Is it? That's the very basis for error that begat this article. In fact, Turing's and Kahneman's minds were too open. They didn't express sufficient reservation by demanding more rigorous tests of those claims.
Perhaps a better maxim would be, "It's good to have a mind that's open just enough to entertain the impossible."
That saying, or ones like it, are also attributed to Carl Sagan, G. K. Chesterton, James Oberg, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, Virginia Gildersleeve, Bertrand Russell, Max Radin, ...
This article mentions Walter M. Kotschnig as the author of the earliest known instance of the saying, but notes that even Kotschnig seemed to be quoting something that was already known at the time:
An appropriately simplistic quote from someone who habitually and sometimes famously demonstrates being stubbornly narrow minded. But then, how else would he not know that brains don’t fall out of—nor are placed in—minds.
In addition to statistical evidence people should really examine the plausibility of the mechanism in question. Most accounts of ESP have no description of how it might actually work. The theories are typically dualistic, vitalistic and even plain magical.
What kind of “mechanism of action” you are looking for? I mean, physicists provide no “mechanism of action” for the forces they stipulate to exist. There is no “mechanism of action” for electromagnetism, it just does what it does. Similarly, ESP force might not have “mechanism of action”, it just could do what it does.
What you are doing here is that you are betraying two huge hidden assumptions that you implicitly make. First is that you are most likely expecting to obtain “mechanism action” in some kind of mathematical terms, which implicitly assumes ability to use mathematics to explain the observed universe. Second is that you are looking for “mechanism of action” for ESP in terms of known physical forces and theories. Here, you implicitly assume that known physics is all there is.
Now, I do not believe in ESP either, my point is only that you are demanding rigor from ESP you don’t from electromagnetism.
If a natural phenomenon is claimed to exist and be observable, then it is reasonable to expect a theoretical framework which allows others to formulate experiments to test it in novel ways. It does not have to be couched in mathematics, but once the description is transmitted it should permit thinking along the lines of "Aha, you're saying that this <well-defined-thing> causes that <well-defined-thing>! If that is the case then this <new-experiment> should have that <surprising-outcome>". That framework should also be clear about under what circumstances the phenomenon occurs, so that an outsider can in principle understand its limits and be able to perform tests without the advocate claiming that their experimental conditions were "not conducive" to the phenomenon.
Another example of a "hypothesis" which has no mechanism of action (and I therefore do not regard as a hypothesis) is the "Stoned Ape Hypothesis". It claims that the ingestion of psylocibin explains the sudden increase in size of the brain at one point in our evolutionary history. But it does not actually give a mechanism for how your or my genes today would be affected, it just says that hunter-gatherer culture would have changed and there would be more group sexual activity. If I were to be presented with this "explanation", I would not expect a dramatic effect on brain size, because there would be less sexual selection going on.
Homeopathy also strikes me as a claimed effect without plausible mechanism.
Physics can replicate electromagnetic effects with an extremely high degree of precision, it's almost trivial to replicate said effects.
Physics has formulated models of how electromagnetism works and from that model, predicted other effects that could be replicated in experiments as well. That's what a 'mechanism of action' means here. The predictive power of a model, by whatever means it's formulated makes it useful.
There are infinitely many ways to model electromagnetism but only a few of them are useful because they allow to make theoretical predictions that then also match reality.
I think it's the combination of "ESP has no mechanism of action in terms of known science, and so would require new fundamental physics to be possible" and "ESP has never been successfully tested, and not for lack of trying" together that's a really hard pill to swallow.
imo having an open mind means rather exclusively to allow the possibility to be moved by scientific evidence. Not just believe for the sake of it or because of some kind of bias If we don't keep an open mind, in this sense, we'd still believe the Sun rotates around the Earth.
> People have erroneous intuitions about the laws of chance. In particular, they regard a sample randomly drawn from a population as highly representative, that is, similar to the population in all essential characteristics. The prevalence of the belief and its unfortunate consequences for psvchological research are illustrated by the responses of professional psychologists to a questionnaire concerning research decisions.
(emphasis mine)
Not only does the statement say that “people” make this mistake then go on to cite a questionnaire only of professional psychologists, but the questionnaire is the prototypical non-random random sample the very psychologists taking it are allegedly proving misinformation about. Questionnaires select for people with the time, inclination, and attention to start and then finish a questionnaire.
Infamously, experiments held at universities bias towards undergrads. Experiments that reward participation bias towards people motivated by the reward. Experiments that don’t reward participation bias towards people good-natured enough to contribute just for science.
Certainly very ironic. But is this line of argument incorrect?
E.g. if I said "I don't believe in the Holy Book because in verse 7 it says that one cannot trust anything written in any books". Isn't that an analogous reasoning?
I think these examples/arguments are ultimately about exposing a liar-paradox statement, and when you can show such a statement you have proven that something isn't right.
Yes. And might I say everything has a statistical bias. Picking people for an experiment is not like throwing dice
Your sample will always be biased, and it would be crazy to try and get a random sample from "the world". (and even then you have temporal bias - you can't run your experiments on people from the XIX century)
> The idea you should focus on, however, is that disbelief is not an option.
The results are not made up, nor are they statistical flukes. You have no
choice but to accept that the major conclusions of these studies are true.
More important, you must accept that they are true about you.
So so arrogant, and he ended up being wrong about it too. It's very hard to take him seriously after reading this.
Yes. It is. But as another poster has noted, he largely recanted in 2017 [1]. And this is to his credit. Few scholars -- and fewer prominent ones -- have been willing to reverse course in as public a fashion as this.
“The argument is inescapable: Studies that are underpowered for the detection of plausible effects must occasionally return non-significant results even when the research hypothesis is true – the absence of these results is evidence that something is amiss in the published record. ”
> I am still attached to every study that I cited, and have not unbelieved them
So he admits that the studies don't replicate but he still believes in their conclusions? Somehow that makes him look worse, not better, in my eyes but maybe I'm too critical.
You’re allowed to be attached to any theory you want, as long as you don’t let it override your judgement of the actual evidence. In this sense it’s probably better that you’re cognizant and open about your personal bias, rather than pretending it doesn’t exist (or overcompensating in the other direction and thus developing a new bias.)
I think you're somewhat misinterpreting his point. He's not saying "I'm correct whether you like it or not". Instead, he's saying "we are all prone to cognitive errors, whether you like it or not".
Admittedly, the experiments he conducted and cited were found to be flawed. But I think his point, as I understand it, still stands.
It sounds like he's saying his students were wrong to express disbelief over the counter intuitive findings of a study because the statistics were such that it left no option but to accept the results. Which is arrogant and wrong. Studies can be faulty or fail to replicate, statistics can be misapplied or fudged, future studies also contradict prior findings, etc.
Blind faith in the results of a study is not good science. If a study is counter intuitive, one should question it.
The point doesn't stand, at least, not for psychology papers: even if the data have been collected correctly, the method was flawless, and the statistics have been done properly, the conclusions (as written in the paper under "Conclusions" heading) are always beyond the scope of the experiment, often far beyond it. I've never seen a psych paper that limits itself to just the experiment. They always present the outcome as proof for some kind of broader theory (which usually has been proven wrong in the same style by somebody else).
> My reason for writing this letter is that I see a train wreck looming. I expect the first victims to be young
people on the job market. Being associated with a controversial and suspicious field will put them at a severe
disadvantage in the competition for positions. Because of the high visibility of the issue, you may already
expect the coming crop of graduates to encounter problems. Another reason for writing is that I am old
enough to remember two fields that went into a prolonged eclipse after similar outsider attacks on the
replicability of findings: subliminal perception and dissonance reduction.
> I believe that you should collectively do something about this mess. To deal effectively with the doubts you
should acknowledge their existence and confront them straight on, because a posture of defiant denial is selfdefeating. Specifically, I believe that you should have an association, with a board that might include
prominent social psychologists from other field. The first mission of the board would be to organize an effort
to examine the replicability of priming results, following a protocol that avoids the questions that have been
raised and guarantees credibility among colleagues outside the field.
I'd say that it wasn't the epistemology that was flawed, but the studies. (Though, ok, arguably it was a flaw in the epistemology that it didn't allow for flaws in the studies.) But the more interesting question is how the initial studies could have been so flawed. At any rate, those results were not replicated, and science marches on.
How is "More important, you must accept that they are true about you." anything but flawed? If something is true for 60% of people must you accept that it is true for you as well, even though evidently it wasn't true for 40%?
Yeah, your reaction is. The whole point was to be humble and accept that you might be wrong. In particular, if well-done research contradicts your prior belief, then you "have no choice" but to consider that you might have been wrong.
It turns out that the "well-done" was not the case here, but I find it hard to think your post was in good faith.
The conclusion is a bit at odds with the rest of the piece:
> And that’s interesting. When stupid people make a mistake, that’s no big deal. But when brilliant people make a mistake, it’s worth noting.
Maybe not. In the words of the author,
> maybe these are real effects being discovered, but you should at least consider the possibility that you’re chasing noise. When a striking result appears in the dataset, it’s possible that this result does not represent an enduring truth or even a pattern in the general population but rather is just an artifact of a particular small and noisy dataset.
Clearly brilliant people saying that something that later turns out to be noise is statistically undeniable signal is worth noting. I'm not sure what you're seeing here.
I don't think it is worth noting. Brilliant people make mistakes too, just not at the same rate as the rest of us. That one or even a few make the a specific mistake means nothing -- it's statistical fluke, even if it seems noteworthy in isolation.
Kahneman and his book „Thinking fast and slow“ are totaly overrated. In fact „despite Kahneman's previous contributions to the field of decision making, most of the book's ideas are based on 'scientific literature with shaky foundations'. A general lack of replication in the empirical studies cited in the book was given as a justification.“ Unfortunately you will find that statement only at the end of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow. It should be stated at the beginning. So many wrong assumptions especially in economics, but also management theory are based on this book. But nothing of is book can be replicated: https://replicationindex.com/2020/12/30/a-meta-scientific-pe... Unfortunately far to few people know about this.
I doubt we can get places if the reader of this comment ws to produce thoughts about what I think about what the author thinks psychologists think.
I'm not comfortable with the idea the unmatched creative engineering powers of mother nature did not discover something as simple as radio.
We could power down the electrical grid and do the experiment? But I can just call everyone, what use is telepathy?
The cat is in front of the house when someone arrives (which is never at the same time sometimes skipping a day) but the rest of the day he is nowhere near on the camera footage. For him there is a point, it means food!
"Whenever there is a simple error that most laymen fall for, there is always a slightly more sophisticated version of the same problem that experts fall for."
@dang: the original title should be "I disagree with Alan Turing and Daniel Kahneman regarding the strength of statistical evidence", the way it was edited it became... clickbait ?
Perhaps one should also beware of the study by one man. I have a vague recollection of hearing that, at the time Turing was expressing his opinion of telepathy, there seemed to be experimental evidence for it, but it turned out that all the evidence came from one person, using unsound methods (including, IIRC, counting "one before" or "one after" guesses as successes if the results had higher than the expected frequency of one of those outcomes.)
Tentatively, that person may be Joseph Banks Rhine.
Yes - I had to read into that part of Turing, since I had never previously come across his views on ESP, but it seems like his error was not that he believed the statistics to be more powerful than they were - but rather he was too credulous in believing there weren't charlatans intentionally fudging the stats in order to help their point. Basically - the stats were powerful, but they were just fake.
He doesn't, but he does qualify as someone on the receiving end of content-free smears and libels, and 'eugenicist' is a useful term of abuse if you want to convince others that someone is a bad person.
My understanding is that he believes people should be able to exert some level of control over the genetics of their offspring, but that he is strongly opposed to any type of coercive eugenics. Some people would consider him a eugenicist because of his position.
I do consider that eugenics, but I just wouldn't use that term because people's brains turn off when they hear that term. It's a useful term if we want to discuss social policy, but only if people have the emotional reservoir for nuance.
All societies practice eugenics to some extent, whether in banning relatives from marrying, choosing abortion when the child would have terrible life conditions, or selecting mates based on biological traits like beauty.
From the first paragraph of Wikipedia:
> Eugenics (/juːˈdʒɛnɪks/ yoo-JEN-iks; from Ancient Greek εύ̃ (eû) 'good, well', and -γενής (genḗs) 'come into being, growing')[1][2] is a set of beliefs and practices that aim to improve the genetic quality of a human population,[3][4] historically by excluding people and groups judged to be inferior or promoting those judged to be superior.[5] In recent years, the term has seen a revival in bioethical discussions on the usage of new technologies such as CRISPR and genetic screening, with a heated debate on whether these technologies should be called eugenics or not.[6]
If history, the source of the definitions of all words, has defined eugenics to mean men with mustaches filling out charts about which women are contributing the most to "race improvement," then it would probably be best to accept that's what it means.
> In recent years, the term has seen a revival in bioethical discussions on the usage of new technologies such as CRISPR and genetic screening, with a heated debate on whether these technologies should be called eugenics or not.
This contention referenced by Wikipedia shows that the debate goes well beyond Nazis. There's no other convenient non-euphemistic word for this concept.
Why don't we call the evil uses of the ideas of heredity "eugenics," and call the good uses of DNA science, "genetic medicine." Plenty of other words have good/evil divides, like "surgery" vs. "assault with a deadly weapon."
certainly, and you've chosen your blonde, blue-eyed partner attentively, but those traits are recessive, so when you find that your children will not have them you want to abort and try again.
slippery-sloping the ideas of control very quickly leads to nightmarish scenarios, of course slopes tend not to be slippery just because we fear they may be, but sometimes the slipperiness of a slope will seem not a problem until the right social movement comes along and takes advantage of it, best to be prepared is the pessimist's take.
If by "he" you mean Turing, then no, not in the sense that Pearson, Galton, or Fisher would be considered eugenicists today. Nor in the sense that Charles Davenport, who ran CSHL and the Eugenics Office, would be considered a eugenicist today.
Not sure about Alexander, I don't really pay attention to what he writes about medical biology.
Almost certainly not in the sense that most people might object to (so you are committing the "Non-central Fallacy"). And your distrust sounds franlky paranoid.
I'm sorry I wasn't aware of any of that. I think the post I shared is fairly innocuous though and doesn't promote or contribute to an agenda of ethnic cleansing.
> isn't he a eugenicist? I know everyone loves to "separate the artist from the art" or w/e but that one thing really does make me distrustful of every single other thing he writes. What are his goals, how does this fit into them.
IIRC, he's not a eugenicist, but shares one of their big assumptions (that intelligence is heritable and some ethnic groups are smarter than others).
His commenters are the kind of people who have decided this:
> that intelligence is heritable and some ethnic groups are smarter than others
is true because if it was true, Berkeley feminists with humanities degrees wouldn't want to admit that, and they find those people annoying, therefore the option that makes you go "well we just have to face the facts" must be the case.
Of course, the first part of the sentence doesn't imply half the things they think it does, certainly doesn't imply the second, and even then the implications "…and it must be genetic" "…and there's nothing we can do about it" "…and that's why we're more virtuous than those other people" would not necessarily be true.
(Genetics, like social sciences, doesn't produce reliable results because it uses observation studies and hasn't heard of the credibility revolution thing yet. Intervention studies are either beyond our capabilities or would be unethical to do.)
> Dor Yeshorim (Hebrew: דור ישרים) also called Committee for Prevention of Jewish Genetic Diseases, is a nonprofit organization that offers genetic screening to members of the Jewish community worldwide. Its objective is to minimize, and eventually eliminate, the incidence of genetic disorders common to Jewish people, such as Tay–Sachs disease. Dor Yeshorim is based in Brooklyn, New York, but has offices in Israel and various other countries.
[snip]
> In both the Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jewish communities, there is an increased rate of a number of genetic disorders such as Tay–Sachs disease, an autosomal recessive disorder that goes unnoticed in carriers, but is fatal within the first few years of life in almost all homozygotes. (The exception is the rare adult-onset Tay–Sachs, which is normally not fatal but is incapacitating.)
[snip]
> Dor Yeshorim screens only for recessive traits that give rise to lethal or severely debilitating disorders, providing prophylactic, rather than diagnostic services. They do not screen for disorders arising from dominant gene mutations, as these cannot be prevented by informed mate selection. Only conditions which can be reliably reported as a positive or negative genetic match are tested.[8]
In short, they're trying to use selective breeding to remove certain genetic traits from the population.
There is no interpretation I can think of whereby Alan Turing or Daniel Kahneman could be considered eugenicists, so I have to assume you mean Scott. And no, Scott is not a eugenicist. He's a psychiatrist who is also extremely critical of statistical deficiencies and cognitive biases, especially as they play out in social science research and science journalism, so that is his goal with all of these think pieces on why some headline making the rounds is probably wrong. Not much different than Andrew Gelman in that respect, though far more of an amateur, that is, Scott is very far from an expert in statistics, though he's pretty good at reading scientific research.
What I imagine you've heard is people who have seen the way he treats his comments section and his approach to discourse as a commitment to hearing all sides. Before he went to Substack, he took down his blog because of a NY Times hit piece alleging he supported Charles Murray, which wasn't really true, but he was critical of universities not allowing Charles Murray to speak. He is also fairly known for his "tend his garden" thing on his own blog, which means he favors people who are polite in the way they comment over people who don't hold abhorrent points of view. For instance, his blog is about the only non-explicitly racist place you'll still see Steve Sailer on a regular basis, who is definitely a eugenicist. But to Scott, he doesn't really mind if you spend 90% of your commenting effort over several decades committed to the real problem with America being that our worst cities are overrun with genetically inferior black people, just so long as you're polite about it and don't start fights in his comments.
The unfortunate side effect of this that I don't think Scott has ever grappled with and maybe never will now that he's making money from it is that his blog has gradually fallen prey to the Gab/8chan effect that being the last person to tolerate bad people means your blog is going to become overrun with bad people. His comments sections have tremendously deteriorated over the years because of that. Everybody is very polite and friendly with each other while discussing incel theory and the problems of low IQ in the global south.
That said, Scott himself still overwhelmingly writes about nerd topics, like his absolute obsession with prediction markets. It's practically every other post. Just avoid the open thread posts that where the comment direction is entirely driven by the audience rather than by him selecting a topic.
And, I guess for completeness, I believe someone on Twitter once posted "evidence" of Scott admitting in private that he believed blacks were genetically predisposed to low IQ. He has never publicly said anything like that, so I guess take the word of some random person on the Internet that produced a collection of pixels with whatever size grain of salt you think that warrants.
> Before he went to Substack, he took down his blog because of a NY Times hit piece...
That's a distortion. He took down is blog because the NYT journalist planned to use his real name, which is their typical practice. They didn't even have to break confidence to find it out, because he had publicly made the link in published work. This was also before he (or anyone else) saw the article. He and his fans seem to be under the false impression that their extremely-online internet-forum mores apply to all of society, and were outraged.
It's also an exaggeration to call the article a "hit piece." It wasn't glowing fluff, and that's all. I don't think he and his fans would have been satisfied with anything except an uncritical report of how they see and understand themselves.
No reporter is forced to out someone by “typical practice”, it’s a deliberate action. Revealing Scott’s identity only added heat to the story, not light.
That's a list of seven things, over a time period spanning 50 years. More than half appear to be cases where the person or their family were in legitimate physical danger. In all listed cases, it's the author's identity that was kept secret, not the subject of an article.
> No reporter is forced to out someone by “typical practice”, it’s a deliberate action.
In cases like Scott Alexander's, they're not compelled to hide anyone's identity either.
> Revealing Scott’s identity only added heat to the story, not light.
Maybe in the mind of his fans, but obviously not in the reporter's view. And frankly, all the "heat" came from Alexander's reaction and that of his fans.
> He has never publicly said anything like that, so I guess take the word of some random person on the Internet that produced a collection of pixels with whatever size grain of salt you think that warrants.
You're claiming they faked that? That's silly. Scott's main purpose in life is being extremely nice to various weird irrelevant species of right-wingers in his comment sections; when he writes a post about politics the main thesis is that you too should also calm down and be extremely nice to them, which is why he makes the posts so long you'll forget what you were upset about by the time you finish reading them.
When it comes to say, Berkeley feminists, who are occasionally mean to him in real life, he's never nice to them and calls them practically Voldemort (direct quote).
He also likes to occasionally quote his irrelevant right-wing friends like Moldbug (or Charles Murray), ostensibly to write responses taking them down, but of course if we all just ignored them they'd go away and the main reason to write any kind of response to them is to let people know they exist.
As previously stated I think you should ignore everyone from Berkeley or else they'll make you join their polycule and discuss AGI alignment all day.
> How could Turing have thought this? I don’t know much about Turing but it does seem, when reading old-time literature, that belief in the supernatural was pretty common back then, lots of mention of ghosts etc.
I think that today we overestimate how much we know, and discount the existence of “supernatural” phenomena that we don’t fit into our model of the universe.
Karma (or something like it) is a thing that probably exists; but we do not have the necessary concepts or tools to qualitatively or quantitatively describe how it works.
I'm not sure what you mean by karma in this case, but I wanted to note that the word "supernatural" is very often misused. Once you start prodding people about what they mean by "supernatural", you quickly discover that they don't know what "natural" or "physical/material" mean, much less what "supernatural" means, and the whole conversation descends into grumbling.
Here's one definition of "supernatural order" [0].
https://replicationindex.com/2017/02/02/reconstruction-of-a-...