Epistemic Learned Helplessness (2013)
slatestarcodex.com
slatestarcodex.com
I suspect that argument from authority, like "goto considered harmful" and Moore's Law, have entered the public consciousness in a warped popular form that barely resembles the original.
In topics in which I am not a subject matter expert, I can and should defer to the actual subject matter experts, absent very compelling evidence to the contrary. I'm not perfect at this, but I first read Epistemic Learned Helplessness at about the right time several years ago and it re-appears unbidden in my consciousness to hit me in the back of the head any time I start thinking an expert might be wrong in their area of expertise.
Reluctance to do this because of misguided applications of the argument-from-authority fallacy is probably one of the root causes of antivaxx, climate "skepticism", flat-eartherism, and other hot political topics with a vocal population who have convinced themselves that authorities are not to be trusted. You can never successfully argue for instance that "AGW is probably true because 98% of climate scientists agree with its foundations", because the answer is always, "that's the argument-from-authority fallacy", even though reliance on authority is the correct approach. What you inevitably get instead is two or more laypeople clumsily trying to debate the nuances of a subject that they have no academic background in.
Just like pointing out a slippery slope may be entirely correct; it's only a slippery-slope fallacy if there's no evidence that the slope is, in fact, slippery.
That is the claim that people make when they make an argument from authority. That doesn't make it not a logical fallacy.
> It's only argument-from-authority if there isn't sufficient evidence that this authority is most likely correct on this count.
Sometimes this works (the Earth orbits the Sun) and sometimes it doesn't (sanitizing hands/scalpels is actually a good idea between dissecting cadavers and doing c-sections).
This is the point where branding things as fallacies breaks down, and is very much the point of the article.
Calling “argument from authority” on somebody’s point is one of the weakest rebuttals you can provide, because you’re not really tackling the substance of the argument.
In this case, “98% of scientists agree that AGW is happening” implicitly says “and I have all the arguments provided by those 98% on my side”. Presumably, if AGW isn’t happening, their arguments are wrong somehow, and you should be able to point out how. It’s not just appeal to authority, it’s saying “here’s a big body of research, tell me where it went wrong”.
Ultimately, nobody is an expert on everything, and heuristic thinking has to take over at some point. Overwhelming expert consensus is a damn good heuristic to go by.
Sometimes.
I don't know enough about physics to even really understand the standard model. I still believe that it's pretty much true.
However this approach is a bit limited. There simply aren't experts in macroeconomics that could convince me of anything on an appeal to authority basis in that same way.
Ultimately, arguments are much cleaner and more convincing if you can simply and directly argue the point. For those arguments that are not so amenable, expert consensus may be a practical alternative, but at best it's a least bad choice, not something to be lauded.
This is actually a perfect example of the difference between argument-from-authority and argument-from-authority-fallacy!
Galileo didn't say "the Earth orbits the Sun because I say so and shut up." He said "the Earth orbits the Sun, here take a look."
Not fallacy.
The physicians who refused to wash their hands didn't say "washing hands has no measurable impact on mortality and here's our data to prove it", they said "gentleman doctors do not have dirty hands, and shut up."
Fallacy.
i'd contend the word 'defer' is too strong. one should accept that SMEs have made reasonable arguments based on information you don't have (like the many wrong lines of reasoning they've already attempted). "epistemic learned helplessness" would then lead you to defer to the expert, but that's not the only rational response in every case.
there's a different skill, discussed secondarily in the essay, for sniffing out bs. that's probably best termed 'wisdom', or informed meta-pattern-matching. so another rational response is to use your wisdom to decide how much to trust the expert. trusting the expert is not necessarily an either-or thing.
So the failure to exercise an appropriate degree of epistemic learned helplessness might also be interpreted as a failure to recognize, or a lazy unwillingness to accept, that acquiring subject-specific knowledge---as well as subject-specific metacognitive knowledge to indicate to one that one lacks substantive knowledge, takes actual work which one has not put in.
But on the other hand....
Why Most Published Research Findings Are False https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1182327/
Put other way, if you are susceptible to argument, you must be willing to accept the risks, or unaware that there are risks in committing fully to an argument and a premise. This seems particularly suitable to startups where oftentimes evidence of demand, market size, or growth is conspicuously absent at the moment of inception.
""" Bob explained that weak opinions are problematic because people aren’t inspired to develop the best arguments possible for them, or to put forth the energy required to test them. Bob explained that it was just as important, however, to not be too attached to what you believe because, otherwise, it undermines your ability to “see” and “hear” evidence that clashes with your opinions. """
I think these strong opinions change when there is information to do so, and that's probably where the whole "stay focused and keep shipping" idea comes from: collect soft feedback, hard metrics, and otherwise information by providing a product-as-a-hypothesis. The more often you ship and measure, the better your direction and your alignment with what people will pay for.
just like, say, a theist or an atheist, in-between which fits the agnostic (the epistemically helpless person in this case).
This reminds me of a very interesting (and accessible!) article by the mathematician Terence Tao about what major mathematical results tend to look like, and how to be more skeptical of your own work: https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/be-sceptical-of...
> If you unexpectedly find a problem solving itself almost effortlessly, and you can’t quite see why, you should try to analyse your solution more sceptically. In particular, the method may also be able to prove much stronger statements which are known to be false, which would imply that there is a flaw in the method.
You don't have to instantly believe arguments. Sit back and gather data to assess the predictive power of the model.
Since they cannot judge theories scientifically, and they cannot judge them based on how well they're presented, they can only fall back on social consensus and instinctive sense of weirdness. "Trust the academy", would seem to be the more accurate shorthand.
Why judge at all? Or rather, why develop certainty when you lack the capacity to judge accurately?
The answer is that certainty, even when it is unwarranted, is sometimes useful and necessary. Certainty can also lead to major oversights and failures so it is something we should use with caution and care. When assessing the appropriate level of certainty we need to address not only our own level of expertise, but also the utility (and risk) which adopting a particular certainty provides.
However, I find this article rather misguided in its conclusions:
> And so on for several more iterations, until the labyrinth of doubt seemed inescapable. What finally broke me out wasn’t so much the lucidity of the consensus view so much as starting to sample different crackpots. Some were almost as bright and rhetorically gifted as Velikovsky, all presented insurmountable evidence for their theories, and all had mutually exclusive ideas. After all, Noah’s Flood couldn’t have been a cultural memory both of the fall of Atlantis and of a change in the Earth’s orbit, let alone of a lost Ice Age civilization or of megatsunamis from a meteor strike. So given that at least some of those arguments are wrong and all seemed practically proven, I am obviously just gullible in the field of ancient history. Given a total lack of independent intellectual steering power and no desire to spend thirty years building an independent knowledge base of Near Eastern history, I choose to just accept the ideas of the prestigious people with professorships in Archaeology, rather than those of the universally reviled crackpots who write books about Venus being a comet.
The author has discovered their lack of expertise in ancient history. Knowing that, it seems to me that adopting a high level of certainty about ancient history based on "mainstream" or "the academy", without a clear idea of the utility of adopting that certainty, is epistemically irresponsible or at least unnecessary.
I think for stuff like religion or philosophy, you really move away from the domain of "correct/incorrect" to more conditional arguments: philosophy Y makes sense if your values are X. One is only better than another if it more aligns with your values and experiences. Your values are going to be determined by the totality of your life experiences and genetics. You can dispute that holding a certain position isn't necessarily pragmatic within a given context, but you can't really say it is wrong, in my view. Of course there are lots of smart people on this site, so I'm curious to see what others may think of my views on philosophy.
Political comment threads strikes me as a good example of people on every side of every issue being 100% convinced of things that could not possibly all be true.
If you took seriously the one idea that "the purpose of human life is to produce more humans" [SolaceQuantum below], you should be trying to have as many children as possible. For a male with upper-middle class resources, 1000 children should be achievable. (You don't have to raise them, just "produce" them.) A billionaire with strong organizational skills might manage 10^6 children.
This conflicts with the (unstated) idea that children should be raised well, in a nurturing environment with good parenting. Also, that overpopulation is bad. And that other people have an equal right to children. And ...
So I don't think you need epistemic helplessness. You just need a broad perspective.
Wow! This explains why so many antivaxxers and the likes are highly educated people, often with engineering-like background. I never realized that until reading this. They're smart enough to never have developed a thick enough skin against convincing-but-wrong arguments, which means that once someone does convince them of something (despite their smartness), they're (we're?) all-in.
Makes me wonder how vulnerable I am to all this. I'm sure in the target demographic here. Maybe Osama would turn me into a suicide bomber too? Or into an antivaxxer :-)
I always test, before moving to production. Always. Even if it seems trivial to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt, by argument, that this code is correct. Always test, before moving to production.
I just don't know how people do it. I have to iterate and poke at things constantly as I go.
Everyone thinks they are better than average ;)
It's too easy to fall into the trap of inverting a positive trait and say, "I'm probably less un-awesome than average," or to exaggerate false humility.
Sample bias comes in as well, since among my rich friends, I am below average net worth, but still above the 75th percentile nationally. It's like that stupid job interview question, "what is your greatest weakness?[0]"
It's an interesting exercise anyway.
([0]Apparently one wrong answer is, "suffering fools gladly.")
Translation: People who have spent so much time playing with highly abstracted and greatly simplified models, they've lost their grasp on how messy and complicated the real world can be.
This.
The best you can do is to make arguments like "if you accept all the axioms I mentioned above, you should also accept this conclusion".
(This is the opposite of the "instant expert syndrome" to which many people seem susceptible, where they are certain they know which side to take about whatever was recently in the news.)
In real life, you probably do have commitments and decisions to make.
I find the easiest way out of the "we're in a simulation" conundrum is to ask why you would behave differently, ethically, inside a simulation to outside: doesn't the fact you display consistency on your behaviour define you as you?
Lewis Carroll wrote an essay on this topic:
https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/What_the_Tortoise_Said_to_A...
Or, in a more refined way: There is an effectively infinite number of theories that have equal evidence (namely: none), and consequently you should give each one only (1/infinity) attention, i.e. epsilon, i.e. basically zero.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/04/book-review-the-secret...
But it is a repost from livejournal, so it's probably over 10 years old. I can understand not wanting to rewrite it.
His newer writing is not like this. On the other hand, his newer writing is not so short.
And more importantly, the goal is not to make himself look good, but to relate a point as he experienced it.
I have no idea how frequently this happens, or how it resolves.
At the same time though, I think it's worth remembering that the placebo effect is real and measurable so if someone claims X, Y or Z cures their headaches maybe they're not lying :-)
A really good consideration is experience and observability. Those trump smart and well educated most of the time. It's the difference between seeing something and inferring it or simply repeating orthodoxy.
The Observability test is good when dealing with putative authority. Instead of asking if they are right you first ask, is this something they can observe. If not their opinion means a lot less.
A good modern example is climate change. Almost no one has the training, experience and familiarity with actual data to have form a reliable opinion. Without all three a persons opinion isn't worth much.