People on Tumblr are discussing Eliezer Yudkowsky’s old essay The Correct Contrarian Cluster, and my interpretation was different enough that I thought it might be worth spelling out. So here it is: is there a General Factor of Correctness?
Remember, IQ is supposed to come from a General Factor Of Intelligence. If you make people take a lot of different tests of a lot of different types, people who do well on one type will do well on other types more often than chance. You can do this with other things too, like make a General Factor Of Social Development. If you’re really cool, you can even correlate the General Factor of Intelligence and the General Factor of Social Development together.
A General Factor Of Correctness would mean that if you asked people’s opinions on a bunch of controversial questions, like “Would increasing the minimum wage to $15 worsen unemployment?” or “Which interpretation of quantum mechanics is correct?” or “are artificial sweeteners safe?” and then somehow discovered the answers to these questions, people who did well on one such question would do well on other types more often than chance.
This is a surprisingly deep and controversial issue, but one with potentially big payoffs. Suppose you want to know whose economic theories are right, but you don’t want to take the time to learn economics. Consider some position that was once considered fringe and bizarre, but now known to be likely true – for example, pre-Clovis settlement of the New World. Find the economists who believed in pre-Clovis settlement of the New World back when doing so was unpopular. Those economists have demonstrated a proven track record of being able to winnow out correct ideas amidst a sea of uncertainty. Invest in whatever company they tell you to invest in and make a killing.
I’m sort of joking, but also sort of serious – shouldn’t something like this work? If there’s such a thing as reasoning ability, people who are good at sifting through a mess of competing claims about pre-Columbian anthropology and turning up the truth should be able to apply that same skill to sifting through a mess of competing claims about economic data. Right?
If this is true, we can gain new insight into all of our conundra just by seeing who believes what about New World migration. That sounds useful. The problem is, to identify it we have to separate it out from a lot of closely related concepts.
The first problem: if you just mark who’s right and wrong about each controversial issue, the General Factor Of Correctness will end up looking a lot like a General Factor of Agreeing With Expert Consensus. The current best-known heuristic is “always agree with expert consensus on everything”; people who follow this heuristic all the time are most likely to do well, but we learn nothing whatsoever from their success. If I can get brilliant-economist-points for saying things like “black holes exist” or “9-11 was not a government conspiracy”, then that just makes a mockery of the whole system. Indeed, our whole point in this exercise is to see if we can improve on the “agree with experts” heuristic.
We could get more interesting results by analyzing only people’s deviations from expert consensus. If you agree with the consensus about everything, you don’t get to play. If you disagree with the consensus about some things, then you get positive points when you’re right and negative points when you’re wrong. If someone ends consistently ends up with a positive score beyond what we would expect by chance, then they’re the equivalent of the economist who was surprisingly prescient about pre-Clovis migration – a person who’s demonstrating a special ability that allows them to outperform experts. This is why Eliezer very reasonably talks about a correct contrarian cluster instead of a correct cluster in general. We already know who the correct cluster is, and all of you saying “I have no idea what Clovis is, but whatever leading anthropologists think, I think that too” are in it. So what? So nothing.
The second problem: are you just going to rediscover some factor we already know about, like IQ or general-well-educatedness? I’m not sure. WHen I brought this up on Tumblr, people were quick to point out examples of very intelligent, very well-educated people believing stupid things – for example, Newton’s obsession with alchemy and Biblical prophecy, or Linus Pauling’s belief that you could solve health just be making everyone take crazy amounts of Vitamin C. These points are well-taken, but I can’t help wondering if there’s selection bias in bringing them up. Yes, some smart people believe stupid things, but maybe even more stupid people do? By analogy, many people who are brilliant at math are terrible at language, and we can all think of salient examples, but psychometrics has shown again and again that in general math and language skills are correlated.
If we look for more general data, we get inconsistent results. Neither IQ nor educational attainment seems to affect whether you believe in climate change very much, though you can get slightly different results depending on how you ask and what you adjust for. There seems to be a stronger effect of intelligence increasing comfort with nuclear power. Other polls show IQ may increase atheism, non-racism, and a complicated cluster of political views possibly corresponding to libertarianism but also showing up as “liberalism” or “conservativism” depending on how you define your constructs and which aspects of politics you focus on. I am very suspicious about any of this reflecting real improved decision-making capacity as opposed to just attempts to signal intelligence in various ways.
The third problem: can we differentiate positive from negative selection? There are lots of people who believe in Bigfoot and ESP and astrology. I suspect these people will be worse at other things, including predicting economic trends, predicting world events, and being on the right side of difficult scientific controversies, probably in a way independent of IQ or education. I’m not sure of this. But I suspect it. If I’m right, then the data will show a General Factor of Correctness, but it won’t necessarily be a very interesting one. To give a reductio ad absurdum, if you have some mental disorder that causes you to live in a completely delusional fantasy world, you will have incorrect opinions about everything at once, which looks highly correlated, but this doesn’t necessarily prove that there are correlations among the people who are more correct than average.
The fourth problem: is there a difference between correctness and probability calibration? Suppose that Alice says that there’s a 90% chance the Greek economy will implode, and Bob has the same information but says there’s only an 80% chance. Here it might be tempting to say that one of either Alice or Bob is miscalibrated – either Alice is overconfident or Bob is underconfident. But suppose Alice says that there’s a 90% chance the Greek economy will implode, and Bob has the same information but says there’s only a 10% chance that it will. Now we’re more likely to interpret this in terms of them just disagreeing. But I don’t know enough about probability theory to put my finger on whether there’s a true qualitative difference.
This is important because we know calibration is a real thing and some people are good at it and other people aren’t but can improve with practice. If all we’re showing is that people who are good with probabilities are good with probabilities, then whatever.
But there are tantalizing signs that there might be something more here. I was involved in an unpublished study which I can’t upload because I don’t have the other authors’ permission, but which showed conclusively that people with poor calibration are more likely to believe in the paranormal (p < 0.001), even when belief in the paranormal was not assessed as a calibration question. So I went through the Less Wrong Survey data, made up a very ad hoc measure of total calibration skill, and checked to see what it did and didn't predict. Calibration was correlated with IQ (0.14, p = 0.01). But it was also correlated with higher belief in global warming (0.13, p = 0.01), with higher belief in near-term global catastrophic risk (-0.08, p - 0.01), increased support for immigration (0.06, p = 0.048) and with decreased support for the human biodiversity movement (0.1, p = 0.002). These were all independent of the IQ correlation. Notably, although warming and GCR were asked in the form of probabilities, immigration and HBD weren't, suggesting that calibration can be (weakly) correlated with opinions on a non-calibration task. Maybe the most intriguing evidence for a full-fledged General Factor of Correctness comes from Philip Tetlock and IARPA's Good Judgment Project, which got a few thousand average people and asked them to predict the probability of important international events like “North Korea launches a new kind of missile.” They found that the same small group of people consistently outperformed everyone else in a way incompatible with chance. These people were not necessarily very well-educated and didn’t have much domain-specific knowledge in international relations – the one profiled on NPR was a pharmacist who said she “didn’t know a lot about international affairs [and] hadn’t taken much math in school” – but they were reportedly able to outperform professional CIA analysts armed with extra classified information by as much as 30%.
These people aren’t succeeding because they parrot the experts, they’re not succeeding because they have more IQ or education, and they’re not succeeding in some kind of trivial way like rejecting things that will never happen. Although the article doesn’t specify, I think they’re doing something more than just being well-calibrated. They seem to be succeeding through some mysterious quality totally separate from all of these things.
But only on questions about international affairs. What I’d love to see next is what happens when you ask these same people to predict sports games, industry trends, the mean global temperature in 2030, or what the next space probe will find. If they can beat the experts in those fields, then I start really wondering what their position on the tax rate is and who they’re going to vote for for President.
Why am I going so into depth about an LW post from five years ago? I think in a sense this is the center of the entire rationalist project. If ability to evaluate evidence and come to accurate conclusions across a broad range of fields relies on some skill other than brute-forcing it with domain knowledge and IQ, some skill that looks like “rationality” broadly defined, then cultivating that skill starts to look like a pretty good idea.
Enrico Fermi said he was fascinated by the question of extraterrestrial life because whether it existed or it didn’t, either way was astounding. Maybe a paradox, but the same paradox seems true of the General Factor of Correctness.
Outside the Laboratory is a post about why the negative proposition – no such General Factor – should be astounding:
“Outside the laboratory, scientists are no wiser than anyone else.” Sometimes this proverb is spoken by scientists, humbly, sadly, to remind themselves of their own fallibility. Sometimes this proverb is said for rather less praiseworthy reasons, to devalue unwanted expert advice. Is the proverb true? Probably not in an absolute sense. It seems much too pessimistic to say that scientists are literally no wiser than average, that there is literally zero correlation.But the proverb does appear true to some degree, and I propose that we should be very disturbed by this fact. We should not sigh, and shake our heads sadly. Rather we should sit bolt upright in alarm. Why? Well, suppose that an apprentice shepherd is laboriously trained to count sheep, as they pass in and out of a fold. Thus the shepherd knows when all the sheep have left, and when all the sheep have returned. Then you give the shepherd a few apples, and say: “How many apples?” But the shepherd stares at you blankly, because they weren’t trained to count apples – just sheep. You would probably suspect that the shepherd didn’t understand counting very well.
If, outside of their specialist field, some particular scientist is just as susceptible as anyone else to wacky ideas, then they probably never did understand why the scientific rules work. Maybe they can parrot back a bit of Popperian falsificationism; but they don’t understand on a deep level, the algebraic level of probability theory, the causal level of cognition-as-machinery. They’ve been trained to behave a certain way in the laboratory, but they don’t like to be constrained by evidence; when they go home, they take off the lab coat and relax with some comfortable nonsense. And yes, that does make me wonder if I can trust that scientist’s opinions even in their own field – especially when it comes to any controversial issue, any open question, anything that isn’t already nailed down by massive evidence and social convention.
Maybe we can beat the proverb – be rational in our personal lives, not just our professional lives.
And Correct Contrarian Cluster is about why the positive proposition should be equally astounding. If it’s true, you can gain a small but nonzero amount of information about the best economic theories by seeing what their originators predicted about migration patterns in pre-Columbian America. And you can try grinding your Correctness stat to improve your ability to make decisions in every domain of knowledge simultaneously.
I find research into intelligence more interesting than research into other things because improvements in intelligence can be leveraged to produce improvements in everything else. Research into correctness is one of the rare other fields that shares this quality, and I’m glad there are people like Tetlock working on it.
Discussion questions (adapted from Tumblr):
1. Five Thirty Eight is down the night before an election, so you search for some other good sites that interpret the polls. You find two. Both seem to be by amateurs, but both are well-designed and professional-looking and talk intelligently about things like sampling bias and such. The first site says the Blue Party will win by 5%; the second site says the Green Party will win by 5%. You look up the authors of the two sites, and find that the guy who wrote the first is a Young Earth Creationist. Do you have any opinion on who is going to win the election?
2. On the bus one day, you sit next to a strange man who mumbles about how Bigfoot caused 9-11 and the Ark of the Covenant is buried underneath EPCOT Center. You dismiss him and never see him again. A year later, you see on TV that new evidence confirms Bigfoot caused 9-11. Should you head to Florida and start digging?
3. Schmoeism and Anti-Schmoeism are two complicated and mutually exclusive economic theories that you don’t understand at all, but you know the economics profession is split about 50-50 between them. In 2005, a survey finds that 66% of Schmoeist economists and 33% of anti-Schmoeist economists believe in pre-Clovis settlement of the New World (p = 0.01). In 2015, new archaeological finds convincingly establish that such settlement existed. How strongly (if at all) do you now favor one theory over the other?
4. As with 3, but instead of merely being the pre-Clovis settlement of America, the survey asked about ten controversial questions in archaeology, anthropology, and historical scholarship, and the Schmoeists did significantly better than the anti-Schmoeists on 9 of them.
One problem that occurs to me:
Sometimes we are more justified in false beliefs than we are in true beliefs. It might have been the case that, given the state of the evidence in say 2010, that it was more rational to deny the existence of pre-Clovian settlement of the Americas. Belief in pre-Clovian settlement of the Americas circa 2010 would then just represent a lucky guess – such people might in fact be worse at making predictions, in that they rejected the view that was better supported by the evidence.
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If you know nothing about why they believed the belief, just the fact that it turns out to be true increases the probability that they got to it by evidence. They could also have arrved at it by luck, but generally, true beliefs are more likely to have been arrived at by evidence and less likely to have been arrived at by luck than false beliefs.
You need to be a little subtler in making the luck objection. For instance, luck combined with a common source of belief can increase the variance–if each group is 50% right, you’d ignore them, but if their decisions have a common cause beyond just better reasoning ability, there’s a 50% chance that *all* of a group are right and a 50% chance that *none* of a group is
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I don’t think it’s just “luck”, necessarily, but rather selection bias. There’s a common scam known as the “reverse pyramid” that utilizes the same principle.
You call 1000 people, and tell them that you can infallibly predict whether a stock will rise or fall over some short term. You then give them a prediction, for free; but you tell half of them that the stock price will rise, and then tell the other half that it will fall. Then you talk to the 500 people whose prediction ended up being correct by pure chance, and make another prediction, totally free of charge. Then you call up 250 people… then 125… then 63… And before you know it, you’ve got 4 or so people who are totally convinced that you are an infallible stock market oracle who is never wrong. And then, and only then, do you ask them for money; as much money as they can spare.
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My favorite example of this: Aristotle proposed that there might be a continent of some kind surrounding the South Pole, and the idea caught on well enough that it remained pretty popular into the early modern era. Eventually, once south-lying lands like Tierra Del Fuego, Australia, and New Zealand had been circumnavigated and proven not to extend to the South Pole, the idea declined, and in 1814, Matthew Flinders finally dismissed the idea of an antarctic continent as having “no probability”. Flinders’s false belief was definitely better justified than Aristotle’s true belief.
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Not sure about that. P=0 is a very, very strong claim indeed, and certainly not one that could be considered even nearly justified to my mind as regards “no Antarctic continent” in 1814. Even P(Bigfoot caused 9/11) /=0 (though there certainly are an awful lot of 0s after the decimal point).
And in any case, aren’t you begging the question? Isn’t the subject under consideration precisely whether, for reasons we don’t fully understand, some people are consistently better at making judgments in cases where seeming best analysis of the evidence does not support them?
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Like, forget the thing about 0 not being a probability, that’s probably excusable as rhetorical excess. The problem is that it was just a big chunk of unexplored territory, and high confidence that there was no landmass there was no more justified than high confidence that there was a large landmass there.
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I still think that Flinders was more justified in believing that there was no landmass there, on the basis of many years of exploration at increasingly southern latitudes which had shown no evidence of a landmass, than Aristotle was justified in believing that there was one, on the basis of aesthetics and false assumptions about geology (or whatever).
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I think you’re being awfully cavalier in assuming a weak case for Bigfoot causing 9/11. Consider the evidence:
* Bigfoot is, by definition, a very tall, very hairy humanoid… just like Osama bin Laden.
* Our primary exposure to Bigfoot is mysterious, grainy, sporadically released videos… just like Osama bin Laden.
* Only crackpots believe that Bigfoot lives in the mountains of rural Kentucky… just like Osama bin Laden.
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TIL: Osama bin Laden is an undescribed species of hominid.
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Tom Richards: “And in any case, aren’t you begging the question? ”
I must be reading an intelligent comment if the guy used “begging the question correctly”. I bet Tom Richards is right about everything else in his comment.
Isn’t that the point of this whole post?
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Or, Aristotle had some general factor of correctness that allowed him to make this prediction accurately without any knowledge, and Finders had a factor of incorrectness that condemned him to make this prediction wrongly even with lots of data.
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Depends on how consistently someone has unjustified true beliefs. If it’s just once or twice, I’d chalk it up to them being lucky. But if they reliably hold beliefs I (or the general consensus) find unjustifiable, but later turn out to be correct most of the time, I expect them to know something I don’t.
Intuition can sometimes integrate masses of seemingly unconnected data that you can’t possibly hope to reason about (or even write a computer program to feed into Bayes’ equation). And it may well be possible that some people just have a knack for finding and combining the right information at the right time and in the correct way. It might even involve feedback loops looking for “correct contrarians” who are also experts in their respective fields and doing original research.
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The problem is:
I am a world-renowned economist. As economists go, I am a rock star god amongst my peers. Even non-economists know my name. I have economics all sewed up. Anyone wants an opinion on anything to do with economics, I’m the first name on their speed dial.
That does not mean I know how to prevent blackspot in roses. So putting me on “Gardener’s Question Time” is not a good idea.
If I want to know about roses, or pre-Clovis settlements, or how to paint a shed, I’ll have to rely on the opinions of experts in those fields. And as Scott points out, that’s mainly “What’s the consensus opinion? Okay, I believe that”.
Unless I’m a supergenius polymath with the disparate talents and time to be able to investigate and master all the topics under the sun (just call me Ildánach), that’s what I have to do, so my opinion outside of economics has no greater or lesser weight than that of the cleaning lady who vacuums my office after I’ve gone home at night (indeed, the cleaning lady may be a keen amateur gardener who knows way more about roses than I do).
So it would be perfectly possible for me to be sound and reliable when talking about economics, but completely out of my tree when talking about “is Pluto a planet”, Bigfoot or the best way to get wine stains out of a white silk slip.
A contrarian cluster range of my opinions may let you know how good or bad I am at judging is the consensus opinion in various fields good or not, but nothing more. If the consensus today is “Bigfoot does not exist”, then I look good by saying Bigfoot does not exist and I look off the wall by insisting it does; if in fifty years time we find a real live Bigfoot, then I look good for believing in it and otherwise I’m one of the examples trotted out to be laughed at like The Man Who Didn’t Sign The Beatles and Lord Kelvin (yes, that Kelvin) saying X-rays would prove to be a hoax.
Simply holding a crackpot opinion (by the standards of the day) does not tell us anything until we have definite evidence for the crackpottery one way or the other, and something like cryonics or Many Worlds is not something we can know right now is right or wrong (until the people who signed up for cryonics get/do not get successfully thawed out in fifty – two hundred years’ time).
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So, supposing there’s a five-person gardening panel on GQT: four gardeners and the rock star economist. A big argument breaks out about how to treat blackspot on roses, there are two leading methods, and the gardeners split 2:2 on the question. Arguments get traded back and forth, various anecdotes and studies and bits of evidence get mentioned, but none of the gardeners budge from their initial position. Finally the economist pipes up: “I’m no expert on this, but it sounds like Alice and Bob are more convincing on this issue than Clare and Dave.”
So if I had been half-listening to the programme and didn’t really follow the argument very well, then in principle the economist’s input might swing me one way or another. On the other hand, the guy’s an economist, and I have specific problems with contemporary economists, so in practise, probably not. Now if the guy was a top historian or even a rockstar astrophysicist (not in the Dr. May sense), then I might say, yes, their general intelligence, skills at assessing evidence, etc. make them useful as a tiebreak, let’s go with the AB method.
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Remember that the idea is to find the Correct Contrarian Cluster — i.e., the gardeners are split 9:1, and the economist says, “Obviously Jackie is right!”
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Let’s take Scott’s Alice and Bob. First case: Alice is 90% confident Greece will implode, Bob is 80% confident. What that means is both of them do believe Greece will implode, Alice just thinks it is going to happen faster/harder than Bob thinks it does. So there’s not really a disagreement about what is going to happen here, simply when it is going to happen.
Second case: Alice is 90% confident Greece will implode, Bob is 10% confident. Now we have real disagreement. If Bob turns out to be right, in the face of Carol and Dave and Evelyn and Frank backing up Alice that “No, Greece is definitely going to implode”, then it begins to look interesting. IF Bob continues to have his predictions validated by What Happens Next, and his predictions continue to be in the face of the prevailing wisdom, we can start to say “That Bob, he’s onto something!”
How does Bob do it? Superior rationality? High intelligence? Suppose Bob tells us that the pixies at the bottom of the garden whisper it into his ear under a full moon? Do we believe Bob (and that pixies have now been proven to exist)?
We can test the economist’s blackspot remedy and see if it works. Cryonics – we’ll have to wait a good while to find out one way or the other. Many Worlds – there’s a lot more heavy lifting in the theoretical work to be done. Sure, perhaps in fifty years time, all the current physicists who reject it will be fodder to point and laugh at, along the lines of People What Believed In Phlogiston.
Or maybe in fifty years time we’ll have proof positive that believing in the Many Worlds Hypothesis goes with wearing your underwear on your head and talking about your friend Harvey, the six foot tall rabbit pooka.
Either way, the only proof of the pudding is in the eating: does the economist’s treatment kill my roses or let them flourish? Does Bob always back the right horse?
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I think everyone would agree that hypothesis-testing by observation is the canonical way to obtain truth; the arguments here are about hypotheses that can’t be tested, or can’t be tested yet, or for which the evidence is ambiguous, etc. “Will Greece’s economy implode?” is a question that will certainly be answered in time, but we want to know now. (The rose example falls into the category of hypotheses that can’t be non-destructively tested. Choose the wrong remedy and your roses all die.)
My main problem with Scott’s GFC-by-CCC metric is that it seems like a fairly small effect. This makes it unhelpful for influencing behavior in situations in which people have vested interests, which is nearly all of them. Suppose that old chestnut the Redskins Rule turned out to be non-randomly predictive after all, for some small p. Fans of the predicted loser would still be unlikely to concede its validity in any particular case.
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\(T)he arguments here are about hypotheses that can’t be tested, or can’t be tested yet, or for which the evidence is ambiguous, etc.
But there has to be something for us to start making a decision about “Bob is probably likely to be right about the pixies living at the bottom of the garden”.
If we try the remedy and it kills the roses, yes that’s destructive and we’re likely to curse and say “I’m never listening to that chancer again!” but it’s a small destruction that doesn’t cause much harm. So based on whether or not the roses die, we can then have something to go on for “Did Bigfoot cause 9/11? Is the Ark of the Covenant under the Epcot Centre? Will cryonics work?”
Otherwise, if all we have is “Bob holds weird opinions nobody else holds, or at least only a very few other oddballs hold them”, then all we have is your standard nutter on the bus, and I don’t think anyone here is going to argue that the person who spends the entire journey twitching and muttering to invisible entities is exhibiting their possession of some mysterious General Factor of Correctness.
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Scott’s point here is exactly that some people may have access to a… crystal ball, if you will, that makes their apparently uninformed opinions better than chance, or even better than ~half of informed opinions — the human equivalents of the Redskins Rule. By your reaction, I’d guess you are dismissing that possibility out of hand. I’m prepared to consider that it might be true. I’m just curious what we’re supposed to do with it. If Bob Smith, who has the highest measured GCF of any human on the planet, says anthropogenic global warming is real and we should take steps X, Y, and Z to fix it, that still isn’t going to be persuasive to those who oppose X, Y, and Z, because even Bob is wrong sometimes. (On a personal level, of course, I might turn to Bob for investment advice, but given what he’d likely charge, it might not be worth it.)
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We’re invoking crystal balls, now? 😀
Okay, if we’re trying to decide “I am the prime minister of a small island nation. I know damn-all about economics. I have two advisers. Bob is recommending a policy Bill says will ruin the country. Bill is saying I should institute reforms Bob says will wreck the nation. How, oh how can I tell who is right?”, what we’re being asked to decide it on is “I know! I’ll ask Bob and Bill who their favourite football teams are!”
We need something to go on rather than “Bob has a lucky rabbit’s foot – in his brain”. If you’re asking me to believe in Bob’s crystal ball, well fine, but how do I know Bob knows any better about which team is the best, how to paint a masterpiece of contemporary art (hint: painting? sound art is where it’s at now, baby!) or what is the best way to skin a cat, then I really think I need something more to go on than “Well, 9 out of 10 of his peers think Bob is a nutter because he believes in Atlantis, Mu and Lemuria”.
Bob may well be really that smart, that well-informed, and that better than the Relevant Experts In the Field, and it may not be down to sheer dumb luck, but how can I tell if I don’t have some means of checking his predictions? I’m not dismissing the possibility that something along the lines of a General Factor of Correctness exists, but I do think we need some way of gauging who is the possessor of uncanny insight and who’s been hitting the magic mushrooms when it comes to “wacky, counter-intuitive predictions and the one weird trick that will fix the economy”.
My second, related objection is this: the assumption here seems to be that Really Smart Guy will be equally really smart about everything and I don’t necessarily believe that’s so. At least not on a “So I did some quick cramming and now I can contradict people who’ve built academic lives around in-depth study of the topic” level.
Again, yes, polymath geniuses exist. But as a rule of thumb, I think that an expert economist is an expert economist, and once they go outside their field, their opinion is no better than “reasonably intelligent amateur who takes an informed interest”. So trying to decide “Who is the best economist” based on “Are they right about maxi dresses: next big thing or dreadful rehash of the 70s?” is not much better than putting all the names into a hat and having a lucky dip.
EDIT: Isn’t this really a form of the appeal to authority? General Factor of Correctness sounds a lot like the mediaeval attitude that “Well, Master Aristotle is a really great philosopher so we will also believe him on everything from embryology to geography”. People like to turn up their noses at those backwards Middle Ages when they solemnly quoted old books about things they had no experience of themselves in parrot-fashion, but aren’t we creating a modern version of the same? “Master Bob is a really smart economist, so I’ll take his advice about whether I should have that liver transplant or not and to hell with what the doctors at the hospital tell me!”
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“Second case: Alice is 90% confident Greece will implode, Bob is 10% confident. Now we have real disagreement. If Bob turns out to be right,”
How could Bob turn out to be right? Either it will implode, or not. Both of them thought that possible.
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Yeah, I think this is an obvious but important factor. The article is dismisses the strategy “always agree with expert consensus on everything” as trivial, but that’s not really right, is it? Most people would rather reason from and confirm their priors instead of making the effort of learning what the expert consensus in a given field is and then updating their beliefs. So while the strategy may be obvious it is also often not used.
I’ve written a bit more on the findings of the Good Judgment Project below, but a quick summary is that in order to be right about something, you need both the intellectual abilities to be right in general and the desire to be right about that specific subject. So in that light the explanation for experts in a field not necessarily being right about other fields thus seems simple: While they may have the intellectual ability to be right about many things, they don’t desire being right about subjects outside their field.
Probably the best candidate for a General Factor Of Correctness is desiring to have reality-corresponding beliefs about as many things as possible, also having such a desire be stronger than your desire to confirm your existing beliefs. If you have such a desire you then need the ability and opportunity to pursue it, but I suspect you won’t often find people who want to be right while lacking the ability to act on that desire.
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The context here is an old article by Eliezer where he also suggests that to know the answer to a question about the economy, he could ask economists whether they believe in many worlds and accept their economics answers more than those of economists who don’t believe in many worlds. I’m pretty sure that the expert consensus is not in favor of many worlds (it’s neutral at best).
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Well, my argument is mostly that ‘agree with the experts’ is for many people too high a bar to clear, even for experts outside their own field.
Yudkowsky’s approach seems pretty useless to me. If you look for economists who have what he considers to be the correct opinion on the many worlds theory, you’re most likely just going to find the (probably pretty small) set of economists who are also interested enough in quantum physics to have an opinion on many worlds who also agree with you.
More generally, the approach seems to fail because it
1) Requires you to have an informed opinion about a set of reasonably esoteric fields where you are certain a contrarian opinion is correct
2) Requires that your certainty is warranted
3) Requires enough other people in the field you’re actually interested in (e.g. economics) to have informed opinions, in public, about enough of the same esoteric fields you have opinions about for you to pick out a group of justified contrarians with some sort of certainty.
To my mind, this is unlikely to happen.
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The problem is if these economists get their answers about physics the exact same way that Eliezer gets his answers about economics; by asking physicists if they believe in their favorite economic theory.
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“If I want to know about roses, or pre-Clovis settlements, or how to paint a shed, I’ll have to rely on the opinions of experts in those fields. ”
That assumes that “the opinions of experts in those fields” are readily determined. Figuring out who the real experts are isn’t always easy. To take your example of economics, Galbraith was a very prominent public figure who a non-economist might reasonably view as one of the experts—but had very nearly no reputation within the profession. Krugman somewhere comments that he discovered that Stephen Jay Gould was the equivalent in evolutionary biology. The same abilities that make you able to figure out your field well enough to do original work in it may make you more able than most to make sense of what is really happening in someone else’s field, who is a reliable expert and who a good writer skilled at pushing his public reputation—perhaps with political or ideological axes to grind.
Carrying the point further, the superstar academic is better qualified to choose among the variant opinions of professionals in other fields, because he is better able to distinguish good arguments from bad, evaluate people by looking at an overlap between their areas of expertise and his, and similar tactics. In the climate controversies, I have a better opinion of Hansen than of Mann, in part because when Hansen talks about the economics of dealing with AGW he gets it right, in part because Mann’s pretense to be a Nobel Prize winner is evidence that he’s a flake.
The expert in one field may also be better able to distinguish a consensus in another field that is based mostly on pressures for conformity from one based on good evidence, having observed similar patterns in his own field.
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An observation.
You’re an expert in economics. The majority of people aren’t experts in anything more than being themselves. I would think that by virtue of you being an expert in something, you have practiced thinking skills that the majority of people haven’t practiced and are better equipped to evaluate information in other fields than the average person.
Maybe a simpler way is saying that being an expert in complexity better prepares you for other complexity.
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My rockstar superman economics skills may indeed enable me to decide Professor Smith is a pushy self-publicist and Professor Jones is sound in his approach.
That still only means I now decide I can trust Jones and Brown and Robinson when they say “St Brendan the Navigator was the first European to visit the New World” and think that Smith is talking out of his hat when he says “Nonsense, it was Leif Erickson!”
It does not mean I am now an expert on history or navigation or mediaeval sea voyaging, it simply means I have a better chance than the man in the street at identifying who’s a chancer and who’s dull but informed and who’s keeping up with advances in the field. It still doesn’t let me say “I independently came to the same conclusion as Jones, Brown and Robinson* and so they are correct and so you can trust me when I advise you on spraying your roses, the best colour to paint your shed, and how to bake a really light sponge cake.”
*Unless the corollary to that is “Because of my expertise on skin hide boats and how feasible it is that they could make a long sea journey”, which is not necessarily the same thing as “The expertise I obtained when I did a five-hour cram session on the topic is just as or even more trustworthy than the experience of those who have made a study of the subject for years”.
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This isn’t a good objection. At least, your example is not a good one to illustrate it. Maybe if someone has an astrological system for winning the lottery, and they win the lottery, I could see raising this point (but even then, we’re making certain *assumptions* about logical positivism and a consistent universe in order to undergird our dismissal of the astrologer).
But in the case of Clovis, the whole point is that they reached a conclusion (not ‘made a guess’) based on limited evidence. Why and how did they reach this conclusion? That’s the whole mystery…
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You are responding to a hypothetical correlation by noting that there will be select examples of deviations from that correlation. That’s not much of an objection.
The proposition under consideration is that the rule “If someone has been right on something you know the answer for, then that gives you non-zero information on a question whose answer you don’t know”. Information is a stochastic property. What happens with a special case doesn’t rebut an assertion of information.
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I think the discussion questions are relatively weak evidence because they rely on only one point of data. If the man on the bus /also/ successfully predicted a mechanism of time travel, /then/ I would start digging.
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I disagree. The correct prediction involved an astronomically unlikely combination of two hugely unlikely claims. The very fact of Bigfoot being responsible for 9/11 would be sufficient reason to have much lower confidence in our (or at any rate my) general worldview, and as such assign much higher (though still low) prior probabilities to other unlikely claims. The tramp’s hit on that still wouldn’t make me think his Arc theory was probable, but it would make me think it was sufficiently probable for a cost-benefit analysis to recommend digging.
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I was taking into account the possibility that there was something wrong with my mind, which I think is more likely than any of these scenarios. I suppose if I was mildly sure it wasn’t deja-vu-like effect, then I would start digging.
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“and as such assign much higher (though still low) prior probabilities to other unlikely claims.”
That, by itself, does not give rise to Ark (note spelling) theory being any more likely. You are making the error of affirming the consequence: the Ark theory is unlikely, and clearly something unlikely is happening, so maybe the Ark theory is true. But you haven’t provided any reason to prefer “Both of the tramp’s claims are true” to “The Bigfoot claim is true, but the Ark claim is not”; you haven’t given any reason why the probability mass that previously was assigned to “Neither claim is true” should be preferentially redistributed to “Both are true” rather than “Just the Bigfoot one is true”. You’ve simply noted that there is probability mass to redistributed, and taken for granted that is should be redistributed to “Both are true”.
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The probability of the next coin flip coming up heads is still 50:50 no matter how many of the previous coin flips came up heads.
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False in the relevant sense. If the coin came up heads each of the past twenty times, consider that you have a biased coin that is near-certain to come up heads again.
If some people are better at problem-solving than others, that’s the equivalent of their minds being biased coins.
(consider by analogy the claim that there’s no point in trying to get all-star players on your baseball team; sure, they’ve gotten more hits and home runs in the past, but the chance of a coin coming up heads is always 50% regardless of past behavior!)
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This reminds me of a section in one of the culture novels where the minds are studying a small number of humans with an uncanny ability to come to correct conclusions about situations given insufficient information.
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At a considerable tangent, this is why prediction before the fact is a better test of a scientific theory than explanation after the fact. For details see:
http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2010/03/prediction-vs-explanation.html
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At some point, your assumptions about what is going on must change. Someone who dismisses eight or ten heads in a row as a fluke is probably on safe ground. Someone who dismisses forty is exercising a fanatical attachment to some assumption that they should really be re-examining.
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One not-yet-mentioned problem with the “pre-Clovis” approach: it’s probably not sufficient for people who’ve succeeded in sifting through a mess of competing claims about pre-Columbian anthropology to have just the ability to apply that same skill to sifting through a mess of competing claims about economic data. For the skill set to transfer they’d likely have to go ahead and actually do the economic sifting– and a lot of the time they’d need for this has already been spent studying pre-Columbian anthropology. Your average pre-Clovis whiz is probably getting his economic ideas from reading the occasional op-ed or magazine piece, and our confidence in the result should be marked down accordingly.
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It sounds like Scott is saying that someone with a high correctness factor would guess right about both pre-Clovis anthropology and Schmoeism based only on flipping through op-eds in both fields, but the limited nature of that information seems to make objections like Lightman‘s more important.
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Perhaps they’re good at identifying others’ correctness factors, and figure out which experts to listen to. Or perhaps they understand the sort of biases that experts are likely to have, and can find the truth more accurately (but no more precisely) by correcting for this.
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No doubt that happens sometimes. More often, when I read an expert in one field sounding off in another, it reminds me of Tom Wolfe’s test pilots crashing their cars in late-night drunken rat-racing, in an attempt to prove that the Right Stuff applies in all endeavors.
The important point is that when an anthropology maven decides which economic ideas to believe, he’s usually employing a different skill than he used to get his anthropological reputation; if he turns out to be right about economics as well, there’s likely to be some luck involved.
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Right, the fact that it takes time to acquire expertise and people have finite time to spend weakly suggests that expertise in different areas should be anticorrelated.
To take a concrete example, let’s say I’m a professor at a university where every grad student we admit is someone whose IQ is exactly 125 and spends exactly 40 hours a week on classwork. If I am talking to a grad student and they demonstrate comprehensive knowledge of graduate-level computer science, it seems reasonable for me to make a Bayesian update against them also demonstrating comprehensive knowledge of graduate-level biology.
(This suggests that a general rationality/correctness factor may exist even if we can’t see it in the data.)
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The closest thing I can identify to a General Factor for Correctness is consilience: small truths are interwoven with each-other in a massive number of ways, and the more knowledge you gain of various domains, the more you can spot the generalities to abstract out. Math actually consists of an entire field devoted to handling the abstracted generalities all on their own, having thrown away the concrete instances. But as a general rule for daily life, apparent propositions, domains, or belief-systems that only really agree internally, without being reconcilable externally to other domains of confident knowledge, are often more likely to range from overblown to pseudo-intellectual, or even into intentional falsehood, than to be unusually accurate “prophecies”.
A mind that can more efficiently compress its specific experiences into abstracted models will achieve a lower generalization error — this is actually more-or-less a theorem of statistical learning theory.
So: a guy says Bigfoot caused 9/11. This completely fails to relate to anything else I’ve ever learned, experienced, or even just heard. He’s probably just nuts.
Yet, so: a guy says AI could destroy humanity. He explains the reason is because there’s no physical force compelling the machine to care about us, so why wouldn’t it just do what it wants? Well, I’ve certainly never seen physical forces compelling moral obedience, and I have seen psychopaths who just do what they want because they fail to possess mental machinery for caring about others, so actually, this seemingly crazy proposition is pretty consilient!
By this metric, notably, you can immediately notice that Thomas Friedman is full of shit.
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I can’t help imagining that Schmoeism predicts population boom and increased nautical investment in pre-Clovis conditions.
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The mental trait that you describe (and speculate about it’s actual existence) would likely have conferred a fitness advantage to our evolutionary ancestors. Making successful decisions in the face of great uncertainty could keep you alive long enough to reproduce.
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I don’t think that’s the right level on which to think about this. It’s like saying “being good at things is evolutionarily advantageous”. Well, so it is, but you can’t evolve “being good at things” as a trait directly. You have to see what the structure of being good at things is, how each different thing evolved, and what factors have led to the preservation or extinction of individual differences in them.
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The mental trait would be a subconscious integration of knowledge and deduction that emerges into consciousness as an actionable prediction. In the ancient ancestral environment, when this fails, presumably you die young. When it succeeds, you pass on your genes. An analogy could be the anthropomorphised descriptor of cleverness in some animal species such as foxes.
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I believe you can however evolve prediction traits by rewarding a neuronal structure that correctly predicts what inputs are received in the future – see e.g. stuff like the Memory-prediction framework.
There’s a theory that ‘Ecstatic Seizures’ work by flooding the prediction component with ‘you’re correct!’ messages which brings on the euphoria feeling (which matches my own experience).
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Ehh. The tribe can survive being wrong better than you can survive being on the wrong side of the tribe.
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Or you become the leader of the tribe. There is no evolutionary advantage to being persistently stupid.
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I’m not sure how you look at politicians worldwide and assume that being right is more likely to make you a leader than being good at stroking the egos of others.
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Being right need not be taking the right positions – an unscrupulous politician who’s right about what positions to take in order to win without being pressured to enact something disastrous and reputation-destroying has an advantage.
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There’s no evolutionary advantage to being persistently on the wrong side of the tribe either. The question is which is less likely to prevent you from reproducing.
If you are on the wrong side of the tribe, you cannot be leader. No matter how right you are.
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During times of abundance, status quo behaviors are rewarded within the tribe because it promotes cohesion of interests. However, during times of scarcity, such as driven by environmental factors, innovative behaviors are necessary for rapid adaption. As hunter gatherer tribes moved into northern Europe and confronted radically changing seasonality (and associated abundance-scarcity cycling), they needed to evolve innovative thinking traits, such as described in this post. Hence the correlation with IQ increase.
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Exactly. This is why you won’t find a “correct contrarian cluster” in politics. In the ancestral environment they would all be dead.
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Yup. The only thing people hate more than a smartass is a smartass who’s right. This is definitely not a trait that would increase your fitness in the ancestral environment.
I don’t really grok why most people distrust anyone who looks smarter than them, but it’s easily observed. I can’t help but find that strange; trusting stupid people seems a lot more dangerous to me.
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One reason not to trust smart people might be concern that they are smart enough to fool you into acting in their interest and against yours.
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The modern derogatory concept of smartass is a luxury borne of our current affluence (and near total extinction of existential hardship). Think survival competence instead, which is how that trait would have been manifested in that era.
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A smartass is someone who pushes you under him in status by showing that you’re wrong. If his arguments aren’t persuasive, its an annoyance. A smartass that is actually right can be a real threat to your status.
If you’re a smartass that’s right, you might be really good at crushing ideological enemies, but you’re not making any new friends by doing it, and friends are important for politics.
The problem isn’t with the “being right” part, it’s with the hostile and not-thought-through political strategy of trying to push everyone under you instead of making friends.
Of course, from the correct smartass point of view, it’s seldom a “hostile” act (at least, not admitted to oneself as one). It’s seen as “I want them to see the right answer! I’m trying to help!”. However, they also see the wrong person as *already* lower than them in status. They might not be judgy about it, but they tend to internally run on rules like “people who are right should be listened to, even if they’re not as popular” so their status rankings clash with the rest of the tribe and result in conflicts when it comes up. The smart ass generally doesn’t have any respect for the existing system, seeing it as unfair and stupid, so they’ll act like it doesn’t exist – like they expect everyone to bow to *their* idea of how status should work. And they’ll end up arrogantly challenging the entire system, making more enemies than friends, and being somewhat bitter and resentful that their not-so-smart political strategy didn’t work as it “should”. And of course, none of is to say they’re *wrong* about their system being better, necessarily – it’s just that it’s irrelevant. No one is asking them.
One strategy is to shut one’s mouth and begrudgingly accept one’s “unfairly” lowered status. One is to run away saying “screw you all, I’m going home”, and trying to play with a few like minded individuals where you can agree on more argumentative norms (or whatever it is).
However, there’s also one where you try to understand *why* it’s so unfair. The one where you try to understand the ins and outs of how even “wrong” people see things so that you can work with them and make friends. And crush your enemies only when you can actually win at acceptable cost. In short, taking the blinders off and actually playing politics without selling out on your principles or running away from the problem.
Personally, I think there’s a place for all three responses. If you can get the last one to work though, it has some nice advantages.
At least, that’s how it looks to me, as a recovering self-identified “smartass who’s right” (who still kinda identifies as a smartass who’s right, but one who is *somewhat* more selective about when to be all “in yo face” about it” to people, and somewhat more likely to let people “be wrong”)
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If you’re a smartass that’s right, you might be really good at crushing ideological enemies, but you’re not making any new friends by doing it
You’re making friends from the less-clever enemies of the people you are crushing; isn’t that kind of John Stewart’s and Steven Colbert’s entire shtick? And it seems to me they have achieved real political power in the process.
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Being able to accurately perceive and predict the physical world definitely confers a survival and reproduction advantage up to a point (though there are cases in which, for example, truly accurate assessment of say, your own tribe’s goodness, might be disadvantageous, and it is in such places we find predictable biases). That fact is one of the best reasons to think our perceptions at all correspond to some really existing world.
But like any other trait, we’d expect some people to have more of it than others, and for it to be more or less advantageous in different environments.
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The evolutionary advantage humans (and really, all living animals) have is pattern-matching to danger. Seeing every streak of yellow as a lion is advantageous to the onyx even when it’s wrong half the time, and this is generally true with any broad class of cases where the cost of being wrong in one direction is death and the cost of being wrong in the other direction is minor inconvenience. Evolution overfits the high-cost consequences.
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Is being correct (in a way that is at variance with received wisdom) about uncertain propositions really so advantageous? Are you sure that being small-c conservative and accepting the popular opinion isn’t generally better for you?
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Yeah, it’s hard to enjoy the eventual vindication you get for being right after that bit where the other villagers burn you at the stake for your correct contrarian opinions.
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People have a wide range of abilities. Evolution is too slow and random to optimize for every trait that might be good.
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That is true, but the traits that are extant are the ones that made it through the gauntlet of chance and natural selection. It’s very difficult to account for the failures, because they are mostly lost to ancient prehistory.
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It may be worth discussing anti-factors here. Anderson, Lin, et. al. from Wharton found Harbingers of Failure which:
Clearly, market-performance is (for however we care to define socially constructed) a culturally defined feedback loop constrained by needing to move real stuff around. But this sort of data mining should be able to find *correlations* in other sufficiently large markets-of-ideas. I’m not sure if we can draw a useful link between market-performance-prediction and “general correctness” but it may be worth discussing as why this sort of thing *isn’t* a useful concept to port over.
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Thanks for the link. I wonder whether it suggests that people who are enthusiastic about products that have failed should be very cautious about starting businesses which are intended to sell to the general public. Nothing wrong with people like that looking for a niche market.
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Yes, it does, just not by very much. If people in delusional fantasy worlds are more likely to have incorrect opinions than average people, it follows that people who aren’t in delusional fantasy worlds are less likely to have incorrect opinions than average people.
You are correct if you are using modes, however. Since few people are in delusional fantasy worlds, the mode is “not in a delusional fantasy world”, delusional people are worse, and nondelusional people are identical to the mode.
1. Yeah. But fhis falls under the third problem. Also, I would assume that the guy is more likely to be unreliable because he is a creationist, but I still need to figure out which *direction* he’s unreliable in. Creationism probably means he’ll always underestimate or always overestimate one party’s chance of winning, not just that he misestimates.
2. It is generally a bad idea to expend lots of resources based on personally being convinced that something is true when it has not been checked by others and otherwise stood up under testing and probing, since you have some probability of being incorrectly convinced. So no.
3. If some factor leads to people both believing in a particular economic theory and believing in a particular archeological theory, it may just be that the factor got lucky. Imagine an extreme case where every economist flips a coin. If the coin comes up heads, they believe economic theory A and archeological theory B. If it comes up tails, they believe ~A and ~B. It then turns out that B is correct. Should I then believe A, on the grounds that all the economists who were correct about B also believe A?
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> Yes, it does, just not by very much. If people in delusional fantasy worlds are more likely to have incorrect opinions than average people, it follows that people who aren’t in delusional fantasy worlds are less likely to have incorrect opinions than average people.
I suspect you misread this. There is no correlation about correctness among people who are more correct than average (i.e. ones who are not in a fantasy land). They are are less likely to have incorrect opinions than average people, but there is no correlation among the defined group.
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It depends whether the delusional people are a small minority, or a majority even of subject matter experts. If so, then finding thwt small non-delusional minority is worthwhile.
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I don’t think we can reasonably deny that there will be at least one general Factor of Correctness, and also at least one Factor of Incorrectness (e.g. insanity). But it is questionable whether that factor will apply to all areas of thought at once, as Eliezer seems to suppose, and it seems to me we have good evidence that it will not. In particular the fact that political parties are so “unanimous” in their opinions indicates that it won’t. Because the political party issues shows one of two things: 1) one political party is absolutely right about everything; or 2) people adopt political opinions based on party affiliation, not reality. And 1) is clearly false, so the answer must be 2).
And if 2) is the case, then if the general factor applies to politics, we should find a “correct contrarian cluster” of people who may belong to a political party or not, but have a set of opinions where they are consistently disagreeing with their party because they are right and the party is not. I don’t think anyone can find a substantial case of this, so I don’t think there is any “correct contrarian cluster” in politics.
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Nuclear power.
Also atheists who were raised religious. (People reject their religions and become atheist; they don’t, in the same proportion, reject their religion to become another religion that is as far away from their initial religion as atheism is.)
Of course, this has a problem: if a cluster of people consistently disagree with their party on a bunch of issues, they’ll form another party. You will then observe this as a case of people agreeing with their party, not disagreeing with their party, and you won’t be able to distinguish it from people who joined the party first and adopted the beliefs of the party second. Libertarianism may actually be in this position–Scott is a blue and not a libertarian, but when you look at the issues he disagrees with blues on, they are pretty much all issues that libertarians agree with, and not, for instance, non-libertarian conservatives.
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The fact that libertarians don’t agree entirely with either major party, but agree with one party on some things, the other party on some other things, and neither party on some things, is, imo, a point in their favor.
Of course, one could cobble together many other conceivable combinations of positions other than libertarianism that are the same, but none come to mind right now that are similarly influential and/or logically consistent today.
For a similar reason I tend to feel slightly uneasy when I find myself agreeing 100% with anyone. I try to find some flaw, somewhere. Of course, it’s generally a good practice to try to poke holes in one’s own view, and maybe this is also just me trying to differentiate my own thought just to feel special (and I do, on occasion, read something with which I have 0 quibbles), but there’s also this general notion I have that, “no one person can be 100% right, so reality is always going to be slightly different.”
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Scott Alexander is probably more rational about politics than anyone else I know, but this suggests he has the same kind of problem (irrationally attaching to group opinions.) Libertarians basically have their opinions determined by one overarching general principle, and reality doesn’t work that way, so they can’t be right about everything. The blues won’t be right about everything either, so this to some extent supports Scott, but on the other hand you can’t really think that the reds will be wrong about everything, so why doesn’t Scott have any red opinions?
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On the other hand, it does seem like there are multiple issues in which libertarians represent correct contrarian clusters within conservative political parties – Gary Johnson within the US Republicans and Daniel Hannan and (formerly) Douglas Carswell within the UK Conservatives, for example. And interestingly, Carswell now appears to lead a correct contrarian cluster on a number of issues within UKIP, and those issues are by no means all the same as the ones on which he was right to disagree with the Tories.
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The point is that Scott is not a libertarian (and clearly has areas where he disagrees with libertarians), yet in the cases where he does disagree with his party, these disagreements almost always end up as disagreements in the libertarian direction, and not in other directions. This suggests that libertarianism is such a contrarian cluster.
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Expressing views that are literally correct is a luxury that actually-electable candidates and parties can’t afford. Libertarians can afford to say true things in public ONLY because they have absolutely no chance of getting elected.
If Libertarians ever seemed to have a chance of winning office in large numbers, their elections would MATTER enough that their electoral process would select for candidates who pander more. The candidates would start saying what their polsters think will be popular with the electorate, the electorate would preference-falsify to pretend to believe what they’re supposed to believe, and the positions would all become unmoored from reality as much as mainstream republicrat views are.
Whereupon some other party would have to take on the role of saying things that are actually true and not caring whether it’s popular – possibly the Green Party.
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You are aware that Scott wrote the FAQ about why not to have your opinions all determined by Overarching Libertarian Principle?
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I don’t really understand the claim. Do you think that everyone in the country agrees with either all of the Democratic Party’s positions or all of the Republican Party’s positions? Because that’s certainly not the case.
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The idea is that people disagree with the Democrats and Republicans, but they don’t *randomly* disagree. People who disagree with their own party disagree on particular issues and in particular directions. So you get Republicans who oppose drug laws and Democrats in favor of nuclear power. But you don’t get Republicans who want to loosen the evidence for rape accusations at colleges, or Democrats who want school prayer, at least not in the same quantities.
This lets you distinguish “people believe this because they are smart” from “people believe this because they believe whatever their party says”.
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Is there data that backs this up, or is that just your impression? It’s extremely easy to get a weirdly skewed picture of opinions of groups like Democrats or Catholics or gun owners by reading media sources.
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It seems like you are disagreeing with Unknowns. He said “I don’t think anyone can find a substantial case of this” and you are saying well we have these common cases of people disagreeing with their parties (drugs & nuclear power). I agree that those as well as several other areas are common, and depending on what level is set for “substantial” I’d say there are many more.
So either Unknowns overlooked a very common phenomenon or we both misunderstood what he was trying to say. That’s what I’m trying to figure out.
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There is no evidence for your assumptions that politico cal disagreements with one’s party are only in conventional categories as depicted in the media.
Many religiously conservative blacks and Hispanics believe in prayer but vote with progressives because they want the government benefits or they have been emotionally manipulated by race-baiting. Without this religious minority population, the blues would have trouble winning elections.
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I would bet my shirt that I could find Democrats who want school prayer. The relative silence in the media there is because of a stronger party line, not because there isn’t anyone signed up for the party who disagrees with it.
Republicans who want to loosen standards of evidence for rape accusations… those are probably rarer, because that’s a position native to a certain flavor of feminism, and it’s harder to find Republicans who’re serious about that than it is to find Democrats who’re serious about public religion. But they probably exist, too.
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I think an alternative model is to say that there is still a “general correctness factor”, but there is also a “politics factor”, and a given individual’s opinion is the sum of their loadings on both factors, plus noise. So the correctness factor still applies to political topics, it just usually gets swamped by the politics factor. From an inference point of view, that would be fine (provided you have enough data), you would be able to do a Netflix-style factorization and extract both.
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I would guess the one of the easiest ways to more correct then usual is to to de-simplifiy problems by acknowledging the fuzziness of the definitions and breaking things into components. For example rather then then the supporting or opposing the serotonin hypothesis of depression, have a list of hypotheses of both correlation and causation for each serotonin receptor type with happiness and depression. The problem is that is inefficient for most problems and isn’t applicable for questions of resulted in complex systems like elections, but being aware that your heuristics will fail in some edge cases seems like a good place to start.
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Are they higher-level Keynesian beauty contest players?
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1. Obviously I ignore both sites and go check Ladbrokes or literally any prediction market.
2. Why would I want a Nazi-melting box? I don’t hang out with Nazis and have no need to melt anyone.
3. Not at all. Both are almost certainly wrong in important ways, knowing economists. Nor do I care what either thinks about archaeology. And can someone tl;dr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settlement_of_the_Americas for me? Is the validity of “Clovis-first” even a question on which an (honest) expert should have more than 75% confidence? If not, the counterfactual behind #3 basically contains no information.
4. How does one “do better” on a test the answers to which are controversial? According to who?
Tetlock’s research just validates Bryan Caplan’s ultimately rather banal observation that you shouldn’t really listen to anyone who expresses an opinion on a highly uncertain and controversial issue but isn’t willing to bet on it. In my opinion, the most surprising related research finding (Servan-Schreiber) is that even betting for abstract stakes like reputation in a particular community will work, provided that reputation is well-quantified. I also find it pretty unsurprising that CIA analysts with their classified info can’t beat the best amateur, uncleared forecasters. The vast bulk of classified info probably shouldn’t be secret, but also isn’t especially relevant or even interesting, yet the fact of its classification will likely lead someone with clearance to overweight it. Moreover, different elements at the CIA face different political incentives: career civil service types probably face the least career risk by being exceptionally well-calibrated, but have little incentive to be highly discriminating, whereas fast-track political apointees angling for a cabinet job probably have the exact opposite incentives.
Oh, and BTW, if you want to see prediction market addicts forecasting sports, weather, industry trends, etc., come join us at Inkling or a similar market. GJP happened to focus on international affairs because that’s where the money is. They also put a lot of resources into training, team-building, etc., and ended up with an exceptionally successful pool of superforecasters. But in many ways international affairs is a terrible testbed for studying correctness, because the questions that turn out to be interesting often can’t be or fail to be formulated in the right manner before the events of interest take place. (For example, you can ask if there will be a coup in country X by date Y, but first please produce a definition of coup which uncontroversially either applies or does not apply to every single political power shift in history.) Sports, weather, etc., are easier domains in which to formulate precise questions, provide a wealth of statistical data for coming up with good predictions, and yet still abound with ill-informed pundits all to eager to make lousy predictions.
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I’m not interested in prediction markets per se (well, I am, just not in this context), I’m interested in the observation that certain individuals seem to consistently do very well in them.
Besides, if I ever get into prediction markets, it will be because I finally overcame my procrastination and decided to win some easy money betting against Bernie Sanders.
(and possibly Biden running for President. Right now it’s at about 50%. Does anyone seriously expect him do this?)
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Well I am looking forward to reading Tetlock’s book on superforecasters when it comes out this fall, but I would be surprised if it contains anything too surprising.
On your aside: I’ve made much more money by betting against Hillary. (For the general, not the primary.) Her fans think she’s got a 65% chance which I don’t buy, and her haters will occasionally bid that down to 45% or so. On a good day I can get in between. There is not so much to be made by shorting Bernie, even at a place like predictit.org where his market price is an astounding 23%, factoring in fees, market depth, etc.
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I’d rate Biden running for President around 35%. I see the yes side of the bet as mostly counting on two factors:
1. Most people in his circle are telling him to do it
2. He is likely to listen to those people
1 is a reasonable assumption for any prominent politician considering a run. You’d expect their circle to comprise people who think the politician is great or at least has something to contribute. Plus the self-interest of a small chance that they’ll end up being in the circle of the President.
2 would normally be a sticking point for someone with Biden’s political experience, as you’d expect him to realize it’s a low percentage political move. But the bet there would be that he’s looking for a distraction from grief and a way to return a sense of purpose to his life after the saga of his son’s illness and death. Not because of anything specific about Biden, but just because those are things people in general are often looking for in similar situations. A presidential run is certainly a distraction and certainly infused with purpose. It may make him more susceptible to listening to his boosters than he normally would be.
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At this point in Biden’s career, his choices come down to running for president, or becoming a forgotten and impotent something-emeritus. He’s too old, and his reputation too weak, for him to either start down a new path or wait until 2020.
It is possible that he’s ready to wind down his career and focus on non-political matters for the remainder of his life. But if a career politician’s choices come to the greatest job in politics ever and forgotten emeritus-something, I wouldn’t bet everything on his choosing “forgotten emeritus-something”. If an otherwise impotent nobody has even a long shot at more power than any other human being ever, he might just go for it.
It would, of course, be an extremely long shot at this stage. But his campaign, at this stage, would need to be little more than a placeholder campaign as the Democratic Alternative Who Isn’t A Crazy Socialist Just In Case Hillary Drops Dead; he doesn’t have to undertake the herculean effort of building a campaign that can defeat Hillary because that’s not going to happen, and so he can expect to take over the working bits of Hillary’s campaign if his own is ever really going to make a go of it. And he doesn’t have to plan on staying in office past 2020, because that’s not going to happen either.
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I think one thing which has become very apparent with the current Republican field is that running for president has become a very winning life choice, even (or maybe especially) if you fall into that large not-entirely-implausible-but-still-not-likely-to-win category which now seems to include most senators and governors.
There is only shame if you win the nomination and lose the general. There is absolutely no shame in losing the nomination unless it was viewed as yours to lose in the beginning (as it is with Hillary now). On the contrary, running an even remotely plausible campaign for the nomination greatly increases your speaking fees, your probability of getting a tv show, of being invited on tv shows to comment all the time, etc.
I think there are fewer democrats doing what the republicans are now doing only because the establishment is so settled on Hillary that running against her might be viewed as an act of party disloyalty. Though I do wonder if there’s something about conservatism or the GOP more generally that has started to encourage this for them in particular. Maybe conservatives, though they have a low view of government in the abstract, have an even higher view of the majesty of the office of the POTUS than do most liberals, meaning that even trying to run for the office puts you in that lofty “potential president material” category.
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It much less meta than that. The past few election cycles wiped out a lot of the potential Democractic talent. There are currently 31 Republican governors to 18 Democratic governors, 31R:11D state legislatures. 54D:44D senators, and 246R:118D House members. The problem is compounded by the fact that the ones who got wiped out were more likely to be the newer, younger ones with potential. Now they’re just “that guy who couldn’t win his own state.”
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I think that a large number of Democrats aren’t doing it this year specifically because of Hillary, yes. It’s hard to overstate the degree to which Hillary is dominating the Democratic establishment ATM.
But I also think that the incentives are very different for Republicans and Democrats – not so much for an ideological reasons, but for two other reasons.
First, my sense is that relatively speaking, Democrats tend to care more for party loyalty, Republicans for ideological loyalty. That makes it much easier to justify a presidential run if you’re a Republican.
Second, I think the media landscape is dramatically different for the right and the left, which changes the career paths, and hence the incentives to run for President if you don’t have a good chance to win, on each side.
EDIT: @ Jaskologist – while there’s some truth to that, I think there’s also a reasonable number of people who would probably or certainly be running this year if Hillary weren’t. It is certainly not the case that every potential candidate in the Democratic Party is running.
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Wait until the answers are no longer controversial, see who the experts now side with.
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No.
Relating this to the real world, I’d expect to learn that the survey results were something like this:
| Schmohist | Anti-Schmohist
--------------------------------------------
Pre-Clovis support | 8 | 6
Pre-Clovis against | 4 | 12
No opinion | 188 | 182
…and I’d be unlikely to want to draw any conclusions from that. If the economists do actually all have opinions on Pre-Clovis settlement of the Americas, that would be because it’s been politicized (either generally, or theoretically just among economists), and I wouldn’t want to draw conclusions from that, either. The opinions that end up in political bundles are not, I believe, generally viewed as related to each other, instead achieving high correlations because of group enforcement.
There’s an essay on less wrong that specifically addresses this question: http://lesswrong.com/lw/gt/a_fable_of_science_and_politics/ . I’ll excerpt at length:
It’s hard to read that essay as support for the idea that when the devotees of one idea largely agree on one side of a different contentious idea, the fact that they’re right about the first one suggests they’re also right about the second. Sure, this is a constructed example, and quite arguably an artifact of politicization, which does things this way on purpose. But I don’t see how you can avoid both the problem of the issue being politicized, and the problem of extremely small sizes in the group of “has opinions on two very different issues”.
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YES. Thank you.
And when you select for controversial opinions on several issues, your sample will end up even smaller and weirder.
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“3. Schmoeism and Anti-Schmoeism are two complicated and mutually exclusive economic theories that you don’t understand at all, but you know the economics profession is split about 50-50 between them. In 2005, a survey finds that 66% of Schmoeist economists and 33% of anti-Schmoeist economists believe in pre-Clovis settlement of the New World (p = 0.01). In 2015, new archaeological finds convincingly establish that such settlement existed. How strongly (if at all) do you now favor one theory over the other?
4. As with 3, but instead of merely being the pre-Clovis settlement of America, the survey asked about ten controversial questions in archaeology, anthropology, and historical scholarship, and the Schmoeists did significantly better than the anti-Schmoeists on 9 of them.”
Isn’t communist versus capitalist an example of why this wouldn’t work? If one position is ideological, like all political groups it will bring its bundle of correct and incorrect positions.
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To me, the second situation (with the man who claimed that Bigfoot caused 9/11) seems much more clear-cut than the other scenarios, and I think the reason is that he clearly has some additional piece of information that you (and most other people) don’t have. In the other situations, the same information is available to everyone, and their differing opinions depends more on how they interpret it. These look like two fundamentally different types of situations.
It seems like the second scenario (hidden information) is less common, especially since people will generally share their information in support of their arguments, and everyone ends up having the same information again. However, I think “ability to find novel pieces of information” seems like an ability that could definitely contribute to a general factor of correctness.
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1. I would favor the pollster who believes in evolution over the pollster who does not. Any interpretation of data confers numerous degrees of freedom on the interpreter, and I am a lot more confident that the evolutionist’s judgments will not be driven by wishful thinking. Also, hackneyed joke about how it’s a logical truth that the Green Party will never win an election so P=0.
2. Learning that bigfoot caused 9/11 would so undermine my confidence in the media, the government, common sense, and natural science that I have difficulty imagining what my resulting belief set would look like. I am not sure I would still be confident that my name is E.K. I think this scenario might just be too weird to elicit useful responses.
3. If I found out that one sect of economists had correctly predicted the discovery of pre-Clovis settlement while another had not, my first, second, and third instincts would be to look for explanations that make it a spurious correlation. Maybe the Schmoeist economists are more liberal, and pre-Clovis settlement comports well in some subtle way with liberal ideology. Maybe risk-takers are drawn to Schmoeism, and believing in pre-Clovis settlement was, at the time, a pretty big risk. Only after all of the hypotheses that don’t depend on some sort of cross-disciplinary prescience are ruled out (and good luck with that!) would I seriously entertain the idea.
4. If the Schmoeist economists consistently outperform the anti-Schmoeists on a wide array of scientific predictions, I would be inclined to think they were more reliable and subscribe to the Schmoeist newsletter, yes.
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Any interpretation of data confers numerous degrees of freedom on the interpreter, and I am a lot more confident that the evolutionist’s judgments will not be driven by wishful thinking.
Oh really? And the evolutionist-pollster might not be hoping, for example, that the Pomegranate Party will win because they’re running against the Sacrifice to Baal Party, and the Baalists are those crazy creepy religion-obsessed nutjobs while the Pomegranates are nice and liberal and recycle and worry about global warming and really they’re just the right kind of folks – so if maybe perhaps a tiny tiny bit of data massaging makes them look like they’re doing a small bit better than they actually are, that may encourage the floating voters to go Pommy not Baal?
You’re absolutely sure that could never, ever happen? Because look at the results of the recent British election and how everyone that counted as a pundit was convinced the Tories under Cameron would get hammered and that didn’t happen in reality.
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I’m reminded of the story about how unscrupulous hedge funds sometimes create lots of parallel, slightly different funds at the same time. One of these will, by sheer chance, inexplicably beat the market five years in a row. The hedge fund goes on to tout that fund as evidence that they’re investing geniuses.
Let’s say there’s an issue that smart people at large are spilt 50-50 on, and tribe X is really convinced that one side of the issue is right. Then it turns out that tribe X is right. There are two kinds of possible explanations:
1) tribe X collectively reasoned out the correct solution, because they’re better at being right
2) tribe X chose their side based on a variety of cognitive biases or life experiences common to tribe X members. or, a small number of influential but possibly fallible tribe X members chose that side, and it spread as a cultural meme to everybody else (e.g. Eliezer and many-worlds), etc. (i.e., any factor that has nothing to do with how smart or ‘generally correct’ tribe X members inherently are)
Seeing that tribe X was right certainly causes a Bayesian update that makes (1) more likely than before. But I think in any case, the prior for (1) is very, very low, exactly _because_ people at large are split 50-50. If an issue is 50-50, there must be compelling evidence and good arguments on both sides.
The result is that if you ran this kind of experiment on, say, ten 50-50 issues and 1000 tribes, and you found one tribe that got all the issues right, I would still think it was far more likely they got lucky.
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The problem is more insidious when it isn’t one hedge fund company deliberately seeking to employ a deceptive strategy, but 10,000 independent hedge funds all starting out in a given year. The five year survivors may well be honestly convinced that they are investing geniuses rather than lucky.
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I think almost everyone makes these kinds of judgments all the time, consciously or subconsciously, and for better or for worse. I tend to assume people who make a lot of spelling and grammar errors are more likely to be wrong, for example. This may be a helpful shortcut, but there are definitely pitfalls as well: people tend to assume that people with certain accents (British) are smarter than others (Southern), that people who agree with them on one highly questionable issue (religions) are more trustworthy on other questions, etc.
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Are you sure that’s false?
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Do you consider Yudkowsky himself to be someone who might qualify as having a high General Factor of Correctness? Because I haven’t been able to take him seriously ever since finding out about Roko’s Basilisk – it’s a perfect example of smart people taking lots of individually-logical steps to come to a completely ludicrous and insane conclusion.
Also, if a small group of people prove to be consistently really good at predicting not only major international events but also “sports games, industry trends, the mean global temperature in 2030, or what the next space probe will find” and they’re not terribly well-educated or well-informed about the things they’re so consistently correct about – it’s possible they’re actually making decisions in a way that everyone else could theoretically learn to imitate, but it’s also possible they’re just psychic.
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You don’t even need to go off into overly specific predictions of the far future. You can just look at the linked article and the bizarre insistence that the many worlds interpretation is a “slam dunk”. Given that there’s no evidence for it (though none against it either), having such a high confidence strikes me as to be irrational.
Maybe, *maybe*, if there were enough backward looking predictions a la Pre Clovis to demonstrate a remarkable track record, but if there had been I expect it would have been prominently trumpeted in the post.
To put it another way, even if the correct contrarian cluster exists, I’d be skeptical of anyone’s claim to be in it without some actual evidence.
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>Do you consider Yudkowsky himself to be someone who might qualify as having a high General Factor of Correctness?
I don’t think you can, because Yudkowsky’s contrarian opinions are on matters that are not settled yet. If we wait until some of his weird theories are confirmed/disconfirmed, we will then be able to say what his Factor of Correctness is.
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Wait what? Yudkowsky banned someone for basically having a LW specific troll, how does this indicate that he’s wrong, re: basilisk?
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Because he didn’t ban on grounds of simply trolling, he banned on grounds of the idea being intrinsically dangerous, and according to RationalWiki he still doesn’t believe it’s safe to talk about the concept of “acausal trade with possible superintelligences”.
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RationalWiki is not what I’d call a reliable source on this topic, but I’ve seen references to the basilisk blanked as late as a year ago. I think Roko deleted his own account, though, albeit only after Eliezer threw a fit and blanked a bunch of his posts.
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I am not in love with Eliezer, but he doesn’t believe in Roko’s Basilisk.
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Eliezer doesn’t believe in the exact version of Roko’s Basilisk that was causing trouble, but he does believe that Roko’s Basilisk-like ideas are serious threats.
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Believing that Basilisks are possible doesn’t seem that crazy. Human minds probably have exploitable flaws.
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It may be relevant that the tails come apart and so we should be wary of expecting the best economists to also be better at thinking about anthropology than the almost-best economists, for instance. That is, there may be a correctness factor for the general population that doesn’t work the same way for experts. If there’s a correctness factor for economics and another one for anthropology and they’re correlated, they may nevertheless be uncorrelated or even negatively correlated among the best economists.
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1. No opinion
2. I’d start digging as fast as I could.
3. By a small to moderate margin.
4. By a good to moderate margin.
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> I think in a sense this is the center of the entire rationalist project.
And that’s why the central rationalist text is Tetlock’s Expert Political Ju– wait, what? who? *Many Worlds*?
Seriously, though. One better criticism is that even if there’s a general factor of correctness, that doesn’t mean that if you look at a particular subgroup that’s correct in one particular area they’re more likely to be correct in another particular area. (Statistics! Our intuitions are bad.) As a perfectly plausible mechanism and relevant subgroup-drawing, experts may know a lot in their own fields, but are actually worse when they venture an opinion at all (or at least a contrarian one) on expertise-requiring questions in other fields, because you only have so much time to become expert in things. [edit: discorded beat me to it above]
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Economists who believed in pre-Clovis American settlements may have just sat at the faculty luncheon with a particularly clever and contrarian anthropologist/archeologist/historian and been convinced of it. If they didn’t carefully weigh all the evidence and make the correct conclusion, that would be a major confounding factor. (Of course, if a person has a network of people who tell them correct contrarian things, then that’s useful too)
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I agree there’s certainly noise, I’m asking if there’s also signal beneath it.
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I think another question is, “if there’s signal, how much?”
It’s possible for there to be some weak cue that lets you predict something better than randomly guessing, but not necessarily much better. In principle you could integrate that with a bunch of other weak cues and possibly even some strong cues and get a better result than if you didn’t use that cue… but in practise the gains to be had might be so small, that the chances are that the noise might mess things up more than the signal helps.
I’ve often had this problem when working with machine learning. Yes, there are lots of techniques that are reasonably robust against throwing lots of “junk features” at them, but “reasonably robust” isn’t the same as perfect and I’ve often got slightly better results by keeping the weakest cues away, even if the weakest cues on their own allow predictions substantially better than chance.
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The ability to figure out which contrarian academic is likely to be right is one of the things that might make you both successful in your own field and better at reaching conclusions in other fields. More generally, the ability to distinguish honest arguments by people who care whether they are right from attempts to persuade by people who care whether you reach their conclusion, is an important input to making sense of the world.
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I agree, this example would be a good illustration of the skill underlying the correct contrarian cluster (if there is one). To the extent such a thing exists, it would be largely based on skills related to evaluation of evidence and sources. Hearing a good argument from a good source and finding it convincing is a demonstration of that skill.
I don’t think it’s very useful to think about the correct contrarian cluster in terms of polymaths who accumulate world-class expertise in numerous fields. Even if there do turn out to be a few of those, it’s not really actionable. World class multi-field polymaths would be difficult to cultivate. And you can’t just ask them about a subject in a field they haven’t studied yet; since their correctness is based on deep study, you’ve got to give them time to study it.
Much more useful would be some factor of source and evidence evaluation that allows people to judge correctness from hearing/reading divided expert opinion, even second or third hand like through journalists’ reports. If this exists, it’s likely to be teachable. Or at the very least you can find people with a lot of it, give them a field they haven’t studied and some cursory information about it, and learn something useful from their impressions.
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Huh, I originally misinterpreted the Correct Contrarian Cluster as Correct (Contrarian Cluster), whereas it’s the Cluster of Correct Contrarians. No wonder that Eliezer’s term didn’t make sense to me.
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Is it really -0.8? Perhaps -0.08?
This paper by Tetlock et al. is relevant here. They had a bunch of people forecast geopolitical events over two years. Then they looked at how various individual differences variables and experimental manipulations (e.g., putting people in different kinds of teams) correlated with prediction accuracy. Their main results are in Table 3; the signs are negative because lower Brier scores are better. However, I am somewhat skeptical of these results as the structural equation model they use (Figure 4) seems to be misspecified (several Heywood cases).
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1. Yes. Whatever I already thought. My prior confidence in pollsters is low enough that knowing one of them has a borderline-certifiable belief in another area doesn’t make me think him or her much less reliable than the other.
2. I dig. The Bigfoot 9/11 discovery has already, as I mentioned above, made me much less confident in my previous overall worldview, making unlikely predictions by anyone significantly less unlikely. Even with the tip from the Bigfoot-predicting tramp, I probably only rate my chances of finding the Arc somewhere around… 15%, maybe, but that’s a high enough probability to recommend digging given the potential payoff.
3. Negligibly-very slightly.
4. Meaningfully.
As an aside, I’m pretty sure the general factor of correctness is something Pratchett intends us to think of Vetinari as scoring astonishingly highly in.
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If you had asked a white racist what would happen in Zimbabwe/Rhodesia once (black) majority rule came into effect, I am strongly confident that the racist would probably have made a better prediction than an anti-racist. They would have been ridiculed and vilified by the anti-racists for this, but time has shown they would have made more accurate predictions.
What does this tell us? Is racism correct? If racists can be right about some things, are they right about others?
Today’s racists are far more likely to view climate change as not existing. They are ridiculed and vilified for this in the same way our Rhodesian racist (who was right) would have been about his “racist” predictions.
Even people who have a good record of correctness on some issues can have blind spots on others. We are all influenced by ideologies and social groups to which we belong.
A person who is correct on all the dry, scientific, non-political issues can throw their rationality out the window when it comes to issues with a political dimension (which seems to be pretty much everything now).
Correctness probably rewards cynicism and social detachment. Most people probably wouldn’t want to pay the costs required to be correct on everything.
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“Revolution creates freedom” factoid actually statistical error. Average revolution creates 0 freedoms, Washington George, who lived on his own continent full of natural law theorists, was an outlier and should not have been counted,
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Indeed. I think ultimately this boils down to a question of which is more important – correctly predicting an outcome or the “quality” of your reasoning?
Let’s say that tomorrow, we stumble upon some sort of completely scientific and incontrovertible proof that climate change is entirely fake and represents zero threat to humanity whatsoever and never will. What would the reaction be by those who, previously, were fervent believers in climate change? An apology? An admission of a mistake? Compliments to the foresight and prescience of their former opponents?
Not bloody likely. Almost certainly, they would grudgingly admit being incorrect, but immediately follow it with something like “Those deniers just got lucky. Based on the evidence we had at the time, advocating for intervention against the threat of climate change was still the most reasonable and ‘correct’ position to take.”
My guess is that this is how most of the world sees racist Rhodesians – as idiots who got lucky. And there probably aren’t enough major issues like this that show a huge level of contention followed by some ultimate outcome where predictive ability can be properly judged to form a large enough sample size to draw any meaningful conclusions on the data.
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My problem with this is subject expertise vs generalism. For instance, EY’s oft repeated claim that someone who accepts many worlds is more likely to be rational would, at the very least, have to have looked into it. This is not a time free use of one’s time, and thus detracts from one’s study in one’s chosen field. That is, the more you know about other fields, the less you know in your chosen field than a hypothetical you who devoted all their time to their field.
This idea, specialism vs generalism, is something I’ve noticed in day to day life. During my academic studies, some colleagues would essentially devote all their time to their field. As a result, they were better at it than I was. I am fairly confident that I had a broader base of knowledge than them, but if it came to a question about this particular field, they were more likely to be right than I was.
If an economist was right about the clovis sites, I might wonder if they’d spent some time studying to be so, which might make them less expert in economics.
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That sounds a bit like the RPG fallacy.
Yes, in theory everybody has a finite amount of time available for studying and learning things, making knowledge a zero-sum game. But in practice, some people are just astonishingly good at picking things up quickly, while others will never be more than mediocre in any field even if they spend every waking hour of their life on learning about it. (Sorry, Malcolm Gladwell.) I doubt that raw amount of time spent on studying is very often the limiting factor in how much someone can know.
In fact, it seems that expertise in one area and above-average knowledge/skill in other areas are very often positively correlated. In my experience, the more competent someone is in their day job, the more likely it is that they have at least one unrelated hobby or interest which they also excel in.
E.g. take Richard Feynman, who was a world-class physicist and a semi-professional artist and who decided to go and study Mayan hieroglyphs one day and almost immediately discovered some things which the experts in the field had missed. If I learned that Feyman, after spending just a few weeks of learning about some new area of science which he had known nothing about beforehand, had formed an opinion about it which was contrary to the expert consensus in that field, I would be willing to bet more than even money that Feynman would turn out to be right in the end.
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I really don’t think this is generally true. There certainly exist individuals of such extreme intelligence that they do well in multiple fields, but, actually Feynman is a great example. In one of his books he mentions that he and his fellow physicists had spent lots of time inventing clever new stats techniques, only for him to go talk to a statistician who was already aware of them! The point being that as smart as Feynman was, he alone wasn’t able to go into a field he wasn’t familiar with and invent things no-one had ever seen before. So , using this principle you might find Feynman making incorrect predictions about statistics based on his more limited knowledge and then conclude he wouldn’t make very good predictions in physics!
Yes, a very smart person has the ability to master lots of subjects, but not the time! Feynman was good at lots of things, but he was expert at one.
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But note that in your anecdote, although it turned out that Feynman had been re-inventing the wheel, he wasn’t actually wrong — the techniques he had discovered were valid and useful, just not as original as he’d hoped. And in the case of the Mayan hieroglyphs he did in fact discover something new which was later accepted as valid by experts in Mayan archeology.
Anyway, my point was not that Feynman could just walk into any field and start second-guessing the experts there. My point was that his reaching impressively high levels in several other fields, does not appear to have come at the cost of his accomplishments in physics (unless you want to claim that he would have won two Nobel prizes if he had focused himself more).
And if he did take a contrarian position on a topic which he had only started investigating a few weeks before, then based on his track record I would assign a pretty high probability to the hypothesis that he had indeed discovered something new which all the domain experts in that field had previously missed.
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This corresponds to my father’s story about Leo Szilard. Szilard would come to my father (they were both U of Chicago professors) with some idea in economics. It was generally right, but something economists already knew.
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In my field, the most respected figures are, in general, specialists in a given area. In my experience, they are very clear on what is and is not in their area, and in what areas they defer to the opinions of others.
In a way, having a definitive opinion is a sign of being a generalist with limited knowledge.
Perhaps a “general factor of correctness” is a social skill of determining what sort of other people to listen to, which may mean “only listen to people who don’t make definitive statements” or “only listen to people when they put a great deal of caveats and preconditions on their statements.”
I could see where, over time, this would repeatedly lead to a confidence interval that did not include the null.
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The continuous, weak-evidence version of this effect is very hard to apply. But the negative selection version works very well. It’s simple: whenever you read something that’s stunningly stupid, close the tab and pretend you’d never read anything by that author. Do this consistently while also keeping careful track of which sources are primary sources and which sources are secondary sources, and you will sometimes find that what looked like a 50/50 split among experts was actually a 100/0 split among non-stupid experts, balanced out by secondary sources and an occasional idiot.
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So you expect there to be a class of people who never say anything stunningly stupid? If you interpret stunningly strictly enough for that to be true I suspect you won’t get to eliminate enough experts for the heuristic to be worthwhile.
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I expect the main effect of a heuristic like this is false positives on “stunningly stupid” causing you to disregard the opinions of those in opposing tribes.
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This is reminding me of Geneen Roth, a writer of self-help books. I found her books engaging and initially plausible.
She wrote a book about figuring out *exactly* what you want to eat, then eating the least tolerable amount. Her weight was low normal and life was good.
Then she discovered she had a systemic yeast infection, and most of the foods she liked were actually making her sick. One of the few foods she could tolerate was peanut butter, and she gained weight.
She developed an emotionally stressful method of emotional change and losing weight and she made a bunch of money from it.
She lost all the money to Bernie Madoff, and wrote a book of financial advice.
At that point, I was done with Geneen Roth. Perhaps I should take another look at her books to see if I can figure out if there’s something she’s getting wrong in general, and if it’s a mistake I’m making.
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I first thought that “Clovis” referred to the Merovingian king and that “pre-Clovis settlement” meant something like “it would have been preferable if Europeans had colonized the Americas before Clovis was king”.
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After reading through the Psychology Today article linked from the Wikipedia page on the Good Judgment Project summarizing the research, the qualities required don’t seem that mysterious to me.
From https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-sports-mind/201505/whos-best-predicting-the-future-and-how-get-better :
So basically, good forecasters are people who:
– Want to have beliefs about the world that accord with reality instead of wanting to confirm their existing beliefs
– Primarily rely on evidence, actively seek out new evidence, and are willing to update their beliefs in light of that evidence
– Have the knowledge and intellectual capacity and skills to act on their desire to be correct about reality
Note: Haven’t commented here before, so apologies in advance for any mistakes in formatting.
EDIT: Link to full paper is here: http://pps.sagepub.com/content/10/3/267.full.pdf
The summary above seems to be basically accurate, although the paper obviously has more detail. The researchers have included some data on the characteristics of superforecasters vs. others, so for anyone interested in this it’s well worth a read.
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Hm, I just get a subscription page when trying to access the paper now; luckily I saved a copy. I suppose I’ll take this as a sign that it was my fate to read that paper so that my beliefs could be supported and reality bent the rules for me.
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Were you previously using wireless at a library (or perhaps on a college campus)? I’ve found that some publishers recognize connections coming from a subscribing library and grant access even if you don’t go through the library page or log in. Sage might have been one.
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No, same computer and connection.
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“when they go home, they take off the lab coat and relax with some comfortable nonsense. And yes, that does make me wonder if I can trust that scientist’s opinions even in their own field ”
This only shows the author’s own biases against “comfortable nonsense”. What does even fall under that term? Doing hard drugs? Monthly binge drinking? Watching Judge Judy religiously? Reading shallow works of fiction? Working on your oldtimer car? Playing table games with your friends? Having and keeping friends in the first place? Doing charity work unrelated to your field? Having any hobbies at all? Would anyone question Richard Feynman’s abilities in researching and teaching theoretical physics because in his spare time he was also a painter, drums player, safe cracker, night club visitor, and womanizer?
Nearly everyone occasionally needs a break from their primary field of interest, but that does not automatically call into question their abilities in that primary field. The only people I can think of that are both exceptional in what they do and never need a mental break from it by doing something else, I call savants.
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Believing or disbelieving things based on religion/politics/other instead of using a basis of evidence and rational thought.
None of those are true beliefs and none of those are comfortable nonsense beliefs, because none of those are beliefs.
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The quote I commented on was not limited to beliefs and ideas. It was about “[taking] off the lab coat and relax[ing] with some comfortable nonsense.” The distinction between beliefs and activities is artificial; in the end, everything we believe and everything we physically do is for the benefit of our brain anyway. Scientific work outside of non-scientists’ imagination is far from flashy and exciting all the time. It can be boring, repetitive, and the road to success (if success happens) is paved with setbacks. Scientists are still human, and humans need physical and mental distractions if they don’t want to burn themselves out on their job. If Judge Judy or the Holy Mass will do the job without interfering with their work, then by all means, let them.
But it doesn’t matter anyway, the argument works the same for pure beliefs and ideas. The Wikipedia list of Christian thinkers in science shows that believing in science and believing in religion don’t have to be mutually exclusive to be notable in either. There are people who are able to distinguish between those two aspects of their lives, and I harbor the belief that this is the real meaning of rationality. It’s not to shut out all superstitious thought, just like Catholicism would like you to shut out all heretic thought, but being able to separate them in a real way, so that one does not obviously interfere with the other.
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Yes it was. “Nonsense” is a truth value and only makes sense in the context of things that can have truth values.
This would not surprise the author, since that is his entire point.
You do you, I guess. Meanwhile, the author is trying to find a consistent method of separating truth from nonsense.
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“The fourth problem: is there a difference between correctness and probability calibration? Suppose that Alice says that there’s a 90% chance the Greek economy will implode, and Bob has the same information but says there’s only an 80% chance. Here it might be tempting to say that one of either Alice or Bob is miscalibrated – either Alice is overconfident or Bob is underconfident.”
In the long run you can figure this out by giving people points proportional to to the negative logarithm of the probability they assign to the event not occurring. If Alice says 90% chance of collapse and Bob says 80% chance of collapse, if there’s a collapse then Alice gets -ln(.1) points and Bob gets -ln(.2) points. If there isn’t, Alice gets -ln(.9) points and Bob gets -ln(.8) points. I guess you could call these points “nats” or whatever.
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This breaks down if
a) calibration is harder on some problems than others (e.g. everybody is well-calibrated on dice-throws) and
b) some people make more predictions in some of these categories and some more in others.
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Three somewhat disconnected points here:
1. The math guarantees you’ll find a general factor for basically anything. (Yes, it’s more complicated then that, but not interestingly so.) The question then is if it is something real or just an artifact. Interestingly, the realness of a general factor for predictions would be unusually testable. Basically one would measure it for past testable predictions and then remeasure for then-testable now-future predictions twenty years later. If it stays basically stable it’s probably real, if not not. My guess is factors for specific fields (economics, archeology…) will be stable, the general factor won’t.
2. Yudkowsky claims the domain experts are clearly wrong on several otherwise basically unrelated things. This basically requires the general factor of correctness not only to exist but to be really important.
Because if it is that important, then it may be the main explaining factor for some real people’s opinion sets and then someone claiming the experts are obviously wrong on lots of things might just have a high general factor of correctness. On the other hand, if that factor is not a very important thing, that option goes away and someone claiming the experts are obviously wrong on lots of things is almost certainly a crank.
3. If you identify the general factor of correctness with rationality it would be basically explained by biases affecting people less or more. The individual biases are mostly measurable. Carrying on from there, it could be two stories
-There could be a general factor for non-biasedness which then should be a less noisy version of the factor for correctness
-and/or there could be some biases affecting practical judgments much worse than others.
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Yes. This is an important point that deserves promotion. But I either don’t understand, or disagree with your second point that:
I’m not an expert in factor analysis, but based on what I know my intuition is that there isn’t a strict dichotomy between “real” and “artifact.” And my understanding of what you’re proposing to quantify a factor’s “reality” sounds like test re-test reliability. The reality of a concept is more like validity. I think your proposal measures something important, but not reality/validity.
p.s. For what it’s worth. In 2012 I was made one of the Good Judgment Project’s first superforecasters and starting in 2013 I joined the GJP statistical research staff.
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Whoops. I spoke to soon. I don’t think its true that a general factor always appears. It will always appear when sub-tests are all positively correlated, but I’m not sure we have good reason to think all sub-tests of “correctness” will be positively correlated.
http://bactra.org/weblog/523.html
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2013/04/myths-sisyphus-and-g.html
Regardless though, I think the main point is that the existence of a general factor would be far from sufficient to prove that the general factor is very useful.
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Can you explain/link to this math?
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The psychologist Keith Stanovich is constructing a rationality quotient test. Not sure if this is quite what you’re after, though.
http://io9.com/a-test-to-measure-how-rational-you-really-are-609412488
Also, ClearerThinking (led by Spencer Greenberg) are working on a similar project.
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Time spent on topic X is time that cannot be spent on topic Y. The existence of a hypothetical ‘general correctness factor’ seems to also implicitly be an argument that time spent on a topic should not be much related (in the extreme case: unrelated) to belief accuracy on that topic. This seems wrong.
One might also think of the correctness factor as an amplification parameter which modifies belief accuracy based on signal strength; a ‘people high in ‘general correctness’ can do more with less’-type thing. You still come across the problem that you need a signal to amplify, and it seems to me that experts have such a lot of knowledge about the topics in which we’re interested that in general the disparity in initial signal strength between the ‘right in general-guy’ and the ‘expert’ should be so high as to make the (non-field-knowledge-related) amplification irrelevant. I’m not saying knowledge about one topic cannot be applied to increase accuracy on other topics, but the topics need to be related, which brings into serious doubt the extent to which such an effect can ever be as ‘general’ as seems to be implicitly assumed; it seems plausible to me that one should be able to use knowledge of mathematics and statistics to improve judgments on e.g. a variety of medical topics, whereas it seems less clear just how statistics would help you make sense evaluating the accuracy of historical sources dealing with the true state of affairs in 16th century Naples.
A related problem which may have been mentioned in other comments is that how you evaluate correctness is not perfectly clear, and ideally certainly more complicated than it is made out to be in the post. People can be right about stuff for the wrong reasons, or they can be wrong for the right reasons (e.g.: ‘not enough evidence’).
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The corporate culture at Amazon.com includes the veneration of a list of “Leadership Principles”. One of these principles is “Be Right a Lot”.
Unlike meaningless but externally similar lists at every large corporation (e.g. integrity, excellence, obsequiousness), the Leadership Principles are part of *actual* daily conversations about what the right/Amazonian thing to do is.
This happens more often, admittedly, with Principles like “Customer Obsession” and “Frugality”, which are applicable to individual decisions. However, it does also lead to occasional discussions of what it even *means* to “Be Right a Lot”, how that’s in conflict with having a “Bias for Action”, and how the heck one even goes about assessing such a propensity in an interview.
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Hopefully I didn’t misread the post (bit short on time), but I think one other issue is where the available “evidence” is actually noise and peoples opinions are just noise. I think stock market prediction is sometimes a little like this. Often people predict up or down, or they predict a crash or correction is coming “soon”, and if you have a decent number of punters, some will be correct by chance alone (for example, up or down, 2^5, you only need 32 people to “discover” someone with the prophetic ability to predict the last up or down trends). If you select those people as GF for correctness, you’re in trouble. I guessing you could detect the noise-like nature of the evidence by the distribution of opinions, but I haven’t thought about it a lot and my stats isn’t going to win any awards either.
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No one is going to point out that Archaeologists are pretty split on the pre-clovis stuff about 2/3rds for – 1/3rd against? Large amounts of the evidence for pre-clovis is pretty loose, and that the field puts up with it because they generally like the people proposing it? Which isn’t to say there aren’t one or two good sites and there’s not some good work done… but the science is far from settled.
On the topic at hand, I’ve met some people I consider to be lucky, just like a ‘luck stat’ like in a RPG. As a rational person I can lie to myself and say that memory is faulty, we forget data that would contradict our experience, and that we are more prone to seeing coincidences in than not. This doesn’t change the fact that saying the rational answer *feels* like a lie. It feels and looks like luck exists.
There’s a theology term: preternatural, which refers to something that doesn’t violate divine law, but goes against the patterns of normal phenomenon. High levels of coincidentalism, unexplained foresight, and other factors that can be attributed to luck would all fit in that description. Preternaturalism was historically associated with witchcraft and the devil, perhaps if it had a genetic component, maybe it’s been artificially selected out of the humans. Those who had more preternatural luck were burned at the stake.
The problem with this is that it basically means “these people are born more compatible with seeing the code of the matrix than you are”, which isn’t very useful. I mean, it is in the sense that you can look up the answer in the back of the book just by asking them, but having the answer isn’t anywhere near as useful as the how and why something happened. If you have no knowledge of the underlying system, and all you have is correlations, once the correlations break down you’re left with less than no knowledge.
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I am a “lucky” person. Like, eerily lucky. I used to think it was Providence. I now think it’s a combination of
*some actual luck (affluent parents, high IQ)
*something like “resourcefulness” (a sort of general “survivor quality”, being good at making things work out for myself; my dad’s description was “if somebody dropped you in Greenland, you’d find your way home”)
*something like “gratitude” (noticing things that go well for me, being able to appreciate extremely positive experiences)
*the Matthew Effect making good luck and good decisions compound
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Beauty is more important than either of those. And you’ve got it, unless you faceplanted into a lathe or something recently.
I wonder how many ugly high IQ people from rich families think of themselves as “lucky.” My guess – not many. Perhaps I am too cynical. But then IMHO the primary “luck” these days is not wealth or beauty but how aggressive your neoplasms are and how many decades it takes them to show up. Don’t count your decade-eggs before they’re laid!
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Whenever I hear about people being “lucky”, I immediately think of this study:
I can’t find the original paper this is based on, but I wonder how it distinguishes between the possibilities that the unlucky people didn’t notice the message and that they didn’t trust it.
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As I recall, it did the obvious thing: they asked them if they saw the message.
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Re Lesswrong survey: I recently plotted Lesswrong survey 2014 general opinion on logit scale to http://www.leijuvakaupunki.fi/images/box/lw2014pestlogit_correct.png
The confidence of opinion increases from left to right so that for instance if one puts a probability estimate of 25%, it comes to x = -1 about. To top is the prevalence of the opinion in the survey population so that if 25% of population hold the opinion to be less probable than x, then y ~ -1 about. The succession rule may twist it a bit, or not. Succession rule adds 1 to the occurances and 2 to the total number of observations to correct for 0% and 100%.
So global warming is held on sum as the most credible proposition, and religion is held generally the least credible position by the lesswrong survey population. There seems to be a cluster of l religion, supernatural and god, of which god is held most credible and religion is held least credible.
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An *apparent* “general factor of correctness” will arise if there are such things as broadly applicable principles.
For example: physicists, for good or for ill (and in my opinion mostly but not always for good) frequently attempt to explain things in other fields. So do economists. Frequently, what they’re doing is taking some mathematical tool (power laws, statistical mechanics, etc) and applying it to new things. If certain tools have broad applicability, then someone who uses them everywhere will have an overall tendency to be right when “expert consensus” is wrong.
In a more subtle and subjective sense, it’s possible that certain *mental tactics* are broadly applicable. Anything from simple stuff like “check the data” and “consider that you might be wrong” to aesthetic sensibilities about “elegant” solutions. If there are certain tools of correct thinking, then people who use them will come up with better ideas across the board.
Some tools of correct thinking are common among educated and conscientious people. (“Check the facts”, “listen to people who disagree with you instead of just insulting them”, etc.) Some are rare, and may not even be articulated yet. It may be that the secret of being Ramanujan is “oh, I just Fwibble”, and the problem is that nobody has yet specified *how to Fwibble.*
I don’t think there’s any evidence as yet that there’s *one* tool rather than many. “The scientific method” is a pretty generally applicable tool; so is “try statistics on it.” I’ve known a few people who are *weirdly* good at getting correct intuitions on technical topics they know nothing about, and they may be using some nonverbal, “intuitive” part of their brains in a “generally correct” manner.
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This reminds me of how, for instance, high-energy physicists came to dominate derivatives trading. It isn’t a general factor of correctness. It’s that applied math works a lot better than intuition, even very finely tuned intuition and a great business and finance education, at more things than just physics.
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I think the Duhem-Quine thesis (AKA confirmation holism) is a useful tool here. Theories are not tested in isolation; any test of a theory is also a test of its assumptions “all the way down”. A confirmation of one piece is actually a confirmation of the entire “web of belief”, and therefore strengthens all other pieces as well.
The General Factor of Correctness emerges not as a property of people, like IQ, but of systems of belief.
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“Outside the laboratory” doesn’t seem very paradoxical to me. It seems like exactly what you would expect with many different professions that require largely disjoint sets of knowledge and skills. In particular, the argument of “Outside the laboratory” seems like evidence that what you need to be a good e.g. biologist is depth in biology, not in a more general skill like epistemology or rationality.
The Telock result is really intriguing; I have no idea how it could be true. Is there a plausible explanation?
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Basically, this is a question about “to what extent can ideas generalize”, or “how simple is the world”, or “is all knowledge just domain knowledge.”
The human brain is evidence against the strongest possible statements of the “all knowledge is domain knowledge” thesis. We have *one*, rather small, organ which is responsible for everything humans know. We seem to have a repeating *pattern* in cortical architecture, which makes some researchers suspect that there’s a “single cortical algorithm.” If knowing about A really told you nothing about B, then we’d need specialized “hardware” for every task. We don’t. The universe is at least *somewhat* intelligible. In a very weak sense, having a human brain is a “general factor of correctness.”
I think of this in sort of a PCA sense — are there “principal components” that explain a lot? Can you capture a lot of information about the world in a “sparse” or “compressed” way?
The answer is quantitative rather than qualitative. I’ll find myself in arguments with radical empiricists saying “no, really, not everything is a special case, you *can* generalize, THE HUMAN MIND IS A THING” but it would also be true to argue with radical rationalists that “no, really, not everything is just an application of your general theory, the universe isn’t as friendly as that, I fucking *dare* you to try your theory on this problem.”
The world is *pretty* simple but not *perfectly* simple. If you want to quantify that, you need to talk about actual Kolmogorov complexity or power spectrum or whatever.
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We’ve certainly got some specialized “hardware.” Some parts are much more important than others, and different parts do different things. And the universe is somewhat intelligible… But some parts of it are much more intelligible than others. And we often make things intelligible, or communicable, with analogies to the sorts of things our brains handle well.
Some things (most things?) can be dealt with practically when defined simply, and that class of things contains everything we have knowledge of. Nothing is actually simple. Some things are simple to deal with when we’re careful not to set our standards too high.
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One possible revision of the “always agree with expert consensus on everything”:
“Always agree with expert consensus on everything *except* when it is likely skewed by signaling.” In which case it is always interesting to see which Blue Tribe experts are willing to make concessions to the Red Tribe and vice versa. So “Weigh more heavily the opinions of experts who are willing to send negative tribal signals.”
Corollary: “Weigh more heavily the opinions of non-angry experts.” There are a surprising number of angry experts.
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Perhaps related is the SciCast project, which tried to answer a range of prediction questions about science and technology by crowdsourcing the answers (like the IARPA project cited here). It’s also funded by IARPA. They’re not open for submissions right now, but every so often they’re looking for new questions to answer, and votes/predictions on those questions. See more at scicast.org.
“Unlike other forecasting sites, SciCast can create relationships between forecast questions that may have an influence on each other. For example, we may publish one question about the volume of Arctic sea ice, and another about sea surface temperature. Forecasters can later link the two questions together, and make their forecasts for ice volume depend on sea temperature. Once they are correlated, SciCast will instantly adjust ice forecasts whenever the temperature forecast changes!”
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For those interested in the Superforecasters, we are having a conference and meetup in London on the 24th October which will give answers to some of the questions raised here https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/myevent?eid=17800174802
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Let’s see-
1) Yes, but-
I’m prepared to draw an inference in favor of the second site based on that fact, but not a very strong inference. It would color my perceptions only in the exact situation you posit, where I have no other exposure to the data. Even knowing the positions of the parties would lead me to make my own guesses based on past experience, and this data wouldn’t be enough to overcome my own self-assurance.
2) Maybe.
I don’t want to make a special snowflake answer here, but I find this question harder than the others. If someone predicts that bigfoot exists AND did 9/11, that’s very powerful evidence that they have access to information which I don’t. Ordinarily, I would see that kind of information as uncorrelated with the otherwise-distinct assumptions you need to make to locate the Ark underneath EPCOTT… but the fact that Bigfoot did 9/11 tells me that my model of reality is disasterously wrong anyway.
So ordinarily I’d say ‘This man has shown himself to be very right about past things, but the chances of THIS prediction being right are so incredibly low that I can’t update to positive probability’. And then an invisible garage dragon would eat me or something because bigfoot did 9/11 and none of my priors are trustworthy.
So I probably would go to Florida, under the suspicion that I’m actually insane or something, and neither finding nor not-finding the Ark of the Covenant would make me calm about the whole situation.
3. I don’t favor either from that information.
But I think that question could still prove your point in another way. Like, if the anti-Schmoeists happen to be somewhat more correct about an obscure point of precolonial history, I don’t consider that literally no information, but I do think it’s more likely to be noise than signal. Beyond the obvious questions of what kind of reasoning and scholarship are signaled by historical knowledge as opposed to economics, this feels likely to be the artifact of another correlation. Maybe most Schmoeists are Communists and most anti-Schmoeists are facists, and something about those political viewpoints makes each more prone to motivated reasoning in favor or against pre-Clovis settlements. (This does not, of course, disprove the possibility that a preference for communism or facism is connected to General Correctness)
But if anti-Schmoeists are mostly in favor of pre-Clovis theories AND support a more nuclear-heavy grid AND oppose artificial electric deregulation legislation, I’m more likely to listen to them. And I think that’s pretty much your position anyway.
(…is what I would like to say, but economics is a field full of motivated reasoning landmines. Even trying to avoid them, I’d probably end up supporting whichever theory led to the results I liked best.)
4. Oh whoops I answered 3 before I read this. Yes, I would feel a little better about the Schmoeists then.
But I would still be worried that all of these things come from a ‘history and culture correctness’ mechanism which is only loosely affiliated with economics.
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This might be more about over-confidence, but I’m sure I saw something which argued (from some survey/study) that the best people at making predictions in a field were those in related fields, compared both to specialists and more distant people. So people whose life’s work was studying Iranian politics made worse predictions about Iran than people whose life work was studying Egyptian politics, and vice versa, although both were better than those who studied Jane Austen. I think the thing I read argued that the problem was that the specialists tended to put too much weight on the details only they knew which were often less important than the obvious stuff. E.g. they would focus on the personality of a new Minister or the impact of a recent protest whereas others looked at very broad trends.
More generally, my gut feeling about this is that within intelligent people, the two things that lead to them being wrong is either
a) not taking the ‘intellectual responsibility’ to actually think about things themselves, and instead just defer to expert/tribe position. I associate this with ‘comfortable’ establishment types, and it’s probably more frequent.
b) being so convinced of their own insight that they over-estimate how much weight to give to their own arguments/insights over others. I associate this with an autodidact tendency – at a personal level I’ve seen it in people who were very bright but didn’t go to universities/jobs where they met intellectual peers. This is obviously more frequent with rationalists/contrarians.
So I guess that tending to be right might be steering between these: people who actually think about things for themselves, but don’t overvalue their own unique insight.
As a side point, I use ‘What Scott Alexander thinks about things’ as a short-cut to guessing what’s true about things I’m not informed about. With a few exceptions where you seem to have a stronger than usual “personal” take on it – specifically ‘Social Justice’ stuff.
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For me, this recalls how the usage of the word “bias” has shifted.
Around here I think we’re all on board with the idea that we’re not perfect reasoners encumbered by weird neural glitches, we’re actually just a bag of modules and specific algorithms which interoperate to sometimes yield correct results.
—
Lightning strikes a tree and creates and great fire which wipes out all the local flora and fauna. The leader of the tribe holds a council to determine what should be done.
Bandmate 1 suggests that the band should relocate far away from trees so this never happens again.
Bandmate 2 advocates for making more sacrifices to the Lightning God to avoid further punishment.
Bandmate 3 points out that this type of thing happens very rarely and that doing nothing at all is the easiest option.
The first suggestion will technically solve the problem but is an overreaction. Having no other information, I would predict (with low confidence) that Bandmate 1 would also promote avoiding all berries because one time they got sick after eating some berries, to cease hunting wildebeest because one time their cousin was gored, and to set a night watchman outside the cave every night because one night three years ago a bear raided some food stores. I might loosely refer to Bandmate 1 as anxious. Their plans for the future are skewed because their probability estimates are all skewed in a mutually correlated way in favor of absolutely guaranteeing security and safety.
The second suggestion rests on a poor model of the world. However, other than wasting whatever resources are involving in making a sacrifice, it actually addresses the problem just as well as the third suggestion of “do nothing” except it makes the band feel like it’s doing something. Bandmate 2 may also believe that the recent drought was caused by the appearance of a handful of recent bad omens. In other words, Bandmate 2 is the incorrect contrarian cluster, the conspiracy theorist who manages to always be wrong in unfalsifiable ways.
The third suggestion optimally conserves resources and recognizes the futility of taking action, but such a phlegmatic attitude is prone to go catastrophically wrong every once in a while. What if there really is a Thunder God, after all, and the decision to do nothing actively dooms the band? Where Bandmate 1 is anxious, Bandmate 3 may be neurologically biased in favor of conservative predictions, believing the world to be a pretty safe place at a gut level. But just because Bandmate 3 was right this time doesn’t mean Bandmate 3 is a superpredictor. Bandmate 3 may also be prone to insisting that the game will come back because they always come back, that the rains will come soon because droughts are unusual, that hunting wildebeest is safe because they’ve personally never seen anyone gored.
So that was my off the cuff typology of why people are usually bad predictors for psychological reasons. I would love to see a psychological analysis of the superpredictors in the Good Judgement Project – do they have a unique disposition? Is that correlated?
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I’m am Bandmate 4, and I recommend moving away from the area where all the flora and fauna are dead.
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Bonus round: a week after your band vacates the area, a meteor strike destroys everything that remained. How should the band interpret this information? How WILL the band interpret this information?
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The efficacy of option 2 may help explain the evolutionary success of religious thinking: in many situations, the best course of action may be to do nothing substantive, yet take relatively low-cost actions which make you feel you are doing something. Compared to taking potentially high-cost, high risk substantive action, or doing nothing but living in dread, option 2 may actually be the best.
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While making the sacrifice at the obvious location, ie the remains of the tree, Bandmate 2 notices something flickering. When he tries to pick it up, it burns him, and he shouts “The Lightning God has sent a message. We must all gather here right now!!”
When they do, Bandmate 5 thinks “Hey, that stuff might be useful.” Several months later, Bandmate 2 says “Let’s make sacrifices to the Lightning God who gave us this gift.”
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“If they can beat the experts in those fields, then I start really wondering what their position on the tax rate is and who they’re going to vote for for President.”
May I ask why? What exactly are you implying here?
I feel like to a certain extent, we’re confusing “the ability to be correct about what really happened” with “the ability to forecast how popular opinion will move.” A “generally correct” person could predict who will be elected President, but does that mean this candidate is somehow superior to other candidates? Does that make their position on tax rates the best position? What exactly would you do with such information if you had it?
Like, to take the Bigfoot 9/11 example, let’s say he phrases his comments very specifically, and the guy says: “Ten years from now, everyone will acknowledge that Bigfoot caused 9/11.” Let’s say that he is correct about this, ten years pass, and for whatever reason (perceived evidence, or maybe just the rhetorical ability of the anti-bigfoot crowd), 95% of surveyed Americans do in fact believe that Bigfoot caused 9/11.
Does this mean that the original predictor was right? Well sure, he was right about how opinion would change. But does this mean Bigfoot *actually caused* 9/11? Well no, not necessarily. If, one year later, we stumble upon some sort of “smoking gun” solid evidence that shows Bigfoot didn’t actually cause 9/11, but most people refuse to change their opinion on the issue, was the original prediction right or wrong? To what extent has this man shown the ability to be “generally correct?” How could I utilize his abilities for anything other than evil (like say, a politician who has no deeply held positions, and only wants to win elections, and could really benefit from having someone on his staff who can accurately forecast public opinion 10 years into the future)?
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This is a good point, though part of the weakness of the whole enterprise is that expert consensus or overwhelming public opinion are the only yardsticks for determining correctness. So, if someone predicts “10 years from now, 95% of experts will think Bigfoot caused 9-11,” that prediction will, in ten years, be indistinguishable from “Bigfoot did, in fact, cause 9-11,” in terms of judging that person’s “correctness factor.”
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Exactly.
But if the prediction is “Bigfoot did in fact cause 9/11″, at Year 10, when 95% of experts agree, this person will be judged as accurate.
But if new evidence is found at Year 11, and all the experts change their position, this person would then be judged as inaccurate.
How “correct” you are about something depends on both the evidence and the expert consensus (these are often, but not always, correlated…) *at any given moment in time* Someone who appears to be “generally correct” today could be “generally incorrect” tomorrow if popular and/or expert opinion moves on a few key issues.
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I think this is why Scott’s example of some archaeological question which is currently say, 50-50 split, but which one can imagine being pretty decisively answered by some new discovery. Only if you were right before the new discovery do you get the correctness points. In other words, there probably are good criteria for judging this, but they may be fewer uncontroversial criteria than we’d like or expect.
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Not that I’m reading less wrong a lot, but it surprises me that I’ve never seen less wrong people (explicitly) discuss the work of Keith Stanovic. I’d recommend his book “Rationality And The Reflective Mind” for some very interesting reflections regarding intelligence and general rationality, from the perspective of a philosophically inclined researcher in biases, heuristics, and decision making. I think he’s brilliant. Currently reading another book he wrote “The Robots Rebellion”. You guys should check him out! He seems right up your alley.
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If ability to evaluate evidence and come to accurate conclusions across a broad range of fields relies on some skill other than brute-forcing it with domain knowledge and IQ, some skill that looks like “rationality” broadly defined, then cultivating that skill starts to look like a pretty good idea.
There’s no question in my mind that on average men are more rational than women. And that this is independent of IQ and education level. Men are more object, abstraction and fact-oriented and women are more people-oriented. Women can only really be interested in individuals. Not necessarily individuals they know personally. They ARE interested in celebrities. Unlike women men can find physical objects, facts and abstractions intensely interesting. When women are interested in objects (clothes let’s say) it is strictly for the impression that those objects will make on the people they know. They’re not interested in these objects in themselves.
Obviously nerds are more fact, abstraction and object-oriented and less people-oriented than other men. Does that mean that nerds are more rational than other men if we control for IQ and education level? Maybe. If there is a difference, it’s definitely smaller than the male-female difference in rationality though.
The people who do well in the interpersonal world operate subconsciously in it, through intuition. If you ask them how they do it, they would not be able to tell you. Conscious reasoning (“if A is true, then B must be false”, etc.) is more common and useful in the fact, object and abstraction worlds.
People can be charmed, cajoled, guilt-tripped. Facts are implacable. The skills one needs to do well with people are very different crom the skills one needs to do well with cold, hard facts. If there is a rationality factor independent of IQ and education, then I would guess that it’s related to this people-objects spectrum of mental orientation.
There is a theory that people of northern European background are more rational (Finns are an extreme I guess) than others because they lived on isolated homesteads for millenia. The northern climate could not support high population density for famrers.
If you live in a big village, you have to be political to survive. You have to be good at influencing people. If you live on an isolated homestead, your struggle for survival is mostly conducted against the inanimate forces of nature. This could have made such people more object-oriented and less people-oriented than others.
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“There’s no question in my mind that on average men are more rational than women. And that this is independent of IQ and education level. Men are more object, abstraction and fact-oriented and women are more people-oriented. Women can only really be interested in individuals. Not necessarily individuals they know personally. They ARE interested in celebrities. Unlike women men can find physical objects, facts and abstractions intensely interesting. When women are interested in objects (clothes let’s say) it is strictly for the impression that those objects will make on the people they know. They’re not interested in these objects in themselves.”
It’s interesting that you start with a probabilistic statement, and then go to absolutes (“Women can only really be interested in individuals.”) which imply a degree of telepathy you haven’t got. This is not a good argument for your rationality.
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All the women I’ve known could only be interested in individuals. The degree of the ability to be intersted in objects, facts and abstractions that I’ve observed among women does not vary. It’s like the ability to get pregnant in men.
It’s typical that out of the several points I made in the above comment you chose to dispute the one that almost certainly offends you personally.
Men get personally offended all the time. But some men have the ability to sometimes rise above that and to consider things in the abstract instead. I have never known any women who showed any sign of such an ability.
How do I know that no man has ever gotten pregnant? I don’t. I’ve never known or read about any men who have. But if I wanted to make an effort to express myself in the strictest way possible, I would avoid absolutes when talking about male pregancy.
Making that kind of effort is not always worthwhile though. Actually, it’s a waste of time most of the time. If I was always worried that someone who was personally offended by one of my points would nitpick them in this fashion, everything I wrote would become unreadably verbose and would take several times longer to write. And the points I made wouldn’t get better for it.
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“All the women I’ve known” does not encompass the attitudes, interests or views of “All the women I don’t know”, much less “All the women currently alive on the earth, or who have ever existed”.
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The point was reasonable and grounded in the specifics of what you were saying. You did proceed really quickly from probabilistic statements to absolute statements about the internal processes of a very large group of people. Don’t be daft. One doesn’t have to be personally offended to notice that – really it seems to me that you’re the first one here to talk in terms of offense & political pre-commitments.
And the analogy to pregnancy is not, I think, well-formed. If nothing else, it’s much easier to determine whether or not someone is pregnant than it is to classify their mental processes. And we have access to a vastly larger body of evidence in the one case than in the other (your personal subjective observation vs the entire history of the human race).
To be clear here, I’m not saying your argument is either true or untrue. But I don’t think you can assign such a high degree of certainty to it. I don’t think it’s good to assign high degrees of certainty on the basis of “I have never known any woman who did this.” & it bothers me that your immediate response is to start talking as though the only reason anyone could disagree with you is because they personally take offense.
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“And we have access to a vastly larger body of evidence in the one case than in the other”
This is not true. The history of science, mathematics and other fields that require rationality is evidence. Female contributions to them have always been negligible. Public stereotypes are evidence as well. Folk wisdom about human nature is pretty much infalliable. By the way, if you disagree with that, please cite a case where you think it’s wrong.
“If nothing else, it’s much easier to determine whether or not someone is pregnant than it is to classify their mental processes.
Preganacy is not apparent for months after it starts. Irrelevant nitpick? Sure, but you’re defending someone else’s irrelevant nitpick here – the one about my use of absolutes when comparisons would have been more factual. Please try to avoid throwing stones from glass houses.
And on that note, where did you suddendly get all that certainty of yours? Much more difficult to determine? I thought you were against certainty. Much? How much? More? Why not less? And based on what evidence?
I admit that this is not how real disucssions of real issues ever look like, but if you want to play this game, I can play it too.
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I would posit that the number of individuals involved in the history of mathematics, science, and other fields that require rationality is significantly less than the number of human beings in recorded history
I mean, you can argue about precisely how much evidence there is for the rationality / gender hypothesis, but I think no matter how much the exact number is, it’s going to be hugely off from the amount of evidence for the no-male-pregnancy hypothesis. I just don’t think it’s a good analogy.
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Not hugely off. 0% vs 0.1% or 0.5% or whatever it might be. If you want real statistics, there’s Murray’s Human Accompishment.
Most stats-gathering efforts, including Murray’s, have an error rate. What would the errors look like? People (both men and women) getting credit for stuff they didn’t do or the current thinking in the field about the relative importance of various contributions being wrong.
What is the likelihood that the error rate of Murray’s method is higher than the share of female contributions that he recorded? That likelihood isn’t low at all. If his error rate is 5%, it would probably tower above the female contribution rate as determined by his method.
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I guess it’s a big internet and I shouldn’t be surprised that somewhere, someone actually believes vox populi, vox dei, but I didn’t expect to find such a person here.
For reference the full quote is “Nec audiendi qui solent dicere, Vox populi, vox Dei, quum tumultuositas vulgi semper insaniae proxima sit.”
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Folk wisdom about human nature is pretty much infallible.
So, Glossy, what colour are your eyes? Which foot do you dig with? Oh, we know all about the likes of you and what you’re like and what you do and can’t or won’t do…
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@Glossy, This does give me a weird feeling of deja vu to an essay by one of my least favorite philosophers, the late and I hope mostly unlamented David C. Stove. He wrote an essay arguing for the intellectual inferiority of women. Among the terrible arguments he deployed was the one you give, citing the lack of contributions from women. Like you, he seemed blissfully unaware of the fact that recent historians who have looked for contributions from women have found quite a lot of them; there seems to be a depressing pattern to stories about female accomplishments, where even if they were recognized in their own time (as happened more often than one who hasn’t actually studied the history might think), later generations forget them, or more likely just forget that women were involved.
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Hypothesis: General correctness is the ability to compensate for the inherent bias of politicization that plays into every field’s consensus.
Even on the extreme end of the spectrum of ‘no-politics': e.g. the Clovis question – there are reputations and careers built on one an answer. Then there are the preferred conclusions that native people want: namely that they are descended from the original settlers. This is what I gather from about the issue from DNA USA, Brian Sykes.
Another example will help to illustrate how to be Generally-Correct about archealogy: Piltdown Man.
Without using your scientific knowledge, just your cultural knowledge do you think the following will hold up: The year is 1912 and an evolutionary link between ape and man has been found on a British Isle! Thus lending credibility to a separate evolutionary lineage for Europeans.
I think the problem for many experts, is that they aren’t able to go “meta” on an issue like this and see the issue in context of the biases of the day.
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Oh, I think Piltdown Man is my favourite hoax! Though I do feel sorry for Teilhard de Chardin – this scandal obviously didn’t help him when he was getting in trouble with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith over his “Cosmic Christ” ideas
(I’ve never believed he was the hoaxer, because frankly he never struck me as having that kind of sense of humour, or much of any kind of one.)
It’s also a big part of why I’m so sceptical about evolutionary psychology explanations, or at least the pop versions of the same. See how fast there were diagrams and “artist’s impressions” and hypothetical reconstructions of the mental, social and civilizational levels of Piltdown Man, who turned out in the end not to exist at all? A lot of evo-psych seems to me to take the same approach: well, here is this thing in modern human behaviour that needs to be accounted for. So first we’ll assume it’s always been this way, or at least part of humanity for hundreds of thousands of years. So to survive this long, it must have had some evolutionary advantage, else it would have died out with its possessors. So we posit an explanation for why men are promiscuous, or women like pink, or people have some kind of unreasonable bias against eating raw dead raccoon that’s been scraped off the road after stewing in the sun for three days.
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Making good guesses is much, much less important than nailing down certainties. Maybes carry much less water than sureties. Advancements come from taking what used to be uncertain environments and making them certain. I am deeply skeptical of the notion that getting better at dealing with uncertainty is a critically important endeavor. We’ve all got brains that evolved to deal with uncertain environments. Sure, some might be better at it, some might be worse. But it just isn’t that big a deal. You don’t get from the stone age to now with better and better guesses. You get here, and to a better future, by accumulating certainties. Some fields don’t seem to make for productive certainty-mining. Long term political forecasting, for example. That doesn’t make such subjects less important, but it very much does make it so that knowledge is less productive there.
Let’s take any task that produces value. Say, making tortillas. I’ve gotten OK at that over the last few weeks. So I’ll get two people behind me when I make them – some random guy, and a Probability Estimation Genius. – and I ask them various questions. Is this the correct amount of flower? Have I added too much water? Is this the correct amount of salt? Is this the length of time I should knead the dough? Is the pan too hot? Probability Estimation Genius will make better guesses, and will be much better at estimating how often he will be wrong than the random guy. But the probable result of following his advice and the advice of the random guy is the same – shitty, worthless product. In order to get something valuable, you need to know what you’re doing. If you don’t KNOW how the dough should look/feel/taste, if you don’t KNOW how hot the pan should be, etc, you’re not going to produce value. The value comes when you figure that stuff out and don’t need to guess anymore.
There’s an argument to be made that Probability Estimation Genius is still better off, because he is going to figure out the right way to do things quicker. Perhaps. But how much better off? How much time do you save, how much performance is gained, by being better at guessing than your peers? I would say it is heavily dependent on what kind of environment you’re in. But going back to my earlier point, I think that environments where it’s terribly hard to nail things down, where guesses are very often the best you can do, are much less productive than environments where you can methodically nail down one thing, then the next, then the next.
Speculative markets would be the prime example of the first kind of environment, engineering the prime example of the second. Probability Estimating Genius will count coup in the stock market, make a big profit off of their abilities. Someone with great deductive prowess, and an excellent memory, will probably do better in the market than your typical shmuck, but he won’t approach PEG’s profits. But who will be the better engineer? And which field’s advancement yields more fruits for humanity?
Porque ne los dos? Why not be a great deductive mind, and a great estimator of probabilities? Well, I guess my question is, which is more productive – gathering and feeding more facts and arguments into your deductive engine, or getting better at guessing? I don’t think the answer is obvious, but my feeling and working assumption is that the former is more productive than the latter for the same reason that advancements in engineering seem to yield more fruit than advancements in speculative techniques. What you can nail down is more important than what you can’t, because you simply can do more with it. And if you want to move the needle on something that can’t be nailed down, which everyone does, my answer is to drill down to some part of it that can be nailed down, and work within that.
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An extremely people-oriented person could pick the right side in a scientific controversy by intuiting which side’s proponents are BSers moved by ulterior motives. To be able to choose the right side in a scientific or technical field through first principles or by examining the available evidence it would help to be object, fact and abstraction-oriented.
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I like the people-oriented view. Extend it to encompass a good intuitive sense of human cognition patterns, and you can can judge not just “who seems like a motivated BSer” but also “who seems like a rigorous thinker and who seems like a sloppy or hasty one.” That might get you most of the way to the right side of the controversy, just via knowing who to listen to.
The only issue is that people in the field can also tell who’s a BSer and who’s a rigorous thinker. Probably better than you can because they’ll catch the BS or rigor of technical points and you’ll miss it. That’s a big part of how consensus forms. So I don’t know how likely it would be to beat consensus with such an approach.
I guess you’d be looking for someone with such developed “people sense” that they are superior judges of BS or rigor despite being ignorant to judge technical points. Like they can infer it from writing style or organization or word choice or facial cues or others’ reactions or something non-field-specific.
That level of people sense would be pretty amazing. But I wouldn’t be totally surprised to find it. Any gene or meme that boosted intuition about the trustworthiness of information from other people would have been the subject of huge selection pressure since the invention of language. We might by now harbor some pretty amazing capabilities in that regard.
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It’s interesting to read that old article from Eliezer again. He correctly identifies the problem that in order to identify the “correct contrarian cluster” in the first place, you need to have some objective way to verify the correctness of a contrarian claim.
Scott, in today’s post, identifies the same problem and proposes to look at claims which used to be controversial, but have since been resolved, thanks to new evidence, to the satisfaction of the experts in the relevant field. So e.g. if we take it as a given that the existence of pre-Clovis settlements is considered uncontroversially true today, then we can use that to find people who predicted that outcome when it was still a controversial claim, and look at their predictions in areas where the jury is still out.
However, Eliezer addresses the same issue by giving three examples of things which he considers “slam dunks”, none of which is in fact generally accepted as uncontroversially true today! His three examples are atheism, the many-worlds interpretation and P-zombies. I think it’s fair to say that none of these can be fairly described as something which used to be controversial but where one side has clearly won the battle since then.
(Probably most people on this site, including me, will agree that atheism is true with 99.9999999999% certainty, but if you believe it’s a settled question then I want to introduce you to a few billion people who would disagree quite strongly. And obviously there are lots of quantum physics experts who disagree with Eliezer’s stance on MWI. Not sure what percentage of mainstream philosophers would side with him on P-zombies, but it’s not really the kind of thing where new evidence might prove that a formerly-controversial position turned out to be correct.)
So, Scott is saying: if someone has a track record of correctly making contrarian predictions which are later vindicated by new evidence, you should pay extra attention to what they say about topics where the experts aren’t sure yet. Eliezer is saying: if you agree with me on a topic where I am very certain that I am right, even though half of the world’s population has a different opinion, then I will assume that you are correct on other topics (where I do not have enough knowledge to directly judge the evidence by myself) as well.
That’s a rather important difference.
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As for p-zombies, the Phil Papers survery of anglophone philosophers shows that p-zombies are controversial and not a slam dunk (scroll to the very bottom).
~47% say p-zombies are conceivable but not metaphysically possible
~25% say p-zombies are inconceivable
~18% say p-zombies are metaphysically possible
(the rest fall under “other”)
Like most big philosophical questions, there is division and no clear “slam dunk” either way, as much as Yudkowsky probably wishes there was.
The other thing to note about Yudkowsky’s examples is that none of them make empirically testable predictions about the world, and it’s unclear how they could be resolved by empirical evidence, so I’m not even sure if they’re relevant to the issue in the rest of the post. P-zombies and atheism are philosophical positions, while MWI is an aesthetic interpretation of some mathematical models of quantum mechanics that is not empirically testable (if I understand it correctly).
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So according to the survey, 72% of anglophone philosophers say p-zombies are metaphysically impossible. Given the generally contrarian nature of philosophers, I’d say that’s actually pretty impressive (and many of the 10% in the “other” category were surely people who basically also think p-zombies are metaphysically impossible but wanted to vastly exaggerate their quibbles in order to be special snowflakes).
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Atheism does make empirical predictions about the world, as Yudkowsky points out in “Religion’s Claim to be Non-Disprovable” and “Beyond the Reach of God”. In fact, there is a whole book called Why Won’t God Heal Amputees? which uses this as its main argument against Christianity.
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Well, the existence of a Christian God may lead to empirical predictions, but the existence of God in a philosophical sense, where no claims about God being active in the world at all are made, is *not* empirically verifiable.
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I’m amused that there are atheists who believe the simulation hypothesis is plausible. You don’t quite get a triple omni God (omnibenevolence is unlikely), but two out of three ain’t bad.
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Amen to that.
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The idea of a superpowerful creator(whether that’s a god, alien or programmer) isn’t inherently implausible, it’s just that there isn’t any evidence of it(from an atheist POV).
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The same was true of, e.g. pre-Clovis Americans, not too long ago. Or the existence of Antarctica. Or an alien supercomputer simulating our entire perceived universe.
Disbelieving in any of these things, may be rational. Asserting with extremely high confidence that they do not exist, rather less so.
And in the case of atheism vs. the simulation hypothesis, the simulation hypothesis is a subset of theism. Whoever is running the supercomputer that simulates our universe, is our god by most non-sectarian definitions. So if someone assesses p(simulation) > p(theism), it seems likely they are being biased by the framing of the questions.
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Even if we are in a simulation the people running the simulation are probably not all powerful or all knowing. Merely very, very powerful and very knowing.
Its not clear they could predict the future. Humans cannot always predict how our own machine learning algorithms will behave. In addition its unclear the people running the sim can get the sim to behave however they want. I cannot get excel to do all the things I want it to :).
I agree with the gist of your post though.
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Probably most people on this site, including me, will agree that atheism is true with 99.9999999999% certainty
Assigning P=0.999999999999 to anything this side of “cogito ergo sum”, is either an act of faith, signaling, or a major calibration error. No human being I know of has anything remotely like enough accumulated experience with reality to assign even ten nines to the hypothesis, “my perceptions correspond to an objective material reality”; how are you getting two nines beyond that for any subordinate detail regarding the possible reality?
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Calibration error. Maybe some signaling, too.
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I think that’s a big part of the reason people are making a big deal of the article. The underlying idea has some merit, but the actual items EY claims are slam-dunks and says we should judge truth claims by are crazy. And Scott is right, this does cut to the heart of Rationality. Rationality claims to be able to make you a better thinker, and better able to gauge what level of certainty you should have about certain claims.
So you delve into the writings of its primary prophet, and learn that he declares with total certitude that MWI is a slam-dunk. But then you check with people who study quantum physics, and they say it looks like he has the kind of understanding of QM that you’d get from the intro class-and also makes all the classic mistakes that you would expect from a beginner. The term “Dunning-Kruger” is used.
And, well, you don’t know much physics yourself, so who can say? But you do know some things about religion, which EY harps on constantly. And there, you notice that again he makes very basic factual errors, the type that should be obvious to anybody familiar with the source material. Again, he declares these errors as slam-dunk facts.
As for p-zombies… well, can you bring yourself to care enough about p-zombies to even decide what would constitute a definitive resolution to that problem? Is that really the make-or-break issue?
At that point, using his own test, you have to ask to ask, “why should I expect Rationality to work for me? It doesn’t look like it worked for you.”
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On p-zombies, while many philosophers agree with Eliezer, his actual argument against p-zombies isn’t itself very good or conclusive. So for him to say it it is a slam-dunk with only a link to himself harms his credibility.
(Side note: I’m not super well studied on the issue at the moment, but my understanding is that while p-zombies themselves are a seemingly silly thought experiment, one’s opinions on that thought experiment corresponds with a certain set of views that has profound implications of the philosophy of the mind and the philosophy of cognitive science. Still, I don’t see any resolution to it in the near term, so I agree it’s probably not something worth talking about unless you are really interested in philosophy, and certainly isn’t relevant given the rest of the contrarian cluster post)
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Probably most people on this site, including me, will agree that atheism is true with 99.9999999999% certainty, but if you believe it’s a settled question then I want to introduce you to a few billion people who would disagree quite strongly.
Probably that depends on your definition of “most”. There’s certainly me, and I think a couple of others as well, hanging around the joint who are theists at the very least (and horrible rotten stinkin’ flat-out actual believers at the worst). I don’t know if that’s one sleeping dog we should let lie and not ask who is and who isn’t
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Indeed, I certainly wasn’t claiming that there are no theists here at all. But I’d be extremely surprised if they were a majority, which is what “most” means.
It seems reasonable to assume that the demographics here are similar to those of Lesswrong, and according to the 2014 survey that group consists of 80% atheists (and another 10% agnostics). So “most people here will agree that atheism is true” would seem to be a safe claim, although I have already admitted that I should have released my finger from the ‘9’ key a little earlier.
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Oh, come on, let’s ask. Are you a believer?
It’ll be fun, opening up the debate about if saying “no” in a hostile environment (or simply not speaking up) is a rational choice, an ethically sound choice, or just a choice that would fog the data to the point of being unuseable.
(For the record – I do my best to follow the Man, and I am part of a Roman Catholic congregation.)
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From what I’ve seen, in most places on the Internet the decision to stay quiet and go with the group consensus is not merely a “rational choice”, but rather, “the only choice that makes any sense at all, what is wrong with you, do you really want to get fired from your job, SWATted, and blacklisted from everywhere ?”. Scott wrote a post on that whole topic just a few days ago.
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Some people must be more willing to accept unpleasant facts than others. The truth is often unpleasant. By that logic cultures and individuals that like flattery and sappy melodrama should be less rational than those that hate them.
I think that public stereotypes are the most valuable source of information in sociology. It’s the wisdom of crowds. Millions of observations coalescing into conclusions the way gazillions of water molecules coalesce into rivers.
The stereotype of men being more rational than women is ancient and universal. And yes, women like sappy melodrama more than men.
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Liking sappy melodrama doesn’t necessarily mean you think real life is a sappy melodrama. As for women liking it more than men, well, Star Wars.
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This seems to be the second time in the same comment block that you’ve talked about the comparative rationality of men and women. In both posts, you also make little more than the vaguest gestures towards addressing the topic of the main post. The first time, somebody challenged you to defend your claims, which you did by referencing “all the women I know” as good evidence.
This combination of facts leads me to strongly believe that you have no intention to add to the discussion by saying things that are kind, true, and necessary, but are rather looking for a soapbox.
Moving on to actual substance, even if your conclusions were true, they seem to be more aligned with discussion about a “General Factor of Correctness” rather than a specifically contrarian measure of correctness, so I’m not sure that would be particularly relevant to the discussion.
Nevertheless, I’m not sure your argument follows particularly well. Some people are less likely to accept facts because they are unpleasant. I agree with you there. Others are more likely to accept facts because they are unpleasant (see:doomsday predictors, conspiracy theorists, me in middle school). Generally, however, people are tuned to prefer pleasant facts in most senses of the word “pleasant.” Confirmation bias, self-serving bias; I’m sure you are familiar. However, it seems like a jump to go from there to “people who like sappy melodrama are less rational than those who hate them” and from there to go to “women are less rational” (admittedly, I’m not sure if you are arguing that direction or if you are taking women are less rational as fact and using that to explain a penchant for sappiness).
In fact, research suggests that (at least in romantic situations), men are more likely to exhibit self-serving bias. (Source) So if we were to accept a tendency to prefer pleasant facts as evidence of less “rationality,” it seems that you are not on the steadiest ground in suggesting that women are less “rational.” In fact, you, as a man, might consider whether your belief that men are more rational might itself be a wonderful example of self-serving bias!
More research suggesting that men are more prone than women to a number of irrational biases
I’m not trying to say that women are necessarily more rational than men, but simply that the converse is far from proven. Your assertion that “public stereotypes are the most valuable source of information in sociology” has an inherent problem. Millions of observations, all affected by bias, don’t necessarily lead to truth. Stereotypes about women and other races as recently as one or two hundred years ago were exaggerated, often to the point of postulating that one group or another was inherently incapable or rational thought/understanding politics/performing well in universities. These stereotypes were shown to be wildly inaccurate. Why are you so confident that modern stereotypes are particularly more accurate.
You talk about “ancient and universal,” but the simple fact is that stereotypes change significantly in relatively short periods of time.
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Scott,
A slight tangent, but I’m curious how you analyzed the calibration skill from the Less Wrong survey data. I read your analysis that you posted along with the survey results, and I didn’t really agree with your assessment (I believe there were a few people in the comment thread there who shared my thoughts).
Wouldn’t you expect even correctly calibrated people to be overconfident on hard questions and underconfident on easy questions? For instance, if I ask an obscure question about someone in the bible, most people will have a low confidence in their answer. However, if it turns out that the answer is actually Jesus, a lot of people will guess correctly anyway and look underconfident. I would expect this to show even well-calibrated people as underconfident on any question where the correct answer is among the most common things that someone would guess even if they didn’t actually know the answer. Conversely, if I ask a question that seems straightforward but actually contains some hidden assumptions or has an unexpected answer, people will get it wrong and appear overconfident.
On the Less Wrong survey, I think the Obama, Norse God, and maybe the cell biology questions all fit the model of “one of the first answers that comes to mind as a guess turns out to be correct”. The planet density question has an unexpected answer (at least to me), and the computer games question contained hidden assumptions.
Also, on a more general level, is there any evidence that ‘ability to assign confidence in trivia questions’ is well-correlated with ‘ability to assign confidence in correctly analyzing complicated information’?
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I think it’s important to separate the scientific theories from other predictions. Our schmoeist and anti-schmoeist may be able to look at the facts and come up with a reasonable belief on pre-clovis culture but there is not any scientific way that we know of to predicting international politics.
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This is one of those cases where we should be spending less time at the theoretical level and more time with actual examples. Take a peek through history. It should offer many, many people who turned out to be surprisingly correct. What other conclusions does this lead to? I think that’s what people are getting at when they bring up Newton or Pauling. If you really believe in this, you should be applying it to those guys, not just the topics Eliezer points to.
(And historically, Eliezer’s requirement of atheism would not have served you well in truth-seeking. That would have meant ignoring most of the scientific fathers. You would have been Yes on Lysenkoism, and No on Big Bang. Also No on Bayes and his theorem. But this is hardly a valid sampling of historical personages.)
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And historically, Eliezer’s requirement of atheism would not have served you well in truth-seeking. That would have meant ignoring most of the scientific fathers. You would have been Yes on Lysenkoism, and No on Big Bang.
I think that was one of the initial objections to the Big Bang theory; it sounded much too much like the one-off creation by God in religion and mythology, which offended a lot of people on the grounds that “This is letting a Creator back into scientific discourse by the back door!”. Added to that that it was propounded by a Belgian Roman Catholic priest, and it looked much too much like some religious jiggery-pokery going on
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That could either be an objection to the notion per se or an objection to its use, though. Part of the problem I have with the four discussion questions is that they lampshade the plausible existence (well, or the intuitive-ness, anyway) of a General Factor, but highlight uses for it only when you have literally no other data to work with.
I would take the objections you raise as evidence that if there is a General Factor, it’s pretty weak evidence by itself. I mean, I get that this is what the whole post is about- how to evaluate experts in a divided field where you don’t have the time, understanding or information to take a good look at it yourself. It’s just that I can’t think of any situations where I have so little information beyond ‘secondary beliefs of experts on both sides’ that this effect would push me to believe one way or another.
(Actually I can think of one case- quantum mechanics. I have no domain knowledge and there’s not much chance that I’ll gain any. There I’m happy to believe people I consider smart for other reasons, but that’s primarily because my opinion on quantum mechanics will not change my life even one iota.)
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The fourth problem: is there a difference between correctness and probability calibration? Suppose that Alice says that there’s a 90% chance the Greek economy will implode, and Bob has the same information but says there’s only an 80% chance. Here it might be tempting to say that one of either Alice or Bob is miscalibrated – either Alice is overconfident or Bob is underconfident. But suppose Alice says that there’s a 90% chance the Greek economy will implode, and Bob has the same information but says there’s only a 10% chance that it will. Now we’re more likely to interpret this in terms of them just disagreeing. But I don’t know enough about probability theory to put my finger on whether there’s a true qualitative difference.
I don’t think I understand this paragraph. First, I would say that any two people who have the same evidence and assign different probabilities to P are disagreeing. I don’t see how calibration comes into it; disagreement seems compatible with them miscalibrating or not miscalibrating. Second, calibration, inasmuch as I understand it, is a property of a system of beliefs, not a single one. If I believe 10 things to .7 confidence and 7 are right, that set of belief is well-calibrated. But there doesn’t seem to be any sense to saying that my .7 belief that P in and of itself is well-calibrated — unless we just look at whether P is true or not, in which case calibration reduces to accuracy (closeness to truth, where truth = 1 and falsehood = 0).
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> Good Judgement Project […] average people
I opine that there is a strong selection effect in the GJP, and that the participants are by no means average. They required a college degree! That’s “everyone is above average”, right there, by at least a standard deviation. And even at that there were more PhDs and master’s degrees than you would expect by picking at random from the college-educated population.
> [correlations in LW survey data]
Small p-values or not, these correlations are so tiny as to be uninteresting.
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Right, Good Judgment Project super forecasters tend to very bright, very hard working people who have the time to follow a lot of obscure foreign affairs topics.
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Postulate Persons exhibiting an exceptionally high “General Factor Of Correctness” will exhibit an exceptionally low incidence of the Out of the FOG forum’s “Top 100 Traits of Personality-Disordered Individuals” (PD traits)
Rationale PD traits are notoriously stable in the face of attempts to alter them … no matter whether the means of alteration are pharmaceutic, psychotherapeutic, or the exercise of ordinary free will. These PD traits are “sticky” in the sense that, for sadly many people who are sincerely motivated to change, avoiding relapse is exceedingly difficult.
In essence, PD cognitive ecologies are self-adaptive … perhaps this is why PD traits are so distressingly common?
Conversely, persons exhibiting a paucity of PD traits plausibly possess cognitive skills that are effectively and adaptively “not wrong” in regard to real-world problems.
Conclusion Societies may be well-advised to choose leaders who do not exhibit PD traits, on the grounds that these leaders are more likely to exhibit an exceptionally high “General Factor Of Correctness.”
Uh-oh.
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My completely un-thought-through guess is that the source of any General Factor of Correctness is probably going to come from experience & judgment in evaluating sources and arguments as reliable or not, and in the ability to quickly build and correct mental models for things. It’s appealing because it’s not domain-specific and therefore generalizable, without being identical to genius or some kind of extraordinary mysterious mental power.
Of course I could also be privileging my particular mental processes here.
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I think that maybe what this way of thinking about this subject misses, is that many seemingly contested or closely contested questions are not actually closely contested when looked at by a disinterested party. The field of Frowlapology has believed X since the 1800s based on then brilliant work by a pioneering Frowlapologist. Later Frowlapologists have intellectually grown up learning X and with all their professors and professional colleagues believing theory X.
Time passes and weird things that don’t quite fit theory X gradually pile up and eventually some young iconoclast proposes theory Y that ties everything up nicely. But everyone who spent 40 years of their professional career as an X theorist rejects Y and so do their grad students if they know what’s good for them.
Then a reasonably intelligent individual from another field looks at Frowlapology and says, hmm Y looks better to me. The individual could do the same in many fields, because the secret sauce that causes them to be correct is disinterest and detachment. Not being from the field what seems like a hard question in the field is actually an easy question. Such a person could amass quite a “correct contrarian” score but wouldn’t have any real advantage on questions which were actually hard questions.
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Consider the following scenario: There is a school of thought that makes a theoretical prediction based on what appear to be good reasons. For some reason, the evidence to back up said prediction does not seem to be forthcoming, which is cited by people disagreeing with it. To make matters worse, there appeared to be some evidence, but it turned out to be unreliable. Time passes … and something resembling evidence at long last shows up. On the other hand, it’s much less than the people who originally issued the prediction had in mind.
How skeptical should we be about the prediction? In a related question, what is the track record of earlier predictions that fit the pattern?
I can think of several predictions that fit the above pattern. One of them is believed by the Left. Another is believed by the Right. I am disinclined to take either that seriously. On the other hand, there are other predictions that I am inclined to take seriously that also fit the pattern.
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That Good Judgement Project thing reminds me of an old long-distance scam I once read about (which some people might still practice):
So, let’s say you’re a bookie who offers bets on 5-horse races. Your first step, in that case, should be to find, let’s say, 5^4 marks (there’s one born every minute, so this shouldn’t be particularly hard). Make sure they don’t know each other, either. Now, you send out a bunch of letters to these marks; the first 5^3 marks get a letter saying “Here’s some friendly advice: Horse A will win the big horse race tomorrow, and I suggest you place some money on him. Signed, Iam A. Kahneman”. The next 5^3 marks will get a slightly different letter, which reads “Here’s some friendly advice: Horse B will win the big horse race tomorrow…” and so on. If you do this for each horse, sending a prediction of its victory to exactly 1/5 of your hapless marks, then the next day there’ll be exactly 5^3 marks kicking themselves that they didn’t follow the advice in your letter.
Of those 5^3 marks, next time there’s a horse race, 5^2 of them will get a letter advising them to bet on Horse A, 5^2 of them will get a letter advising them to bet on Horse B…
Eventually, you’ll have exactly 5 suckers who’ve gotten accurate predictions from you about 3 horse races in a row, and who will be perfectly happy to take a big, expensive bet from your associates on the next horse you predict.
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Classic scam, but the hard part these days would be getting 5^4 people to read their unsolicited mail.
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Armchair prediction: When holding things such as general knowledge constant, it will come down to making accurate, gut level evaluations of a hypothesis’s parsimony.
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Can “belives that the anthropogenic component of climate change is currently unknown” or other [disagrees with experts in the field] beliefs be listed in either column before the expert consensus changes due to new evidence? Or should we look at people’s Brier score and make predictions off of that?
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In example 2, I don’t dig. A broken clock is right twice a day. In examples 3 and 4 I am persuaded, moreso in 4 but I’m biased because I’m an Anthropology major (also Business).
In example 1, I’m sure I’m reading too much into it, but because the Green party rarely wins elections and because I strongly associate young earth creationists with the Red Tribe I’d be somewhat persuaded by a red tribe person picking a Blue party win. Now, if the creationist is a member of the Blue party I take it back, but I tend to favor picks where people predict against their interests. Some exceptions apply, but obviously I much more persuaded on Clovis dates by a scholar who previously argued for a more recent date than someone who argued for an old date all along.
I mean, example two is a classic contrarian who picks up credit whenever an unlikely consensus emerges. Thus I’m biased against the near psychic early adopters and the bandwagon. Show me instead the invested expert who changed their mind relatively early and see what else they are contra on. This gives us a person who is capable of understanding the consensus and also capable of disagreement with it. Bigfoot Epcot guy is first, but I perfer instead the people who heard his theory and did the research.
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I think it’s often implied that people we are evaluating as candidates for High General Correctness will approach questions in different fields in about the same way and with the same methodology. Whereas in practice there’s an incredible amount of motivated reasoning that probably often overshadows whatever benefit the Correctness is giving them.
Moreover, since we’re looking at contrarian claims, specifically, the amount of motivated reasoning is even higher.
Say we have a superpredictor named Sue, who in the past went against the expert opinion on two different topics in two different fields and ended up being right. We now examine other contrarian claims Sue has. One of them is “the claims of a small religious sect my family belongs to are literally true”. This is definitely an against-the-experts contrarian claim. How much more credence are we about to give it due to Sue’s past prediction successes? I guess not much. Assuming there is General Correctness, Sue’s past successes are evidence that she has an unusually high value of it, but still we expect that benefit to be absolutely swamped by motivated reasoning in the case of her family religion. But most contrarian claims Sue holds – and expresses an opinion publicly on – are probably more like “family religion” than “I have coolly and dispassionately examined the various pros and cons on this issue that’s not at all dear to my heart, and reached the following conclusion”. And, more importantly, we don’t know which are which.
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Ok, so here’s my suggestion:
We take a millennium prize problem’s solution, and keep it hidden. Then, we take a general population of non-mathematicians and sit them at a table- in front of them are two pieces of paper covered in whatever set of arcane symbols represent the solution to, say the P=NP problem. They don’t even know if P=NP is true or not- they just know there are several sheets of paper with variant answers.
Or better yet, multiple pieces of paper- half of which say ‘yes it does” half of which say “no it doesn’t”. Only one piece of paper contains the true solution.
Heck, you can do this with stuff that’s KNOWN. There’s a million obscure but true theorems out there. Pick five at random, pick the most plausible looking wrong ones, and see if people can reliably suss them out.
The world is filled with obscure-but-proven knowledge- you can easily set it up so each person gets a different AREA- the first one gets an obscure question of CS, another one gets a question about protein formation, and so on. The chances that people would’ve read this particular paper published in the Romanian Journal of Astrophysics are very low.
As a matter of fact- I’m pretty sure you could kick that off with an undergrad’s senior thesis. THEY don’t have to know anything about protein formation, what they have to know is that a certain protein observably does a certain thing, as stated in paper A, which demonstrated paper B to be wrong, and see if people reliably choose A over B.
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DNA data is a rapidly developing field, so we can look back to see who was right and who was wrong about new developments in population genetics.
One of the more prescient books of recent times was Cochran & Harpending’s “The 10,000 Year Explosion” that predicted, among much else, that modern humans would be discovered to be a little bit Neanderthal.
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2009/02/my-review-of-10000-year-explosion.html
You could go back to look up reviews of that book.
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Here’s Paul Krugman’s 1996 takedown of Stephen Jay Gould:
http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/evolute.html
I try not to have opinions on macroeconomics, since it ought to involve doing a lot of mental work that I am not in the mood to do. But anytime I’m in the mood to be snippy about Krugman, I try to remind myself that he dropped in briefly as an amateur to a field I know more about and quickly saw through the most overrated reputation.
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I think reactions to ex-Harvard President Larry Summers’ controversial speech in 2005 might correlated well with a General Factor of Correctness related, at least, to human beings:
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2005/03/larry-summers-math.html
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I’m not sure this is a problem on your end, but every time I try to click through on a link on your blog, I end up on an unrelated advertising page. Do you know why that could be?
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Sorry. My pre-2006 website got hacked and I need to get around to restoring it.
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If we are trying identify characteristics and modes of thinking that allow individuals to excel at decision-making under uncertainty, a good complement to Tetlock-style experiments might be to analyze successful players at a game like Poker.
Fundamentally all you’re doing in poker is predicting the future. Every time a player takes an action at the table (betting and sizing the bet/calling/folding) he is making a move that he believes maximizes his expected value given the remaining cards to be dealt and given other players’ likely response to his action. If you’re putting money into the pot, it’s because you believe either your cards are giving you higher equity than the other players cards or youre causing other players to fold cards with higher equity than your own.
There are a lot of controls inherent to the poker that resolve shortcomings in experiments like the GJP:
– Specifying the question for prediction. The only goal in poker is to make money. No worries about too narrowly/widely defining the problem and conditions for a correct answer.
– Incentives. Again, very few people come to a poker table without the primary goal of winning money. Motivated reasoning, signalling, and politics are not really in play.
-Sample size. The long-run winners can be established easily, with millions of online hands played.
Ive seen a few common traits among players that are long-term winners, and unlike chess, IQ does not appear to be all-important. Calculating your own equity (aka implied pot odds) is trivial, but it is a foundational skill that must be learned. Reading ‘tells’ etc is largely nonsense from movies.
The real skill is inferring a probability distribution (aka range) of hands your opponents are holding based on their betting action (the lines they take) at the table. This happens via a deductive process that incorporates information about the other player’s skill level, and tendencies you’ve seen among similar players in the past. To make these decisions, a player needs to draw on all his past experience– millions of hands– and find some general patterns that can be mapped to the current situation. There are some game-theory layers on top of this, but mapping those patterns is the foundation. And to internalize the correct maps requires a lot of reflection on past experiences, being very careful not to generalize from exceptional cases.
TL/DR – the best poker players have data banks of generalizations that are more correct than other players, and they use these as inputs into a probabilistic decision-making model. Players seem to accumulate the patterns via relentlessly scrutinizing past information as honestly as possible.
The big question, I suppose, do any of the skills required to win an incentivized a zero-sum game against other individuals generalize and map to other domains? I don’t really know.. but as a way of thinking and structuring problems, Ive seen a lot of parallels in my professional career.
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How much of success as poker is getting in games with bad players?
Nate Silver talks about he made a living as a Las Vegas poker player in 2005-2006 by exploiting tourists who were in over their heads. Then the tourist players disappeared at the end of 2006 and only pros were left, so he started losing money and quit in the spring of 2007.
Interestingly, Silver could have used this experience to make an even more profitable bet in the financial markets: against mortgages, but he missed the connection between the popping of the housing bubble in California, Nevada, and Arizona at the end of 2006 and the disappearance of cash-rich tourists to fleece. When he wrote a book about his career in 2012, he still hadn’t noticed the connection.
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One of my readers is a Super Forecaster in the Good Judgment Project, and kindly shared his (perhaps overly modest) insights:
As Tetlock’s team keeps saying, doing well in this weird competition involves more than sheer luck. (I suppose that’s their biggest finding to date and they are doing all kinds of silly psychometric tests on us to see what they can correlate it to). Two examples:
– In the first year, I finished high in my “experimental condition” that had over 100 participants. All forecasts were individual in this condition. Top predictors from each group became “supers,” others were allowed to keep going as usual. Majority, I imagine, dropped out because it truly takes a lot of time. A few others who were near the top but didn’t make it to “supers” did well enough next year to achieve the “super” status. Even if they “competed” within a pool of several thousand.
– Last year, a particular group of “supers” beat everyone in the other groups by a largish margin. Today, this same team still has the best score even if “supers” competition is now among eight groups.
And yes, the “supers” consistently beat everyone else, but I think it has a lot to with self-selection for folks willing to google on regular basis information pertaining to completely weird stuff like this:
“Will China seize control of the Second Thomas Shoal before 1 January 2014 if the Philippines structurally reinforces the BRP Sierra Madre beforehand?” (The answer is supposed to come as probability and can be updated daily if desired.)
As you can imagine, it requires more or less the same mentality as the one demonstrated by those tireless Wikipedia editors.
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2013/12/tetlocks-good-judgment-project.html
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That explains why they beat Joe Q. Random, but not why they beat CIA analysts.
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Could it be that CIA analysts, consciously or unconsciously tailor their predictions in order to make them more palatable for their bosses?
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If I were put on the spot to provide a guess (for the Good Judgment Project and such), my guess would be that this is a ‘neural networks’ thing.
As in – when you make computer neural network you are trying to make the interface between ‘take in a lot of info’ and ‘output an answer’. The interface is doing a whole bunch of math things to appropriately weight and add all the info together and such. The better it is, the better you result should be, consistently.
People, in a sense, already are neural networks. So I would expect that for those people who outperform the experts, that’s where they’re winning. (The question then might be, but why aren’t these the kinds of people who are hired as experts in the first place. The most likely answer seems to me to be that the expert jobs are not actually ‘make these decisions al day and we hire the people who do it best’, they involve other things like investigating questions, dealing with people about it, etc, and thus attract employees based on that, instead).
So I would expect that people with good generic neural networks do well in a lot of area if the questions are formally put before them.
However, I wouldn’t necessarily expect them to do well in ‘things they just go around believing’, since unless they have reason, they’re not necessarily likely to be doing all the ‘taking in input’ stuff like they are, presumably, in the study.
The other problem is that I’m not sure to what extent this would be a trainable thing…
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My general impression is that all truths are connected to other truths, so people who refuse to admit certain truths tend to intellectually hamstring themselves in other areas.
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They found that the same small group of people consistently outperformed everyone else in a way incompatible with chance. These people were not necessarily very well-educated and didn’t have much domain-specific knowledge in international relations – the one profiled on NPR was a pharmacist who said she “didn’t know a lot about international affairs [and] hadn’t taken much math in school” – but they were reportedly able to outperform professional CIA analysts armed with extra classified information by as much as 30%.
Wait, so… that thing in Consider Phlebas wasn’t a completely arbitrary excuse of a plot element to make it seem like the Culture is really really concerned about humans having more dignity than housepets? It was based in something real?
duuuuuuude
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I would be astonished if Iain Banks knew about this when he was writing that. The book was released in 1987, which is a couple years after Tetlock seems to have started working on judgment, but I wouldn’t expect him to have produced any substantial results by that date. The popular press only took it up in the late 2000s.
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