Give an example?

reflexively inverting any advice you are given to see if it still sounds wise as a test for falsifiability is something I think Charlie Munger mentions doing.

It's funny, I wrote a blog post arguing against humility not too long ago. I had a somewhat different picture of humility than you:

People internalize norms in very different ways and to very different degrees. There are people out there who don’t seem to internalize the norms of humility at all. We usually call these people “arrogant jerks”. And there are people – probably the vast majority of people – who internalize them in reasonable, healthy ways. We usually call these people “normal”.

But then there are also people who internalize the norms of humility in highly unhealthy ways. Humility taken to its most extreme limit is not a pretty thing – you don’t end up with with wise, virtuous, Gandalf-style modesty. You end up with self-loathing, pathological guilt, and scrupulosity. There are people out there – and they are usually exceptionally good, kind, and selfless people, although that shouldn’t matter – who are convinced that they are utterly worthless as human beings. For such people, showing even a modicum of kindness or charity towards themselves would be unthinkable. Anti-charity is much more common – whatever interpretation of a situation puts themselves in the worst light, that’s the one they’ll settle on. And why? Because it’s been drilled into their heads, over and over again, that to think highly of yourself – even to the tiniest, most minute degree – is wrong. It’s something that bad, awful, arrogant people do, and if they do it then they’ll be bad, awful, arrogant people too. So they take refuge in the opposite extreme: they refuse to think even the mildest of nice thoughts about themselves, and they never show themselves even the slightest bit of kindness.

Or take insecurity (please). All of us experience insecurity to one degree or another, of course. But again, there’s a pathological, unhealthy form it can take on that’s rooted in how we internalize the norms of humility. When you tell people that external validation is the only means by which they can feel good about themselves…well, surprisingly enough, some people take a liking to external validation. But in the worst cases it goes beyond a mere desire for validation, and becomes a need – an addiction, even. You wind up with extreme people-pleasers, people who center every aspect of their lives around seeking out praise and avoiding criticism.

But I actually don't think we disagree all that much, we're just using the same word to describe different things. I think the thing I called humility - the kind of draconian, overbearing anti-self-charity that scrupulous people experience - that is a bad thing. And I think the thing you called humility - acceptance of your flaws, self-compassion - that is a very good thing. In fact, I ended the essay with a call for more self-charity from (what I called) humble people. And I've been trying to practice self-compassion since writing that essay, and it's been a boon for my mental health.

(By far the most useful technique, for what it's worth, has been "stepping outside of myself", i.e. trying to see myself as just another person. I find when I do something embarrassing it's the worst thing to have ever happened, and obviously all my friends are thinking about how stupid I am and have lowered their opinion of me accordingly...whereas when a friend does something embarrassing, it maybe warrants a laugh, but then it seems totally irrelevant and has absolutely no bearing on what I think of them as a person. I now try as much as possible to look at myself with that second mindset.)

Anyway, language quibbles aside, I agree with this post.

Tying a desired attribute/model/stance/intention etc to an emotionally salient avatar or image seems to make it a lot stickier. I've tried to induce this in various ways with mixed success, but the successes have been useful enough that I keep doing it. See also, Command Mode by PJ Eby: http://dirtsimple.org/2006/03/stretching-your-self.html

Tom Chi presented on some related topics at EAG, part of which I like referring to as the Tom Chi question: Can this process, in principle, lead to a robust solution to the given problem domain? So kind of a handle for the concept of checking your heuristic-problem mapping.

Edit: I remember now that this is commonly referred to as the Emperor of China's Nose problem.

It seems that EBM defaults to a do-ocracy. This is alluded to in the discussion of purchasing authorship in prestigious papers. The system seems to work by offering to do all the "hard parts" of publishing. This meshes with Goodheart's law: figure out which proxy measures people care about, and then game the proxies. We have 3 sets of interests: the organization, the customers of the organization, and the professionals the organization partners with. The customers care about whichever proxy measures they have learned to care about, headline statistics, good words like "randomized controlled trials", "meta-analysis" etc (see the Bingo Card Fallacy). The professionals care about prestige. The organization buys associations with the professionals and then sells them to their customers. They smooth away all the frictional costs associated with this transaction and thus gain access to monkeying around with the methods of that transaction in a way that optimizes for the proxies their customers respond to.

There winds up being an ongoing battle. Educators try to teach the public about new, harder-to-game proxies (forest plots! preregistration! and on the very cutting edge, specification curves!*) Organizations have a very large incentive to find ways to game the new proxies. It is actually surprising that much progress is made. The incentives are asymmetric, especially money wise. Good conceptual handles/frames (like the spread of the pyramid of evidence) seem to help a lot. Vox.com recently did an article explaining forest plots, though I am having difficulty finding it now.

The general pattern is that the new proxies need to better along some understandable numerical (meta-anlysis = bigger n!) or graphical dimension (forest plots give an intuitive overview of an entire line of study at a glance). I am hopeful for specification curves for exactly this reason since the output is intuitively graspable. It is then plausible for a meme to spread that evidence without X backing it is lower quality, where X is simply the checklist of hardest to fake proxies for rigor/validity.

One objection might be that you can only build so much on the top of the pyramid of evidence when the base is rotting (poor individual study design), but I think it helps. When Cochrane does a meta-analysis and only includes 10% of the papers in a given research area because the other 90% are crap, this sends a signal to the system. It would be nice if the signal was more robustly responded to of course, but at least it exists.

*Skip to this point to see what the output of a specification curve would be: https://youtu.be/g75jstZidX0?t=1484 The second curve shown illustrates how discontinuities can highlight problems/areas of interest in the specification space.

It seems that EBM defaults to a do-ocracy. This is alluded to in the discussion of purchasing authorship in prestigious papers. The system seems to work by offering to do all the "hard parts" of publishing. This meshes with Goodheart's law: figure out which proxy measures people care about, and then game the proxies. We have 3 sets of interests: the organization, the customers of the organization, and the professionals the organization partners with. The customers care about whichever proxy measures they have learned to care about, headline statistics, good words like "randomized controlled trials", "meta-analysis" etc (see the Bingo Card Fallacy). The professionals care about prestige. The organization buys associations with the professionals and then sells them to their customers. They smooth away all the frictional costs associated with this transaction and thus gain access to monkeying around with the methods of that transaction in a way that optimizes for the proxies their customers respond to.

There winds up being an ongoing battle. Educators try to teach the public about new, harder-to-game proxies (forest plots! preregistration! and on the very cutting edge, specification curves!*) Organizations have a very large incentive to find ways to game the new proxies. It is actually surprising that much progress is made. The incentives are asymmetric, especially money wise. Good conceptual handles/frames (like the spread of the pyramid of evidence) seem to help a lot. Vox.com recently did an article explaining forest plots, though I am having difficulty finding it now.

The general pattern is that the new proxies need to better along some understandable numerical (meta-anlysis = bigger n!) or graphical dimension (forest plots give an intuitive overview of an entire line of study at a glance). I am hopeful for specification curves for exactly this reason since the output is intuitively graspable. It is then plausible for a meme to spread that evidence without X backing it is lower quality, where X is simply the checklist of hardest to fake proxies for rigor/validity.

One objection might be that you can only build so much on the top of the pyramid of evidence when the base is rotting (poor individual study design), but I think it helps. When Cochrane does a meta-analysis and only includes 10% of the papers in a given research area because the other 90% are crap, this sends a signal to the system. It would be nice if the signal was more robustly responded to of course, but at least it exists.

*Skip to this point to see what the output of a specification curve would be: https://youtu.be/g75jstZidX0?t=1484 The second curve shown illustrates how discontinuities can highlight problems/areas of interest in the specification space.

1. We become increasingly poorly calibrated in the extreme tails
2. Model uncertainty increases a lot in the tails, justifying skepticism

"The remedy lies, indeed, partly in charity, but more largely in correct intellectual habits, in a predominant, ever-present disposition to see things as they are, and to judge them in the full light of an unbiased weighing of evidence applied to all possible constructions, accompanied by a withholding of judgment when the evidence is insufficient to justify conclusions.

I believe that one of the greatest moral reforms that lies immediately before us consists in the general introduction into social and civic life of that habit of mental procedure which is known in investigation as the method of multiple working hypotheses. "

-T. C. Chamberlin from: http://www.mantleplumes.org/WebDocuments/Chamberlin1897.pdf