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David_Gerard comments on [LINK] Freeman Dyson reviews "Physics on the Fringe: Smoke Rings, Circlons, and Alternative Theories of Everything" - Less Wrong
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Comments (19)
Crankery in old age is really sad. (And, weirdly enough, the topic of the latest SMBC strip.) I've wondered sometimes about why this happens; it seems to correlate with age but not young or middle age, so I discard the default hypothesis that a false idea finally got lucky and slipped through one's memetic defenses (since that feels like more of a Poisson distribution).
As you age, your general intelligence takes a real beating but your personality traits like Openness don't change so much (and great scientists will tend to be very Open). Openness and low IQ is also correlated with being New Agey crap and that sort of thing (IIRC, citations in Miller's Spent), and these bizarre false theories do seem New Agey in some respects ('it's all, like, circles of energy man!').
Could this be the problem? When you're young and sharp, you can keenly examine new theories and ideas, although you have the handicap of being ignorant and not having spent much time on matters; so your productivity rises in your middle age to your early 40s; but by that point, your raw intelligence has become blunt and dull, and your knowledge may be increasingly out of date, while your interest in new ideas remains the same. So you continue to seek out or look at new ideas, while you are no longer able to evaluate them.
So to test this we'd want to test the following:
Check the New Age <-> high Openness/low IQ correlation
(If it doesn't hold true in unscientifically capable or trained populations, why would it hold true for old eminent scientists?)
Test that 'weird and false ideas' do disproportionately pop up in old age
(as opposed to being adopted as impressionable grad students but only worked on & espoused in the leisure of old age/tenure/retirement, or following some 'lightning strike' model, due to say the simultaneous occurrence of emotional trauma and a meme impression)
That their rate does correlate with being Open
(If there is no such correlation, it may be that the entire effect would be IQ-related.)
That their rate does inversely correlate with IQ at that time, ideally, at the instant they accepted the false idea
(If it turned out the acceptors of false ideas had most of their IQ intact, and the more conventional ones were stupid, this would be rather odd.)
I hypothesise a mechanism in the brain that works as a black-box evaluator of idea quality - you feed it ideas and it just gives you an oracular answer of how good the idea is. c.f. the widely-experienced phenomenon where you wake up in the middle of the night with a brilliant idea, write it down and then in the morning realise it's rubbish. This idea evaluator going awry might lead to many an accepted crackpot offer.
Your hypothesis seems to be not the idea evaluator going awry, but the ability to judge its outputs going awry.
This matches up nicely with the process-1/process-2 set of theories, where IQ is just a sort of 'algorithmic' or simulation thinking which is either invoked or not invoked based on one's rational or reflective tendencies. Stanovich extends this to include 'mindware', cached bits of logical or statistical reasoning which the IQ can apply to problems.
The problem with that, and why I didn't mention it, is that we currently have few good ways to measure rational/reflective tendencies, so we would have a hard time finding the possible inverse correlation.
Even if we did, we might not expect to find anything: the point of reflective thinking is to know when to switch over into expensive IQ and critical thinking, but how would this not happen at some point as these eminent scientists write up their ideas and argue with other people? If it was all reflectiveness, the first time they tipped over into non-heuristic thinking, they'd realize how stupid they were being. So do they manage to never do it? Or do they uncritically accept their ideas and then by the time anything might cause critical thinking, they've already hardened around it with confirmation bias and stubbornness and whatnot?