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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

>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).

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> 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...

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.

> 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.

> 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

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.

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