All of rpapp's Comments + Replies

rpapp60

I think what you have done here is pinpoint the difference between true belief and knowledge. It is indeed a very important distinction. I would be wary of using the word “confidence” though, because in US parlance it usually denotes a state of mind (which can be unsubstantiated) rather than express the measure by which your prediction can be considered well-founded.

1mako yass
It seems relevant to that, I guess. I was considering discussing that. It seems to me that the common image of confidence is just the appearance that results from having a lot of epistemic confidence (about the things we're usually interacting with). I think the contemporary understanding of the word is probably just confusion, it will wash away when people learn what the real underlying thing is.
3Trevor Hill-Hand
The above comment just helped me realise that the connotation above is why I like the word "credence". Does "credence" have similar problems in other cultures though?
rpapp30

From a nomenclature perspective, yes of course, in worry / anxiety or similarly, sadness / depression pairs, the latter ones are meant to refer to the pathologic version of the affect. I’m sorry for the sloppiness in my language.

With attribution though, I was intending to mean that affects that are triggered by unconscious mental states are often (wrongly) attrubuted to available external events as causes after the fact, rather than the more common meaning of cogitatively attributing some cause to an effect, as a way of explaining (and potentially coming t

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3ChristianKl
That seems surprising to me to read. https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/323454.php suggests that the word anxiety refers to the normal emotion. Sadness also seems to be a word for an emotion. Worry doesn't seem to me like a word that points to an emotion but a word that points to a mental process (similarly to how feeling threadened is a mental process). Depression on the other hand isn't an emotion but a more permanent state of mind. It's more similar to anxiety disorder.
2Holly_Elmore
Ah, I see. I think our disagreement comes down to experience. I've had my share of misattributions, but through practice with CBT and mindfulness, I'm now pretty good at noticing quickly after I experience an anxiety spike. Then I just have to replay the last few minutes, and usually I feel triggered again when I get to the original trigger. I'm not saying this gives me clarity on whatever "underlying issues" may also cause anxiety, but it's usually immistakable that that event minutes ago triggered the anxiety that started then. If I don't realize that some small thing just gave me an uptick in anxiety, that's when I start misattributing it to big life issues. But if I wasn't able to identify anxiety spikes quickly and identify the proximate cause with confidence, finding the proximate cause could just be another playground for anxiety.
rpapp30

The right question to ask depends on what you want to know. “Success”, “contribution”, “greatness” are in themselves not quantifiable. You have to change these terms into something quantifiable, that will necessarily come with a different meaning. I do not pretend that I can provide a quantifiable, universal definition for these terms that will satisfy everyone. For example, a measure of success is remuneration, so you may want to ask whether higher paid scientists have correlated higher IQ, and the answer to this would be yes (this is true to almost all o

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rpapp100

While I find your solution thought provoking, I am not sure I agree with your conclusions. Suffering from chronic anxiety myself, I know it not to be a cognitive process. My problem is not that I spend effort cogitating on a solution to a non-existent threat, but rather that the constant feeling of dread poisons my everiday existence. False attributions are a typical byproduct of this state: one rarely experiences such feelings without also being compelled to find an explanation as to why they came about, arguably, because in a healthy mind, one would expe

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3Holly_Elmore
"Oftentimes you are experiencing dread without any real external triggers whatsoever, providing no readily available, preferably small threat that you can safely attribute it to." Again, I doubt this actually occurs that often. My prior is that there is some trigger whatsoever in most cases. Perhaps it is better not to try to find a cause, though, if you think it most likely you'll turn up something false. I'm not recommending you try to dispatch with your anxious feelings through (mis)attribution. When I realize something like jealousy is keeping me tense and distressed, usually the real (still unpleasant) feeling comes to the fore and fight-or-flight recedes on its own. But sometimes I realize what's happening and still feel anxious, just more mindful and not spinning off into false attributions as much. I'm not recommending you seek the relief of an answer to soothe yourself, but rather that you remember that, when you are feeling anxious, your body is preparing you to deal with what it perceives as a threat. With mindful observation, it is often possible to determine what set off anxiety and led to the cascade of imaginary threats. And very often, thinking about the perceived threat consciously cuts it down to size. The true thing that is threatening you may not be insignificant, and may feel really terrible. But we don't call it anxiety if someone is having a totally proportional reaction to their problems.
7Holly_Elmore
I see what you're saying about false attributions, which seriously exacerbate anxiety, but I'm talking about piecing together the actual series of events that occurred when you became anxious, not the things you subsequently started worrying about. I actually don't think feelings of chronic anxiety have no proximate cause and come up out of nowhere. Of course no one knows this for sure, but my belief based on the high efficacy of CBT for anxiety, my experience with CBT and Buddhism, and my own introspection is that thoughts are the triggers and sustainers of chronic anxiety. Most people can learn to identify the thoughts that sustain their anxiety and see for themselves that they contain cognitive distortions. Furthermore, I believe that the anxious feelings that call up the thoughts usually do come from some external trigger, however subtle. Being on your commute where you're normally stressed, someone giving you a confusing look, or having feelings you're not supposed to have (like jealousy) can be enough to get an anxiety storm going. For any particular instance of anxiety coming "out of nowhere," my prior is now that there was an external prompt or trigger. I'm not saying anxiety was a called for reaction (if it ever is), but it was the reaction to something that you perceived as a threat to your safety, status, self-concept, etc. Often the trigger is so small that you don't consciously notice it, drawn instead by anxiety's slight of hand to worry about health, safety, all the things you listed. Maybe the threat reframe doesn't work for you, but for some reason it does for me. When I ask myself what's threatening me right now, the answer tends to be more real and immediate than when I ask myself "why am I anxious?" and get a bunch of general reasons that might justify feeling distressed. I think the threat question cuts through a lot of the shame I have at feeling negative feelings towards other people. I believe my anxiety results in large part from wanting t
Answer by rpapp10

Your question is not well defined. Who are “best scientists”? What is “academic success”? How do you qualify “contribution”? Academia is a social institution as much as a scientific one, recognized success depends on power structures and social skills as much IQ. As far as contributions go, a relevant contribution does not necessarily require high intelligence: for example, the matrix equations used today in quantum electro-dynamics were found by someone remembering that they saw a mathematical formula somewhere that fit the experimental results. Also ther

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3ChristianKl
The task of remembering that a previously seen formula that matches the pattern of the experimental results looks to me like being about pattern-matching ability where IQ helps a great deal.
6Raemon
This seems fair, although I think it'd be more helpful if it came with some more concrete recommendations. Are there particular metrics that you think would be appropriate for particular fields, but not for others? Or if you don't think this question would be helpful at all, maybe try to suggest a better question that you think would be more helpful?
8Eli Tyre
There are a number of ways we could measure scientific success: number of citations, number of importance weighted citations, or winning of Nobel prizes. Do Nobel prize winning scientists tend to have higher IQs than scientists in general?