A little Learning is a dang'rous Thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring:
There shallow Draughts intoxicate the Brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.
Over the last few years I've found that
1) I notice this problem in myself and others more and more
2) Reminding myself of it helps keep my identity small
3) People strongly resist not doing it, people are mistrustful of experts
My formulation: Oh, so you've overturned decades of investigation by professionals with your 30 seconds of poorly worded thoughts, watchout we have a badass over here. (note: I only use one this caustic on myself)
OTOH: there are areas where a cursory investigation reveals that no one has been doing much rigorous work and it's easy to disregard established opinion.
The odds that I find a clever argument contradicting someone who works on this topic for a living, just by reading one or two popular explanations of it are minuscule.
There's different kinds of "works for a living", e.g. I write software for a living and employ statistical methods for a living, and it has to actually work, not merely look plausible, or I will not get paid. I also do art for a living, and here it has to look plausible, and if I do very plausible looking clouds and mountains that doesn't make me much of a meteorology expert or a geophysicist. (It does make me a bit of an expert because human visual system is amazingly sensitive to things being wrong, but only a bit, and its very superficial expertise).
"Somebody says, 'You know, you people always say that space is continuous. How do you know when you get to a small enough dimension that there really are enough points in between, that it isn't just a lot of dots separated by little distances?'
Or they say, 'You know those quantum mechanical amplitudes you told me about, they're so complicated and absurd, what makes you think those are right? Maybe they are not right.'
Such remarks are obvious and are perfectly clear to anybody who is working on this problem. It does not do any good to point this out."
--Richard Feynman, The Character of Physical Law (1965)
dealing with some of the comments to my post about time-turners and General Relativity
Next up: The Litany of the Déformation professionnelle.
One of the most robust findings in studies of expertise is that unless the expertise is in callibration itself (eg. gambling) experts are systematically overconfident. In particular they overestimate the relevence of their expertise to things that are not central to their actual professional or academic practice. For example a neurobiologist with no training in information theory may tend to place inordinate trust in their intuition "it is theoretically impossible to recover information from that brain" without realising how different that question is from the fact that they actually do know, "it isn't possible for us to repair that brain to functioning condition in place".
In the case of the time turner thread that motivates this post we have an example of believing that some knowledge of General Relativity is sufficient to make one an expert at solving engineering problems in a counterfactual physical reality rather than merely being necessary. The most insightful comments in that thread don't do anything to challenge ...
Good post. Experts on X are usually right about X. What's worse, if an expert in X and an expert in a closely related Y disagree about Y, the latter is usually right (or has a stronger position).
It's not easy being a small fish in a big intellectual sea, but that's how it is for us all, even the most brilliant.
Experts on X are usually right about X
That's true in many fields but not others. Experts in "New Testament studies" are usually wrong about whether Jesus had magical powers.
I'm not sure it's actually true that the majority of such scholars would say that Jesus had magical powers. Now admittedly my priors on this are mostly Catholic, and most of those Jesuit, and I don't know a lot of evangelical new testament scholars; but it still appears to me that serious Biblical research is one of the best ways of convincing believing Christians that the religious world is not as they thought. Case in point: Bart Ehrman.
The poll would have to be anonymous to have any validity. There are a lot of priests, reverends, and theology professors who know how much they can and cannot say. Pay very careful attention to subjects an individual scholar does not talk about. Notice how many of them never mention the resurrection or the virgin birth, for example. OTOH they will talk about loaves and fishes and walking on water and Lazarus because they can get away with explaining those parts of the New Testament as understood by modern scholarship without being fired.
Man, I didn't even follow the rest of that discussion until now.
I'm going through and systematically upvoting you to bring your accurate, on-point posts back up towards 0. Like, in the thread where we were disagreeing, you were telling me the conventional approach, which is an important thing to know. And now I know where this charge without charge idea is coming from, which is nice! But half of it was at -1. And it's worse with the higher-rated, less comprehensible objections.
I notice that people (including me) are especially prone to this in economics. Everyone feels that they can figure out the correct tax/foreign/monetary/regulatory policy simply by using some trivial demand-supply arguments. Further, they always use a moral axis as well (arguing about fairness/equality/social justice), which always dilutes whatever little insight they might have had.
Worse: economists are highly distrusted as experts. One friend told me that economics as a field has a huge "conservative bias", and you can't trust their methods bec...
If I come up with $flaw in $argument, how I endorse presenting $flaw depends on my goal.
If my goal is to learn more about $argument, I endorse asking a question which prompts others to provide me the information I want. (E.g., "How does $argument address $flaw?") I also endorse doing this if I think others might benefit from that information, even if I won't.
If my goal is to expose weaknesses in $argument for the benefit of others, I endorse asserting that $flaw is a flaw in $argument. I am of course aware that there exists a social pattern where...
For any given assertion by an expert on a situation you are not an expert on, the probability that your criticism is correct is not small. However,
1) this does not mean that the expected value of the criticism is negative, even to the expert. If the expert receives 100 comments, 99 of which are confused and one of which blows apart their argument, then they are probably collectively valuable.
2) if the expert is unusually patient, your comment can present her with an opportunity to correct your confusion.
I would say that the important thing is more humility of presentation than humility of willingness to speak at all.
Instead I may ask politely whether my argument is a valid one, and if not, where the flaw lies.
One should always have respect for one's own ignorance and limitations, and yes, it's highly unlikely you'll come up with an objection in a minute that experts haven't already considered, but I don't know why groveling to your betters is required. Why do I have to preface every statement with "I could be wrong, but...."? Can't we take that as assumed, and discuss the facts?
"You're so much wiser and more experienced than I am, but ...." Why...
We must test our own ideas and arguments. Just because we don't know how to do so doesn't make our ideas any better, but it can make them seem better to the careless.
It's part of why I don't post very often on this site. Even though I know more QM than most people here, I know I don't know enough to argue the validity of the sequence.
Hmm. I'm not sure what to think about this post given that I just made remarkably similar comments on your general relativity/time turner thread in part accusing you of being on the wrong side of this in a way that you don't seem to be acknowledging. I would appreciate your comments on this, shminux, and also to know whether or not you are in a position of expertise regarding GR.
(I made that comment before seeing this thread and would probably have worded things differently if I had.)
So, one more litany, hopefully someone else finds it as useful.
It's an understatement that humility is not a common virtue in online discussions, even, or especially when it's most needed.
I'll start with my own recent example. I thought up a clear and obvious objection to one of the assertions in Eliezer's critique of the FAI effort compared with the Pascal's Wager and started writing a witty reply. ...And then I stopped. In large part because I had just gone through the same situation, but on the other side, dealing with some of the comments to my post about time-turners and General Relativity by those who know next to nothing about General Relativity. It was irritating, yet here I was, falling into the same trap. And not for the first time, far from it. The following is the resulting thought process, distilled to one paragraph.
I have not spent 10,000+ hours thinking about this topic in a professional, all-out, do-the-impossible way. I probably have not spent even one hour seriously thinking about it. I probably do not have the prerequisites required to do so. I probably don't even know what prerequisites are required to think about this topic productively. In short, there are almost guaranteed to exist unknown unknowns which are bound to trip up a novice like me. The odds that I find a clever argument contradicting someone who works on this topic for a living, just by reading one or two popular explanations of it are minuscule. So if I think up such an argument, the odds of it being both new and correct are heavily stacked against me. It is true that they are non-zero, and there are popular examples of non-experts finding flaws in an established theory where there is a consensus among the experts. Some of them might even be true stories. No, Einstein was not one of these non-experts, and even if he were, I am not Einstein.
And so on. So I came up with the following, rather unpolished mantra:
If I think up what seems like an obvious objection, I will resist assuming that I have found a Weaksauce Weakness in the experts' logic. Instead I may ask politely whether my argument is a valid one, and if not, where the flaw lies.
If you think it useful, feel free to improve the wording.