Just a data point, but I felt a need to write it:
I found here a link to an interesting article "Multitaskers bad at multitasking". According to the article, people who 'routinely consumed multiple media such as internet, television and mobile phones' were worse at three attention-related experiments described in the article. However these people have self-reported as better in multitasking.
Now here are some selected comments from below the article: (three comments from three different people)
Women make better multitaskers then most men, only because their lives depend on multitasking at home and at work...it seems the above study was just computer based, which is probably why the multitaskers didn't do so well...they were thinking of other things that they should've or could've been doing.
This is surprising. I'm fantastic at it. Perhaps the pool didn't actually include those who are actually gifted enough to multitask.
I am a multitasker. I have a conference call on mute as I type this. The advantage? Ignoring the detail allows me to focus on the big picture, ensuring my team are always realigning with the strategic objectives. I have a very competent group of focussed people. They're great with detailed tasks that require focus. They wouldn't let me near those activities as we all know I'd make mistakes. As a team we understand each other's strengths and weaknesses and it works well.
There is something valuable in these comments. First, some aspects of the work (such as focusing on the big picture) in a given context may be more valuable than what was tested in the experiment. Second, despite multitasker getting less utility per task, they may get more total utility, which would make multitasking a good strategy. Third, people are different, so even if the results of this experiment are relevant for majority of people, there may be some exceptions for whom multitasking is a way to get high quality work done.
However all three comments have somehow missed the essence of the article. If the article says "it was experimentally shown that people who believe to be good at multitasking work are statistically worse at work" you can't respond just by "that's nonsense, because I believe I am good at multitasking my work", unless you include some convincing evidence why we should believe that your belief is more reliable than similar beliefs of the other people who were experimentally proven wrong. (How about considering a possibility that you might be wrong, both about "being fantastic" and "focusing on the big picture"?) And that evidence should be something better than a cached thought (women being better multitaskers), or an ad-hoc excuse (a computer-based study can't measure the real multitasking).
I think we are already doing good about it on LW. I did not notice the gradual change in my epistemic hygiene expectations, until I read a text containing basic mistakes, which I probably would not have recognized as mistakes a few month ago. As an analogy, washing one's hands may feel like a boring ritual, until one sees other people eating with dirty hands and suddenly feels disgusted.
Yeah. I have just been metaphorically bloodying my forehead trying to explain to someone that if A says "X", B says "oh, you cherry-picked that example, so it's a bad argument", A says "no I didn't, it's from Y" and B replies "oh, you just picked Y at random, so it's a bad argument", then B has done something stupid no matter what the argument is about - and this has been impossible to get across. It felt very like arguing with a creationist. (It was similar in unlikelihood of minds being changed - one person is Brit...
The wiki entry for Epistemic Hygiene defines the term as:
Epistemic hygiene consists of practices meant to allow accurate beliefs to spread within a community and keep less accurate or biased beliefs contained. The practices are meant to serve an analogous purpose to normal hygiene and sanitation in containing disease.
The term was coined in Steve Rayhawk's and Anna Salamon's post "The ethic of hand-washing and community epistemic practice", and there have been several mentions of it around the site. But what, exactly, might good epistemic hygiene norms be?
I'm especially interested in this question in the context of meetup groups. In Less Wrong NYC: Case Study of a Successful Rationalist Chapter, Cosmos writes:
Epistemic privilege and meme-sharing: The most powerful aspect of a group of rationalists is that you have an entire class of people whose reasoning you trust. Division of labor arises naturally as each member has different interests, they all pursue a variety of skills and areas of expertise, which they can then bring back to the group. Even the lowest-level rationalists in the group can rapidly upgrade themselves by adopting winning heuristics from other group members. I cannot overstate the power of epistemic privilege. We have rapidly spread knowledge about metabolism, exercise, neuroscience, meditation, hypnosis, several systems of therapy... and don't forget the Dark Arts.
This would imply that one way that a meetup group (or for that matter, any social group) could get really successful would be by adopting great epistemic hygiene norms. But unless everyone present has read most of the Sequences - which gets increasingly unlikely the more the group grows - even most LW meetups probably won't just spontaneously enforce such norms. Wouldn't it be great if there were an existing list of such norms, that each group could look through and then decide which ones they'd like to adopt?
Here are some possible epistemic hygiene norms that I could find / come up with:
And of course, there's a long list of norms that basically amount to "don't be guilty of bias X", e.g. "avoid unnecessarily detailed stories about the future", "avoid fake explanations", "don't treat arguments as soldiers", etc.
Which of these norms do you consider the most valuable? Which seem questionable? Do you have any norms of your own to propose?