How confusion spreads and becomes engrained (2017) | Hacker News Reader

How confusion spreads and becomes engrained (2017)

stephan-shahinian.medium.com

59 pointsrzk39 comments

"If people come to a different conclusion than me, it's because they are confused. Here's what I tell myself they do wrong, so that I can pity them without challenging my own certainty."

- Stephan Shahinian

> The Oracle — Best in the World @ Financial Markets, Macro-Economics, Identifying Geniuses, Forecasting Future

So relieved to see this comment at the top. After reading OPs second paragraph I was thinking oh, so by 'confusion' he actually means people with different opinions from him

Taken as a list of biases, the article is useful. It never hurts to be reminded about all the different ways we can be led astray. But the problem is, the list of 'mitigations' boils down to become an investigative journalist who researches _everything_ using multiple viewpoints from primary sources, surrounds themselves with people who disagree with them and engages them in lively dialogue, and remains open minded and neutral about everything until the end of time

Ain't nobody got time for that

We have a limited about of time and energy and need to decide where to spend it. Sometimes it might be more efficient to take received wisdom and run with it rather than launch a research project twenty times a day

"people with different opinion" is some ideal that i found nice a decade ago. But today i think that the objective facts are pretty well known and most trouble are people who cant differentiate between a fact and their opinion. There are some things that we just cannot possibly know and people love to fill these voids with their imagination.

The objective facts are more well known than they were a decade ago on things that were a question a decade ago.

But now we've got new questions. The objective facts on at least some of them are not yet well known, because the questions are too new.

You are too kind to this guy.

> So I always viewed my writings as a gift to humanity and the future generations, to introduce some new perspectives into the world.

https://stephan-shahinian.medium.com/why-i-stopped-writing-4...

We mortals just haven't evolved to his Übermensch-level of thinking yet:

> I never viewed myself as a typical writer, who is writing for a large audience or the general public.

> Instead, I wanted to introduce some new, unconventional or contrarian ideas into the world that most people would not fully understand or be able to follow (at least not currently).

> Maybe in several decades once humanity evolves and thought progresses they will understand my ideas and their complexity.

Hilarious. This is what Strauss and Nietzsche and Bronze-Aged Pervert all claim as well. “Writing for the few who can hear” https://johnganz.substack.com/p/the-super-duper-men

What a joke.

Do you always disregard someone's opinions based on the fact that the person is a weirdo? :-)

the paragraph above without context doesn't strike me as weird or eccentric. seems more grandiose narcissism which makes someone very dismissable, rightfully

Some weird nations will make you president with such a big gift of god°!

Why not?

If you have limited time span on this Earth, sounds like a prudent default strategy to avoid wasting time with BS - at the cost of a few false negatives...

A weirdo? Not necessarily. There can be some gems hidden in a weirdo's thinking.

A flaming egomaniacal narcissist? Usually, yes, I disregard them. Maybe this is a flaw in me, but I don't have the patience to sift through that particular flavor of garbage to try to see if there are any gems in there.

It takes an atypical human not to.

And there is, of course, nothing higher to aspire to than to be typical.

Not sure how you got my aspirations from my statement of fact?

As observed by Keynes - the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.

Being proven right eventually can have great personal value. There is no guarantee that this will also translate into monetary value.

This Keynes quote gets passed around a lot.

However people identify places the market is irrational and use it to make profitable trades every single day. These irrationalities don't automatically translate into favorable trades, but they can be used to help inform which trades are good and which are bad.

True, the quote though is a warning to people trading rationally.

Different perspective: the market is always right and it's the individual that is wrong in the moment.

Successful day traders over the long term learn to be fairly humble.

That different perspective has its own failure mode: people who take "the market is always right" as it being right about the state of the world, or (worse) ethics, and try to divine information about the world and themselves by checking with "what market thinks".

The two perspectives are really just saying that the market does what it does, and by trading on it, you're playing with a game that's only loosely correlated with anything outside of it. It's a mistake to expect the market will closely follow what's going on in the real world, just as much as it's a mistake to expect to get great insights about the real world from what the market is "thinking".

In this context I mean price. Nothing else.

Ask an economist or investor why the market goes up or down and you'll get many reasons, some may be right, some may be wrong.

Ask a trader why the market goes up or down and you'll get supply exceeded demand, or vice versa.

You can have a fun debate about everything the first two care about, but at the end of the day, only the price action will feed your family or improve/worsen your standard of living.

I do think there's a lot of truth here, but statements like these expose the underlying immaturity.

> In my professional career I have interacted with many NASA scientists, U.S. intelligence agents, Stanford professors, Goldman Sachs managers, Google engineers, CalTech researchers. Among them there are many great minds, but also several mediocre minds, who have found ways to hide behind these big brands.

Agreed, maybe I'm missing something, but I'm not aware of his great skills or success. There's even some paranoia in there about how people are out to get the geniuses.

The weirdest thing is that it reminds me of others who create interesting and potentially useful thoughts, but seem ultimately bland like self-help entertainment.

It seems like something that an LLM would be quite good at generating!

LLM would be good at generating bland self-help entertainment but much weaker at generating original, creative, potentially useful thoughts.

Good article but I think a few examples would benefit illustrating some of these pitfalls in action.

I strongly agree re "Only accessing secondary sources of information" being a pitfall. Examples abound, here is one:

Headline: China’s Xi threatens ‘catastrophic consequences’ if China confronted

What Xi actually said: ""Our world today is far from being tranquil; rhetorics that stoke hatred and prejudice abound. Acts of containment, suppression or confrontation arising thereof do all harm, not the least good, to world peace and security. History has proved time and again that confrontation does not solve problems; it only invites catastrophic consequences. Protectionism and unilateralism can protect no one; they ultimately hurt the interests of others as well as one’s own."

From https://americanmilitarynews.com/2022/01/chinas-xi-threatens...

That's not a good exemple. That's an actual threat from Xi Jinping albeit a veiled one.

The media rightfully translated it as it turns out that a significant portion of the general population can barely understand what's literally written so expecting them to read between the lines is a bit much.

The US mortgage market in 2005-2008. It was considered a good investment to buy these bonds. But eventually everything chrashed.

All sources are secondary technically. The only primary sources about stuff like what happens in Ukraine are in Ukraine. I happen to know some people there but how many do?

Just like that, all information ever is always "incomplete, out of context, simplified, generalized and distorted in other ways". It's impossible to provide "complete" "objective" information, choosing to report on something but not the other thing is already bias and you can't report on everything all the time (I'm sure there are some fundamental limitations in information theory/incompleteness theorem).

Sometimes you can distinguish between primary and secondary sources easily, e.g. if you talk about a book this book is the primary source and everything else is not. Sometimes it's harder to get to primary sources, but it's generally not hard to get close enough. If you analyze who copied what from where you can find out fairly easily which sources are close to what is reported and which ones are remote and part of the "whisper game." In my experience, almost everyone who criticizes media tends to offer no reasonable substitute for e.g. news agencies who have reporters on the ground. Mostly they refer sources that are far removed from the action reported (e.g. blogs, commentators, etc.) and therefore unreliable. It's not bad advice to seek primary sources in this looser sense, such as sources with reporters in direct contact with eye witnesses.

On a side note, reporting biases are normal and not a substantive problem as long as people can recognize the reporting of alleged facts and distinguish these from opinions and comments. You can test this ability.

> if you talk about a book this book is the primary source and everything else is not

Just to add here - it's a primary source if you're talking about the book and it's discussing a new idea of some sort or events they themselves saw - if it's a history book and you're using the book to understand the events it's describing which the author is interpreting by their having read other sources (e.g. first hand accounts of the event), the books itself isn't a primary source.

Otherwise I agree with what you're saying.

That's a good point and important. My background is philosophy so I wasn't thinking about books describing historical events.

Yeah, my background is history so that explains the difference in how we're considering things.

And yet were required by society to subscribe to the prevalent narrative as a mark of our loyalty/respectability within whatever group we operate.

And that requirement is getting more and more enforced by more and more groups as the old social contracts are collapsing as a consequence of global changes nobody feels in control of and a lot of people aren't ready to deal with.

And as blind group loyalty is fundamentally irrational it's no longer necessary or even desirable for the accepted narrative to conform to any kind of standard for logical coherence and accordance with the observed reality, as accepting it more about showing your commitment to the group/nation/party/movement then it is about it being true, or useful for guiding behavior and decisions.

This is where we get today's problem there simply is no tolerance for any grayzones where we dont know what is right and true where big interest are at play so we cannot really have a rational open search for the truth in those area. And once you accept this for the big ticket items it's hard to then require rationality in the areas where it might still be allowed societal pressures.

A primary source in Ukraine is an eyewitness or direct account. A secondary source is someone reporting on, summarising, or drawing conclusions from one or multiple primary source accounts. No one said primary sources are complete, objective, unbiased, or any other thing than primary.

Which is why a good secondary source is so valuable. A good secondary source will combine multiple primary sources, add some objectivity, and come up with something that is closer to the truth of what happened than any one primary source.

Agreed. Good tertiary sources like analysts are also sometimes OK. But all primary sources all the time is not reality

Robert Murray Smith made the point a few days ago, in a rather more diplomatic manner, about the difference between expertise and expert. [0]

For those who read German, Bonhoeffer makes a similar point in "Von Der Dummheit". Dummheit literally means 'Stupidity', but "Societal Confusion" is definitely a better way of putting it. Bonhoeffer was imprisoned and executed by the Nazis. [1]

And of course there is the classic "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds" by Charles Mackay which covers the classic fads like the South Sea Bubble and Tulipmania [2]

[0] https://youtu.be/LMaH8LYPgWU

[1] https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Von_der_Dummheit

[2] https://amzn.to/3KFs6hW

This article would benefit from some actual examples, otherwise it is useless. What confusion is the author talking about exactly?

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