Morendil comments on What is Bayesianism? - Less Wrong

81 Post author: Kaj_Sotala 26 February 2010 07:43AM

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Comment author: komponisto 28 February 2010 05:48:43AM *  8 points [-]

The problem you have is the one shared by everyone from devotees of parapsychology to people who believe Meredith Kercher was killed in an orgy initiated by Amanda Knox: your prior on your theory is simply way too high.

Simply put, the events of 9/11 are so overwhelmingly more likely a priori to have been the exclusive work of a few terrorists than the product of a conspiracy involving the U.S. government, that the puzzling details you cite, even in their totality, fail to make a dent in a rational observer's credence of (more or less) the official story.

You might try asking yourself: if the official story were in fact correct, wouldn't you nevertheless expect that there would be strange facts that appear difficult to explain, and that these facts would be seized upon by conspiracy theorists, who, for some reason or another, were eager to believe the government may have been involved? And that they would be able to come up with arguments that sound convincing?

I want to stress that it is not the fact that the terrorists-only theory is officially sanctioned that makes it the (overwhelming) default explanation; as the Kercher case illustrates, sometimes the official story is an implausible conspiracy theory! Rather, it is our background knowledge of how reality operates -- which must be informed, among other things, by an acquaintance with human cognitive biases.

"Not silencing skeptical inquiry" is a great-sounding applause light, but we have to choose our battles, for reasons more mathematical than social: there are simply too many conceivable explanations for any given phenomenon, for it it be worthwhile to consider more than a very small proportion of them. Our choice of which to consider in the first place is thus going to be mainly determined by our prior probabilities -- in other words, our model of the world. Under the models of most folks here, 9/11 conspiracy theories simply aren't going to get any time of day.

If it's different for you, I'd be curious to know what kind of ideas with substantial numbers of adherents you would feel safe in dismissing without bothering to research. (If there aren't any, then I think you severely overestimate the tendency of people's beliefs to be entangled with reality.)

Comment author: Morendil 28 February 2010 10:32:50AM *  12 points [-]

"Not silencing skeptical inquiry" is a great-sounding applause light

The main issue with it has been noted multiple times by people like Dawkins: there is an effort asymmetry between plucking a false but slightly believable theory out of thin air, and actually refuting that same theory. Making shit up takes very little effort, while rationally refuting random made-up shit takes the same effort as rationally refuting theories whose refutation yields actual intellectual value. Creationists can open a hundred false arguments at very little intellectual cost, and if they are dismissed out of hand by the scientific establishment they get to cry "suppression of skeptical inquiry".

This feels related to pjeby's recent comments about curiosity. The mere feeling that "there's something odd going on here", followed by the insistence that other people should inquire into the odd phenomenon, isn't valid curiosity. That's only ersatz curiosity. Real curiosity is what ends up with you actually constructing a refutable hypothesis, and subjecting it to at least the kind of test that a random person from the Internet would perform - before actually publishing your hypothesis, and insisting that others should consider it carefully.

Inflicting random damage on other people's belief networks isn't promoting "skeptical inquiry", it's the intellectual analogue of terrorism.

Comment author: ciphergoth 28 February 2010 10:48:45AM 5 points [-]

the intellectual analogue of terrorism.

I like this comment lots, but I think this comparison is inadvisable hyperbole.

Comment author: Morendil 28 February 2010 11:42:55AM 4 points [-]

Perhaps "asymmetric warfare" would be a better term than "terrorism". More general, and without the connotations which I agree make that last line something of an exaggeration.