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ChristianKl comments on Intentionally Raising the Sanity Waterline - Less Wrong
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Comments (89)
I don't have any issue with someone trying to change beliefs of society. That are many cases where belief change is useful.
On the other hand that's not the same thing as teaching people critical thinking or raising the sanity waterline.
Eliezer counts "...what constitutes evidence and why;" as one of the things of raising the sanity waterline. By teaching people that they should treat uncontrolled surveys and research done in a participant-led, qualitative, feminist framework as good evidence you are part of the problem and not part of the solution as far as raising the sanity waterline goes.
Deciding that you are rational and therefore can see that polyamory should be better respected in society and then using whatever way to convince people whether or not that way has anything to do with rational argument isn't what I consider raising the sanity waterline.
Can you clarify why you believe that such research is unacceptable as a form of Level III evidence? After all, some evidence is better than no evidence for actually changing one's mind. Polyamory research is a very new field, and descriptive studies are pretty much the best there is at this stage. But if you find other relevant research on polyamory that we missed, I would be happy to update my beliefs.
I don't see a good reason to believe that it's representative of all polyamorous people. There's a certain scene that very much values openness but there are other people who live polyamorously and who aren't very open. Just because the feminist who runs the study is herself very open in her communication and interacts with others who are also very open doesn't mean that everybody is.
You also did present it as fact in your article and especially if you are writing for a naive audience telling them about the uncertainty is useful if you want to train critical thinking. Skepticism is a default for critical thinking. If there no evidence either way, than there no evidence.
Feynman held his cargo-cult science speech about reasoning with better quality.
If you also sincerely believe that we should put more weight on science done with an explicit feminist framework that's a position worthy writing an article about because I guess that you are holding a minority position under self-labeled rationalists.
A core question of rationalism is: "Why do we believe what we believe? In this case you don't tell the reader why you think the particular material you reference should make him believe that poly people are happy and open.
I'm curious why you attribute that position to our blog post - that's the opposite of a steel man move. In fact, the Intentional Insights blog post did not make the claim you seem to attribute to it. What we claimed was the following, which I am quoting from the blog post: "research on poly relationships show that people with consensual non-monogamous relationships are happier, especially with their sex lives, than those who are in traditional monogamous relationships, and communicate more openly."
If you have research - any sort of research - demonstrating otherwise, I would be happy to update my beliefs. I think we can agree that the quality of evidence should be the deciding factor :-)
I think the common meaning of the phrase "research shows X" is "research shows X is true". If that's not what you want to argue you can use phrases like "research suggests X".
If the thing you want to teach is evidence based reasoning it would be still useful to explain a naive audience the strength of the evidence.
A post either has mistakes or it doesn't. The point of steelmanning is to change someone's argument to make it better. I'm not denying that it's possible to steelman the claim that polyamory increases happiness or openness but that's not what I care about here. The thing that matter is whether or not this post encourages critical thinking. Using "show" when you mean "suggest" doesn't help for that goal.
I agree that the common meaning of the phrase "research shows X" is "research shows X is true." However, can you clarify to me where you believe the post makes mistakes in its use of "show" vs. "suggest"?
The statement I made in the salient blog post on the Intentional Insights website was as follows "research on poly relationships show that people with consensual non-monogamous relationships are happier." I believe that the evidence I cited there supports the notion that "research shows X is true" when X = "on poly relationships shows that people with consensual non-monogamous relationships are happier." For examples of such evidence, see this article, or this book or this article.
If I did make a mistake, as you suggest, I'd be glad to update my beliefs - I love to be convinced to do so :-) Indeed, I acknowledged in an earlier comment that the post went a little too strongly into using cognitive ease strategies to make its points. So we'll work to tone down the cognitive ease strategies in the future, and thank you for being one of the people to help update my beliefs incrementally.
My core issue isn't about the availability of research but about the research that you cited. If you want to teach evidence based reasoning than you have to give people good sources. You don't want to teach people to treat media articles titled 12 surprising facts about X as real evidence. It would raise the sanity waterline to teach people that such articles don't constitute evidence.
You cited a link citing the first article. From Ioannidis we know that in general observational studies are pretty unreliable. This article isn't even a good observational studies. The gave their questionnaire only to Swingers and then compare those Swingers with external values from the literature. There no reason to believe that's a good idea for a value like self reported happiness.
As far as the second article goes. First as far as I see you didn't cite it. If you think that it's an important article that someone should use for forming an evidence based view on the subject, you should cite it.
Secondly it says: "However, inconsistent with our predictions, anxiety was unrelated to current relationship status". I don't see how that translates into them being more happy.
As far as the book goes, it doesn't seem to be a peer reviewed study. Even when it might reference them.
It's great to see we are both committed to using evidence, and the debate is now focusing on the nature of the evidence.
I believe I had earlier stated the following in my comment above
As that comment illuminates, I used the kind of evidence available currently.
For the second article, it states "a sizeable minority of people engage in CNM and report high levels of satisfaction." CNM is the common acronym for consensual non-monogamous relationships. To me, "high levels of satisfaction" equates to being "happy." However, I accept that we might interpret the term "high levels of satisfaction" differently - to me, it equates to being "happy," but it might not to you. I think that's primarily a semantic issue, though, and would rather not pursue it.
I am confused by your claims that the book is not a peer reviewed study. It is published by Rowman & Littlefield, a well-known and well-respected publisher, which has a solid peer review process. I would appreciate your clarification on what you meant when you suggested it was not.
The link you give for Level III evidence means that it's "controlled trial without randomization". Controlling against a literature value isn't a controlled trial.
Just given your questionaire to swingers that want to take a questionaire about swingers and presumably give the world a good impression about what it means to be a swinger to some average census value or literature value doesn't work.
The feminist paper says that it uses a qualitative approach. In the hierarchy that you linked that's Level VI.
To the extend that currently there isn't strong evidence available, you shouldn't use definitive language like "show" but suggest to illustrate that the evidence isn't strong.
When reading that your first reaction should be "How do they know?" In this case this is part of their discussion of previous work and a result that comes out of the data they gathered and that they discuss in the methods section. The first paper I looked at from that pile contains lines like "A social constructionist discourse analytic approach was taken to the data.", so again qualitative. The second is also again qualitative. If it's multiple qualitative studies that's in your linked scheme level V.
"Sizable minority" is also a term that doesn't tell you whether the average member of the population is better or worth then average.
It's a book and no study.Books are generally not primary sources.
Regarding the book, I want to draw your attention to the content of my comment above:
Can you please point out to me where we disagree regarding the book being a peer-reviewed study? That was the issue you raised, and that was what I responded to. So please let me know what your thoughts are about this matter.
That depends, in particular on whether "some evidence" is a representative sample. If the only evidence you see is a selected subset, it might well be worse than no evidence at all.
Good point about a selected subset, I agree. We have tried, in that post, to be representative of the current research on polyamory. If you happen to find contradictory research, I would be happy to update my beliefs.
The belief you ought to update (and reject), based on the evidence that is the almost unanimous comments to your post, is that, regardless of whether polyamory advocacy is rational, it is useful to keep it prominently visible on your site.
That's a fair point, which I accept, and we are working on additional posts. In fact, we just posted one about dual process theory. Do you think that post is better suited for promoting rationality?
In general yes, but you started the OP with arguing that LW has too much jargon. In that post you invent new jargon with "autopilot system" and "intentional system". If I google those terms there are only 4 hits with both and most of them aren't even relevant hits.
Hm, we intended the "autopilot vs. intentional" to communicate things more clearly to a broad audience, but I see the point you're making, something to think about for the future.
When it comes to the specific terms, "intentional" isn't what I would use to label System II. When meditating I can be focus my intention without being in analytic mode. Wikipedia suggests that the terms explicit system, the rule-based system, the rational system, or the analytic system. All of them are probably less misleading than "intentional".
But that isn't the biggest issue here. Jargon is often invented because the speaker thinks it's useful. At the same time inventing new jargon makes it harder for outsiders to follow you. If you reuse the terms in another article an outsider doesn't exactly know what they are referring to.
It also makes it harder for someone who read your introductory material to afterwards read the existing academic literature because he has to learn new concepts.
You make superficial arguments against jargon instead of addressing the existing arguments for inventing jargon to justify your project and then you go and invent new jargon that suggests you didn't deeply engage into thinking about the issue.
The real problem here isn't that inventing new jargon is bad. The problem is that you aren't committing to any principles and follow them. You lack strategic commitment. That's a problem for the kind of organisation that you want to build that's bigger than any specific mistake to be found in the few posts that you wrote till now.
In this case I'm not particularly happy with the terms System I and System II either. I think there a case for using more descriptive words. But if you want to do so, the proper thing would be to review the different terms that are in use in the literature and the arguments people make for using one term over another. That takes research and is hard work but it would probably lead to a better blog post than going the lazy route and simply inventing your own terms. Going the lazy route for inventing jargon is why things got the way they are on LW.
Discussing the semantics by looking at advantages of different terminology also helps a lot to understand the underlying subject matter in more depth.
Thanks for the feedback.
I'm curious what makes you believe we did not review the literature? System 1 and 2 are used by Kahneman and Stanovich and West, while Thaler and Sunstein use automatic and reflective, Goleman uses lower and higher, and others use different terms for dual process theory. A good summary of the literature and the wide variety of terms used is available here.
On our Board of Directors, we have a cognitive neuroscientist whose input on using the terms "intentional" and "autopilot" we used to inform our choice, as well as a licensed therapist who has a great sense of how to communicate complex ideas from psychology to broad audiences. For another example of how therapists use terms such as "intentional," check out this blog post.
Of course, we can have a further discussion about the benefits of dual process theory and using metaphors such as elephant and rider. Your thoughts?
However, again, I appreciate the feedback, and we will consider our use of these terms in the future.
*Edited term "automatic" to "autopilot"
You don't provide reasons in your article of why you prefer the term intentional over the other terms that are used.
I can see the motivation to avoid System I/System II. Why use "intentional" when Kahneman used "reflective". Why do you think using "intentional" is more clear to a new audience than "reflective"?
Why doesn't your article include those reasons, so that the reader knows why you choose your terms?
Then where does "autopilot system" come from? If you used a different term that your board member advised you to use, you screwed up even more.
I believe that I did provide the reasons we preferred the term "intentional" - based on the feedback of the cognitive neuroscientist and licensed therapist on our Board of Directors, with the latter especially helpful for the perspective of someone who has wide experience with how complex psychological terms are explained to broad audiences. As I pointed out above, the term "intentional" is widely used by therapists to explain how our minds work, especially the System 2 part, to broad audiences not well educated in psychology. Since our goal is to explain complex ideas drawn from cognitive neuroscience and psychology to broad audiences, that is why we made the choice to go with "intentional." We have an experimental attitude, of course, and will see how much this term is helpful for broad audiences, and revise our use of it if it seems to be suboptimal.
Thanks for pointing out the spelling error, I meant to write "autopilot" in the comment I made above. I edited the comment based on your noticing the error.