From Less Wrong:

we need to study the cognitive sciences, figure out the way our intuitions work and how we might correct for mistakes. Above all, we need to learn to always question the workings of our minds, for we need to understand that they are . . . → Read More: Your intuitions are not Magic]]>

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From Less Wrong:

we need to study the cognitive sciences, figure out the way our intuitions work and how we might correct for mistakes. Above all, we need to learn to always question the workings of our minds, for we need to understand that they are not magical.

While composing this post on No Agenda Forums, an interesting problem came up.  How can I show someone their own biases?  They are obvious to me, but (by definition) the other person’s entire system of thinking is arranged in such a way as to find their biases valid.

After coming to understand the limitations . . . → Read More: What sort of mirror?]]>

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While composing this post on No Agenda Forums, an interesting problem came up.  How can I show someone their own biases?  They are obvious to me, but (by definition) the other person’s entire system of thinking is arranged in such a way as to find their biases valid.

After coming to understand the limitations of our built-in processing, this problem really bugs me.  What kind of mirror can I use to show someone their errors?  How could they show me my errors?  Assuming my reasoning is faulty, would I be just as difficult to convince, or does my experience with fallacy and bias give me any advantage?

I guess this is what keeps a skeptic up at night.

Note: I addressed the following essay to the general population of the No Agenda Forums, a community that I cherish despite frequent frustration.  It is peopled by many conspiracy theorists and champions of various “alternative” things, such as alternative explanations, alternative medicine, etc.  In short, people I cannot really reach on a level . . . → Read More: You make and break your own religion]]>

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Note: I addressed the following essay to the general population of the No Agenda Forums, a community that I cherish despite frequent frustration.  It is peopled by many conspiracy theorists and champions of various “alternative” things, such as alternative explanations, alternative medicine, etc.  In short, people I cannot really reach on a level of reason.  What I say may not do any good, but if even one in a thousand of those readers can see the light, then I am proud to have played a small part in the emergence of a rational mind.

It’s funny to me that no one here agrees on what “the truth” is, even in broad strokes.  But, (most) everyone agrees that authorities or experts must be lying to them about that truth…er, whatever it might be.  And if an authority occasionally says something you accept as truthful, then it must be to distract from something more secret and sinister.  The circular reasoning and contradiction are so palpable I can scarcely believe you don’t trip over them.

Ponder for a minute what this says about your thought process and your own bias.  You begin with an infallible conclusion, only trusting whatever evidence you see that supports it.  Evidence to the contrary is dismissed as untrustworthy by the very fact that it contradicts what you believe.  You decide wholly based on your own internal compass, even embracing the idea of cognitive bias as a sort of meta-physical truth detector.

This is, essentially, a definition of religious devotion to an unassailable faith.  You act as though you have arrived at your belief system through a a rational process, but even a novice critical thinker such as myself can trivially destroy your claims.

When you choose not to be cognizant and critical of your own bias, you disown reason itself, and make it impossible to discern the plausibility, likelihood, or truth about anything (except perhaps stumbling upon it as a complete accident).

When you cry “wake up”, what do you mean by it?  You do not accept what you are told, but instead you accept what you have invented.  To be “awake” as you are, is to be trapped in a fever dream of conspiracy and unreason, with no light to guide you; only the ever-deepening rabbit hole of your own delusion.

There is a much higher level of awareness than the one you defend and so cherish.  You already possess the tools to attain it: intelligence and doubt.  Turn these faculties upon yourself.  Doubt not only “authority”; learn the ways your own mind has evolved to be a poor reasoning machine.  Learn what logical fallacies and cognitive bias are.

The grand collective endeavor of science and reason tell us that the most simple, parsimonious, and mundane explanations are usually (but not always) correct.  This is not a dogma, but rather a good default position from which to begin.  The more complicated a claim is, the more skeptical you should be; the more work the claimant needs to do in order to show it’s valid.  As Carl Sagan said, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”.  People untrained in science may not find it obvious why this should be the case–  If you have not had the benefit of truly understanding the methods of science, please find the time to read The Demon-Haunted World.

You can escape the wall of religion in which you have trapped your own mind.  From the inside, it’s an insidious, invisible wall that only tells you you’re right.  From the outside it’s an unassailable fortress of irrationality.  Learn how to be wrong.  Revel in your mistakes as you discover them.  Each time you find an error, you win the opportunity to correct it.

I subject myself to the same standard that I ask of you.  Also, the same criticisms.  We are all imperfect in our reason, in some ways irreparably so.  But we can be clever enough to design systems that give reliable results in spite of our bias (science), and modest enough to understand and work around our own limitations (awareness of fallacy and bias).  And as we continue down the road of reason, we find flaws in these systems and refine them as well.  Nothing is sacred, everything is subject to scrutiny.

I can argue against unsupported claims, and try to provide directions for understanding why they are likely wrong.  But there’s no way I know of to plant the seed of desire to reason.  If, like me, you managed to reach adulthood without learning these things, then I hope you too will choose to born again into reason, science, and skepticism.

I love everything about this Skeptoid post, in which Brian makes great points about the peril of debating when the truth is on your side.  It’s counter-intuitive on first consideration, but as I’ve mused previously, debating has relatively little to do with truth and mostly pivots on charisma and debate tactics (many of . . . → Read More: More debate fail]]>

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I love everything about this Skeptoid post, in which Brian makes great points about the peril of debating when the truth is on your side.  It’s counter-intuitive on first consideration, but as I’ve mused previously, debating has relatively little to do with truth and mostly pivots on charisma and debate tactics (many of which pragmatically employ fallacy and bias to torpedo the opposition).

I don’t agree with Brian that scientists must always be at a disadvantage.  After all, there’s nothing to stop someone from being right AND being a talented debater.  But it is folly to assume that the facts will be an asset, and naively blunder into a battle you will surely lose.  Further, you have to be careful about how you debate, because it’s easy for an opponent to leverage your use of “dishonest” debate tactics to cast a shadow on your credibility or factual claims.

I don’t have a lot to add to this excellent post about the narrative fallacy at lesswrong.  Here are some great excerpts, to convince you to go read the whole thing:

Essentially, the narrative fallacy is our tendency to turn everything we see into a story – a linear chain of cause and effect, . . . → Read More: That’s the story of my life]]>

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I don’t have a lot to add to this excellent post about the narrative fallacy at lesswrong.  Here are some great excerpts, to convince you to go read the whole thing:

Essentially, the narrative fallacy is our tendency to turn everything we see into a story – a linear chain of cause and effect, with a beginning and an end.

…

Our brains are engines designed to analyze the environment, pick out the important parts, and use those to extrapolate into the future.

…

This tendency can be seen in a variety of lower level biases. For instance, the availability heuristic causes us to make predictions and inferences based on what most quickly comes to mind – what’s most easily remembered. Hindsight bias causes us to interpret past events as obviously and inevitably causing future ones. Consistency bias causes us to reinterpret past events and behaviors to be consistent with new information. Confirmation bias causes us to only look for data to support the conclusions we’ve already arrived at. There’s also our tendency to engage in rationalization, and create post-hoc explanations for our behavior. They all have the effect of of molding, shaping, and simplifying events into a kind of linear narrative, ignoring any contradiction, complexity, and general messiness.

Like most sports, I’m not much good at debate.  I say it’s a sport because it’s a competition with a winner and loser where the participants’ skills have the largest bearing on the outcome.

I think that most people casually lump debate and argument into the same mental bin; if not as exact synonyms, . . . → Read More: Argument > Debate]]>

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Debating

Like most sports, I’m not much good at debate.  I say it’s a sport because it’s a competition with a winner and loser where the participants’ skills have the largest bearing on the outcome.

I think that most people casually lump debate and argument into the same mental bin; if not as exact synonyms, then as different degrees of the same thing.  But they are really quite different!  A debate has almost nothing to do with logic or the correctness of stated facts, but these things are crucial to the outcome of an argument.

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Adversarial collaboration

In an argument, the two sides start with differing opinions or understandings about a topic.  Well-conducted arguments can get very pedantic and take a long time to conclude.  Sometimes the facts needed to decide an argument aren’t available.  Although they can get heated with emotion, at the end of a good argument both sides should depart with the same understanding, reached by applying logic to the available facts.

Arguments are a great way to battle cognitive bias!  It’s a system of informal collaboration: each participant tries to find the logical or factual flaws that the opposing side is laboring under, and point them out.  Unlike a debate, this process has nothing to do with ego, wit, or the invocation of clever but misleading fallacies.  The goal of an argument is not to win, but rather to be (or become) correct.  This is a subtle but extremely important distinction.

As a skeptic, I love to argue.  I love to be right and convince someone else of it, and I also love to be proven wrong and thereby learn.

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It’s a trap! (sometimes)

When you’re in an argument, you have to be vigilant for signs of “impedance mismatch”, i.e. an argument conducted in bad faith–  If only one side is interested in arguing but the other side moves into debating then the the progress and outcome of the discussion will be of undefined significance.  Just as if one person is figure skating and the opposing side suddenly switches to ice hockey.. nothing meaningful can be said about the results except it won’t end well.

If the debating party is clever, they can very easily prevail over the arguing party.  Attractive, unsupported claims can be made quickly so the debater stays on the offensive.  They can weave straw men and ask questions that don’t have snappy answers.  If the opponent is able to keep up, the debater can arbitrarily move the goalposts.  The arguer quickly gets mired down, spending time to refute or reason through even a small portion of the claims.

Citing that your opponent is not being truthful and flagging their fallacies doesn’t win debates.  This is why those with logically inconsistent (or unsupportable) viewpoints love to debate, especially against scientists and critical thinkers.  It gives them the chance to win without being right!  By selecting an opponent who is beholden to logic and really wants to change the other’s mind, the debater is practically assured victory.  Even if the quarry detects the trap and switches to debate tactics, the attacker can force a stalemate by pointing out the logician’s hypocrisy for using fallacies!

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What to do

If you are a critical thinker and you love to debate, then dive in, be ruthless, and take no prisoners!  Don’t go to the dark side, though; be ever vigilant in checking your cognitive bias.  Winning debates doesn’t make your position correct.

If you are like me, argumentative but more interested in truth than victory, then surround yourself with like-minded people.  If you find your positions challenged aggressively it can be an ego hit to defuse a debate instead of meeting it head on.  But it’s nothing like getting sucked into a trap when you’re unprepared; losing the debate despite being right.

Hybrid fusion-fission energy generation a possibility via Futurismic.

Isn’t it interesting how this story swept through the internet?  Everyone, of course, wants to get rid of nuclear waste right?  Awful, evil stuff.  Bury it in the earth if you have to.  Making it disappear in a magic theoretical reactor is even better, what great . . . → Read More: The emotions of energy]]>

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Hybrid fusion-fission energy generation a possibility via Futurismic.

Isn’t it interesting how this story swept through the internet?  Everyone, of course, wants to get rid of nuclear waste right?  Awful, evil stuff.  Bury it in the earth if you have to.  Making it disappear in a magic theoretical reactor is even better, what great news!  But what struck me is how no one seems to realize that this is by no means the first idea for a reactor to deal with nuclear “waste”, and that the stuff isn’t really waste at all once you understand a little about it.

Read on, and discover a whole nuclear world that you’ve probably never even heard of.

I’m not an expert, but it should be mentioned that this “hybrid’ is not the only idea for handling spent LWR fuel, not by a long shot.  There are several (fission) reactor designs that can actually gobble up all our “spent” fuel and burn up the long-lived radioactive compounds to produce energy.  Vastly more energy than the once-through LWR reactors managed to extract from it in the first place.  An order of magnitude more– energy that’s just sitting around in the spent fuel being all nasty and lethally dangerous now, and we could be using it to power our elecrtic cars and toothbrushes for the forseeable future.

I’m not going to try to make the case here, I’m not a nuclear physicist and my research into this has been limited so far.  Just enough to realize there’s a lot more here than most people know about.  The sites Energy from Thorium and Nuclear Green are good places to start for anyone who’s interested to learn more.  These sites are maintained by strong advocates and enthusiasts, but I would ask you to at least familiarize yourself with what they have to say before writing them off as cranks.  And they’re not good candidates for “industry shills” because frankly the current nuclear power industry is nowhere near this far along, and shame on us for that.

While we’re swinging for the fences with fusion research (that’s cool but seems to stay 2 decades away forever), there’s a lot of great fission approaches that are comparatively easy, but research and development are languishing basically because public sentiment associates nuclear energy with bombs and accidents.  The bitter irony* here is that the new reactors, by design, can be safe in all the ways that people associate with nuclear danger, and green in all the ways people associate with nuclear .. um, evilness?  I’m not talking about throwing more security at it, or digging a deeper hole for the nasty byproducts.  I seriously mean safe and good.  I know, it knocked me over too when I first started hearing about it.

* I thought about it, and yes I think that’s an appropriate use of the word ‘irony’

Skeptical threat level orange: Energy production is one of the hardest topics on which to find rational discourse and unbiased information.  Personally I don’t have a horse in this race, I’m not a nuke head or an anti-nuke.  I’d love it if fusion was practical now.  It would be great if solar and wind could produce power on the scale we need**.  Maybe the next breakthrough will do it, of course let’s keep up the fierce R&D.  And that’s all I ask for nuclear.  Get your head out of the 1960′s and give it a fair shot.

** Heck it’s not even a scale problem yet, the EROEI is still so bad on wind and solar that they’re the butt of jokes, among those who bother to do the calculations.  Remember ethanol from corn?  Remember when everyone thought it was going to be awesome… before someone did the math?

There are so many fallacies and biases that I can’t keep them straight, even though critical thinking is something I value highly.  I’m not much good at debate, and although I’d love nothing more than to engender critical thinking and skepticism in others, I don’t have any good ideas on how to do that, except maybe . . . → Read More: A critical baseline]]>

There are so many fallacies and biases that I can’t keep them straight, even though critical thinking is something I value highly.  I’m not much good at debate, and although I’d love nothing more than to engender critical thinking and skepticism in others, I don’t have any good ideas on how to do that, except maybe hitting them with a WWIT? question.

But what about aspiring skeptics– people who already have the spark of reason but haven’t yet learned to see the fnords on their own?

You can’t just toss formal logic at them and say “here, you’re good to go”.  There ought to be some kind of primer or baseline; some few principles to learn, understand, and then apply.  I read a thoughtful post entitled Obstacles to Critical Thinking, and realized that the items discussed therein would be a great place to start.

• When I have an emotional stake in something, I am extremely likely to be affected by selective validation.
• Don’t give authority a free pass from skeptical scrutiny, especially when I like or tend to agree with the source.
• Just because something is normal, conventional, or popular doesn’t make it true or correct.
• My memory is not as accurate or complete as it seems, and neither is anyone else’s.
• My mind is heavily optimized to use and trust cognitive biases, so thinking critically will always be a challenge.  Don’t get cocky!

In fact, running these checks on a regular basis is probably a good idea no matter what your level of skeptical skill.

But that’s not why these things are a threat to actual real scientific medicine (ARSM?).  . . . → Read More: Dangerous faith-based mechanics]]> There are many confirmation biases and magical thinking tendencies that fuel testimonial and anecdotal evidence for the efficacy of woo, from acupuncture and chiropractic all the way up to the giant woo umbrella of “complementary and alternative” medicine (CAM) or “integrative” medicine.

But that’s not why these things are a threat to actual real scientific medicine (ARSM?).  The real danger is when CAM seems to get real results.

I don’t possess a great deal of knowledge about cars.  If I took my car to a faith healer, all the prayer in the world wouldn’t change the oil.  (I guess if I took it to a detox loon, their BS might actually apply in this case).  Clearly a complex system like a car is going to need some real work done eventually, or I’m going to notice it doesn’t work right any more.

But what if that car healer chose to learn and incorporate some actual, real mechanical repair and maintenance techniques into their practice?  They might not be ASE certified, sure, but they’d probably be able to do a passable job making my car work.  They can get real, even measurable results.

As an unsophisticated customer of this faith-based mechanic, I might drive away with a great testimonial about how my car’s chi was unblocked and its aura re-alignment took care of that weird noise in the passenger door.  At a minimum, each visit builds trust in my faith-canic, and their authoritative expertise in all things auto.

What’s the harm if he puts a homeopathic sealant on the tires and tells me they’re now good for another 20 thousand miles?  I have a horrible blow-out on the highway, but I’m OK; modern car safety features are extremely well-designed (by science)

This is obviously an absurd example, but I’m trying to illustrate the problem of false attribution in fields based on woo.

Massage, range of motion exercises, strength-building exercises, and mobilization of joints are all legitimate science-based techniques used by physical therapists and physicians with specialties in physiatry, orthopedics, and sports medicine. Some chiropractors also use similar techniques -and with good results. But by doing so and calling it “chiropractic” it legitimizes the pseudoscientific practices that are very common within the profession – like treating non-existent “subluxations” in order to free up the flow of innate intelligence.

Maybe your chiropractor is really a quite rational physical therapist simply operating without a license and has never done any harm.  You know your acupuncturist is really on the level, because transdermal electrical stimulation works wonders on your pain.

The problem, as with my mechanic above, comes when satisfied customers encourage a ground swell of support, and studies showing that (the scientifically sound part of) some woo is effective.  Increasingly, woo promulgators are not only allowed to practice without any kind of “surgeon general says you are stupid” warning, but taken seriously as a form of actual real scientific medicine.  Only leave off on the science a bit you stodgy old skeptic, because we get results!

Are you already a skeptic?  Cool; but I bet you know someone who is into chiropractic.  Please, warn them before this happens.  And if you think I’m picking on the chiros a bit much, it’s because they routinely perform actions, on purpose, that can massively damage important nervous system components, all in the name of healing.  And they may even be covered by your insurance already.

The precautionary principle can so easily be abused to the point that it becomes a zero risk . . . → Read More: Risk assessment bias]]> Another quick redirect; I love this writeup of how we are stupid at risk assessment . I wish a few of the people close to me would learn up on this a bit.

The precautionary principle can so easily be abused to the point that it becomes a zero risk bias .

This is a TED video from 2006, but I just now watched it. Michael Shermer talks about cognitive bias, pareidolia, and other interesting ways we fool ourselves.

Michael Shermer at TED.com: Why people believe strange things

It’s a delightful 12 minute refutation . . . → Read More: Why we believe strange things]]>

This is a TED video from 2006, but I just now watched it. Michael Shermer talks about cognitive bias, pareidolia, and other interesting ways we fool ourselves.

Michael Shermer at TED.com: Why people believe strange things

It’s a delightful 12 minute refutation of stupidity.

I spent rather a long time contemplating the creation of this site. There seem to be many good reasons not to bother, including but not limited to: