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In other words, use the emotional power of doubt to counteract the bias induced by the emotional power of your desire for that theory to be true.
Why do I find these reactions highly counter-intuitive? That is, I would never have predicted that this is what people would say.
I'm not sure. Is it could be that the details make the story sound apocryphal or contrived? Or is it that you find the underlying moral unbelievable? That is, do you expect that people's judgement of guilt is distorted heavily by the moral repugnance associated with the alleged crime?
Well, I find the attempt to save a falsely accused man to be much more morally admirable than the attempt to save a justly accused man. Indeed, the fact that child molestation is considered very morally repugnant and carries huge legal and social costs is part of the reason why I feel that any attempt to protect a man from false accusations of child molestation to be very admirable.
To answer your question, I didn't expect (at least, not till now) people's judgement of guilt to be distorted so much by the moral repugnance of the alleged crime. If indeed people do distort this much, I should carefully rethink my understanding of moral intuitions.
A law professor who was a practicing defense attorney whom I talked with during my ordeal told me of an experiment he had done. He was at a dinner party and told people at one table that he was defending a man who was wrongly accused of molesting a child, and was met with shock and accusations of trying to free a monster. He told another table that he was defending a murder suspect whom he was convinced was guilty, and got, "Oh, that's sounds interesting. Tell me more."
Ray Atkinson on Quora
Why do I find these reactions highly counter-intuitive? That is, I would never have predicted that this is what people would say.
"Independence is for the very few, it is a privilege of the strong. Whoever attempts it enters a labyrinth, and multiplies a thousandfold the dangers of life. Not least of which is that no one can see how and where he loses his way, becomes lonely, and is torn piecemeal by some minotaur of conscience. If he fails, this happens so far from the comprehension of men that they cannot sympathise nor pity."
--29, Part 2: The Free Spirit, Friedrich Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil- Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future
While Nietzsche writes it beautifully, perhaps the simplified, layman version would be:
"If you insist on refusing social obligations and violating social norms, then life becomes very hard: you will be lonely and your conscience will bother you a lot. If you fail---i.e. the pain of being outcast exceeds the benefits of independence---then no one will give a damn."
(The last part is almost tautological; if you're lonely, then most people don't care about you. The exception might be when one writes one's experiences down, as Nietzsche probably did.)
Among the worst of barbarisms is that of introducing symbols which are quite new in mathematical, but perfectly understood in common, language. Writers have borrowed from the Germans the abbreviation n! to signify 1.2.3…(n-1).n, which gives their pages the appearance of expressing surprise and admiration that 2, 3, 4 &c. should be found in mathematical results.
Augustus De Morgan, The Penny Cyclopædia of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, London, 1842, vol. 23, p. 444
EDIT: Do the downvotes come from people not getting the fact that this was supposed to be humorous, or from people not sharing my sense of humor?
Notation is like an unruly child. If it's to be any real help at all, you kind of can't help but abuse it.
Precise forecasts masquerade as accurate ones.
-- Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise
The distinction between precision and accuracy is one of the most useful distinctions I've learnt.
If your goal is to get at the truth, then accuracy is always the primary goal, and precision secondary. Indeed, it is quite dangerous to aim for precision first. This was also captured by Knuth, "premature optimization is the root of all evil."
Unfortunately, most people are convinced more easily by precision than by accuracy. Politicians and false prophets often employ this trick. Precision reflects confidence. Also, it is trivial to very whether a statement is precise; but incredibly difficult to verify if it is accurate.
Which philosophers do "philosophy of science" right?
Some names come to mind: Ernest Nagel, Ian Hacking, Peter Galison, Alex Rosenberg, Samir Okasha, Tim Maudlin, David Albert, David Wallace, Massimo Pigliucci.
Actually, I haven't really encountered famous but shoddy philosophers of science. The reputed people seem to understand the problems they're thinking about very deeply, have deep domain knowledge and also write very clearly.
As a side note, I highly recommend Samir Okasha's A Very Short Introduction to the Philosophy of Science. For philosophy of physics, The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Physics has a great selection of topics.
Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets is a book by David Simon and it is essentially an ethnography of the homicide unit of the Baltimore police department. I've read parts of it and it's very good. It's the book on which the TV show, The Wire is based on. The Wire also has excellent ethnographic elements.
Small rationality-inducing cognitive algorithms that manifest in everyday speech:
- " You're missing the forest for the trees." Given what you want to achieve, spending time on these details may not matter.
- "For example?"
- "What's the chance that that'll actually happen?" Think about the probability of the hypothetical. The notion that randomness and chance is something that can be measured is a rather recent phenomenon in human history.
- "What's done is done." or "No use crying over spilt milk." Don't fall prey to the sunk-cost fallacy.
- "I'm going to play the devil's advocate here." Steelmanning your argument.
- "What difference does it make?" Does what we're arguing about actually have any consequences?
- "You've got to take the long-term view." Don't think of the action you're considering as a single-shot thing, but more of as part of a strategy.
- "They did this study..." What does the literature say? I agree that this move is often used to just support the argument you want supported; but hey, it's a step in the right direction.
- "I don't get it." I notice that I'm confused.
- "So let's be clear here." OR "Just to make sure that we're on the same page here." You and I may have different models, so let's ensure that we have the same model.
- "This is win-win." Basically, a Pareto improvement.
- "You do your job. I'll do mine." Benefits of specialization.
I agree that these phrases aren't very nuanced or advanced rationality techniques, but they're steps in the right direction. And to better is why we have things like Less Wrong.
Also, "Care to bet on it?" OR "Why don't you put your money where your mouth is?" OR "I'm willing to bet that..."
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MIRI's Summer Fundraiser is underway: https://intelligence.org/donate/
If someone from MIRI is reading this: Having the upper-limit of the donation progress-bar truncate in the middle of the blue box is confusing. It makes one feel that you've reached $200K, and that you have to go the rest of the distance of the blue box to actually reach your goal.
I suggest moving <# of Donors> to below the progress-bar (as opposed to where it currently is, which is to the right of the progress bar) and scaling the progress-bar to fit the width of box.