Discussions on the internet are failing more and more. We should work on fixing that
Hey,
discussions on the internet have always been a mess. Lots of people shouting and insulting each other. Most people seem to be completely immune to criticism or are simply unable to exchange arguments in a civil manner. Others have given up already and no longer write comments or join discussions. The internet is such a beautiful opportunity to work on our collaborative description of reality and instead we are failing more and more to understand each other. We need to work on improving that or else the internet will lead to violence and ultimately self-destructing societies.
In my opinion one of the root causes of this is that we have a natural tendency to identify with the ideas that we store in our brains. We love ideology and we defend our informational catalogue with everything we got, because acknowledging a good argument means that we were wrong and that we need to let go of an idea, a part of our personality.
A much better way would be to identify with our way of thinking instead of our knowledge. Critical thinking skills are becoming more and more crucial in this age of informational floods. And these "tools" with which we can analyse the value of new information should be the centerpiece of our identity.
These thoughts have lead me to create my first YouTube video in the hopes of at least playing a small part to solve these issues and to create a healthier environment where ideas can be exchanged and we can all learn from each other. Feedback is more than welcome.
discussions on the internet have always been a mess. Lots of people shouting and insulting each other. Most people seem to be completely immune to criticism or are simply unable to exchange arguments in a civil manner. Others have given up already and no longer write comments or join discussions. The internet is such a beautiful opportunity to work on our collaborative description of reality and instead we are failing more and more to understand each other. We need to work on improving that or else the internet will lead to violence and ultimately self-destructing societies.
In my opinion one of the root causes of this is that we have a natural tendency to identify with the ideas that we store in our brains. We love ideology and we defend our informational catalogue with everything we got, because acknowledging a good argument means that we were wrong and that we need to let go of an idea, a part of our personality.
A much better way would be to identify with our way of thinking instead of our knowledge. Critical thinking skills are becoming more and more crucial in this age of informational floods. And these "tools" with which we can analyse the value of new information should be the centerpiece of our identity.
These thoughts have lead me to create my first YouTube video in the hopes of at least playing a small part to solve these issues and to create a healthier environment where ideas can be exchanged and we can all learn from each other. Feedback is more than welcome.
Comments (71)
I thought it was lovely.
Your focus on tools sounds somewhat like [hide="the Quantitative Way "]Overcoming Bias, Less Wrong, Slate Star Codex, putanumonit, Effective Altruism[/hide]. I find a lot to like there, but no one not already committed to science and rationality does.
In my home state of Georgia, in the southern United States, we will soon be sending to Congress a woman who supports QAnon. The gulf between our tribes is as a great as that between a Star Trek future and a Mad Max one.
Thanks! Yeah we are rapidly unlearning how to talk to each other and if I can somehow help to make online conversations healthier, I'll do it. There are many more aspects to this though, that I want to create videos on. Identifying with your tools of thinking is just one (albeit important) part of the solution imo.
This fella should be applauded for using his time to foster civil discourse. This is a good thread.
I'm not sure I agree here. The "informational catalogue" is intricately tied up with "the way we think". I think it's two sides of the same coin, really. You rightly call these things "tools", but the more you identify with "tools" the more they become thought habits. Being right still becomes personal; you just go from being right about things to being right about how to go about things.
What I'm saying can be summed up like this:
Identify with your knowledge ==> You're wrong.
Identify with your tools ==> You're stupid.
It's not an improvement. We need to relativise our tools and learn to figure out what tools other people use and see if there are tools we both can use. That's why science was successful: it's a tool many people can use. But that usefulness decreases the more you identify with the tools: it becomes a sort of scientism: if science can't explain it, it should be disregarded.
If people are suspicious of "critical thinking" there might be a reason. Any tool you use needs to be open to inspection. Less identification, not more.
Maybe I misunderstand you?
Thanks for the honest criticism. I'm not sure if you watched the video, because I'm pretty sure we are on the same page here. I emphasized that it's important to identify with your tools rather than with your acquired knowledge, which explicitely includes actively working on improving those tools. Even though everyone's tools of thinking should in the end be way more stable than the acquired knowledge.
E.g: I am happy to accept good scientific arguments that the Moon is made of cheese, however it takes a lot to make me question my fundamental scientific thinking. Even though there are definitely some parts of my applied scientific thinking that need to be readjusted.
And as I think it's necessary for human beings to form an identity, which means finding the constants in your mind, I think the idea of being defined by your way of thinking and the process of improving it, is a good candidate to focus on. It allows us to feel pride and a sense of accomplishment whenever we improved our perspective.
This is the right thought. It's a truism that you have to find common ground to convince someone, a shared starting point, something. It's no use proving to your own satisfaction that 9/11 was not an inside job, if your goal is to convince someone else.
There was a sort of experiment on BBC3 many years ago called Conspiracy Road Trip, which famously convinced Charlie Veitch, a minor youtube celebrity and prominent 9/11 truther, to change his mind. (That episode.) At great time and expense, they convinced I think only 2 1/2 out of 5 participants. But Charlie was a big win, because pushing conspiracy theories was essentially his day job.
I think of there being a certain class of beliefs -- let's call it "ideology" -- which can have outsize impacts (social, cultural, political, economic) when people act on them, even just by voting, but which have very shallow epistemic roots. If you believe the moon landing was a hoax, how much does that really change how you go about your daily life?
So I also like to think that we all already use tools, share tools, that are up to the task -- everyday language and ordinary informal reasoning. The QAnon folks who almost certainly live near me all do the same sorts of things I do every day, take out the trash, go to work, buy groceries, check the weather. The problem is getting to talk to them about The Crazy in an ordinary way. Conspiracy Road Trip came close.
For instance, if you believe the moon landing was a hoax, would you still believe it if you spent an afternoon at the home of some old folks who worked on the project? Really sat and talked with them a while, asked questions, listened to their stories. Do that with a bunch of people who participated. There would have to been like a 100,000 people keeping this secret for 50 years. If you sat and talked and ate a chicken dinner with them, I doubt you could come away believing they were reciting the script they were given by the Deep State or whatever.
So my question for @Hirnstoff is how you can you do something like that on youtube? Or on reddit? So much of what we use to judge trustworthiness will be missing. But we need something that approximates it. I'm also partial to the view that science is just systematic common sense, so rather than "this is how Science does it" I'd lean on a folksier "that makes sense doesn't it?" approach. The main thing would be to approach ideological beliefs the same way people approach decisions about whether to take an umbrella, or whether their team has a shot at the playoffs this year, or which brand of peanut butter to buy. All these folks reason just like us outside the ideological zone, so start there.
It sounds really hard.
As I'm already planning a video on how I think we can improve discussions directly, I just want to mention a few short thoughts:
We have to bridge the gap that anonymity creates on the internet. We can do that by actively making sure that we state our intentions upfront. "I'm curious why you think that way" "Show me the evidence that convinced you and I'll be open to accepting it as well, if it's convincing"
If no evidence is provided, we can emphasize that the opponent shouldn't build their beliefs on such a weak or even non-existent foundation. If evidence is provided, the discussion can lead to a rational debate about the validity of the provided evidence. If the evidence is even convincing, we have learnt something. Insulting each other or their beliefs and ideas won't change a thing. Opening up, trying to trace the way they came to their conclusion, can help in talking objectively about the validity of the claim or even help us to improve our own perspective. By starting a discussion this way, we show others that we respect them as a person that is also trying to figure out what's true and what's not and thus can connect on this basic level.
Absolutely. Carl Sagan talks about this in Demon-Haunted World -- there are people out there who are curious and inquisitive and the scientific community has failed them by not getting out into the world enough, with the result that his cab driver doesn't know the difference between astronomy and astrology.
Quoting Hirnstoff
But this looks like a non-starter in half a dozen ways. How quickly do you think, in such a conversation, you'll find yourself wanting to say, "But that's not evidence"?
It is entirely possible that the evident success of science, broadly if quietly acknowledged in modern society, is part of the problem. Maybe you're not the only one to whom it has occurred to model their approach to knowledge acquisition on science. Consider that what distinguishes science from ordinary informal reasoning is the positing of invisible entities and hidden forces; what we see in the world is the effect of these invisible armies at work. That suggests two solutions: yours, get people to do their science better; mine, get them to stop doing science at all. In favor of my approach, they're already demonstrably competent at doing jobs and planning birthday parties and judging produce, but real science is actually pretty hard.
Well in that case the focus of the conversation should be what constitutes good evidence and why, which is also a very important foundation to build.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I'm not sure I follow what you're saying here. "Ordinary informal reasoning" also relies on scientific thinking, just without the awareness. To use your past example "Should I take the umbrella or not?". People decide this by making a prognosis about the weather, by watching the weather report or by simply looking up at the sky. We are simply recognizing a pattern and are using our learned knowledge to deduce that it might be raining soon. While we aren't conducting formal scientific studies, we still rely on the same mechanisms to forecast the future.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Those two solutions are the same with a different label. It seems to me that your solution simply doesn't call it science and instead calls it common sense or "ordinary informal reasoning". I think we are calling something common sense when the claim isn't extraordinary and therefore doesn't require extraordinary evidence. "The sky is darkgray and it's autumn, so it'll probably rain soon". However we must rely on our intuitive scientific thinking to come to this conclusion.
Broadly, I'm relying on Sellars's Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man, though without much subtlety.
Quoting Hirnstoff
That's definitely not what I'm saying. It's common sense that when you drop something it falls to the ground; it's science that when the electromagnetic fields counteracting the gravitational field associated with a massive body are rendered less effective, an object will move toward that mass's center of gravity. (Even that is really "sciency" rather than science.)
I think QAnon is a bullshit story nobody should believe and that does jack-squat to help them get through their day. You think it's a faulty scientific theory. I think I could prove to you, using whatever philosophy of science you like, that it ain't science. It is, as the saying goes, "not even wrong". We might agree that it is "attempted science", but I believe the attempt should not be made.
If you ask people why they were trying to do science -- for instance, QAnon interpretation -- what will the answer be? I don't know, but it has to do with tribe. We can say they've engaged in motivated reasoning and fallen prey to all sorts of cognitive biases, and that guarding against that can be taught. But it's a game of whack-a-mole. They'll come up with some different bullshit -- or, honestly, someone will come up with it for them. You hope to make people reason better, to inoculate them against the next round, and I can't argue against that. I just want to leverage the sort of reasoning they already do just fine, rather than expect them all to be Dick Feynman.
What's interesting about this belief is that those who arrive at it do so through an online procedure that makes them feel like they have accomplished serious research, that their conclusion is the result of some kind of scientific process. This is what they believe about what they did to arrive at the belief, and it locks them in the belief because they have to admit to themselves that they were duped and incompetent in order to refute the belief. This is an interesting scheme to deploy on people as a form of interactive propaganda.
It's a narrative technique.
There's an old documentary about cinematography called Visions of Light. In it, the cinematographer on Rosemary's Baby tells a story about Polanski telling him to set up a shot on Helen Hayes (I think) answering the phone in the next room. So he does, Polanski checks it and says, no no no, and moves the camera over a couple feet. When the cameraman checks it, he sees that she'll now be cut in half by the doorframe rather than centered in it. Half of her is blocked now, wtf?
But when he went to a screening and that scene came up, he said the whole audience leaned to one side a little to try to see around the doorframe -- and he realized that Polanski is a genius and he is not.
It is most definitely attempted science. Those people also just want to get to the truth and I would approach them arguing to question the way they've got there. How do you know that the attempt should not be made? How do you determine that QAnon conspiracies are non-sense? Of course by trying to figure out what the evidence is. Another attempt at science ... that's all we do when we want to get to the bottom of things. Some more clumsily than others
So how's the project going so far?
I watched your video and liked it; I sympathize with your goals. You are now mostly telling me that I'm not doing what I think I'm doing and a lot of other people aren't either; we're all doing what you think we're doing but doing it badly.
So how's the project of fixing discourse on the internet going?
Remember, I'm sympathetic, and I'm suggesting you take a step back and consider whether this is the argument you want to be having, and whether this is how you want to conduct conversations.
I gave my actual opinions; I wasn't trying to trap you. But if you're having trouble dealing with someone like me, who's pretty well-versed in what you're talking about, and sympathetic to your program, that ought to tell you something.
I don't know why this conversation took a sudden turn here. I don't have a problem with you at all. On the contrary I enjoy your input very much. Is it because I said "some more clumsily than others"? Because that wasn't at all meant as an insult at you, but rather at QAnon folks. If so, I apologize to have caused this misunderstanding. I should have phrased that clearer.
Back to the topic: I think we're mostly talking semantics here. In my view the only way to get to a good description of reality, is to observe reality repeatedly and to extract useful patterns. A child for example observes its parents' speech and learns how to talk by extracting patterns of sound and attaching meaning to them. One could even say that it conducts experiments by altering some words until it gets the desired reaction. I'd call even that intuitive learning process a form of "science". The point I'm trying to make is, that every person has to follow a procedure of repeated observation and even experiments in order to get to a good description of reality. In my mind there is therefore no difference between science and "Ordinary informal reasoning" other than the degree of sophistication. And thus if I wanted to rely on people using "Ordinary informal reasoning" as the method to get to the truth, I'd inevitably try to sharpen this reasoning and to nudge it more towards "scientific thinking". How would a discussion with a QAnon theorist even look like, if I would avoid asking for evidence (which to me is inherently scientific)?
Right here, sign that this person is serious about 1) not being a hypocrite and 2) actually achieving civil discourse.
You see, the examples you just gave would take too much time and effort to think them through..
Imagine this: You are in a hurry and just as you are walking outside the door, you notice that the sky is cloudy. You already know that a cloudy sky does not necessarily mean that is going to rain, but the probability is much higher than when there are no clouds in the sky. Similarily, you know that an umbrella is always a burden to carry, unless when it is raining, then it becomes a valuable possesion. Now that these, and more, statements have rushed all around your mind, you must make a decision: Do you take the umbrella or not?
Say, in order to correctly decide wether you should or shouldn´t take an umbrella would require for you to check the weather forecast, check the probability of rain and establish a percentage of risk that you would be willing to assume. Even in a hurry, you may pull out your phone to quickly glimpse at the weather app and some even offer probabilities of rain, but you know, at the back of your head, that the weather cast is often wrong, so you are back in square one.
I could go on and on, but I think that I have made my point. An untrained mind, a mind without support tools, like critical thinking, will always base its decisions on preferences or on irrelevant factors, so it may very well bet on its favorite team even if its not looking too good, be it by pride or by a sense of loyalty, or buy the same jar of peanut butter they have always bought because it is a tradition
Oh gosh no I don't feel insulted or anything. There's no personal animosity between us.
But if I now told you, as I believe, that classical empiricism died a long time ago, how would that affect the project? The spirit of empiricism lives on, but what you describe is not how children learn and is not how science is done.
Do you need that theory to do want you want to do?
Maybe in some idealistic form, but you are a material being and you live in a material world. I don't think your object much applies to this original posters position. We refute and prove things most powerfully with evidence, any idealism you embrace that takes you away from this premise, is just that, idealism.
Not the place for that discussion.
I wish you the best of luck on your endeavour! I personally started something similar, but I have since abandoned it. Unfortunately, individuals are too fixated on their way of thinking and I decided that to spend so much time and effort on vainly trying to convince my fellows on the importance of tools such as critical thinking would be very foolish of me.
I do not wish to undermine your work nor your plans, but rather take my comment as a warning of what there is to come. I hope we get to see more of your content!
Okay, yes, I like these examples. So how would you actually try to talk a friend out of betting on the home team, when you expect them to lose? Keep in mind that sports fandom includes people who get pretty sophisticated in how they use statistics, and people that think stats are, let's say, "overrated"?
Or how would you convince a friend to try a different peanut butter?
People do have these conversations without resorting to talk of evidence and Bayesian inference and the rest.
By first teaching them the importance and relevance of intellectual standards.
People can get better at reasoning, sure, but it should be clear I think ordinary people already have intellectual standards that work just fine in their daily lives, and those standards are robust enough to handle novel situations, of some kinds at least, pretty well. We all have trouble understanding what goes on at Planck scale, but how hard is it to convince someone that if our best player is on the DL we're probably going to lose?
Asking the why of something is always a good way to begin a conversation with the intend of changing someones mind. You must first understand where are they coming from. For all I know, they will always buy the same jar of peanut butter because thats the peanut butter that their now deceased mom used to make their sandwiches or they simply find the taste fascinating.
Once that you understand why do they do this or that, which is rarely simple, you may then make suggestions. By making suggestions I do not mean that you bluntly show stats, data or evidence and tell them they are wrong, but rather you make suggestions into the air, progressively showing new information and different point of views.
For example, lets say your friend always bets on the Cowboys, irrelevant or how they have performed. In the case that, say Patriots, are doing better and one could potentially profit off them with a higher degree of probability, any reasonsable being should drop the Cowboys and back the Packers. However, irrational behaviours such as undying loylaty or more complicated situations will prevent this decision from even being considered. This is precisely the point when you ask why.
Why do you bet on the Cowboys? Why do you even bet to begin with? Why this why that. Guide them into questioning themselves on their beliefs. Show them the path with easy questions.
Once your friend is questioning wether he should bet to begin with, you may show him that the Patriots are doing better, starting with simple suggestions and moving on into presenting more structural data. This process may result on your friend betting for another team, thinking and trying something different. You did not force him into doing anything, you just asked him, indirectly, to step out of his ways and try something new
Quoting Hirnstoff
I warn against this kind of idealising of the past, what makes you believe things were better before? With the exception of trolling, which I suspect was taking place in the youtube conversation you showed.
We should also look at how the information is being presented, people are less likely to admit that they're wrong when they're being called an idiot. They are also less likely to admit they're wrong to people they dislike or strongly disagree with on other topics. These things detract from the pleasure of being proven wrong and turn it into a humiliating experience.
There's also a lot of misinformation, just because someone sounds confident and cites sources, you can't assume they're correct yet actually fact-checking them can be laboriously difficult. It is often simply easier to just disregard them.
I think being proven wrong requires a lot, you need to be open-minded and actively listen, you need to fact-check and you need to be talking to someone who is actually trying to help you rather than insult you. The discussion needs to be framed in a particular way (not an ideological debate for example). And we do need to see people being happy to part with incorrect information without responding with bias or fallacy. I could list more reasons, many more. Overall, the list of pre-requisites for someone being in a position where they're likely to admit they're wrong when they are wrong is long and so it's not surprising that it rarely happens.
This is a pretty strange conversation to have with a friend.
Your friend mentions he wants to get home because he has money on tonight's game.
You point out that the team's star player is on the DL.
He understands the point of that. Either he forgot and he'll cop to being an idiot for betting, or he'll counter with another point that both of you understand perfectly.
You are implicitly relying on a shared understanding of the game, otherwise why have this conversation? There may be some "why" in here, but it's bounded.
Thank you. I'll try my best to do my part, but I don't expect to change the world with my little attempt at making YouTube videos. There are many other topics I also want to make videos on. This is just the first stop, hopefully.
Quoting Judaka
I agree. Critical thinking skills have been a rarity long before the internet changed our world. I just think that the internet supercharges the problems that arise as a result.
Quoting Judaka
Absolutely. Those are things I want to talk about in future videos.
Quoting Judaka
But we still have the power to change our own thinking and to try to achieve civil discourse. Changing our conduct online can have wonderful exponential effects. I remember a few comments over the years, where a good debate actually took place. Apologies were expressed after some wrongdoing and good arguments acknowledged and all of a sudden other people chimed in expressing how wonderful this particular comment thread is. I think many people are seeing the dire state of online discourse today and the real world consequences this can have and are willing to do their part. We don't have to change every single person, just enough that these fruitful debates are becoming a more common occurrence and can act as a good example for others.
Edit: it was unavailable when I first looked, now seems OK.
Thanks! Hm that's weird. It should be available on YouTube. If you watched it here you actually watched an embedded YouTube video. Searching "Hirnstoff" on YouTube should work as well.
I take your point that most people are not likely to be able to do adequate science; the sciences (like the arts) are specialist activities that take years to master, but I also think that science is basically just common sense writ large.
In a discussion what really counts as evidence boils down to what can be empirically confirmed and/or is in accordance with common experience, where the latter does not require detailed studies, but just good observation, open-mindedness and intellectual honesty. That's why politics, economics and religion are mostly not worth arguing over, and I think this applies to some areas of philosophy as well.
I know what you're getting at, and I said something similar earlier -- that science is common sense made systematic -- but it's really not, and that's clear for reasons in what you quoted: science produces results that have an air of paradox about them, that tables are not solid, that the air is billions of invisible things, that the earth goes around the sun. It all has to do not with how science makes inferences so much as the theoretical frameworks it produces within which those inferences are made. (See the classic Feynman interview.) And those frameworks posit objects that are not the medium-sized dry goods of our everyday worldview.
I allowed myself the "made systematic" comment because I believe ordinary reasoning is the start and it sustains the scientific enterprise, but one of the first things that happens is that the concept of evidence becomes terribly subtle, and again that's because of the theoretical frameworks.
Where it's not subtle but just complicated is in law, which very nearly is just common sense writ large, or ought to be. (Philosophers don't think nearly enough about law.)
fixed some typos
Right, but I would say that the idea that things are not necessarily what they seem is itself an example of common sense. By saying that science is common sense writ large, what I was referring to was the methodology, not the content; the methodology of common sense investigation being initial observation, prediction and experiment (or further observation to see if the predicted results do obtain).
I think scientific theory however arcane and counter-intuitive it might seem to us, is based on this principle; that a successful theory should fit and explain the observed facts and that its predicted outcomes should be observed.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I'm intrigued by this; are you referring to natural law?
But the difference is that in ordinary reasoning there being entirely new kinds of entities, and those invisible to boot, or entities not being what we thought at all but capable of entirely different behavior -- that's not on the table.
When we talk about evidence in every day life or in a court of law, we're asking what have the sorts of things we're familiar with been up to? And what they've been up to is selected from the sorts of things we know they generally do get up to.
Quoting Janus
And my objection here is that it's not that simple: the content includes the theoretical framework, and what's more since Galileo that framework will be mathematical.
Quoting Janus
Well @Isaac will tell you a lot of that predicting is done "on your behalf", so to speak, by systems in your brain -- it's System 1, not even within your awareness. But besides that -- while I like this story about how science works, it's a bit of a fairy-tale.
Quoting Janus
Goodness no, just ordinary criminal and civil law, common law, that sort of thing. This is also an institution where people gather evidence, reach conclusions, hopefully find the truth, etc.
I don't want to drag this out, as much fun as it is.
My "challenge", if that's the word, to @Hirnstoff was this: how much does the program of improving discussion on the internet depend upon some particular epistemology or some particular view of science? Or depend on accepting those views?
I happen to hold different views. So what? We're having an enjoyable conversation. Why does everyone want to convert me? Am I the only one that finds that a little odd given the topic of our discussion? @Dawnstorm tried to point out that just saying "tools" instead of "beliefs" wasn't going to get you there. We have since then been arguing over my divergent views of the tools. Why are we doing that?
Here's the classic Feynman interview I referred to above.
I've seen this interview taken as evidence (!) that science is bollocks -- here's a Nobel prize winner and he can't answer a simple question, blah blah blah.
That is only the case, because our natural perception is limited. Our hands can't distinguish individual atoms, therefore we only perceive the sum counter force. The mechanism by which we come to the conclusion that a table is solid, is still based on evidence. We just can't perceive the whole picture without the help of technology like electron microscopes.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Ultimately, if we can't agree upon the basic fact that an objective truth is reachable by means of observation, then yes, we can't collaberate. However I don't think that this philosophical debate is a good representation of a conversation with an average Joe that thinks the earth is flat. Most people, at least in my mind, accept science as a good way to reach an objective truth about things.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I'm trying to "convert" you, because this is a debate and we disagree about a fundamental aspect of our existence. But I thought that this disagreement was solvable, because I can still easily integrate each example you proposed into my existing philosophical framework. If you want to argue that my attempt to improve online discourse, will inevitably lead to fundamental disagreements like this, I disagree, because I don't think that this is how most people think about the world and their pursuit of truth.
And just to clarify: My goal is not to make everyone a sophisticated critical thinker. I think some people can be helped more or less towards an improved and more sophisticated pursuit of truth. However most will only take away a simple "be nice!" or "don't insult", and that's fine. There has to be a pragmatic cut-off somewhere, which leaves the philosopher in me unsatisfied, but ultimately allows me to move on and focus on the goal I set myself.
In the sense you mean, it might be most, but it's not all, certainly not where I live: just glance at Wikipedia's summary of views on evolution.
There is much smaller group -- smaller, that is, than those who deny science for religious or conspiratorial reasons -- that includes, I should think, most working scientists and philosophers, a group that would also disagree, because reaching "objective truth" is not what science does. There is, in science, no Great Book of Truth; there is the Great Book of the Not Yet Disproven with a multivolume appendix, the Great Book of the Hard-to-say.
This is no minor quibble. It leads directly to televised hearings where climate-science-denying Senators buttonhole scientists with questions like, "But you can't prove that we're seeing anything more than natural variation, or that burning fossil fuels is changing the climate, can you?" to which the response is always, "No, I can't prove that, Senator, because that's not how science works, you fucking moron." (That last part sotto voce.)
Quoting Hirnstoff
And I'm with you there. I'm not saying that you're going to end up debating the nature of science all the time instead of whatever else you want to do. But I am saying that because your views on the nature of science are detachable from the project, they ought to be detached. I say that in part because I disagree with those views; but also because I think there are approaches more likely to be more successful; and also because if you insist on fitting what everyone says into your framework,
Quoting Hirnstoff
you're undercutting your own goals, you're failing to engage with people by finding common ground, you're treating your own view as the default, as the needed common ground, and it's not. Most of the objection to your approach is going to be garden variety religious or conspiratorial (big pharma created the coronavirus). I make an interesting test case because I object to almost everything you say despite being an outright science cheerleader.
Yet here we are. I hope you're still enjoying the discussion and I hope you find something worth thinking about in the views I've expressed. We do have common ground: it's just hard to see, and it's definitely not what you think it is, since in this case what you think it is is what we're debating.
Yes I completely agree. Objective truth is an ever elusive goal noone can reach. I just didn't want to expand the conversation in that direction at first. I think there is a "virtual" objective truth out there that we can come closer and closer to reaching, but never fully reach. However this common goal is vitally important for every scientist and philosopher, otherwise we simply have nothing to argue about.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I don't think they are detachable, but I think that's pretty much clear by now.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Well yes. Everyone has a default they have to defend and this is mine.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Oh absolutely. This is a very interesting and enjoyable conversation and you definitely got my brain working on all cylinders, otherwise I wouldn't have invested the time to respond.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Maybe one last attempt to find out if I can understand your position. If you don't think this will lead to anything valuable, that's completely fine, but here we go:
As I've stated before, I think that every pursuit of truth is ultimately scientific, just more or less sophisticated. You on the other hand described the method of using "ordinary informal reasoning" as an alternative, right? I think this calls back to what you said at the very beginning : 'rather than "this is how Science does it" I'd lean on a folksier "that makes sense doesn't it?" approach'. If I now imagine trying to convince my friend that the earth isn't flat, I'd assume that he isn't much of a scientist, so a "folksier" approach seems to be more promising. While I would start by arguing for the scientific method and how this seems to be the best way to get us to the truth about things and then follow it up by scientific evidence that the earth is actually an oblate spheroid, you would approach this conversation how exactly? How would you try to convince my friend? How would your approach differ from mine?
Changing this would require discipline, though, and discipline is something which we lack, and is also discouraged.
Excellent question!
First there are gorgeous videos. That's probably where I would start with my kids, or anyone's kids, if they just didn't yet know what the earth is like. We can now just look and see; we don't have to guess or theorize or calculate anything.
It's funny -- my first thought was to come up with a really practical, hands-on sort of game, where you have cut-outs of the continents and look up how long it takes to ship something from A to B, or how long it takes to fly from A to B, and have him figure out for himself that there's no way to arrange the continents on a flat surface and have the stuff that's near near and the stuff that's far far. I spent a long time writing about this, before it occurred to me to just look for video. That's really odd!
So how much resistance is he putting up? Off to google "argument that the earth is flat".
Oh! I missed my chance to say that this is another paradoxical result of science. The earth after all is big enough that locally it is at least awfully flat-ish. In our day-to-day lives we do behave as if the earth is flat and the sun goes around it, unless we are traveling great distances. You don't take the curvature of the earth into consideration when laying out a badminton court.
And I still think getting to look at video from above the Earth -- thank you, science! -- meets all the requirements of common sense. I love that an Apollo astronaut commented to Mission Control, "Just confirming that the Earth is round." I don't think I knew that.
People who today believe the earth is flat are people who've never been told otherwise or serious conspiracy loonies. Are the latter the target audience for your work? It's a pretty special case.
My approach would be pretty much the same and I'd say that such a video would just be a form of scientific evidence. When I'm saying "scientific", I'm not talking about going deep into theory or mathematics. A simple observation or in your case a recording is something I'd also use to convince my friend.
It's clear to me now, that we aren't disagreeing about the approach at all. I just include your approach within the scope of science.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
To be honest, I'm not sure what I want to do yet. I'll just go step by step for now and make videos on topics I care about. And for the time being that's somehow helping to foster conversations on the internet like the one we're having.
Cool. I am definitely going to distinguish between, I guess, careful observation, or technology-assisted observation and the heavy-duty theoretical framework stuff. Science does both, but only science does the latter.
I'm so glad you posted again, because it occurred to me there's a problem in my second post: there's the small sort of paradox, like the earth seeming flat and turning out to be round, and much bigger paradoxes like there being invisible forces that are "responsible" for what goes on around us. The first type don't result from positing new sorts of entities, don't require a fundamentally different framework, but the others do. (Again, the Feynman interview is crystal clear about this.)
I'm just reserving the word "science" for a more theoretical approach than you are. All science ends up there, but a lot of the work is just careful observation and careful inference.
I'm not sure how to deal with a committed flat-earth nut beyond arranging for him to talk to astronauts who've seen it.
(And I have a real soft spot for the video of Buzz Aldrin slugging that moon-landing-hoaxer.)
I disagree; I think invisible entities have always been prominent features of human thought; probably because the phenomenon of movement, which is everywhere in nature, cannot be explained in terms of anything visible.
This is probably why some form of animism seems to be an almost universal feature of so-called "primitive" worldviews. I would venture to say that for per-scientific thinkers some form of animism or other just is common sense.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
This may be true of physics; and perhaps even chemistry. But they do not constitute the whole of science, and they are certainly not independent of observation.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Assuming for the sake of argument that Issac is correct; how would he have found that out if not by observation, etc.? I'm curious about why you say the view is a "fairytale". How do you imagine science is done, and if you have an example of some different procedure than observation, hypothesis, prediction and further observation it would help if you could detail it. I'm quite willing to be convinced to another view if it is compelling.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I'm not wanting to "convert" you, just find out just how and why our views differ, which is far from clear at the moment.
I like just-so-stories. I could tell a different one, but what would be the point of that? Inherited religions are just that -- inherited. Aside from those, in the modern world, the positing of hidden forces and previously unknown types of entities is the province of science. I quite literally cannot imagine what you would have in mind as an exception.
Quoting Janus
Not following you here.
Quoting Janus
Everyone makes observations. Everyone can make careful observations. Why does everyone think that means you're doing science?
Quoting Janus
Observation can be difficult, and expensive, may require technology you don't have yet; coming up with a hypothesis that will actually tell you something, and designing an experiment that does actually test exactly that hypothesis, can be tricky; results still tend to be messy enough to require a lot of analysis before you can even be sure whether the outcome you got was what you predicted or not; but even supposing you go through all that -- where's the theory?
The model you describe is, I think, more or less the one we all learned in school, and it's a nice starting point, captures some of the core values of a scientific process -- but it leaves out theory. Theory is the whole point. It's the intended result of all this work and it's the framework within which you do the work.
Okay here's a tiny example, because you want an example, and it's not even physics. I remember reading this a few years ago during the reproducibility crisis, which as you probably know hit social psychology particularly hard.
Quoting Michael Inzlicht
The whole piece is worth a look. It's heart-breaking. And it's all about the theory, the posits of that theory, the explanatory framework, and the explanations that framework spits out. No one doing science is ever just doing observation-hypothesis-prediction-observation.
The psychiatrist Meehl called it [hide=*](edit: some of the issues in the replication crisis regarding whether the observed effect in a study is actually attributable to the manipulated construct)[/hide] in 1967 (for studies on humans).
(Edit: for why Meehl thinks this doesn't work on physical theories, their point null hypotheses are actually predictions from theory; you'd do a hypothesis test to see if there was significant deviation from F=ma in the lab in physics, you'd do a hypothesis test to see if there was significant deviation from "no effect" regardless of mechanism in human sciences - constructs in physical sciences don't have the same kind of measurement issues as the ones in human sciences either, eg; mass is mass, hesitation is multifaceted)
My son excitedly brought me this video by Sabine Hossenfelder:
(Here's a nice review with quotes.)
Recently, there's also David Lindley's The Dream Universe: How Fundamental Physics Lost Its Way. (Curiously I read somewhere that Hossenfelder suggests physicists start collaborating with philosophers, and evidently Lindley frames his critique in terms of a resurgent Platonism. Maybe one day philosophers will start getting jobs again!)
I don't follow this stuff at all, but I know enough to know that since the beginning string theory has faced criticism that it's not even physics.
To my point in this exchange, it's clear that theory is a substantial piece of any story about how science is done.
The positing of hidden forces is to explain observed phenomena, no? It seems that humans have always imagined hidden forces to explain observed phenomena. The difference I see with modern scientific positing is that it consists in logically and/or mathematically constructed hypotheses, and the predictions which follow from these models are deliberately tested. If predicted results are consistently observed then hypotheses becomes established theories.
So modern science is based more on rigorous logic and math than ancient worldviews were, but that should not be surprising, considering that logic and math have been developed and refined over millennia.
I don't see modern science, logic and math, as having lost, or outgrown, their roots in commonsense, in observation, prediction and testing, though. I'm wondering whether you do, and if so why, and how you understand that purported difference.
Science is inherited too, insofar as people are trained to master the accepted body of theory, every aspect of which is not, obviously, personally tested by each scientist.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
OK, that was hastily, and thus poorly, expressed. What I meant was that, as far as my understanding goes, physics and perhaps to a lesser extent chemistry, is more mathematically grounded than geology, biology, evolutionary theory, genetics and even the most arcane science is not independent of observation, prediction and experiment. I'm keen to be shown a more accurate and comprehensive view than that, if you have one you would care to explain. So far you just seem to be throwing out hints.
I agree with you that modern science is more theory-based; or at least more rigorously theory based, but I see that as a result of a couple hundred years of observation, prediction and testing, as well as some attendant mathematical modeling, which has lead to established theories.
So, I am agreeing with you about mathematical modeling being important in modern science (more in some sciences than others), but I see that modeling as an elaboration of common sense, the math being accepted because it is observed to work, and this, for me, is "common sense writ large".
I admit I could have all this wrong; I'm not so strong on maths, but I'm keen to learn new insights.
Yeah? Look at the quote you're responding to. If you step outside your house on a nice day and suddenly a tree limb cracks and crashes to the ground, you think it would be perfectly normal, just common sense, to spin out some tale about invisible gremlins collecting wood for their home, or about a tree-pruning force that must have swept through your yard and snapped that limb, or ...
That would be perfectly ordinary. That's what you're claiming.
Of course there is a connection between how we ordinarily go about our business and how we do science. But there is also clearly a difference between how we generally talk about what sorts of things there are and how they behave, on the one hand, and what scientific theories say. To deny that difference is to misrepresent both.
Watch the Feynman interview.
If you're really gung-ho, read Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man.
No, that's not what I'm claiming at all. The common sense invisible entities posited to explain phenomena in any culture must be commonly accepted entities within the culture; some arbitrary bit of individual reasoning, or more aptly with regard to your silly examples, story-telling, doesn't qualify as common sense, obviously.
Of course what is commonly accepted may change more or less gradually. In any case I'm still not at all clear as to what claims, claims that you seem to think contrary to what I've been saying, you actually want to argue.
My main point, to reiterate, has been that the very act of positing invisible entities, of whatever kind, is a feature of all cultures, and is thus itself commonsensical.
Okay, it's clear now we've misunderstood each other in a couple ways, mostly my fault. Apologies.
I never intended "common sense" to be something like "what most people believe", and certainly not "what most people have ever believed throughout all of human history".
In fact, in the essay I've been relying on, Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man, Sellars actually stipulates that there are two images based on two different approaches to understanding man's place in the world: the correlational (the manifest image, my "ordinary everyday reasoning") and the stipulational (the scientific image). It's not an empirical distinction. I kinda pretended it was for purposes of this discussion because (a) I didn't want to try to rehearse Sellars's entire argument, and (b) in the modern world I thought the distinction between how people get along in daily life -- driving, working, buying groceries -- and creating complex theoretical frameworks that posit new types of entities to explain what goes on in the world -- I thought that distinction would be clear enough.
I should have recognized there was a problem when you mentioned animism. When I said there was a different just-so story I could tell, but then didn't, it was Sellars's story about something a bit like animism: this is the original form of the manifest image. This original manifest image treats everything in the world as a person. He's careful to say this is not a matter of postulating a spirit that lives in the mountain, but that being a mountain is one of the ways of being a person, and as a person you can do things like get angry and make grumbly noises and throw shit. This is still a worldview that only includes sensible objects, it's just that they're all persons.
He does not discuss religion at all except to include it in the manifest image, and here again I took a shortcut, because the manifest image is not exactly ordinary reasoning about medium-sized dry goods, but an elaboration and refinement of that, and an attempt to hold it together in the face of science.
Why doesn't he talk about religion? We are accustomed these days to talk sometimes of science and religion as competing theoretical frameworks, or in some cases as exactly the same framework with exactly one more theoretical posit, a supreme being. Or we tell stories about man's attempt to understand the world going from superstition to religion to science: all are explanatory frameworks, all have theoretical posits, but when we get to science we have a procedure for testing and a criterion of falsifiability. On this view, the new-atheist approach of treating religion as a competitor in the same market, at least insofar as it offers supernatural rather than natural explanations of phenomena, is perfectly reasonable.
And indeed it's a little messy mapping this onto Sellars's distinction:
Quoting PSIM
So religion, if not animism, goes on the postulational side, right? We say things like, the Greeks explained the behavior of the oceans by having an ocean-god, the behavior of the skies by having a sky-god, volcanoes get a volcano-god, and so on. In the same way that science posits gravity to explain why apples fall to the earth, the Greeks posited Aeolus to explain the winds. Same thing.
The other link I keep posting, is an excerpt from an interview with Richard Feynman. The point of that reference is two-fold: (1) the use he makes of "framework" as part of my argument that without theory it's not science; (2) what he says at the very end:
The Greek gods -- those are persons, clearly, famously, like us, with emotions and everything. In the stories they're even perceptible, you can talk to them and fight with them. The god of Abraham is a person. Whether these categories hold perfectly is not quite the point. Religious concepts are elaborated and refined like anything else, and we may end up with descriptions that don't quite fit the person category, at least not the one we use now, all that well.
But still, maybe we're talking about persons, but we're still postulating those persons, right? And this is the point of the Feynman thing: the posits of science are not something you already have elsewhere in the framework, but different kinds of entities. If I open a door that swings away from me and it thumps to a stop after a opening a little and there's an "Ow!" sound from the other side, it's, to use your phrase, common sense that I've just whacked someone with the door. You might think of that as a theory you have quickly whipped up that includes a postulated person, and I'm not going to deny you that. Go ahead. Cognitive science tells stories like that too. But what you're not doing is positing a new kind of entity. You're gathering some evidence and doing some deducing, or your brain is, whatever. But that's not all science is.
And I can already hear you saying "that's exactly what it is", so please stop and think about how theoretical frameworks work, what is involved a positing a new type of entity, and so on. Maybe you could find another source besides me to explain how science works. Maybe you can come back and tell me I'm all wrong. We've probably already reached the limits of my understanding here, so I'd be happy to stipulate that I have no more to offer by way of further explanation.
Compare my door example to the discovery of Neptune: one involves postulating a person at the moment not visible to you because he is occluded by a solid object; the other involves the prediction of the existence of an as-yet unobserved planet based on mathematics, within a framework that includes gravity as described by Newton's equations. In a sense, the deduction is careful or systematic common sense, just math and inference, but the framework is not common sense, it's Newtonian physics.
The "way of thinking" that emerges in the un-self-censored anonymity of internet forums is what I call the "Either-Or" attitude, which denies any middle position between opinions, and allows for no common ground in discussions. Hence, innocent exchanges of information (opinions) quickly turn into emotional diatribes or win-lose debates. This recent trend reflects a coarsening of culture in the modern era. Yet it's not due to a difference in human nature, but to rapid changes in technology., which have allowed societies to fragment into a variety of interest groups. Mega-Cities, and the Net-connected-world, are becoming un-civilized and dis-connected. If the Us-vs-Them trend continues, we may experience a return to "nature, red in tooth and claw".
However, the "better way" may have less to do with critical thinking, and more with un-critical feeling (lack of self-censorship). Many people think that they "speak Truth" when they express their feelings directly. Perhaps in ancient tribal societies, when everybody knew their neighbors, and subscribed to the same beliefs, such openness was acceptable. Minor disagreements could be settled with brief bickering, or occasionally with empty-handed violence. But, in today's multi-cultural societies, with lethal weapons at hand, it's often better for all to "hold your tongue" in order to avoid open conflict. And young children have to be taught that lesson, when they blurt-out unfiltered feelings that are socially unacceptable.
Before the internet era, civil discourse was possible due to established rules of polite society. But on the net, we are no longer neighbors, and our philosophical differences are often wide. So, in the interest of facilitating social intercourse, while keeping the peace, we need to re-establish commonly accepted guidelines for interpersonal exchanges. And my modest contribution (my "tool") to a Golden Ruled society, is the "BothAnd Philosophy". It's an attitude adjustment, not a critical analysis. :smile:
Etiquette, that's the ticket : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etiquette
Netiquette : https://www.verywellmind.com/ten-rules-of-netiquette-22285
BothAnd Philosophy : So in order to understand the whole truth of our existence, we need to look at both sides of every polarized worldview. In the non-fiction world, we don’t always have to choose either Good or Evil, but we can look for a moderate position near the Golden Mean, the sweet spot I call "BothAnd".
http://bothandblog5.enformationism.info/page6.html
Also: Grice's maxims.
I think we both identify the same problems and mechanisms that can lead to the downfall of modern civilization as we know it and I agree that simply sharpening your critical thinking skills won't cut it. It can only be part of the solution. I chose this topic for my first video, because I see it as a significant first step towards more civil discourse online. However I don't have any illusions, that it will or can be adopted by a major part of mankind.
And I completely agree that Etiquette has to be another big part of the solution. I'm actually working on my next video right now in which I talk exactly about that: I hope to convey how it's possible for everyone to converse in a well-mannered and polite, but still productive and honest way.
Quoting Gnomon
I have read your blog post and found it very interesting. Thanks!
As long as by this one doesn't mean, 'thou shalt not offend.' Offense is the inescapable nature of the negative essence of philosophy.
Depends what you mean by "offend". Offending with arguments and ideas is indeed not only inescapable, but should be appreciated. I know that there's a growing number of people out there who seem incapable of handling such "offense". However I personally wouldn't even call it that. It's just a disagreement, the resolvement of which can lead to valuable progress.
On the other hand I think people should refrain from ad-hominems of all sorts. It simply doesn't help anyone in a debate. But I think that's just common sense, or at least I hope it is.
We are in full agreement. The truth is not even philosophers are ready to handle the negative revolutionary nature of philosophy. We say we're fine with being refuted, but because people are emotionally identifying with their ideas, when it happens they become defensive and emotional. People aren't ready for the reality of the actual thing. What results is that those who are doing the work of philosophy (which is almost always negative) end up getting persecuted by emotion.
Yes, that's pretty much what I had in mind. Thanks for reminding me of Sellar's. I did read PSIM years ago, which is not to say I understood it all. I think I'll revisit it.
From the first I liked Sellar's distinction between the "space of reasons" and the "space of causes". When we talk about the behavior of people and the "higher" animals, we generally explain it in terms of reasons. These reasons can be understood as being postulated as invisible motivational entities with the overarching invisible motivational entity being the will.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Yes, I do agree that science posits (and discovers) new types of entities (and phenomena), so I'm not going to tell you that you're wrong. :smile:
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
This made me think of a situation where you find a rope hanging through a hole in a door, and when you pull on it it pulls the opposite way. In this thought experiment you have no way of checking who or what is behind the door, but you would postulate that there is a person or a dog or some other animal there pulling on the rope. I would think of the discovery of Neptune along similar lines. Gravitational effects on other known Planets are detected, so another planet, at present invisible is posited to explain the observed effects.
I'm starting to get the hang of it, but holy cow...
Quoting Janus
The key there is that there are equations and the equations describe a force not like anything else in the universe. That's your framework. With rough carefully done observations, you can, as the saying goes, do the math. But observations alone won't get you there. The prediction of a planet is not the big posit here, but gravity.
True, but gravity is also felt? Even the so-called "primitives" knew that things fall to earth, and would have been aware of the force acting on their own bodies in the extra effort needed to walk uphill, for example. This is always already an intimately familiar invisible force, no?
Although it can have its criticisms, the new Netflix documentary "the social dilemma" does shed light on how the social media and search engines further dissent by narrowing results to the person's preconceptions.
I agree that the format is not encouraging to thoughtful discussion. And I'd say both aesthetically and behaviourally. The UI is meant for little text. It can be seem by comparing the recent media with older ones, like blogs and even Orkut. And there's a sense of urge, an almost pavlovian conditioning of receiving the next reward. It is very difficult to concentrate on a single demanding matter when you have a plate full of distractions.
That documentary just made this mechanism more evident for me, but I have a longing from some fruitful forums and discussions on some of the old platforms that always made me find these aspects of the new media insufficient.
I doubt this line of thinking is worth the effort, since some of the precursors are lost to time. Suppose some ancient philosopher said, "It is in the nature of most things to fall when released but of some to rise"; is that for or against the idea that we've always known what gravity is? I wouldn't bother unless I were doing history of science.
I wouldn't say we've always known what gravity is (or even that we really do now), but that we always have (by acquaintance) known its effects.
Will watch the video and respond appropriately soon. I just wanted to share my preliminary reaction to the thread.
Jolly. Sellars's thing is that the postulated entities explain correlations often already known. Which, yeah, of course.