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Vladimir_Nesov comments on Open Thread: January 2010 - Less Wrong
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Hello all,
I've been a longtime lurker, and tried to write up a post a while ago, only to see that I didn't have enough karma. I figure this is is the post for a newbie to present something new. I already published this particular post on my personal blog, but if the community here enjoys it enough to give it karma, I'd gladly turn it into a top-level post here, if that's in order.
Life Experience Should Not Modify Your Opinion http://paltrypress.blogspot.com/2009/11/life-experience-should-not-modify-your.html
When I'm debating some controversial topic with someone older than I am, even if I can thoroughly demolish their argument, I am sometimes met with a troubling claim, that perhaps as I grow older, my opinions will change, or that I'll come around on the topic. Implicit in this claim is the assumption that my opinion is based primarily on nothing more than my perception from personal experience.
When my cornered opponent makes this claim, it's a last resort. It's unwarranted condescension, because it reveals how wrong their entire approach is. Just by making the claim, they demonstrate that they believe all opinions are based primarily on an accumulation of personal experiences, even their own opinions. Their assumption reveals that they are not Bayesian, and that they intuit that no one is. For not being Bayesian, they have no authority that warrants such condescension.
I intentionally avoid presenting personal anecdotes cobbled together as evidence, because I know that projecting my own experience onto a situation to explain it is no evidence at all. I know that I suffer from all sorts of cognitive biases that obstruct my understanding of the truth. As such, my inclination is to rely on academic consensus. If I explain this explicitly to my opponent, they might dismiss academics as unreliable and irrelevant, hopelessly stuck in the ivory tower of academia.
Dismiss academics at your own peril. Sometimes there are very good reasons for dismissing academic consensus. I concede that most academics aren't Bayesian because academia is an elaborate credentialing and status-signaling mechanism. Furthermore, academics have often been wrong. The Sokal affair illustrates that entire fields can exist completely without merit. That academic consensus can easily be wrong should be intuitively obvious to an atheist; religious community leaders have always been considered academic experts, the most learned and smartest members of society. Still, it would be a fallacious inversion of an argument from authority to dismiss academic consensus simply because it is academic consensus.
For all of academia's flaws, the process of peer-reviewed scientific inquiry, informed by logic, statistics, and regression analysis, offers a better chance at discovering truth than any other institution in history. It is noble and desirable to criticize academic theories, but only as part of intellectually honest, impartial scientific inquiry. Dismissing academic consensus out of hand is primitive, and indicates intellectual dishonesty.
It's unclear what you mean by both "Bayesian" and by "authority" in this sentence. If a person is "Bayesian", does it give "authority" for condescension?
There clearly is some truth to the claim that being around longer sometimes allows to arrive at more accurate beliefs, including more accurate intuitive assessment of the situation, if you are not down a crazy road in the particular domain. It's not a very strong evidence, and it can't defeat many forms of more direct evidence pointing in the contrary direction, but sometimes it's an OK heuristic, especially if you are not aware of other evidence ("ask the elder").
Maybe "authority" is the wrong word. What I mean is that the opponent making this claim is dismissing my stance as wrong, because of my supposed less experience. It means that they believe that truth follows from collecting anecdotes. They ascertain that because they have more anecdotes, they are correct, and I am incorrect. For not being rational, we can't trust their standard of truth to dismiss my position as wrong, since their whole methodology is hopelessly flawed.
Your core claim seems to be that you should dismiss statements (as opposed to arguments) by "irrational" people. This is a more general idea, basically unrelated to amount of their personal experience or other features of typical conversations which you discuss in your comment.
If someone's argument, and therefore position, is irrational, how can we trust them to give honest and accurate criticism of other arguments?
At which point you are completely forsaking your original argument (rightfully or wrongly, which is a separate concern), which is the idea of my critical comment above. It's unclear what you are arguing about, if your conclusion is equivalent to a much simpler premise that you have to assume independently of the argument. This sounds like rationalization (again, no matter whether the conclusion-advice-heuristic is correct or not).
OK, let me break it down.
I take "life experience" to mean a haphazard collection of anecdotes.
Claims from haphazardly collected anecdotes do not constitute legitimate evidence, though I concede those claims do often have positive correlations with true facts.
As such, relying on "life experience" is not rational. The point about condescension is tangential. The whole rhetorical technique is frustrating, because there is no way to move on from it. If "life experience" were legitimate evidence for the claim, the argument would not be able to continue until I have gained more "life experience," and who decides how much would be sufficient? Would it be until I come around? Once we throw the standard of evidence out, we're outside the bounds of rational discourse.
I don't think that's something that most people who think "life experience" is valuable would agree to.
It might be profitable for you to revise your criteria for what constitutes legitimate evidence. Throwing away information that has a positive correlation with the thing you're wondering about seems a bit hasty.
I am calling attention to reverting to "life experience" as recourse in an argument. If someone strays to that, it's clear that we're no longer considering evidence for whatever the argument is about. Referring back to "life experience" is far too nebulous to take as any evidence anything.
As for what constitutes legitimate evidence, even if anecdotes can correlate, anecdotes are not evidence!
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-anecdotal-evidence-can-undermine-scientific-results
Anecdotes are rational evidence, but not scientific evidence.