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Comment by jimbokun | Hacker News Reader

All you are really saying is its impossible to know anything for certain.

Having a citation from a well regarded source is better than having no citation. Peer review is better than no review. There is probably a higher correlation for a statement from an official state agency being true, than a random statement with no attribution.

So yes, a statement can satisfy any of the things you mention, and still not be true. But that doesn't mean those factors can't be helpful in assessing the likelihood of a given assertion.

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>All you are really saying is its impossible to know anything for certain.

Yeah, in the sense that all you are saying is its possible to have degrees of trust on difference sources of "facts".

That said, you'd be surprised how often the fact (pun intended) that it's "impossible to know anything for certain" is lost on people.

>Having a citation from a well regarded source is better than having no citation. Peer review is better than no review.

That's the problem: we can't even say that.

http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jou...

(Of course we shouldn't trust this paper either: it's, after all, published too).

> That said, you'd be surprised how often the fact (pun intended) that it's "impossible to know anything for certain" is lost on people.

I think David Hume was quite good on this subject. If chance of being right is all there is to knowledge, then maximizing your chance of being right is what knowledge is. So all the peer review, the numbers and statistics, for example, contribute to knowledge even if it might be wrong. And if you dismiss, as you do, statistics because they just might be misleading or biased, and are thus not "objective reality fact", that does damage to your ability to know things, because you are discarding data without considering it, and that damage should be avoided. Whereas the proper thing to do is consider it on merits, whatever the actual merits are.

Selection bias is a huge problem though. Statistics in politics basically have negative utility because people just omit the ones that contradict their favored narrative, and then you get this:

https://xkcd.com/882/

When all you have is that newspaper headline, your knowledge has gone down rather than up.

Maybe, but consider adding another constraint to the game of maximizing your chance to being right -- you have a finite amount of resources (eg, time) to spend on examining evidence, so you need to strategize even what evidence is worth considering and to what extent -- looking more carefully at one thing means you now have less time to look carefully at something else, nothing is free

Of course, in real life, we do have this constraint

> Of course, in real life, we do have this constraint

Which IMO is what causes confirmation bias. But science should strive to get rid of confirmation bias as much as possible.

Your comment is vacuous if you don't expand on it; it goes without saying we want to try to minimize bias as much as possible. Science is part of a world of limited resources too, and investigators have to decide what experiments to try, what topics to pursue

In the context of confirmation bias being an evolved trait, my comment was meant to imply that we should expect science to spend much more resources than mere intuition, but doing so is still worthwhile.

Any scientist will be subject to cognitive bias at some level (if only by choosing the core principles and axioms on which their reasoning is based), but there are systematic ways to mitigate it. Applying more resources to a particular problem will get rid of at least the superficial levels of cognitive bias.

I love this concept as a defence against the 'well virtually anything can be proven wrong or right' anti-knowledge argument...

> it's "impossible to know anything for certain" is lost on people

In my experience, people tend to use this phrase as a bludgeon to exclude ideas they don't like. It's a way to stop a discussion, not help promote understanding and find real facts.

Duh. Now prove it to them.

The article you linked doesn't actually address either of the points you claim it negates. It doesn't look at peer-reviewed status or citation quality (or quantity) as variables. It claims that most published research findings are false, but you're making a misleading interpretation of its findings.

> That said, you'd be surprised how often the fact (pun intended) that it's "impossible to know anything for certain" is lost on people.

It's certainly not lost on the millions of newly minted epistemic skeptics, who all of sudden over the last few months feel a calling to publicly argue against the knowability of objective facts.

I took an epistemology class in college, and I do agree that there is a sense in which facts are never truly and finally knowable to us. But I vehemently disagree that we should import this philosophical doubt into matters of everyday life. Even if our ability to capture facts is imperfect, throwing up our hands and saying "nobody's ever actually known a single fact, so why bother trying to agree on the terms of debate, lets just agree to disagree about the facts" is a transparent gesture towards legitimizing ignorance.

> Even if our ability to capture facts is imperfect, throwing up our hands and saying "nobody's ever actually known a single fact, so why bother trying to agree on the terms of debate, lets just agree to disagree about the facts" is a transparent gesture towards legitimizing ignorance.

Why is the alternative to "throw our hands up.." instead of just becoming more skeptical and scrutinizing sources more rigorously? These days, people cite sources like they are gospel, often having not read through the sources themselves.

Exactly, it has been a fact for a very long time that fats are quite bad for you and you should mostly eat carbs. A fact published in reputable sources and irrefutable to most people.

> That's the problem: we can't even say that.

The paper you cite says that most published research is false.

You infer from this that published research is no better than no source.

But this is wrong! If published research is true 30% of the time, but people's intuitions (on questions research is published on) are so only say 10% of the time, then going with published papers is a better choice.

I'd like to know if people feel, after reading TFA (or the psychology literature), how likely it is that people are wrong most of the time on important questions.

>But this is wrong! If published research is true 30% of the time, but people's intuitions (on questions research is published on) are so only say 10% of the time, then going with published papers is a better choice.

Only if "people's intuitions" are true on a less than a "published research" percentage.

> Only if "people's intuitions" are true on a less than a "published research" percentage.

I think it's a safe assumption.

Many people assume intuitively there's a "why" to their existence. Many people assume from their day-to-day experience that the Earth is flat.

Without rigorous method, "people's intuitions" is just that, "intuitions".

Why on Earth would you assume your intuitions are better than professionals combining intuition with methodology in good faith?

The article we're commenting on (which you can discard more easily than I) describes a study you can reproduce easily to prove it to yourself. Why don't you?

Indeed, technical error on my part. The parent commenter is only "most likely wrong" given the psychological literature on this is most likely right. Some of it you can prove to yourself by experiment such as by following along this ASAP science video[1] (it's essentially Kanehman's Thinking Fast and Slow in accessible form).

[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JiTz2i4VHFw

>All you are really saying is its impossible to know anything for certain.

Which is to say, that what ever being said isn't a fact in the absolute extent people tend to mean when they talk about how facts should change one's mind, and thus why it doesn't change our mind (well one reason at least).

> But that doesn't mean those factors can't be helpful in assessing the likelihood of a given assertion.

But what of the likelihood that the one presenting the information (or someone further up the chain) specifically picked information that would meet all the criteria will being misleading? I've seen this behavior from think tanks on every side of the political spectrum. They begin with a view they want to push and then go searching for the best back information that lets them push it. Unless you are an expert, you don't hear what is left out, which bits are using very precise definitions that are being confused by the layman who is the intended recipient, or what similarly backed information outright calls into question the information being presented. Add in people's own biases to ignore their side when it does it while focusing on the other side, and it creates this view that the well back information from the other side is of far less value than the the poorly backed information from their own side.

Cogito ergo sum res cogitans. Descartes though only one thing is certain: that you can reason, hence that you are a reasoning thing. Not so fast, Descartes.

My Latin isn't nuanced, but I'd want a really thorough list of contexts in which cogitare appears before chastising Descartes on that one :)

Even leaving philosophical skepticism completely aside, there's an indeterminate gap between a "fact" according to peer-reviewed literature, and a fact that would actually stand up to verification indefinitely, unless it's a fact that naturally gets verified a lot.

"Having a citation from a well regarded source is better than having no citation."

Not if the "well regarded source" has a clear motive to lie.

"There is probably a higher correlation for a statement from an official state agency being true"

Not when the statement conveniently exculpates the agency or high ranking members of the agency of wrongdoing. Then there is probably a higher correlation for a statement being false.

For example, when Jean Paul de Menezes was gunned down by the London Metropolitan police almost every claim made to defend themselves in the succeeding three days turned out to be false. They said that there were wires visible from his jacket. They said he was wearing a heavy coat. They said he vaulted the turnstile. They said that they shouted "armed police!" and he turned and walked towards him. None of it was true.

> Not if the "well regarded source" has a clear motive to lie.

Then it is not a well regarded source any more.

The police are considered a well regarded source by the general public:

"THOUSANDS of people plead guilty to crimes every year in the United States because they know that the odds of a jury’s believing their word over a police officer’s are slim to none."

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/03/opinion/sunday/why-police-...

Your article is inaccessible to me beyond the first 2 paragraphs. Please provide additional quotation. I do see that it is in the opinion category, so perhaps a more reliable source could be provided? Something like a main article of the NYT would probably have less chance to be skewed into a bias, than an opinion piece by the author of "Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness".

The reason I would like to know more, is because I learned so many years ago of the importance of doubt in criminal cases in the US. As Wikipedia tells it[1]:

>Beyond a reasonable doubt is the highest burden of proof in any court in the United States. Criminal cases must be proven beyond a reasonable doubt.

If it's currently the case where all that's needed for a suspect to be found guilty, is for a police officer to say they are, then the entire justice system needs to be reworked.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_doubt

>Having a citation from a well regarded source

Who gets to decide who is "well regarded" and who is not?

The community of people who have spent their time becoming knowledgeable in that field. Or do you suppose that any quack peddling snake oil is as knowledgeable as someone who went to medical school and practices medicine?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis

Semmelweis proposed the practice of washing hands with chlorinated lime solutions in 1847 while working in Vienna General Hospital's First Obstetrical Clinic, where doctors' wards had three times the mortality of midwives' wards.[5] He published a book of his findings in Etiology, Concept and Prophylaxis of Childbed Fever.

Despite various publications of results where hand washing reduced mortality to below 1%, Semmelweis's observations conflicted with the established scientific and medical opinions of the time and his ideas were rejected by the medical community. Semmelweis could offer no acceptable scientific explanation for his findings, and some doctors were offended at the suggestion that they should wash their hands. Semmelweis's practice earned widespread acceptance only years after his death, when Louis Pasteur confirmed the germ theory and Joseph Lister, acting on the French microbiologist's research, practiced and operated, using hygienic methods, with great success. In 1865, Semmelweis was committed to an asylum, where he died at age 47 of pyaemia, after being beaten by the guards, only 14 days after he was committed.

Galileo also comes to mind:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_affair

I am sure there are many others, those are just ones I readily remember off the top of my head. Current "experts" are really terrible about defending their current belief system, and actual evidence be damned. Their jobs and whatever depend on them being right, so don't confuse them with the facts LA LA LA NOT LISTENING. (And because they are experts, many other people simply defer to them.)

This does not appear to have changed in the modern world.

I completely disagree. These particular incidents highlight those occasions when new knowledge had to overcome challenges between experts,

It completely ignores the many times experts knew things, and applied them and improved the working of their field.

You are absolutely overfitting an example used to highlight a pitfall. Instead you are using it to dismiss experts.

In other words you are re-broadcasting the anti expert propaganda which is constantly being spread for the past several decades.

Do note: if this was a modern news channel, The usual next step would be to bring up a total hack and have them repeat some truly outlandish claim, and state "the experts are all in cahoots, and are against homeopathy/AGW/etc. they have a monetary interest!"

Of course experts have a monetary interest. Expert Programmers are experts in their code. They earn a living off of it. Does that stop them from making rational choices.

Honestly, he has a point. It's not even that their jobs depend on stagnation: often being an expert makes you blind to new facts and change, shielded on your own expertise. Being an expert only means you've had lots of exper-ience in the field.

Less empirical sciences rapidly change (or worse, simultaneously holds contradicting) views and thus, generate distrust.

Experts, except the truly groundbreaking ones, are only good at touting the status quo. They're just more likely to be correct because, well, the status quo in science is the most "unincorrect" knowledge we have. So far.

You're just bringing up a strawman with the homeopathy "example".

It would be better if you provided more recent examples: medical science was very primitive in the 19th century, and Galileo was not persecuted by scientists. More recently, Marshall and Warren's research on stomach ulcers quickly led to the rejection of the expert consensus which had prevailed for decades, because technological advances enabled them to present convincing evidence to a profession which had come to accept the importance of scientific research.

The consensus around fat being so bad and The Bell Curve are two that come to mind for me.

Modern microeconomics. I could elaborate, when I get to a better keyboard, but I suggest you read Misbehaving by Richard Thaler.

You want a more recent example: I give you me.

I was diagnosed with Atypical Cystic Fibrosis at age 35. It is genetic, thus incurable. Having managed my condition without a diagnosis for decades, I had my own ideas about what was going on with my body, different from the current scientific consensus.

Armed with a proper diagnosis, I began to get myself well. My CF doctor's response was to express zero curiosity and schedule me fewer appointments because "other patients needed him and I did not."

I have been shit on left and right on multiple internet forums for trying to talk about my experiences. I have been called a quack and accused of being mentally ill and had uglier personal attacks made against me. I have had "sciency" people tell me that "13 years of consistent forward progress is a wild coincidence, stranger things have happened, it isn't evidence that you know anything."

No one has yet locked me up in an insane asylum or beaten me to death, but I have absolutely experienced firsthand that this has not really changed. I am currently homeless, which I guess is a slightly better fate than being essentially murdered for trying to share new information, but the way I get treated doesn't speak well of society at large.

> Current "experts" are really terrible about defending their current belief system, and actual evidence be damned.

While it is true that Semmelweis could have communicated his ideas better than he did, his true problem was that he had the brilliance to see and test the correlation he could not show causation: There was no direct evidence of the germ theory of disease. We had to wait a few more decades for Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch.

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