I watched him for years coming into weekly colloquia and seeming to tune out reading papers. But, occasionally there would be a speaker that was less than credible, and you could feel the entire hall close off. But, my advisor would hear a tidbit of a good idea (even amongst loads of bunk), and look up from his journals and ask a genuinely curious clarifying question. This would often lead to new lines of research in our labs.
In the end, many of these speakers were on the wrong overall track, but they definitely had insights that were incredibly valuable. Those who dismissed them entirely missed out, while my advisor had a knack for finding the signal in the noise and moving forward with that without missing it due to judgement.
I noticed something similar: You can find papers by clearly crazy people that have nuggets of good ideas in them. Odd bits of mathematics they reference might be an interesting rabbithole to go down, even if it ultimately leads nowhere.
The whole thing reminds me of the passtime of the hyper-intelligent Minds in the Culture series. They play in Infinite Fun Space, which is vaguely like coming up with new rules of physics and "seeing what happens". The rules don't have to be realistic, just fun.
I've found that practising physicists seem allergic to any such notion, too quick to dismiss unorthodox approaches. So what if they're wrong? They're fun, and maybe not that wrong in some rare cases.
;)
All in good fun. I greatly enjoy the sentiment of your comment and it’s parent that great ideas can come from anywhere. At the risk of creating a segue into controversial topics, I think this plays a huge part of why it’s important that a team of programmers be made up of folks with different backgrounds. I am so often caught completely off guard by how different a valid idea is than mine. “I totally never would have thought of that.”
Who isn't a member of a group? We're all members of a number of groups.
It's refreshing that Kahneman honestly admits that he doesn't change his mind either, and his tastes were formed when he was relatively young. He's not putting himself above the rest of humanity. He could easily say, "Well I'm a famous and distinguished scientist, so obviously my beliefs are rational, unlike everyone else", but he doesn't.
Oh, an agnostic.
There is something to be said about groups of people that hold similar ideas because their similar way of thinking lead them to similar conclusions. It's a very important exception to the OP's description, where the group came first, and may even be the most common kind.
(Of course, the question to answer is why do those people think in similar ways.)
> part of the group of software engineers by trade
I'd bet that one lead you into adopting some values.
Invariably, in every discussion, they'll trot out this sentence: "You <opponent group name> people always think <notion>".
For example: "You Liberal party voters always support lowering taxes" or somesuch sentence.
I point out that I didn't vote for the Liberal party.
"The Labour party voters are the same!"
I point out I didn't vote for Labour either in the most recent election either.
"Err..."
-- at this point their brain locks up, because they're expecting a tribe-vs-tribe fight and they have no idea what to do when they discover I don't actually belong to their "enemy tribe".
Even saying you’re !group makes you explicitly a member of the !group group!
I've come to realize that "white male software engineer" is one of the groups with the highest ratio of priviledge versus priviledge awareness.
(Disclosure: I belong to that group as well.)
If you prioritize truth over group membership, you are more likely to see your own flaws, the flaws in others, and prevent yourself from making catastrophic errors in your inevitable ignorance.
If you prioritize group membership over truth, you are more likely to fall prey to lies that have only short term benefits for one or more members of the group and eventually lead to catastrophic errors.
The best groups are the groups of people who are legitimately pursuing the truth, even if they are temporarily ignorant, which again, is inevitable due to information constraints.
We've become so saturated with power dynamical thinking we've forgotten that it is possible to be motivated to try to see the world accurately so as to best cooperate with it regardless of power differentials.
Not everyone is brainwashed to accept group think no matter in what cirles they have to evolve in.
There are individuals and then there are the parrots who mindlessly repeat what the group says.
You might be a "rational, fully self-realized, and atomized" individual but your behaviors and thoughts are certainly influenced by those around you. Here's a simple example: https://dictionary.apa.org/social-facilitation
> almost not worth listening to their arguments
At the same time, their arguments are likely the-least-dumb / most-intelligent things they've been able to come up with, to rationalize their group's ideas -- so at least you have a chance to get to know what those least-dumb-things are
Never Split the Difference. And Nonviolent Communication.
Because just listening to others, and showing that you care about and understand what they're saying, can go a long way. Not always a need to actually do anything in the real world (or to say or pretend that you agree).
Maybe theoretically this won't place you in their old group, still, you'll a bit form a new group where you and that other person are friends
And while it is true that some groups hold language and ideas that are both infectious and dangerous, arms-length exposure to many such ideas is much less likely to result in pathology than close exposure to one. Refusing to learn an enemy tribe's language is an uninformed bet that you lucked into the best tribe by default.
Anyway, he has a lot to say on the subject and on incentives and human psychology broadly.
A better way to phrase it would be a year when you don't challenge your idea is probably a failed year. It might still win the challenge.
Three mentioned in the article: * Enigma of Reason * The Knowledge Illusion * Denying to the Grave
Actually, everything contemporary mentioning egregores is probably relevant - they're also called 'AI autocults', but the concept existed long before group communication became enmeshed with computer infrastructure - though the dynamics are different now than in enlightenment-era Europe, and the pre-Newtonian assumptions of the older publications throws most modern readers off.
http://stephendavies.org/writings/mitterederEtAl.pdf
We referred to it as "issue alignment" but its gone by other things, IIRC. Basically, in theory, one could end up supporting positions that would make 0 sense outside the context of "well, I support "X" cause "team green" supports "X."
I've seen it happen often online, a lot less IRL.
Jordan Peterson’s zebra story
There's a survival instinct that we can't get away from. That being in groups is innate to the core of our being and to go against the group or even change a group's mind requires potentially breaking that bond and losing the safety that the group represents.
Rather I would say that high agreeableness (and maybe to some degree conscientiousness or extroversion) [1] is correlated with the likelihood that someone will change their opinions in order to conform with a group.
So if you don't like that personality trait, you can seek out less agreeable people, there are plenty of them out there. The only trouble will be that if you need to collaborate with them, you may have a hard time getting anything done!
There is survivor bias among groups - if a bunch of people all have different opinions and aren't willing to modify them, they're unlikely to remain a group for long.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits
I suspect this is why over time all members of a political party become near carbon-copies of each other. Even if the party started "big tent" over a single issue, natural forces will cause it to coalesce into "same thought on all issues".
One solution for the individual is to forcefully prevent yourself from associating with the group, but this often requires drastic action and gets you shunned by all groups. Compare the vitriol against someone who "votes wrong" vs "votes third party" vs "refuses to vote at all".
For example: Someone born and brought up in the West would think that children don't owe anything to their parents because it was their parent's choice to have them.
While someone born and brought up in the East would think that they owe everything to their parents because they gave them the gift of life and because of all the sacrifices they made for their kids.
You can't convince someone in the West to think anything otherwise than that stated above. They are utterly convinced that that is is truth and likewise the reverse for someone born and brought up in the East.
I live in Canada, but I can't imagine it's that much different in the US.
That isn’t at all a uniform view in the West. I grew in a community where people expressed a great deal of what might be called filial piety. Not everyone held or maintained that belief though.
"We are all individuals"
"I am not!"
I tend to agree with you, but based on the way you have worded this, I am curious if you think that people have conscious awareness (which is required to form intent) of this?
And as a follow-up: if this phenomenon is sub perceptual, might that change how one might go about addressing it, or even discussing it (it is a fairly common point raised in these sorts of discussions)?
Some people will be self aware, and not take arguments or positions too seriously - their own or others - they know they hold the points of view for group membership - they tend to not to like to debate them, aware of the futility.
More common though is ego-defense/group-defense reaction. This is the zealot. Both a person's ego (you're wrong) and their group (your group is wrong) is on the line. This is in addition to losing their membership of a group if they adopt a different position.
If we don't even try (including if the idea doesn't even cross our minds), we may never succeed.
The best you can do may be to find a group that is based on something entirely outside everything else, but that's quite hard to locate.
Sure, of course!
That's why "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."
And we can be happy with at least that!
In anything outside science there is no progress at all. Humans in general behave exactly the same since thousands of years.
You could read some thousands of years old drama and the story will be very familiar. Lust, greed and power struggles, and the other typical human traits.
We did not manage to solve even one none technical problem since we came down the trees. But that's nothing unexpected actually given we're a horde of apes. I'm old enough to know that nothing will ever change as we had already more than enough time to easily mange at least some "humanity scale" issues by now. But we as a species are seemingly bound to our ape nature.
The few statistical outliers here and there could not and can not change the course of events. They never had any realistic chance. Because they're outnumbered by the billions. That's just how it is.
Eugenics would be a small chance. Or we'll become some day the "wet bootloader" of some truly intelligent beings. But both is not very likely.
Or, of course, we just kill our species eventually by some stupid mistake, or just out of rage; which is frankly the most likely outcome in the long run given human nature and its current technological possibilities.
There are no other realistic outcomes one could come up. Apes will stay apes. Likely to their very end. Time already proved that we just can't do better.
Now, anybody who likes to argue that I'm too pessimistic needs to explain away why there wasn't any substantial progress up until now (besides tech, which is something almost exclusively driven by singular people). I say it's all about human nature, psychological phenomena and that. Which is something coded by our common gene pool. And that's something that just can't change on any time scale that is meaningful to humanity as it is. (Besides doing this through tech, which isn't a realistic option at all given said human nature. My guess here would be that it's more likely that we'll go "the Borg path" than that we would try to re-engineer our-selfs to become a more generally friendly and intelligent species). Like said, it's imho already proved by time that we don't want maximize joy for everybody. Quite the contrary actually! We seek ever since only more efficient ways to extinguish our enemies. That's the one constant in human history. Actually, even most of our technological breakthroughs are direct results of this pursuit. Go figure…
Hmm, now I have the opening scene of "2001: A Space Odyssey" on my head. Not sure why.
Counter-example: The use of slavery as an energy source replaced by the use of electricity as an energy source.
When you want to listen to music, you open up Youtube (or Spotify, or your carefully curated collection of FLAC files, or whatever) and press play.
When Romans wanted to listen to music, they would tell the slaves to pick up the instrument and start playing.
That's a significant change, IMO.
EDIT: also, written language went from non-existant to 8 billion humans and 86% of them can read in a few thousand years.
"Think about what it takes to claw your way into America’s elite strata. Unless you were born into the upper-middle class, your surest route is to pursue an elite education. To do that, it pays to be exquisitely sensitive to the beliefs and prejudices of the people who hold the power to grant you access to the social and cultural capital you badly want. By setting the standards for what counts as praiseworthy, elite universities have a powerful effect on youthful go-getters."
"As the senior assistant director of admissions at Yale recently observed, “for those students who come to Yale, we expect them to be versed in issues of social justice. We encourage them to be vocal when they see an opportunity for change in our institution and in the world.” Picture yourself as an eager high schooler reading these words, and then jotting down notes. You absorb, assuming you hadn’t already, what it takes to make your way in contemporary elite America. And as you grow older, you lean into the rhetorical gambits that served you so well in the past. You might even build a worldview out of them."
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/08/the-utilit...
At first you say sometuing akin to “to become part of the elite you need to accept the elite's point of view and beliefs”, citing higher education as a gateway for elites, and the you use the discourse “social justice” as an example of what young people must believe in to get to higher education. But “social justice” is definitely not a foundational belief of the elite, because otherwise the US wouldn't work the way it does otherwise, for the elite is the one who actually shapes the society.
If anything, it's much more likely that Yale wants to attract young people by advertising values the young care about (young people being naturally much more progressive than older ones).
The selection committees at universities certainly believes in social justice or they wouldn't consider race so heavily for admissions.
Would you want anything less in an academic institution? That's the entire point of places of higher learning.
Is it really "higher learning" when LITERAL groupthink is required?
(Maybe you're being sarcastic and I'm just not getting it)
As the parent indicated, they're not willing to even communicate with people who don't parrot their own ideas.
> In politics and in religion, the main driver is social. We believe what the people we love and trust believe.
Except I've changed my mind on both, despite enormous pressure by people I love not to.
Also this article seems to be self-defeating: if we don't change our minds, why attempt to convince us of that fact? If we truly don't change our minds, no amount of evidence will help us change our minds about this topic.
Having some familiarity with Kahneman, my guess is he means this is a general, but not absolute rule. Sort of like “You can’t convince someone of a wrong if their paycheck depends on them seeing it as a right.” It’s a helpful general, but not absolute rule.
...does that change your mind? ;)
It happens over days, weeks, months, or years, depending on the subject. People who expect that if they refute a single then should then refute the entire opinion are the problematic ones (with binary thinking).
There are always edge cases, if all it took was a single counter-example, I would be a nihilist with no actual opinions. People change their minds when the bigger picture demands not, not because some young jackass decides binary logic should fully and completely apply to life.
I don't think the point was to convince us that we don't change our minds but rather to convince us to do adversarial collaboration instead of angry science.
Trying to explain the small number of people who do change their minds, David McRaney has an interesting book out called How Minds Change.[0]
And I imagine there are people who change minds, even outside his model. People who change their minds when it doesn't seem to help them strike me as important people to hear from.
[0] https://www.econtalk.org/david-mcraney-on-how-minds-change/
If you want to dismiss me by trying to imply my opinion is driven by a want of something other than accuracy with reality, I can find other people to spend my time with.
Once we're talking about dismissing someone, we've long left the realm of good-faith discussion, which was assumed in the situation you're responding to.
However, when I ask this it is not to dismiss someone, it's because if I understand why something is important to them I am better at arguing in good faith without accidentally being dismissive of what matters to them. Which helps with reaching a consensus, or a respectful point of agreeing to disagree.
Also, it's an important question people should be asking themselves but rarely do.
If you're arguing for a course of action, answer the objections well and then drop it. Often the person arguing against you (especially if they're "the boss") will come back a few days later and present it as basically their idea.
People get emotionally tied to what they came up with, and it can take a few nights to disconnect enough to move on (even if they never admit they were "wrong").
But about the 'drop' aspect, I think there's a reflex for other to argue someone to infinity if it become a belief confrontation, a kind of domination to impose their view. But if the other party drops the fight, it kills that aspect and the other person can accept the idea for its core value.
I love the model of adversarial collaboration, and I don't dispute the extremely strong influence of social bonds on knowledge formation, but Kahneman is just wrong about this. I know he's wrong because I change my mind relatively frequently, about things of at least some consequence.
For a recent example, I was fairly sure that at the beginning of the pandemic, in the US, widespread, cheap testing would enable us to drive COVID cases near zero, and I wasn't shy about telling everyone I met. Obviously, I was wrong, for a variety of reasons - so I updated.
That intimate experience with uncertainty and updating my own beliefs makes me wonder about Kahneman's research methods. It makes me doubt whether this question is even tractable or whether people are even legible enough to researchers to draw conclusions about this.
Interestingly (and disarmingly) Khaneman is very forthright about the role his own experiences have played in convincing him that people in general don't change their minds. He writes:
> I was also impressed by the fact that Anne and I didn't change our minds. I had read Kuhn and Lakatos about the robustness of paradigms, but I didn't expect that minor theories would also be impervious to evidence.
also:
> I will now share a personal experience of belief perseverance that I cannot shake ... However, it turns out that I only changed my mind about the evidence. My view of how the mind works didn't change at all. The evidence is gone, but the beliefs are still standing. Indeed, I cannot think of a single important opinion that I have changed as a result of losing my faith in the studies of behavioral priming, although they seemed quite important to me at the time.
I think the most likely explanation for this is 1) social desirability bias has a dramatic influence on what information people make accessible about their cognition and 2) Kahneman is unusually stubborn, and his generalization from his own personality to all humankind is a manifestation of the typical mind fallacy. [0]
Even now, I can think of ways to argue that testing could still drive COVID nearly to zero in the US, most of which revolve around the idea that we're not really testing or we're not doing it right. But I think I was wrong, partly because of things other people said earlier during the pandemic, including parallel arguments about why "masks work" were wrong, which I saw right away, though I didn't draw the obvious conclusions related to the effectiveness of testing.
I think Kahneman's position requires creative gerrymandering about what counts as an important belief, and about what counts as persuasion.
As an approximation, it works insanely well. And as more and more things becomes "proxies for political decisions" we'll see it ramp up even more.
I was a (relative) loudmouth about my position for over a year, since we didn't have access to home tests in the US until 2022. It was a very heated topic, since I often proposed testing as a preferred alternative to ineffective mask mandates that were popular where I live, and when my wish finally came true, I had to admit I had been wrong.
If changing one's mind about something of that magnitude doesn't count, the principle is badly overstated.
Imagine if you had looked up to realize the flu hasn't gone to near zero with testing, so why in the world would you think something as unknown as covid would?
Of course that didn't stop many like you from attacking those who tried to call for caution. So while it's "nice" that you eventually changed your mind, consider being more open-minded at the start.
On HN, we generally go by article quality, not site quality: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so..., and generally try to avoid guilt by association. These points both follow from the principle of intellectual curiosity that we're trying to optimize for: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor....
Reality is messier than simple heuristics, but I think the current article is a good test case. Can one be interested in Kahneman's views on adversarial collaboration and have a curious conversation about them while in no way endorsing the heinous Epstein? Clearly one can.
In this case, I was unaware of the Edge Foundation's Epstein links. The information is salient and useful. Edge itself certainly doesn't make the information evident. C.f., a site search for "Epstein" which ... conspicuously omits any prominent results for a disclosure or apology:
<https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=site%3Aedge.org+epstein&ia=...>
This is one of my pet peeves with even casual conversation. Someone goes "I don't like X, because Y." You point out Y is false, and the response is "Well, I still don't like X".
It used to annoy me because wanted to help people not base their views on bad information, as that's what I would want people to do for me. But now, it mostly just annoys me because of how predictable it is. You know the only good answer is to agree with them, so what's the point in even conversing?
So you’ve mostly just been alienating people while thinking you’re trying to help them.
Most people have conversations to feed their emotional needs for social interactions and validation, not to learn anything.
We’re interesting animals.
Don't ask why do you not like X because that will get false reasons. Instead, ask how X affects them, how it makes them feel, etc.
But this is more difficult and basically boils down to "become their friend and know them as a person".
In some ways it's like falling in love. Most of us don't evaluate potential partner on a bunch of metrics and then after they reach a sufficiently high ranking we declare ourselves in love. Rather we fall in love instinctively, then evaluate the person rationally (and sometimes reject them, like when the circumstances aren't right or we can see their flaws even through the rose tinted glasses, etc.)
To take the love example, the "tricks of the trade" you see bandied about sometimes do NOT work to "make someone love you" but they can help if you have people who have already decided they love each other.
I purposely keep my copy faced forward on the bookshelf as a reminder of the dangers of reading too much into anything published in the past 15 years.
"Dr. Kahneman, you've been writing about thinking for 40 years. Do you think you've changed how people think at all?"
He said, "No, not even me." He proceeded to tell a story where he fell into the "eloquence trap" that he, himself, wrote about: a doctor said something, and he said to his daughter, "that doctor is very impressive!"
She'd learned his lessons better than he had: she said that what mattered was how much experience the doctor had in this particular area, not how good she sounded.
Politics and religion might be trickier, as people tend to have external forcing factors (family and work opinions) that respond negatively to a fundamental change of some sort or other, up to being sent to prison for a decade for apostasy (see Saudi Arabia). In such situations, even if people do change their minds, they may not broadcast that change to anyone over fear of retaliation at family gatherings or in workplace environments. Even in cases where a particular member of a political party or religious group is shown to be criminally corrupt, many people will still embrace the politics or religion, on the basis that the individual in question is an outlier, not a representative sample - even after dozens of such examples are exposed. (Practically, this is why I've made it a rule to avoid political or religious discussions at work or at family gatherings, there's just not much value to be found there).
The scientific method as it has always existed requires two heuristics from you, the scientist: a hypothesis generator, a test generator (and an all important simplicity measure). The point of the method is that by making these things work adversarially, we can turn our very messy, fallible creativity, ie these heuristics, into facts about what the model isn't. Moreover no additional hypothesis of what the model is, or test which contradicts it, can derive a false fact of this form, relegating the entire concept of adversary to the meta who-gets-their-name-on-the-paper game.
If Daniel has only recently started "using science adversarially", then he has only recently started doing science.
Our brains are great at pattern matching. We want to look at the landscape, see that there’s no hiding lion, and continue hunting-gathering. Constantly rechecking that there’s no lion is draining, and it also leads to less hunting-gathering. Adult humans really dislike having to do that (we even consider it a sign of mental illness)
The “back and forth” between husband and wife supports this theory. Every time one of them designed one experiment, “the ball was on somebody else’s field” and they could temporarily forget about the problem until the results came back. I am sure they were two very busy individuals and being able to “move on to other things” after designing the next experiment was gratifying.
