On Intellectual Dishonesty
aaronsw.com
aaronsw.com
The article is so close to a direct Feynman quote that it makes me wonder if the author was subconsciously plagiarizing Feynman. Normally, I wouldn't mind (subconscious plagiarism is everywhere). But in an article about intellectual honesty I would expect the author to "bend over backwards" to identify and declare potential sources of plagiarism. ;-)
Especially as while Feynman said that I highly doubt he was the first to think it. He was, very likely, merely distilling things he'd heard before much as the current author was.
more from Feynman, via
"Cargo Cult Science", adapted from a commencement address given at Caltech (1974)
quoted at https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman
There is one feature I notice that is generally missing in "cargo cult science." It's a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty — a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you're doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid — not only what you think is right about it; other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you've eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked — to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.
Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them. You must do the best you can — if you know anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong — to explain it. If you make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it...
In summary, the idea is to try to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another.
If the problem or discussion at hand is one that requires rigor to be meaningful or productive, then lack of rigor is definitely a problem, but it's not an action in bad faith.
Lack of rigor becomes bad-faith acting at the exact moment someone says "interesting result, send me your data and method of collection so I can try to duplicate" (i.e. 'send me the serialized representation of your rigor') and your response includes an excuse for why that isn't available anymore, or can't be shared, or will cost the asker a prohibitive amount of money or time, etc.
In this sense, "lack of scientific rigor" would be a subset of intellectual dishonesty. It's not always undertaken in bad faith, but when it's undertaken consciously, then it's dishonest.
The more egregious kind of dishonesty is something like the Bell Curve, where a single exceptional example from a study (one out of 21 if memory serves) was used to essentially propose that minority racial groups were genetically inferior.
There's a third part "3) when the person expects you to be truthful". When you make a statement with the intent to mislead somebody but the person is fully aware that he is being mislead, there is no dishonesty. Magicians and illusionists deceive people who expect to be deceived, so that's OK. Same for CEOs and politicians: people are fully aware that words they use are chosen very carefully.
The first part, that a statement must be untrue in order to be dishonest is unneeded, I think. It's irrelevant whether you say something that's true or untrue, what matters is whether the audience is going to form a belief that is correct or not. For instance it's easy to lie to people by phrasing a statement with a triple negation. Few people parse triple negations properly.
The kindle single "Lying" (20 pages; $2 or so), by Sam Harris argues really well in favor of total and completely honesty (but not unnecessary rudeness). He defines lying as "to intentionally mislead others when they expect honest communication", which is the best definition I've come across.
In other words, I still "expect" honest communication from CEOs and politicians and am frustrated by their lying.
Every time someone repeats the lie that lying politicians are expected and accepted, they're helping make the lie true. Stop it.
This is why so many politicians are completely unable to concede a single point, even when it's completely obvious they're wrong, even when conceding the point wouldn't damage the strength of their argument. The rules political rhetoric are simple: disagree with all arguments and facts of those you oppose and never ever ever admit you're wrong. The moment you say you made a mistake your opponents will mercilessly use it against you and your supporters will perceive you as weak.
The whole political game is not fact based and never has been, in no country at no point in history. It's about teams. And people want their team to WIN, facts be damned.
I would argue that lying has nothing to do with expectations. Magicians and comedians lie, but we are okay with it and we (hopefully) don't believe those statements. We just get our chuckles and forget about them.
Many (not all) people expect politicians and other leaders to lie. And like you said, maybe we need them to lie, maybe the world is better for it. And I am sure there are plenty of politically correct terms to use for those instances instead of lying.
But if the statement is false, then it is false. It doesn't matter how the recipient of the message interprets it, that's their problem.
http://www.lhup.edu/~DSIMANEK/cargocul.htm
The original Caltech posting of the speech text, in .PDF format:
http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.pdf
"I would like to add something that's not essential to the science, but something I kind of believe, which is that you should not fool the layman when you're talking as a scientist. I am not trying to tell you what to do about cheating on your wife, or fooling your girlfriend, or something like that, when you're not trying to be a scientist, but just trying to be an ordinary human being. We'll leave those problems up to you and your rabbi. I'm talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you are maybe wrong, that you ought to have when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as scientists, certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen."
(1) he is an aggressor and I must lie to defend myself, (2) he is a good person but I'm doing him an important favour.
Thus for example: (1) I deceive during wartime by feeding false information to enemy spies or painting wooden boxes to look like tanks, (2) I lie to a family member in order to protect his feelings.
These are 'good' lies. How does it manifest with bad lies?
I conjecture that the bad guys think in precisely the same ways!
So, for example, Hitler really thinks he is is the victim and needs more breathing room, (2) the conman believes his mark is naive and will benefit from learning the ways of the world.
In order to accomplish this the liar has to be intellectually dishonest. He must adopt conspiracy theories or other crazy explanations. He must ignore the nagging feeling from his conscience or impute it to the enemy's supposed injustices.
This makes me doubt the existence of bad intentions. Or if they do exist, they are strictly unconscious. Everyone sees himself as a good guy or a victim.
Generally, I agree with your thrust, but not so strongly as you have phrased it. Self-acknowledged "bad guys" do exist.
Has anyone here tried hard to publish a negative result and had it consistently rejected?
And if you do publish everything, then everything will be lost in a sea of noise... you'd need to create "ultra-publishing" to resolve that...
What you can't publish are things that are not novel and things that are worst than existing methods.
See the biography of Stonewall Jackson. People thought his practice somewhat peculiar, but it earned him respect.
"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you've not fooled yourself, it's easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that."
We've learned from experience that the truth will come out. Other experimenters will repeat your experiment and find out whether you were wrong or right. Nature's phenomena will agree or they'll disagree with your theory. And, although you may gain some temporary fame and excitement, you will not gain a good reputation as a scientist if you haven't tried to be very careful in this kind of work. And it's this type of integrity, this kind of care not to fool yourself, that is missing to a large extent in much of the research in cargo cult science.
"Cargo Cult Science", adapted from a commencement address given at Caltech (1974) http://www.lhup.edu/~DSIMANEK/cargocul.htm
do you tell the genius ax murderer who is trying to kill you that you have changed your name and new location when he asks? Why not? It's dishonest.
One advantage you may be winning for yourself with your caveats, without even realizing it, is a degree of credibility. By being careful that what you say is correct, and not merely "Basically right, more or less. Kind of.", you may find it much easier to convince people when you _do_ take stronger positions.
I think Aaron's counterexample is pretty terrible. Recalling one time you slept in once in 2003 is really not pertinent to the spirit of the question. The point is clearly not to ask you whether you have ever failed to show up for work on time, but whether you have reason to believe that it may be particularly difficult for you now, perhaps because you live far away or have a history of repeated difficulties with time management.
Personally I would recommend erring on the side of accuracy. I've witnessed plenty of cargo cult programming. "This technology will perform well enough for us" could mean from one person "I have run benchmarks on representative hardware and know that, under conditions I am about to explain, this technology will work for us", and from another "I have read about someone else using this technology in some way for something. I don't remember where I read it. Probably a blog post that made it to hacker news."
Seriously, advertising that isn't lying is called "information". And very very few advertisers stick to simply informing people about their product and its verified functions.
It's always "This is so cool! Everybody is using it! Impress your friends! Pick up chicks! It won't hurt.". Lies, all.
Keep the downvotes coming.