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Comment by hermannj314 | Hacker News Reader

I struggle often with this somewhat arbitrary desire for everything to be data-driven and backed by science.

People hope, pray, follow best practices, listen to advice on the internet and yet, every now and then we are reminded that only fools do these things. Really intelligent people only listen to science and do things backed by science and lots of data.

How does anyone accomplish anything if every step they take has to be double blind studied before it even crosses their mind?

Maybe for my own sanity, while humanity marches towards becoming Vulcan, I'll continuing accepting a few heuristics, fables, and Grandma's chicken noodle soup.

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It only needs to be "data-driven and backed by science" if it's making scientific claims. It's totally okay to write a book of advice about workplace interactions based on anecdotes or your own experience (there are many such books) - but it's an entirely different thing to make scientific-sounding claims about how people are categorized.

Sure, but I'd argue that beliefs derived from these sorts of books of advice should be relatively loosely held.

I think it is a bit of a stretch to call a desire for assertions to be backed by verifiable facts "arbitrary".

> How does anyone accomplish anything if every step they take has to be double blind studied before it even crosses their mind?

First, it doesn't have to be double-blinded before it can "cross your mind". There are lots of solid theories that are worth taking into consideration, however if you are writing a book promoting a theory which you claim has a scientific basis it is helpful to at least some evidence that it is true.

Nothing wrong with enjoying grandma's chicken noodle soup. I'm sure it's beneficial - but don't sell it as a cure for cancer.

I used to be the way you describe, and I found it left me without any convictions. I used to think that was okay, because I reasoned with myself that convictions are irrational if not backed by data.

Then I got older and realized how easy it is to frame and manipulate data and “facts” to achieve any desired result on the part of the person disseminating the facts. I realized that having some base convictions was a way to defend against people using data in unscrupulous ways, to convince me of things I didn’t want to believe.

So now I do both. I have some points of view that I can’t defend with data and science and peer review studies. They are grounded in my own observations of the world and how they make me feel. I won’t let anyone tell me what my lying eyes see, that’s for me to determine. But for what I can’t see I try to follow data where I can.

Does this mean I may be living under some incorrect convictions? Sure! But it’s far better than floating like a leaf in the wind, blowing wherever someone spouting some “data” would want to take me.

Irrationality is okay because the world and humans are irrational. You can’t operate in a pure mentat/vulcan mode under such conditions.

You may be interested in the book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Pretty impressive you’ve come to the conclusions you have, I’d say. I suspect many of us choose these points of view by their explanatory power. There will always be some social phenomena that elude explanation by any given point of view, of course.

Thanks for the recommendation I will check it out! Although I can't say that I've come to these realizations all on my own -- I've had a lot of great mentors, friends, and therapists help me on the way.

I'd say your own observations constitute valid (albeit suboptimal) data, to which you apply the scientific method. Peer review isn't part of that method, it's just a useful mistake/fraud filter.

I don't need a textbook to tell me objects fall downwards, I've been collecting that data since I was born.

> So now I do both. I have some points of view that I can’t defend with data and science and peer review studies.

I do like it when people point out which part of their advice is supported by established science, and which is not. Both can be useful.

Well, someone like Taleb would say that human nature (if there is such a thing) has remained unchanged for at least as long as there has been writing. So we have writings thousands of years old on what people thought about how other people work. These have been subject to the best truth filter we know of: time. So you’ll learn more about how your fellow humans operate by reading the classics than whatever bullshit psych field is critically lauded in $currentyear.

Incidentally I’ve also found this to be true for politics. You will get a much better understanding of politics by reading historical texts about the 20th century than by following the day-to-day oscillations of the political machine from any news source. Actually, the latter negatively impacts your understanding.

> human nature (if there is such a thing) has remained unchanged for at least as long as there has been writing

I've seen statements of this sort very frequently - ie. that the "behaviorally modern" human evolved tens or hundreds of thousands of years ago.

I'm curious what the backing of such claims are. It seems profoundly unintuitive to me that human behavior would remain evolutionarily unchanged over tens to hundreds of thousands of years of evolution/founder effects, especially when you consider widespread evolution of various other traits like lactose tolerance in the past ~5,000 years.

If the wisdom of the classics stopped being applicable to modern times then they would die out and stop being read. So, only the observations remain that are most stable, general, and enduring over time.

The power of the classic is largely in being pliable enough to be read in new ways by successive generations, if taken litteraly Plato obviously has nothing to say about downvote etiquette.

He doesn't make even a single throwaway comment on the process of throwing black or white potsherds into an urn to decide whether someone shall be banned from the city of Athens, i.e. the original meaning of ostracism? Because AFAICS that would be pretty literally (actual literally-literally) about downvote etiquette.

No, that is very much not actually literally-literally.

How not? Voting to run you out of town must be ("literally") the ultimate downvote, isn't it?

While things that are useful enough to exist throughout time are usually true/it’s generally a great filter, I think “efficacy” and “consistency with observations and experience across time” are better descriptors of what you’re getting at. If you aren’t paying attention to efficacy or consistency when propagating knowledge, time can just as easily solidify untruths and cause truths to decay and be forgotten.

Something needs to provide for the good hypothesis making side so those kinds of things are always valuable even in the most strict science focused societies, as long as actual results are allowed to take their place in terms of function when they are investigated solidly.

But that's not really the crux of this particular issue, it was pseudoscience not "not science". I.e. it was masquerading as being more scientifically founded than it was instead of just a book of this guy's personal understandings.

If you "only listen to science", you don't understand science.

Science actually has a narrow focus. It only deals with things that are observable, reproducible, predictable and falsifiable. Since Gödel, science even proved itself as incomplete. The best doctors will always say that if something makes you feel better, by all means do it, even if it is not backed by science.

It is not the same as going against science. This can be bad, because science is really good at what it does, thanks in part to its narrow focus. For example, eat all chicken soup you want if it makes you feel better, but if you want your cancer to go away, it is not a good idea to ignore the treatments that science has come up with. The best doctors will tell you that too.

I liked this a lot, but wanted to make a correction.

> Since Gödel, science even proved itself as incomplete. The best doctors will always say that if something makes you feel better, by all means do it, even if it is not backed by science.

Gödel proved mathematics to be inconsistent. This has much greater implications than just proving scientific inquiry to be insufficient. Science relies on the senses for its reliability and is grounded in the physical world. Mathematics has no such bounds.

Given a "complete" formal (scientific!) understanding of the physical world, we still wouldn't know everything, there will always be systems that intersect with it that inform our world, but can't be understood using our rules. No matter how many formal systems we define to wrap our collective brain around the world, there will always be more things to understand.

That's the significance of Gödel.

Nah, he did not.

He proved that "it" cannot prove its own consistency. (Where it can express Peano arithmetic.)

But "it" is not the whole of mathematics. There are "weak" systems that can prove their own consistency. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-verifying_theories )

Then maybe it helps that the theory also fails the "common sense", "easily observable incorrectness" test.

What actually irritates me is how so many people ended up believing in it.

Just the idea that you can classify peoples personality in 4 categories, sounds _for me_ as obviously stupid.

Or the grouping of the attributes associated with the colors, just doesn't at all fit the reality I observe.

Like I know more introverted, less-verbal creative people then I know extroverted creative people.

Similar I have meet analytic, but not careful people.

Or dominate, considerate, nice people.

Heck I have meet people which where both patient and driven, depending on context.

...

If you claim to be a scientist, then it needs to be scientific. Or else you’re a charlatan and need to be called out. If you’re claiming things that go against the scientific understanding, it needs to be called out too. Whether people follow the scientist or not, it’s another problem. Not that it really matters since obviously everyone involved in this is much more interested in the money they are making than in stopping to lie to their readers.

My pet peeve is that in this worshipping of science (count me guilty) it’s often forgotten that it is ultimately an attempt to model a system from within itself, and thus will never model it fully and prove that it is correct or even validate the very fundamental assumptions (STEM-inspired material monism, some mainstream flavor of dualism, or a riff on transcendental idealism—note how this stuff technically would have huge implications for science, yet is formally outside of its scope because it is impossible to prove or falsify).

So whether it is hard science or ghosts and Grandma’s noodle soup, it is always a belief at the core. One of those is a more detailed model and quite useful at making some predictions, that’s all.

I disagree that those assumptions are core to science. Really, science makes relatively weak assumptions, largely around induction and its existence.

Those assumptions are technically not even in scope of our “hard science”, but if one of those assumptions got “proven true” through whatever means (possible oxymoron) it would have major implications as much of pre-existing hard science would suddenly become either markedly less or markedly more consequential and/or new fields may be created.

Those assumptions describe fundamental traits of a system which humans are ill-equipped to live not having a model of; some (many?) people believe advances in science support one of them (e.g., material monism).

“ Really intelligent people only listen to science and do things backed by science and lots of data.”

You know _no one_ smarter than you who follows a deity?

I did not mean for my post to come across in such a way.

But yes - people I know, smarter than me, that believe in a deity, returned quite a few rows when I queried.

I think it was meant with a bit of sarcasm?

Well I mean, if people were like you said, we would have data and science, not rubbish and cultism like this book...

Where is the frigging data ? Where is the scientific process ??

Don't choose a color personality and then exclude team mates based on their "opposed" colors, I beg you. You can like fables, but we can't regress that low.

Good for you, but beside the point.

The point is that the author claims the model is scientific, but it isn't.

According to the article, this particular thought was being used to determine who could perform certain jobs. Requiring those criteria to be based in science is reasonable.

It's only necessary for extraordinary claims. Most books by "experts" make extraordinary claims. We have centuries of data that shows it's best to ignore them completely.

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