'We conclude' or 'I believe?' Study finds rationality declined decades ago
phys.org
phys.org
[If I write "I believe <blah blah>" because I believe something and state the reasons why I believe something, it is probably more informative than the output produced if I believe <blah blah>, then search Google for some random authoritative looking sources that say something that superficially matches what I want to say, and then write "these authoritative sources conclude <blah blah>"].
The observation indicates that popularity of some turn of phrase and "key words" over another have changed over time, which is interesting. But for determining how the actual "rationality" of content has changed, one should pick some set of random articles from different periods and actually analyze structure of arguments presented.
In my experience reading scientific papers, "we conclude" is just a pretentious old-timey way to say "I think". It never actually meant anything more rigorous, it was just the norm to write more pretentiously and inflate the certainty of conclusions.
We've been greatly humbled by being wrong over and over in recent decades. Maybe that has driven people to be less confident and stop presenting their thoughts as inevitable rational conclusions.
Another illustration of the weakness of their data interpretation -- the figure shows use of the word "data" has declined in the past 20 years. Has actual use of data declined over this period? Quite the opposite, surely.
I think (haha) this last point is actually quite revealing and strongly supports the "decreasing pretension" interpretation of the paper's word use trend charts. Maybe people stopped saying "the data says" over and over in a crude attempt to box the reader into submission.
We've been greatly humbled by being wrong over and over in recent decades. Maybe that has driven people to be less confident and stop presenting their thoughts as inevitable rational conclusions.
This resonates with me. We are more able to verify our assertions, quicker, faster, more accurately and are more hesitant to make bold claims.
I also think we have a bit of division of specialization going on, where the world keeps turning if everyone is competent in their specialty, allowing our personal, unprofessional, side to act more irrationally without as much consequence as in the past.
Ultimately it's really hard for me to believe that as we spread education and opportunity to the 8 billion people of the world, we are somehow measurably less rational then when a large swath of our population couldn't even read or write.
As far as historical trends, I think we'd need to start with a clear definition of "rational", and a way to measure that in present and historical societies.
If you "personally believe" something in today's context, then it is "true for you" and cannot be questioned.
Also, I'll just leave this here for fun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lj3iNxZ8Dww
A person of a certain age remembers specifically being taught to obscure weak I-statements with impersonal statements that one could conclude are more rational if they do not think about them too hard.
My high school Philosophy teacher would argue that "I think" is a weasily way to avoid accountability and challenge. And, "I think", she would say, is implied by any first person statement.
Nobody can challenge what you think; your thoughts are your own. What they can challenge are declarations you make about the external world. What she failed to foresee is the degree of offense people would eventually claim regarding others' declarations. "I think" is indeed a way to pull your punches, but often to avoid conflict with the public's increasingly hyper-sensitive disposition than to protect one's own fragile ego.
Arguably it didn't used to be that way, and the current state of affairs--political divisiveness, etc--is a reflection of those rhetorical, linguistic barriers falling.
It actually does. The primary difference is first-person pronoun use versus reliance upon external factors, such as evidence of any kind. That shift indicates a trend towards narcissistic thinking and possibly isolation.
If you have any experience reading scientific papers, you should know that this sort of language carries no information whatsoever on the rigor of the author's methodology.
I don't think it's the most plausible explanation but it's not clearly and obviously wrong. Context what matters to make sense of this, but I'm not sure this sort of analysis could ferret that out.
It's not. Especially when it's just pretension and ritualistic habit, and not even real intent.
The only distinction that matters in what you are arguing is level of education. Again, this is about a very basic command of the written word and at the same the subject here is academic research. Your comment is suggesting a colloquialism as an excuse for poor writing when actually colloquialisms have no business in academic writing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colloquialism
Like I said before I can also understand why these concepts, even though they are incredibly basic, are so absolutely foreign to a community of software developers that don't frequently write or read academic research.
Regardless, I don't really care if an academic thinks they concluded something from evidence or they just think it as a matter of opinion. A lot of the time, they don't know the difference anyway. They can present their evidence and I'll decide if I believe whatever they think or conclude.
I know academics. As a class, they aren't especially rigorous, precise, or deserving of epistemic privilege. Some are, but there's far too much variance to make broad brush statements.
You do care or you wouldn't be arguing with me and sounding emotional.
"In 1907 there were 9,260 books published in the United States according to the New York State Library Bookboard. ...Compare that to 2010 when there were 316,480 books published by traditional publishing companies according to Bowker." [1]
Meanwhile the U.S. population has grown from 92,228,496 in 1910 to 308,745,538 in 2010. [2]
Calculate ratios. In 1910 there was a book published per every 9,959.0 Americans. In 2010, there was a book published per every 975.5 Americans. Ratio of ratios: 10.2x in 1910 individuals per book published.
I'm not going to bother with any stat test. There has been a magnitude of change during this span. We have more authors (or publications) per capita than before, likely reflecting a broadening of the socioeconomic and educational classes of the authors.
[1] http://stuffnobodycaresabout.com/2012/01/31/how-many-books-w... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_the_Uni...
EDIT: It seems I should have started from 1980, not 1910...but now its time for work.
Also at 2001 Judea Pearl published "Causality: Models, Reasoning and Inference", which gives mathematical tools to track causes and effects. This book is full of "beliefs". Less so then the previous book of the same author ("Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems"), but nevertheless.
I believe, that the use of word "believe" or "feel" is not a sign of rejecting rationality. In this case it is about accepting the idea that we do not know the absolute truth and inviting others to challenge our beliefs. It fits nicely with ideas of Pearl's causality which states that it is impossible to reason about causes while sticking strictly to objectivity. So I feel it differently: it is not people became less rational, it is the rationality itself became less objective.
Empirically, does it seem we're in more open times where we're more "inviting others to challenge our beliefs"?
In academia, these days, you can probably question anything and everything - revisionism is rampant in all sorts of areas.
In the mainstream, though, that is not necessarily the case.
The degree of wrongness is quite intense in some fields of research, at least the perception of the body of work is so skewed and biased by not only what gets funded, but by the studies that are just plain wrong and people need to be aware of that.
I don't think so. It seems more like you are encouraged to question a specific set of beliefs but simultaneously heavily discouraged to question a different specific set.
In other words, the sacred cows cannot even be named.
Now it is much easier to come across the material, opinions and research that challenges the previous academic output.
From the article:
What precisely caused the observed reversal of the long-term trend around 1980 remains perhaps even more difficult to pinpoint.
Eyeballing the chart, "rationality words" peaked somewhere there.
We see in graphs how people stopped using "rational" words (because they saw that they didn't work?), and closer to 2000 they've learned a new vocabulary. Correlation between the history of statistics and this graphs is just perfect. Though it is just a correlation and moreover it is a hindsight correlation, not a good reason to be overexcited and to propose a causal explanation.
It would be equally believable that people are simply using different, more fashionable, words, but reasoning the same as they have always done.
Media-hound scientists will always walk straight past the less interesting explanations of their data and seize on the most attention-grabbing conclusion as the one "the data clearly suggests."
Then the comment section will go "what about the less interesting explanations"? Which of course were downplayed in the paper, and omitted entirely from the media promotion of the paper.
And it even looks as if they've assigned "intuition" vs "rational" words afterwards. How come "truth" is intuition while "determine" isn't? But adding "facebook" is really the nail in the coffin: that only became available in 2004 or so, and so could almost only show an upward trend.
Often conversations evolve from describing a first person experience "I went to the shops" to "you know, when you get there and XYZ.. and how you have to..." I feel a lot less receptive when this shift happens.
Another example "you should try fasting" instead of "fasting felt helpful for me".
“Conclude” implies conclusion, where no further evidence is needed, and where no evidence to the contrary is expected. The history of science suggests the vast majority of results are not conclusive.
So maybe this language is not entirely a measure of rational vs emotional, but also a measure of confidence.
Nevertheless, I think the conclusion of this article probably is correct.
And of course, such a change in speech patterns doesn't have to actually speak to a decline in rationality but to a stronger focus on the author of a claim. The rational process of thinking might be as prevalent nowadays, it's just differently worded.
For example, it's not hard to imagine data like this being used to say that the there is "less cultural interest in political correctness due to it's declining usage in discourse" while not factoring in that "woke" has largely replaced it in the frequency of usage while often representing the same concept in the speaker's mind.
The way language and speech change is extremely complex, and I feel like an analysis that uses that time span starts to become almost worthless as anything other than a trivia fact. "People speak differently than they did 20, 50, or 100 years ago" was already pretty well understood, and the assumption that these words have inherent, immutable meaning is misrepresenting what words actually are, stand-ins and generalizations limited by the speaker's understanding of them and the audience they're spoken to.
Statistics can be manipulated in many ways; data could be collected incorrectly (introducing bias), could be aggregated and combined incorrectly and then searched and tabulated incorrectly. To assume that 'data' is always correct and paints a clear picture shows a lack of rationality.
I hope that some of this trend is due to the acceptance thresholds lowering slightly, allowing for publication of incomplete research, on which others can build, rather than requiring a complete conclusion. Of course, one may draw conclusions about funding causing people to wrap up research prematurely.
Well said! I wonder if the crowd here will realize they're only seeing this article because so many of their compatriots felt good enough about the article to upvote it.
If we are to remain rational observers of reality, it is far better IMO to frame statements as "thus far, our hypotheses have / have not been invalidated based on the following experiments, which can be reproduced by following these exact steps..." along with proper control groups, etc.
I often find myself saying "I feel like <some argument> might be the case" when it would have been just as accurate to say "I think <some argument> might be true"
I don't think it makes me any less rational to use the word "feel" over "think", what makes me more or less rational will be the content of <some argument>
This is even less meaningful than word clouds in my opinion (final conclusion pending).
Yes if there was some obvious shift of everyone referencing religious texts or astrological forecasts that would be one thing. Going from I concur to I believe is just a stretch to state anything about rationality.
Thus, it is not the authors have declined in their own rationality, but are instead increasingly choosing to rationally avoid the increasing levels of conflict now present in every aspect of discourse.
Certainly, that explains why I avoid making statements without couching them in such doubt, even when I rationally know that such diminishes those statements potential impact. I’m better off falling short than getting knocked down.
My opinion is that rationalism can only come from individuals.
Only individuals exist. There is no such thing as a collective brain.
Engagement algorithms, most likely. People are probably more likely to engage longer if they're emotionally stimulated than bombarded with a bunch of pesky facts.
Link to corpus (it's paywalled): https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1199644
Link to the democratization of fiction publishing: https://justine.lol/fiction.png
It's much easier to criticize someone's conclusions.
At least, that what I feel.
Sounds more like you've just used this comment section to launch your own rant against a voice that's too loud for your liking...
A more honest statement from people in this position would be "can you help me understand these empirical facts" because believing there's a magic spreadsheet they can understand with a single =SUM(...) column answer is distorting Science.
I can't speak to Trudeau -He's in another economy. Nobody is 100% wrong all the time.