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thomblake 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 illustrated nothing of the sort. The Sokal affair illustrated that a non-peer-reviewed, non-science journal will publish bad science writing that was believed to be submitted in good faith.
Social Text was not peer-reviewed because they were hoping to... do... something. What Sokal did was similar to stealing everything from a 'good faith' vegetable stand and then criticizing its owner for not having enough security.
Noted. In another draft I'll change this to make the point how easy it is for high-status academics to deal in gibberish. Maybe they didn't have so much status external to their group of peers, but within it, did they?
What the Social Text Affair Does and Does Not Prove
http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/noretta.html
"From the mere fact of publication of my parody I think that not much can be deduced. It doesn't prove that the whole field of cultural studies, or cultural studies of science -- much less sociology of science -- is nonsense. Nor does it prove that the intellectual standards in these fields are generally lax. (This might be the case, but it would have to be established on other grounds.) It proves only that the editors of one rather marginal journal were derelict in their intellectual duty, by publishing an article on quantum physics that they admit they could not understand, without bothering to get an opinion from anyone knowledgeable in quantum physics, solely because it came from a
conveniently credentialed ally'' (as Social Text co-editor Bruce Robbins later candidly admitted[12]), flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions, and attacked theirenemies''.[13]"I'd forgotten that Sokal himself admitted that much about it - thanks for the cite.