But when it comes to the actual meat of the religion, prophets and priests follow the ancient human practice of making everything up as they go along. And they make up one rule for women under twelve, another rule for men over thirteen; one rule for the Sabbath and another rule for weekdays; one rule for science and another rule for sorcery...
???
I thought those rules were the outcome of competition between different factions. The factions with the better rules were more likely to win. For example, a century or two ago, part of the Jewish community decide...
Eh, I see this as a purely selective / survivorship-bias process:
All the little minority groups that didn't have weird rules got assimilated into the mainstream culture and lost their identity as little minority groups. They became Persians or Greeks or Romans or Christians or Muslims, when those empires were in ascendancy. Therefore, all the little minority groups that have remained distinct for thousands of years have weird rules.
It's not that the weird rules were good for individuals' survival. Pretty often, you're better off individually if you join the mainstream. But weird rules are good for maintaining group identity.
Joseph, how did they get these "competing rules" in the first place? By making them up as they went along. So, in accordance with human psychology, they make up lots of different rules for different occasions that "feel different". Both sides (or all sides) of any religious battle do this, and it doesn't matter who wins, they still won't come up with a unified answer.
Hmmm...
Q) Why do I believe that special relativity is true? A) Because scientists have told me their standards of evidence, and that the evidence for special relativity meets those standards.
I haven't seen anything contract when moving close to the speed of light. I haven't measured the speed of light in a vacuum and found that it is independent of the non-accelerating motion of the observer. I haven't measured a change in mass during nuclear reactions. I simply hear what people tell me, and decide to believe it.
George Orwell put it far more elegantly, and...
Are you asserting that there is no controversy among credentialed nutritionists about what kind of food is best to eat?
Nutritionist here. The protected word is "dietician", literally anyone can legitimately call themselves "nutritionists", whereas you actually have to have some relevant credentials before you're a credited dietician.
As a nutritionist, my professional opinion is that bricks are quite healthy, due to their high iron content.
Yes, academics largely train people to follow various standard procedures as social conventions, instead of getting people to really understand the reasons for those conventions. Apparently it is very hard to teach and test regarding the underlying reasons. That is the fact that really gives me pause.
"Now suppose we discover that a Ph.D. economist buys a lottery ticket every week. We have to ask ourselves: Does this person really understand expected utility, on a gut level?"
Tricky question. It we look purely at the financial return, the odds, then no. If we look at the return in utility, possibly yes.
Is $1 too much to pay for a couple of days of pleasurable dreams about what one would do if one won? Don't we think that such fleeing from reality has some value to the one entering such a fantasy, a suspension of the rules of the real world?
If we don't agree that that has some value then it's going to be terribly difficult to explain why people spend $8 to do to the movies for 90 minutes.
I don't buy lottery tickets.. but I still dream about what I'd do if I won. I realised a while back that i don't actually have to pay to have those dreams.
In sum, I agree, but one small issue I take is when you argue that someone acts contrary to their learning it demonstrates that they don't really understand it. I'm sure this is often the case, but sometimes it's a matter of akrasia: the person knows what they should do and why, even deep down inside, yet finds themselves unable to do it.
Humans suffer heavily from their biases. I recall at in middle school I came to the conclusion that no deities existed, yet it took me a long while to act on it because of social pressures, so I continued to behave cont...
Tao was described (I wouldn't say invented...) long before Isaac Newton, and yet expresses Feynman's sentiments almost exactly. But then it isn't a religion, either.
Apparently it is very hard to teach and test regarding the underlying reasons.
Does "apparently" (in general) mean you aren't using additional sources of information? In this case, are you concluding that it's difficult simply from the fact that it isn't done? That only seems to me like evidence that it's not worth it. Unfortunately, the value driving the system is getting published, not advancing science.
Douglas, I have found it hard to teach when I have tried, but I'm sure another reason it is rarely done is that academic rewards for it tend to be small relative to the costs.
Tim Worstall, if a PhD economist has pleasurable dreams about winning the lottery, that is exactly what I would call "failing to understand probability on a gut level". Look at the water! A calculated probability of 0.0000001 should diminish the emotional strength of any anticipation, positive or negative, by a factor of ten million. Otherwise you've understood the probability as little symbols on paper but not what it means in real life.
Also, a good economist should be aware that winning the lottery often does not make people happy - though one must take into account that they were the sort of people who bought lottery tickets to begin with.
Tim Worstall, if a PhD economist has pleasurable dreams about winning the lottery, that is exactly what I would call "failing to understand probability on a gut level"
In that case, wouldn't you say that anyone who suffers from akrasia (which is pretty much everyone at some time) has a failure of understanding on a gut level? My subconscious mind doesn't seem to understand that it's a bad idea to eat a box of pizza every night; so I have to rely on my conscious mind to take charge, or at least try to.
Occasionally even health-conscious people eat stuff like pizza, which is arguably the equivalent of buying the occasional lottery ticket. In each case, the conscious mind is aware that one is doing something counter-productive. In the case of a lottery ticket, one is enjoying the fantasy of being free from his day-to-day financial worries,even though there is essentially zero chance of actually succeeding. In the case of pigging out, one is enjoying the feeling of being stuffed with tasty food, even though there is essentially zero chance that there will be a food shortage next week which will justify his having pigged out.
A calculated probability of 0.0000001 should diminish the emotional strength of any anticipation, positive or negative, by a factor of ten million.
I don't play the lottery, but I sometimes have pleasurable daydreams about what I'd do if I were some great success - found the cure for cancer, proved P=NP, won a Nobel prize... objectively speaking, the probability is extremely low, but it doesn't scale my pleasure down by a million times.
A calculated probability of 0.0000001 should diminish the emotional strength of any anticipation, positive or negative, by a factor of ten million.
And there goes Walter Mitty and Calvin, then. If it is justifiable to enjoy art or sport, why is it not justifiable to enjoy gambling for its own sake?
if the results are significant at the 0.05 confidence level. Now this is not just a ritualized tradition. This is not a point of arbitrary etiquette like using the correct fork for salad.
The use of the 0.05 confidence level is itself a point of arbitrary etiquette. The idea that results close to identical, yet one barely meeting the arbitrary 0.05 confidence level and the other not, can be separated into two categories of "significant" and "not significant" is a ritualized tradition indeed perhaps not understood by many scientists. There are important reasons for having an arbitrary point to mark significance, and of having that custom be the same throughout science (and not chosen by the experimenter). But the actual point is arbitrary etiquette.
The commonality of utensils or traffic signals in a culture is important, even though the specific forms that they take...
The vast majority of scientist, by your standard, don't really understand science. Humans have certain built-in biases and consistently make certain kinds of bad judgements. Even statisticians and mathematicians make common errors of judgement. The fact is that people are often not rational and are driven by emotion, biases, and other non-rational factors.
While it's useful to study and understand these biases and it's healthy to try to avoid commoon errors of judgement, it's not accurate to declare that anyone who acts irrationally is not truly a scientist or doesn't actually understand science. You are merely observing that they are human.
I apologize for responding to this where you are highly unlikely to see ... but you seem to be missing an essential point. It is not necessary to understand science to do science any more than it is necessary to understand control theory to balance on one leg. What is disappointing is that even the population of scientists - who would appear the most likely to understand science - make errors that demonstrate that they do not.
Even so, we rationalists ought not to be deterred from improving our minds by their failure to. That would be an improper use of humility.
Comments like the parent are the reason I'm glad we don't have a norm against responding to ancient comments.
Probability theory still applies.
Ah, but which probability theory? Bayesian or frequentist? Or the ideas of Fisher?
How do you feel about the likelihood principle? The Behrens-Fisher problem, particularly when the variances are unknown and not assumed to be equal? The test of a sharp (or point) null hypothesis?
It does no good to assume that one's statistics and probability theory are not built on axioms themselves. I have rarely met a probabilist or statistician whose answer about whether he or she believes in the likelihood principle or in the logical...
John, I consider myself a 'Bayesian wannabe' and my favorite author thereon is E. T. Jaynes. As such, I follow Jaynes in vehemently denying that the posterior probability following an experiment should depend on "whether Alice decided ahead of time to conduct 12 trials or decided to conduct trials until 3 successes were achieved". See Jaynes's Probability Theory: The Logic of Science.
The 0.05 significance level is not just "arbitrary", it is demonstrably too high - in some fields the actual majority of "statistically significant" results fail to replicate, but the failures to replicate don't get into the prestigious journals, and are not talked about and remembered.
The universe doesn't care about Alice's intentions. The trials give information and that information would have been the same even if the trials were run because a rock fell on Alice's keyboard when she wasn't watching.
Surely you accept that if Alice conducts 100 trials and only gives you the successes, you'll get the wrong result no matter the statistical procedure used
Yes, he does.
so you can't say that biased data collection is irrelevant.
Here is where the mistake starts creeping in. You are setting up "biased data collection" to mean selective reporting. Cherry picking the trials that succeed while discarding trials that do not. But in the case of Alice the evidence is all being considered.
You have to either claim that continuing until 3 successes were achieved is an unbiased process, or retreat from the claim that that procedure for collecting the data does not influence the correct interpretation of the results.
The necessary claim is "continuing until 3 successes are achieved does not produce biased data", which is true.
This is a question that is empirically testable. Run a simulation of agents that try to guess, say, which of a set of weighted dice are in use. Pit your 'care what Alice thinks' agents against the bayesian agent. Let them bet among themselves. See which one ends up with all the money.
I thought the exact same thing, and wrote a program to test it. Program is below:
from random import random
p_success = 0.10
def twelve_trials(p_success = 0.25):
>>>># Runs twelve trials, counts the successes
>>>>success_count = 0
>>>>num_trials = 0
>>>>for i in range(12):
>>>>>>>>if random() < p_success:
>>>>>>>>>>>>success_count += 1
>>>>>>>>num_trials += 1
>>>>return success_count
def trials_until_3(p_success = 0.25):
>>>># Runs trials until it hits three successes, counts the trials
>>>>success_count = 0
>>>>num_trials = 0
>>>>while success_count < 3:
>>>>>>>>if random() < p_success:
>>>>>>>>>>>>success_count += 1
>>>>>>>>num_trials += 1
>>>>return num_trials
for i in range(100):
>>>>num_tests = 10000
>>>>twelve_trials_successes = 0
>>>>for i in range(num_tests):
>>>>>>>># See how often there are at least 3 successes in 12I don't follow this. If we meet a scientist who is a Marxist, or a Democrat, or a libertarian, or a Republican, or whatever, we don't point out that there is no empirical proof that any of those political programs would achieve its desired aims, and that no true scientist would hold political beliefs. We accept that political decisions are made on different (some would say weaker) evidence that scientific decisions. More generally, there are many questions that the methods of science can't be used to answer.
I consider myself a 'Bayesian wannabe' and my favorite author thereon is E. T. Jaynes.
Ah, well then I agree with you. However, I'm interested in how you reconcile your philosophical belief as a subjectivist when it comes to probability with the remainder of this post. Of course, as a mathematician, arguments based on the idea of rejecting arbitrary axioms are inherently less impressive than to some other scientists. After all, most of us believe in the Axiom of Choice for some reason like that the proofs needing it are too beautiful and must be true; th...
Sorry, ambiguous wording. 0.05 is too weak, and should be replaced with, say, 0.005. It would be a better scientific investment to do fewer studies with twice as many subjects and have nearly all the reported results be replicable. Unfortunately, this change has to be standardized within a field, because otherwise you're deliberately handicapping yourself in an arms race. This probably deserves its own post.
In my head, I always translate so-called "statistically significant" results into (an often poorly-computed approximation to) a likelihoo...
"And there goes Walter Mitty and Calvin, then. If it is justifiable to enjoy art or sport, why is it not justifiable to enjoy gambling for its own sake?"
You don't have to believe (at any level) that there's a higher chance of you winning than there actually is to enjoy gambling. You just have to consider that the "thrill" payoff inherent in the uncertainty itself is high enough to justify the money that will be statistically spent. I think exactly the same argument could be made about sport.
OT: Eliezer, what do you think about null hypotheses? E.g. what's the correct null hypothesis regarding the probability distribution of the size of (cubic) boxes produced by the box factory, where a flat distribution over the length would produce a polynomial distribution over surface area and volume, for instance?
pdf, that gets into the issue of ignorance priors which is a whole bagful o' worms in its own right. I tend to believe that we should choose more fundamental and earlier elements of a causal model. The factory was probably built by someone who had in mind a box of a particular volume, and so that, in the real world, is probably the earliest element of the causal model we should be ignorant about. If the factory poofed into existence as a random collection of machinery that happened to manufacture cubic boxes, it would be appropriate to be ignorant about the side length.
Sorry, ambiguous wording. 0.05 is too weak, and should be replaced with, say, 0.005. It would be a better scientific investment to do fewer studies with twice as many subjects and have nearly all the reported results be replicable. Unfortunately, this change has to be standardized within a field, because otherwise you're deliberately handicapping yourself in an arms race.
Ah, yes, I see. I understand and lean instinctively towards agreeing. Certainly I agree about the standardization problem. I think it's rather difficult to determine what is the best number, though. 0.005 is as equally pulled out of a hat as Fisher's 0.05.
From your "A Technical Explanation of Technical Explanation":
Similarly, I wonder how many betters on horse races realize that you don't win by betting on the horse you think will win the race, but by betting on horses whose payoffs exceed what you think are the odds. But then, statistical thinkers that sophisticated would probably not bet on horse races.
Now I know that you aren't familiar with gambling. The latter is precisely what the professional gamblers do, and some of them do bet on horse races, or sports. Professional gamblers, unlike the ama...
To add to the comment about gambling-- professional gamblers are well aware of the term Dutch book, if not necessarily with arbitrage (though arbitrage is becoming more commonly used).
Heh. Fair enough, John, I suppose that someone has to arbitrage the books. I'll add it to Jane Galt's observation regarding the genuine usefulness of salad forks.
I agree that 0.005 is equally pulled out of a hat. But I also agree on your earlier observation regarding there being some necessity for standardization here.
Personally, I would prefer to standardize "small", "medium", and "large" effect sizes, then report likelihood ratios over the point null hypothesis. A very strong advantage of this approach is that it lets so...
The point is not that scientists should be perfect in all spheres of human endeavor. But neither should anyone who really understands science, deliberately start believing things without evidence. It's not a moral question, merely a gross and indefensible error of cognition. It's the equivalent of being trained to say that 2 + 2 = 4 on math tests, but when it comes time to add up a pile of candy bars you decide that 2 + 2 ought to equal 5 because you want 5 candy bars. You may do well on math tests, when you apply the rules that have been trained into you, but you don't understand numbers. Similarly, if you deliberately believe without evidence, you don't understand cognition or probability theory. You may understand quarks, or cells, but not science.
Newton may have been a hotshot physicist by the standards of the 17th century, but he wasn't a hotshot rationalist by the standards of this one. (Laplace, on the other hand, was explicitly a probability theorist as well as a physicist, and he was an outstanding rationalist by the standards of that era.)
Yes, there have been many great scientists who believed in utter crap - though fewer of them and weaker belief, as you move toward modern times.
And there have also been many great jugglers who didn't understand gravity, differential equations, or how their cerebellar cortex learned realtime motor skills. The vast majority of historical geniuses had no idea how their own brains worked, however brainy they may have been.
You can make an amazing discovery, and go down in the historical list of great scientists, without ever understanding what makes Science work. Though you couldn't build a scientist, just like you couldn't build a juggler without knowing all that stuff about gravity and differential equations and error correction in realtime motor skills.
I still wouldn't trust the one's opinion about a controversial issue in which they had an emotional stake. I couldn't rely on them to know the difference between evidence versus a wish to believe. If they can compartmentalize their brains for a spirit world, maybe they compartmentalize their brains for scientific controversies too - who knows? If they gave into temptation once, why not again? I'll find someone else to ask for their summary of the issues.
If 'spirituality' is a catch-all dumpster for 'a common explanation toward things I cannot show empirically at this very moment,' then the criticism is correct: this is a useless discarding of knowledge.
On the other hand, if you don't start with an assumption of first principles, you have no science at your disposal. Certainly, new knowledge can build upon established knowledge; but what did that knowledge build upon? Sooner or later, we must come up with a blank. No question can be asked, and tested, unless it starts with something to build upon. The ...
have you ever actually seen an infinite set?
Wait, are you an finitist or an intuitionist when it comes to the philosophy of mathematics? I don't think I've ever met one before in person?
Clearly you have to deal with infinite sets in order to apply Bayesian probability theory. So do you deal with mathematics as some sort of dualism where infinite sets are allowed so long as you aren't referring to the real world, or do you use them as a sort of accounting fiction but always assume that you're really dealing with limits of finite things but it makes the ma...
Sorry, posted too soon. I'm a little confused because you said that you rejected coherentist views of truth, but most mathematical empiricists these days use the idea of coherence to justify mathematics. (Mathematics is necessary for these scientific theories; these theories must be taken as a whole; therefore there is reason to accept mathematics, to grossly simplify.)
Q) Why do I believe that special relativity is true? A) Because scientists have told me their standards of evidence, and that the evidence for special relativity meets those standards.
I also know that GPS satellites work with high precision, and that they wouldn't if they didn't correct for relativity.
GPS? You can do better than that! I believe special relativity because it's implied by Maxwell's equations, which I have experienced. Normal human speeds are enough to detect contraction, if you do it by comparing E&M.
John Thacker:
I consider myself a finitist, but not an ultrafinitist; I believe in the existence of numbers expressed using Conway chained arrow notation. I am also willing to reject finitism iff a physical theory is constructed which requires me to believe in infinite quantities. I tentatively believe in real numbers and differential equations because physics requires (though I also hold out hope that e.g. holographic physics or some other discrete view may enable me to go digital again). However, I don't believe that the real numbers in physics are rea...
Eliezer wrote: "Godel's Completeness theorem shows that any first-order statement true in all models of a set of first-order axioms is provable from those axioms. Thus, the failure of Peano Arithmetic to prove itself consistent is because there are many "supernatural" models of PA in which PA itself is not consistent; that is, there exist supernatural numbers corresponding to proofs of P&~P."
This is getting far from the topic but... I really don't see how Completeness entails anything about PA's failure to prove itself consistent (m...
"PA is not expressible as a first-order statement." Countable sets of first-order statements still count. But, yes, this is getting rather far off-topic.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_completeness_theorem
"Those not willing to examine this evidence are following in the footsteps of Cardinal Bellarmine with his refusal to look through Galileo's telescope. And the refusal is for the same essential reasons: sociology and arrogance."
From the Crackpot Index: "40 points for comparing yourself to Galileo, suggesting that a modern-day Inquisition is hard at work on your case, and so on."
Anyway, based on what I've read, Sheldrake's experiments do return statistically significant results, but there tend to be problems with the experiments themselves that suggest the results are not caused by anything currently unknown to physics. For more details, just check out www.randi.org and search for Sheldrake's name.
Alot of these comments are getting pretty far off topic. Why not create new posts on these interesting topics?
From the Crackpot Index: "40 points for comparing yourself to Galileo, suggesting that a modern-day Inquisition is hard at work on your case, and so on."
Are you seeking truth, or seeking to confirm your current beliefs? Do you deny that the mainstream of the scientific establishment has sociological parameters and taboos, and that these are extremely hostile to the possibility of telepathy and related topics? In that case, you might find this essay by the editor of the Journal of Consciousness Studies, of interest (JCS is a mainstream journal ...
I know for a fact that some scientists, even some world-renowned scientists, are morons outside of their own field. I used to manage construction at a Big 10 University, and had many conversations like this one:
BRILLIANT SCIENTIST, looking over my estimate for a remodelling project on his floor: "What the heck is this, $4000 for a door? A door? I just replaced the front door of my house for $500!"
ME: "Sir, your house is made of wood, and the doors don't have to meet any particular fire code. This building is concrete and steel, and the doors have to be 90-minute fire-rated. This means, among other things, that the door slab has to be hollow metal, which means it is heavy, which means that the frame, hinges, latch, and handle all have to be much sturdier than the hardware on wood doors. Also, the carpenter who will install this door is probably getting paid more than carpenters who work residential, and he's going to have to spend more time on it because it is more complicated. Finally, the lock core has to match all the rest of the cores in this building, so as not to mess up the keying system."
BS: "Don't give me that! This is ridiculous!"
I wish I had a dime for every time this happened . . . .
...But the proverb does appear true to some degree, and I propose that we should be very disturbed by this fact. We should not sigh, and shake our heads sadly. Rather we should sit bolt upright in alarm. Why? Well, suppose that an apprentice shepherd is laboriously trained to count sheep, as they pass in and out of a fold. Thus the shepherd knows when all the sheep have left, and when all the sheep have returned. Then you give the shepherd a few apples, and say: "How many apples?" But the shepherd stares at you blankly, because they weren't
Hmm. Personally, as a Christian and a student of science (doing a Bachelor of Aviation Technology), I have to say that my thought processes were entirely different from what you described in your article.
I went with Pascal's Wager, or at least a modified version of it. Any sort of existence is infinitely better than not existing at all; this eliminates atheism, Buddhism, and Hinduism from consideration, along with other reincarnation-oriented religions. Judaism is almost impossible to convert into, so it's out of the running. Of the religions that remain, ...
I'm curious if you actually put as much thought into this as you claim to. I'm also curious if you grew up in a largely Christian environment. This entire piece sounds a bit like motivated cognition. In particular, I have to wonder whether your justification for throwing out Judaism as being "almost impossible to convert into" reflects an actual attempt to investigate this matter. Depending on the denomination/movement, the time it takes can vary from a few weeks or months (in some Reform versions) to as long as 2-3 years (in Orthodox forms). It also seems like you didn't do much research because under your framework there are much stronger reasons to reject Judaism. In particular, the vast majority of forms of Judaism don't believe in eternal damnation, and those that do generally severely limit the set of people whom it applies to. You seem to have an associated problem in generalizing about Christianity and Islam in that there are universalist or close to universalist forms of both those religions. Not only that, but even among non-universalists there is a chance for members of other religions to go to heaven. (If one were just looking at the Abrahamic religions for example and trying to minimize one's chance of hell, Judaism might make the most sense since many forms of Christianity and Islam are ok with that). But you seem to have also simply avoided thinking about many religious traditions, such as Mormonism and the Ba'hai.
"everything is connected to everything else". (Since there is a trivial isomorphism between graphs and their complements, this profound wisdom conveys exactly the same useful information as a graph with no edges.)
This seems like it is somehow connected to the fact that pantheism and solipsism are identical beliefs with different terminology for that which provides sensation.
And yes, that does make me wonder if I can trust that scientist's opinions even in their own field - especially when it comes to any controversial issue, any open question, anything that isn't already nailed down by massive evidence and social convention.
Not all scientists go around tallying up the expectations payed by their beliefs. If they have a freeloading belief they hadn't examined, one that doesn't affect their science, so what of it?
There's something fundamentally different between a gambling economist and a theist scientist: the thinking requi...
In learning we have two drives, to find truth and to avoid error. These rarely do come in conflict, and even more rarely do they come into any major kind of conflict, but there still are times that we have to decide whether we consider it to be more important to find truths or to avoid errors. Religion, for instance.
Let us imagine that a time traveler arrives from some distant point in the future and teaches me five facts which are not currently known to the world. Four of these facts can be explained with current scientific knowledge, and when they are t...
This article reminds me of a question one of my favorite teachers asked his classes. Are you learning to enrich your life or to avoid pain? What he wanted us students to question was our motivations for sitting in his class and taking notes and memorizing curriculum. Was it because we wanted to do what society tells us we need to do (get good grades, go to college, make a lot of money) or because we genuinely wanted to learn? Obviously the answer for the vast majority of student is the former. The same could be said of the scientists who operate differentl...
Looks like somewhere along the transition to lesswrong, the trackback to this related OB post appears to have been lost. It's worth digging a step deeper for the context, here.
I'm an athiest but I never particularly liked the assumption that anyone religious is some kind of idiot or isn't really a scientist.
A great many physicists in particular were theists. Half the terms you'd find yourself using in physics are the names of theists. Leaving out lots of people with less well known names:
Antoine Becquerel,
Guglielmo Marconi,
Gustav Hertz,
Werner Heisenberg ("“The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you”"),
Max Planck (was really ...
Quick q: the above article reminds me of the theory of scientism (i.e. that science is the only source of knowledge). Have I misunderstood the article?
(apologies - I'm a lowly physics student so my Bayesian logic is definitely flawed)
...In modern society there is a prevalent notion that spiritual matters can't be settled by logic or observation, and therefore you can have whatever religious beliefs you like. If a scientist falls for this, and decides to live their extralaboratorial life accordingly, then this, to me, says that they only understand the experimental principle as a social convention. They know when they are expected to do experiments and test the results for statistical significance. But put them in a context where it is socially conventional to make up wac
"Outside the laboratory, scientists are no wiser than anyone else." Sometimes this proverb is spoken by scientists, humbly, sadly, to remind themselves of their own fallibility. Sometimes this proverb is said for rather less praiseworthy reasons, to devalue unwanted expert advice. Is the proverb true? Probably not in an absolute sense. It seems much too pessimistic to say that scientists are literally no wiser than average, that there is literally zero correlation.
But the proverb does appear true to some degree, and I propose that we should be very disturbed by this fact. We should not sigh, and shake our heads sadly. Rather we should sit bolt upright in alarm. Why? Well, suppose that an apprentice shepherd is laboriously trained to count sheep, as they pass in and out of a fold. Thus the shepherd knows when all the sheep have left, and when all the sheep have returned. Then you give the shepherd a few apples, and say: "How many apples?" But the shepherd stares at you blankly, because they weren't trained to count apples - just sheep. You would probably suspect that the shepherd didn't understand counting very well.
Now suppose we discover that a Ph.D. economist buys a lottery ticket every week. We have to ask ourselves: Does this person really understand expected utility, on a gut level? Or have they just been trained to perform certain algebra tricks?
One thinks of Richard Feynman's account of a failing physics education program:
"The students had memorized everything, but they didn't know what anything meant. When they heard 'light that is reflected from a medium with an index', they didn't know that it meant a material such as water. They didn't know that the 'direction of the light' is the direction in which you see something when you're looking at it, and so on. Everything was entirely memorized, yet nothing had been translated into meaningful words. So if I asked, 'What is Brewster's Angle?' I'm going into the computer with the right keywords. But if I say, 'Look at the water,' nothing happens - they don't have anything under 'Look at the water'!"
Suppose we have an apparently competent scientist, who knows how to design an experiment on N subjects; the N subjects will receive a randomized treatment; blinded judges will classify the subject outcomes; and then we'll run the results through a computer and see if the results are significant at the 0.05 confidence level. Now this is not just a ritualized tradition. This is not a point of arbitrary etiquette like using the correct fork for salad. It is a ritualized tradition for testing hypotheses experimentally. Why should you test your hypothesis experimentally? Because you know the journal will demand so before it publishes your paper? Because you were trained to do it in college? Because everyone else says in unison that it's important to do the experiment, and they'll look at you funny if you say otherwise?
No: because, in order to map a territory, you have to go out and look at the territory. It isn't possible to produce an accurate map of a city while sitting in your living room with your eyes closed, thinking pleasant thoughts about what you wish the city was like. You have to go out, walk through the city, and write lines on paper that correspond to what you see. It happens, in miniature, every time you look down at your shoes to see if your shoelaces are untied. Photons arrive from the Sun, bounce off your shoelaces, strike your retina, are transduced into neural firing frequences, and are reconstructed by your visual cortex into an activation pattern that is strongly correlated with the current shape of your shoelaces. To gain new information about the territory, you have to interact with the territory. There has to be some real, physical process whereby your brain state ends up correlated to the state of the environment. Reasoning processes aren't magic; you can give causal descriptions of how they work. Which all goes to say that, to find things out, you've got to go look.
Now what are we to think of a scientist who seems competent inside the laboratory, but who, outside the laboratory, believes in a spirit world? We ask why, and the scientist says something along the lines of: "Well, no one really knows, and I admit that I don't have any evidence - it's a religious belief, it can't be disproven one way or another by observation." I cannot but conclude that this person literally doesn't know why you have to look at things. They may have been taught a certain ritual of experimentation, but they don't understand the reason for it - that to map a territory, you have to look at it - that to gain information about the environment, you have to undergo a causal process whereby you interact with the environment and end up correlated to it. This applies just as much to a double-blind experimental design that gathers information about the efficacy of a new medical device, as it does to your eyes gathering information about your shoelaces.
Maybe our spiritual scientist says: "But it's not a matter for experiment. The spirits spoke to me in my heart." Well, if we really suppose that spirits are speaking in any fashion whatsoever, that is a causal interaction and it counts as an observation. Probability theory still applies. If you propose that some personal experience of "spirit voices" is evidence for actual spirits, you must propose that there is a favorable likelihood ratio for spirits causing "spirit voices", as compared to other explanations for "spirit voices", which is sufficient to overcome the prior improbability of a complex belief with many parts. Failing to realize that "the spirits spoke to me in my heart" is an instance of "causal interaction", is analogous to a physics student not realizing that a "medium with an index" means a material such as water.
It is easy to be fooled, perhaps, by the fact that people wearing lab coats use the phrase "causal interaction" and that people wearing gaudy jewelry use the phrase "spirits speaking". Discussants wearing different clothing, as we all know, demarcate independent spheres of existence - "separate magisteria", in Stephen J. Gould's immortal blunder of a phrase. Actually, "causal interaction" is just a fancy way of saying, "Something that makes something else happen", and probability theory doesn't care what clothes you wear.
In modern society there is a prevalent notion that spiritual matters can't be settled by logic or observation, and therefore you can have whatever religious beliefs you like. If a scientist falls for this, and decides to live their extralaboratorial life accordingly, then this, to me, says that they only understand the experimental principle as a social convention. They know when they are expected to do experiments and test the results for statistical significance. But put them in a context where it is socially conventional to make up wacky beliefs without looking, and they just as happily do that instead.
The apprentice shepherd is told that if "seven" sheep go out, and "eight" sheep go out, then "fifteen" sheep had better come back in. Why "fifteen" instead of "fourteen" or "three"? Because otherwise you'll get no dinner tonight, that's why! So that's professional training of a kind, and it works after a fashion - but if social convention is the only reason why seven sheep plus eight sheep equals fifteen sheep, then maybe seven apples plus eight apples equals three apples. Who's to say that the rules shouldn't be different for apples?
But if you know why the rules work, you can see that addition is the same for sheep and for apples. Isaac Newton is justly revered, not for his outdated theory of gravity, but for discovering that - amazingly, surprisingly - the celestial planets, in the glorious heavens, obeyed just the same rules as falling apples. In the macroscopic world - the everyday ancestral environment - different trees bear different fruits, different customs hold for different people at different times. A genuinely unified universe, with stationary universal laws, is a highly counterintuitive notion to humans! It is only scientists who really believe it, though some religions may talk a good game about the "unity of all things".
As Richard Feynman put it:
"If we look at a glass closely enough we see the entire universe. There are the things of physics: the twisting liquid which evaporates depending on the wind and weather, the reflections in the glass, and our imaginations adds the atoms. The glass is a distillation of the Earth's rocks, and in its composition we see the secret of the universe's age, and the evolution of the stars. What strange array of chemicals are there in the wine? How did they come to be? There are the ferments, the enzymes, the substrates, and the products. There in wine is found the great generalization: all life is fermentation. Nobody can discover the chemistry of wine without discovering, as did Louis Pasteur, the cause of much disease. How vivid is the claret, pressing its existence into the consciousness that watches it! If our small minds, for some convenience, divide this glass of wine, this universe, into parts — physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on — remember that Nature does not know it! So let us put it all back together, not forgetting ultimately what it is for. Let it give us one more final pleasure: drink it and forget it all!"
A few religions, especially the ones invented or refurbished after Isaac Newton, may profess that "everything is connected to everything else". (Since there is a trivial isomorphism between graphs and their complements, this profound wisdom conveys exactly the same useful information as a graph with no edges.) But when it comes to the actual meat of the religion, prophets and priests follow the ancient human practice of making everything up as they go along. And they make up one rule for women under twelve, another rule for men over thirteen; one rule for the Sabbath and another rule for weekdays; one rule for science and another rule for sorcery...
Reality, we have learned to our shock, is not a collection of separate magisteria, but a single unified process governed by mathematically simple low-level rules. Different buildings on a university campus do not belong to different universes, though it may sometimes seem that way. The universe is not divided into mind and matter, or life and nonlife; the atoms in our heads interact seamlessly with the atoms of the surrounding air. Nor is Bayes's Theorem different from one place to another.
If, outside of their specialist field, some particular scientist is just as susceptible as anyone else to wacky ideas, then they probably never did understand why the scientific rules work. Maybe they can parrot back a bit of Popperian falsificationism; but they don't understand on a deep level, the algebraic level of probability theory, the causal level of cognition-as-machinery. They've been trained to behave a certain way in the laboratory, but they don't like to be constrained by evidence; when they go home, they take off the lab coat and relax with some comfortable nonsense. And yes, that does make me wonder if I can trust that scientist's opinions even in their own field - especially when it comes to any controversial issue, any open question, anything that isn't already nailed down by massive evidence and social convention.
Maybe we can beat the proverb - be rational in our personal lives, not just our professional lives. We shouldn't let a mere proverb stop us: "A witty saying proves nothing," as Voltaire said. Maybe we can do better, if we study enough probability theory to know why the rules work, and enough experimental psychology to see how they apply in real-world cases - if we can learn to look at the water. An ambition like that lacks the comfortable modesty of being able to confess that, outside your specialty, you're no better than anyone else. But if our theories of rationality don't generalize to everyday life, we're doing something wrong. It's not a different universe inside and outside the laboratory.
Addendum: If you think that (a) science is purely logical and therefore opposed to emotion, or (b) that we shouldn't bother to seek truth in everyday life, see "Why Truth?" For new readers, I also recommend "Twelve Virtues of Rationality."