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Comment by quanticle | Hacker News Reader

The irony of a clickbait publication like Vox talking about intellectual humility is breathtaking. Vox and its ilk (Buzzfeed, Huffington Post, Gawker, etc) have done more than anyone else in pushing people to stick to their guns, even when they know their position is wrong. Their attitude towards apologies is never forgiveness, but to attack even harder, saying, "See, even my opponent admits that he or she was wrong!"

Humility doesn't go viral. Careful consideration doesn't get retweets. What spreads is confidence, whether it's well-placed or not. As a result, Vox's product is the very sort of confidence that this article decries.

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> even when they know their position is wrong

Can I get a citation for this one? I've seen plenty of articles that are misleading if not wrong (and also plenty that are quite informative), but I have yet to see evidence they publish ones taking positions they actually know to be wrong.

Ryan Holiday has an entire chapter (Chapter 12) on it in his book, Trust Me I'm Lying: Confessions of A Media Manipulator. His point is that being wrong can actually have positive consequences for a blogger, since it allows them to get paid twice for the same story. First, they publish the original provocative piece. This drives pageviews to the site (and prompts coverage elsewhere, which cements the site's reputation as an "influencer"). Then when people start digging, and the site has to post a correction, the correction can be turned into a story of its own, which drives even more pageviews.

An example from the book is the Shirley Sherrod controversy. Breitbart excerpted two snippets from a 40+ minute speech that Sherrod gave, which were excerpted specifically to make it seem like she was engaging in "reverse racism". This led to Sherrod getting fired, and cemented Breitbart's reputation as an influential site that could even get government employees fired. After the controversy blew up, Breitbart stuck to its guns for as long as possible, in order to gin up as many pageviews as possible from the ongoing controversy as possible. Finally, when it did issue a correction, it issued one that was completely unrepentant -- the only incorrect information it admitted to publishing was that the remarks that it referred to had been made before Ms. Sherrod took her job with the Department of Agriculture, instead of after.

Ezra Klein's interactions with Sam Harris have a similar character. Klein seems to deliberately distort positions that Sam Harris takes in order to make it seem as if he's more sympathetic to right-wing ideas than he actually is. Even when Sam Harris corrects him, both on his podcast and in writing, Klein sticks to his guns, and completely fails to acknowledge that he could have been wrong about his interpretation of Mr. Harris' views. He only admits to corrections in the most technical sense, about narrow facts. Klein never admits the possibility that he might have completely misinterpreted something, only that he got certain details wrong.

It is for this reason that I found it extremely ironic that Vox, the publication founded by Ezra Klein, would publish an article advocating for intellectual humility, when in my experience, both Klein himself and Vox's editorial voice as a whole are among the least intellectually humble publications that I read.

Wow, this is super useful. Thank you for the explanation & pointers!

Before this thread gets too negative, I would like to point out a positive example of intellectual humility: Kahneman's retraction of a chapter of Thinking Fast and Slow [1]. In it, Kahneman acknowledges the basic points of of the Retraction Watch article, explains his mistake, and says specifically what parts of his worldview have changed as a result of the new evidence that he's been faced with. He clearly says that, although he still thinks that priming is real, he has significantly more doubts now about the generality and replicability of priming research, now that study after study has failed to find the effects of priming when attempting to reproduce famous results. He even says that he had the information to come to the same conclusions as the blog, but failed to do so because of his own biases.

[1]: https://replicationindex.wordpress.com/2017/02/02/reconstruc...

Yes, that's a great example from Kahneman; and FWIW, I quoted it here before.

But I also wished Kahenman wrote that in a more prominent location, like edge.org, or publishing a public errata to his book—so that people reading the 'priming' chapter, titled The Associative Machine, in the book are appropriately primed; instead of a comment buried deep in a Wordpress blog.

I came here to precisely point out that Ezra Klein and Sam Harris's episode, and Klein's total lack of intellectual honesty in that episode. I'm glad I first searched to see if it's already mentioned here.

I recall listening to the same fated podcast you allude to, that Sam Harris did with Klein. It was frustrating to see how meaninglessly stubborn Klein was. Klein's attitude was so two-faced that Harris was not joking when he described how Klein's false politeness came across in their private emails: "Hey Sam, let's meet together and discuss how you are a bigot. Thank you, and have a good day."

I can completely see how one could feel that way after reading and listening to the relevant articles, published emails, and podcasts.

I’m not aware of that podcast, but another example is the Cathy Newman interview with Jordan Peterson. I didn’t know anything about either personality when I watched it (and I know very little now), but it was mind numbing how Newman’s only tactic was blatantly misrepresenting Peterson. His ideas may have been total garbage, but we wouldn’t know because Newman was only addressing strawmen. It seemed like her position is so weak that any serious treatment of Peterson’s would have threatened it existentially.

I expected something like this to be the top comment. Vox seems to have become something that many people love to hate and in that case I imagine it feels good to take them down a peg. (Please note that this does not preclude the possibility that you are right.)

Why do you assume ulterior motives? Perhaps people are just sincerely discussing the irony that a notoriously disingenuous publication lecturing readers about intellectual humility. No need to assume that they’re “delighting in tearing them down” (although such delight would be entirely understandable).

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