to make a
| decision.
|
| Consider Linus Pauling's claim that you can prevent cancer with
| megadoses of vitamin C. It was never widely accepted, but
| Pauling is a titan of science with two Nobels and he wrote
| books with convincing-sounding arguments, so it's tempting to
| think maybe this is a case where the status quo is wrong (esp.
| if you have cancer).
|
| I think that's the sort of thing Alexander is trying to
| navigate here - no matter how comfortable you get saying "I
| don't know", at the end of the day you need to take the
| vitamins or not take them.
| speak_plainly wrote:
| The same argument can be turned against you, someone can wait
| for absolute expert certainty and die in the process due to
| lack of action. We all act pragmatically when making
| decisions and simply blindly trusting people is no way to
| live for a thinking and intelligent being.
|
| I was not suggesting this sort of Burdian's ass scenario
| where everyone is so gripped by ignorance that they can't
| act. I'm suggesting instead that ignorance is a starting
| point, to drop your preconceived notions and opinions or at
| the very least challenge them and not be afraid to come to no
| conclusions at all-- keep everything open. To see there is
| gold in the common opinions of people and in the arguments of
| experts, that no one has a monopoly on truth.
|
| You don't need to work yourself up to absolute certainty over
| the world to make a decision. You don't need to blindly trust
| experts and you don't need to be gripped by fear of
| uncertainty and you don't need to be forced into action
| because of arguments. You really don't need to do anything at
| all. There are bigger questions to ponder and a life to live
| that's worth living.
| ineptech wrote:
| I still don't see how this is relevant to the question at
| hand, where someone is trying to convince you of something.
| They either convince you or they don't; refusing to decide
| is equivalent to the latter. Not taking the vitamins
| because I'm "so gripped by ignorance that you can't act"
| and not taking the vitamins because I'm "not afraid to come
| to no conclusions at all" are not alternatives, they're the
| same answer!
| bluetomcat wrote:
| The epistemic standpoint of rationality (particularly
| Cartesianism) assumes a static arrangement of knowledge, where
| one uses analytic reason to gradually unveil bits of it like
| finding new territory on a map. It is rooted in analytic
| geometry.
|
| David Hume challenged this view. His main insight was that an
| object we call "A" in time T1 may not be the same object in
| time T2. We also need to distinguish between "A" as an idea of
| an object and "A" as a particular instance of object.
| voidhorse wrote:
| Along similar lines, critiques of Cartesianism in
| epistemology have also pointed out the heavily social aspects
| of knowledge construction, see situated epistemologies etc.
| Even epistemologists in the analytic tradition have begun to
| move away from Cartesianism due to its limitations.
|
| TBH, taking an epistemic stance that's primarily cartesian
| these days mostly just shows that you're (likely) ignorant to
| basically the entire history of development and research in
| epistemology after Descartes. Cartesianism is a very useful
| perspective and method for certain things, but as a _general_
| epistemology it 's quite crusty.
| ziroshima wrote:
| Agree completely. I think the author misses the big insight
| here. Rather than universal deferment to authority, I think the
| insights here are a) that people overstate their confidence and
| b) not all science should be treated equally.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > I think that the right approach is that you don't need to
| come to any conclusions about anything.
|
| This reminds me of a phrase I often find myself using with
| people: I am not required to have an opinion about everything.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| > " _Like I mean that on most topics, I could demolish their
| position and make them look like an idiot. Reduce them to some
| form of "Look, everything you say fits together and I can't
| explain why you're wrong, I just know you are!"_ "
|
| That isn't making them look like an idiot, reducing them, or
| demolishing their position. That is completely failing to
| demolish their position! While also failing to convincingly
| explain your position.
|
| > " _If you have a good argument that the Early Bronze Age worked
| completely differently from the way mainstream historians
| believe, I just don't want to hear about it. If you insist on
| telling me anyway, I will nod, say that your argument makes
| complete sense, and then totally refuse to change my mind or
| admit even the slightest possibility that you might be right.
| (This is the correct Bayesian action: if I know that a false
| argument sounds just as convincing as a true argument, argument
| convincingness provides no evidence either way. I should ignore
| it and stick with my prior.)_ "
|
| Maybe the correct action is to see that how the Early Bronze Age
| worked has so little effect on your life, no testable hypothesis
| to confirm one way or the other, that it doesn't matter which one
| you believe, or if you believe both (even if they are
| contradictory, that's a thing humans can do). Instead of doubling
| down on one, let go of all of them.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| It also ignores the question of how the person even got their
| prior in the first place. Presumably they heard a convincing
| argument at one point and accepted that - but then later
| changed their standards to not accept convincing arguments. In
| fact, how do they even know "if I know that a false argument
| sounds just as convincing as a true argument, argument
| convincingness provides no evidence either way"? Presumably
| they were convinced of it at some point.
| Jensson wrote:
| > Presumably they heard a convincing argument at one point
| and accepted that - but then later changed their standards to
| not accept convincing arguments
|
| No, many people base their views on what their friends
| thinks, they never reasoned themselves into it.
|
| It is rational to base your beliefs on your friends, and to
| keep those beliefs to ensure you can continue to fit in with
| your friends. That is less work and less risky than changing
| your mind, only few really go against the grain and try to
| think for themselves, it isn't helping them but some people
| has to do that for the benefit of our pack.
| circlefavshape wrote:
| > That isn't making them look like an idiot, reducing them, or
| demolishing their position
|
| I think the quote is in Scott's opponent's voice, not his own.
|
| > Instead of doubling down on one, let go of all of them
|
| Yes. We don't need better ways to form opinions - the world
| would be a better place if we all just had fewer opinions
| SteveDR wrote:
| I believe the parent comment is aware of your first point
| _armchair wrote:
| > That isn't making them look like an idiot, reducing them, or
| demolishing their position.
|
| I think he's saying that he can reduce his opponent to those
| words - i.e., the author's argument fits together, the opponent
| says "it's just wrong" and gets frustrated.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| I agree that's what he's saying, and I'm saying that is not
| demolishing the opponent's position. Scott is going up to a
| castle, talking to the walls until he thinks they should
| collapse, then when they don't collapse he's declaring
| victory by "making the walls look idiotic" and telling people
| he "demolished the castle walls".
|
| If you haven't actually convinced your opponent, and you
| haven't changed their mind, and you haven't understood their
| true objections, and you haven't presented a convincing
| enough case for your position for them (arguing in good
| faith) to accept, you haven't won, there's an underwater-
| iceburg chunk still missing.
|
| Like, if I claim 2 is the largest possible number, and show
| you 1+1, and you say "1+1 is coherent and logical and fits
| together ... I can't place the flaw but something's not right
| and I still don't believe you", I can't go around reasonably
| telling people I demolished you with my proof that 2 is the
| biggest number and you look idiotic for not believing me.
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| The thing is, often people cannot be convinced of some
| statement, not because they are so convinced of their own
| stance, but because leaving their stance feels bad and
| might even question their own identity (what they stand
| for).
|
| Only after all those years i came to that conclusion, after
| a lot of arguing and debating.
|
| And that relates to what the article says, we just nod and
| still keep our position because the other's arguments feel
| concise at first sight but just feel weird. Any rebuttal
| attempt very often feels futile and useless.
| Exoristos wrote:
| > believe both (even if they are contradictory, that's a thing
| humans can do)
|
| It really isn't, though.
| InSteady wrote:
| >Maybe the correct action is to see that how the Early Bronze
| Age worked has so little effect on your life, no testable
| hypothesis to confirm one way or the other, that it doesn't
| matter which one you believe, or if you believe both (even if
| they are contradictory, that's a thing humans can do).
|
| This is a great point, and I'd suggest it is worth taking even
| further. Even for things that have moderate or substantial
| impact on your life, holding space for the possibility that
| multiple competing/overlapping explanations could be true can
| be an extremely valuable (if cognitively expensive) skill.
| pjungwir wrote:
| > I'm glad that some people never develop epistemic learned
| helplessness, or develop only a limited amount of it, or only in
| certain domains.
|
| What always struck me about famous philosophers is that almost
| none of them ever changed their minds. They grasped a main idea,
| turned it into a supreme principle, built everything around it,
| and defended their system against all critiques their whole life.
| I know this is simplifying but I think it's pretty close.
|
| And yet when I read their works, it's easy to see flaws in their
| position. So I've always wondered how they could have such
| tenacity. I'm glad they did though. But it feels like they
| sacrificed their own life for the rest of us, so that we could
| see where one idea goes: what it looks like when it's fully
| developed.
|
| When I play chess, I can never go very deeply down a single line
| before I get distracted by alternatives. But I guess some people
| are doing a depth-first search. I don't get it, and they may be
| wrong, but it's like a service to us all.
| demondemidi wrote:
| I think it is a trope that engineering is "black or white".
|
| Having been a professional engineer for 35 years, it is anything
| BUT. Everything is a threshold for negotiation, there is give and
| take in every design decision. There is no black-white anywhere
| I've ever seen, except freshman-year logic texts. Even with
| digital logic, in reality, there is no such thing as digital:
| slopes, thresholds, manufacturing variations, it's all analog.
|
| Where does this notion come from?
| KineticLensman wrote:
| Exactly. Engineering often involves choosing a solution within
| some time / cost / performance envelope. I'm inclined to think
| that if you can't see where trade-offs might exist, it's
| because you don't fully understand the domain.
| Verdex wrote:
| I suspect it comes from when engineers try to problem solve
| with non-engineers.
|
| At the very least I've been in the room a few times when this
| happened. The engineer says a few things. The non-engineer
| suggests something outside their wheel house. The engineer
| explains why it won't work or would be too expensive to work.
| Non-engineer accuses engineers of living in a colorless world
| without imagination.
|
| The black and white thinking accusation is similar to the 50-50
| chance of winning the lottery (either you do or you don't).
| That is, engineers only say if something can work or won't work
| so they're black and white. It kind of misses the nuance in
| what's happening.
| kbutler wrote:
| He makes a convincing argument to (checks notes) not be convinced
| by convincing arguments.
| growingkittens wrote:
| > You could consider this a form of epistemic learned
| helplessness, where I know any attempt to evaluate the arguments
| is just going to be a bad idea so I don't even try.
|
| Replace "the arguments" in this sentence with "complexity" for a
| more universal statement on human nature.
|
| Some people deal with complexity through science. This sounds
| great, until you realize that science is currently systematic
| (step by step) and not systemic (whole picture). Reality is made
| of interconnected _systems_. A systematic approach leaves blind
| spots.
|
| For instance, look at medicine. Traditionally, men were seen as
| less complex to study because of the lack of a (regular) hormone
| cycle. Our medical system is largely based on _authoritatively_
| treating women as "smaller men". This results in systemic
| ignorance of women's health.
|
| Even in veterinary medicine, kittens are often treated as
| "smaller puppies". This results in needlessly dead kittens.
|
| The difference between essential complexity (complexity created
| to handle complexity) and inessential complexity (complexity
| driven by another purpose) is also important. Some people rely on
| inessential complexity to derive authority: they sound like an
| expert when they talk about their "complex" system.
|
| Understanding systems and system dynamics is useful for
| discerning between good information and bad information. If you
| can visualize an argument as a system (and as part of a system),
| it is easier to avoid getting lost in the details.
| com2kid wrote:
| > Some people deal with complexity through science. This sounds
| great, until you realize that science is currently systematic
| (step by step) and not systemic (whole picture). Reality is
| made of interconnected systems. A systematic approach leaves
| blind spots.
|
| The counter argument is that human minds are limited and very
| few people in history are able keep even a large % of the
| entire system in their head.
|
| A huge problem we face as a species is that as the amount of
| information that needs to be connected to each other in order
| to make progress grows, fewer and fewer people are able to make
| large contributions, meaning we'll accumulate knowledge and
| understanding at a slower rate.
|
| Hopefully technology will help here, and people have been
| working at using computers to try and connect those points, but
| I am not aware as to how successful those efforts have been.
| growingkittens wrote:
| The problem we face is being a culture of many specialists,
| with few generalists. Generalists are capable of managing a
| wide range of information and have the ability to transfer
| skills and knowledge between domains.
|
| You don't have to model an entire system in your head to
| understand the dynamics. That's a specialist, systematic
| point of view.
|
| The technology will only help if we change the culture and
| change how we educate and incentivize the next generation of
| humans.
| com2kid wrote:
| > The problem we face is being a culture of many
| specialists, with few generalists. Generalists are capable
| of managing a wide range of information and have the
| ability to transfer skills and knowledge between domains.
|
| Sadly different fields of science can each take a lifetime
| to master, and even closely related fields use different
| jargon[1] internally, meaning that a person can be an
| expert in something, read a journal article about that
| topic but written by an expert in another field, and not
| fully understand what is being said w/o significant mental
| work translating concepts from how one field talks about
| them vs the language and terms the reader is used to from
| their own field of study.
|
| [1] Defined as specialized language to make communication
| within the field easier
| growingkittens wrote:
| You're describing a procedural problem - different words
| for the same concepts. This is one way science is not
| systemic. As a result, experts end up solving the same
| problems in different silos.
|
| Generalists can spend time "translating" between
| subjects, find the common threads, and find missing
| pieces from other domains. Most domains have developed
| independently from each other, and there are _a lot_ of
| missing pieces.
|
| Specialists are important, but specialists without
| generalists gets us to where we are today.
| danbruc wrote:
| I know nothing about that guy, but several commenters point out
| that debating here does not mean making correct arguments but
| only making convincing arguments. If that is the case, why would
| anybody care? I can imagine a few situations where this might be
| a useful skill, for example if you have some ideological
| predisposition and want to convince others no matter the truth,
| but that does not really sound like a good goal, it essentially
| amounts to manipulation.
| ranprieur wrote:
| This discussion is completely about propositional statements, as
| if that's the only way to know anything. I would say, don't let
| mere _words_ change your sense of what 's real.
| camdenlock wrote:
| Why must these rationalist / atheist / EA people come across as
| the most smug teen debate club nerds?
| k__ wrote:
| Maybe, because the rest is so in love with their opinion.
| brindlejim wrote:
| When I consider how much specious, fallacy-riddled reasoning is
| produced by EAs, all hunkered in their AI bomb shelters praying
| for and against the end, I suspect that the "problem" that
| Scott's friends face is not learned epistemic helplessness, but
| the simple fact he cites that other people just don't want to
| spend the time on their apocalyptic verbosity.
| noqc wrote:
| I think this article is badly argued, but about a topic which
| interests me greatly.
|
| There are basically three epistemologies. There's the
| constructive (mathematical, proscriptive), the empirical
| (science, emotional), and trust. The constructive and empirical
| epistemologies don't separate as neatly as we would like them to,
| but a constructive argument basically looks like: "here's a thing
| that you definitely believe, and here is an implication of that,
| therefore you believe in the implication" aka modus ponens.
|
| The empirical epistemology goes: "You have made a lot of
| observations, here's a simple explanation for all of them that
| you may go check", more or less the scientific method.
|
| The trust based epistemology is just: "If I can establish facts
| about you, then I can establish facts about the things that you
| claim to believe, without having to see the receipts"
|
| Each of these epistemologies has its own definition of argument,
| and they're all similar, but they're distinct, and the author
| isn't being clear about which one he means. In my estimation, the
| passages about ancient history are a reflection of him mistaking
| trust based arguments for empirical ones. This is a very common
| mistake.
|
| An empirical argument is of the form "Here is the test that I
| used to differentiate my explanation from other explanations, and
| why I think this is a good test", whereas the trust based
| argument for the same explanation would be "Here is the data that
| my theory explains".
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