Its even simplier then that.
“My feelings” > “Your rational points”
We simply evolved like that and next step of evolution was to become more rational. We are somewhere in the middle.
“My feelings” > “Your rational points”
We simply evolved like that and next step of evolution was to become more rational. We are somewhere in the middle.
If the idea is to survive and thrive, the “rational” approach is to continue with what our species has always done - stick with the tribe.
I think you are advocating for herd mentality here without realizing it, and to be honest the effect that fitness has can also be upended in large scale conflicts: consider how many died before being able to have children in large scale wars (like WW2) because they felt their charismatic leader's cause was more righteous than the other guys.
Their is safety in numbers, if looked at solely via a predation model but as a Human (with supposed elevated faculties than other animals) their is also a need for self-reflection and introspection that I think most people in modern Society simply will never value (because it's not rewarded much) even when the perils are clear to judge--COVID's ongoing malaise that has caused rift in Soceity highlighted so much of what is wrong with it at it's core, which in my view were their all along because it was better 'not to rock the boat.' Being th eoptimist that I am I simply had thought we could collectively realize we are sooner to perish as a Species from this Earth than have this model we have been coaxed into correct itself, which warrants a global effort to restructure how we engage with one another and the environment we share.
Social cohesion doesn't not mean to be intolerant of contrasting views, and in my view it's best viewed when people accept that the Social Contract applies to all, including those whom you vehemently disagree with and are not of 'your tribe.'
Why? Because solely sticking to the tribe would stagnate and create a mono-culture of not just ideas, but likely a genetic pool where a single unpredictable variance can wipe most of it out completely: European migration into the Americas being an apt metaphor here.
If you're going to follow models that rely on ecology like fitness, you also need to understand that genetic variation is as crucial for survival as replication itself.
Therefore there is no selective pressure towards being rational.
I'm pretty sure there is selective pressure towards being rational, it's just really hard to select for and even then probably not the most important thing.
I remember when I met my first evangelical fundamentalist I couldn't for the life of me figure out why he earnestly believed this nonsense about the world being 7000 years or whatever. It was only when he said that he used to be a homeless drug addict and he was helped out of addiction by a Christian group that it twigged - they showed him kindness that the rest of the world had not.
I'm pretty sure being rescued not only rearranged his whole world view such that the world is 7000 years old. I'm pretty sure it also rearranged his world view to view facts as less important than kindness.
I'm pretty sure there is selective pressure against being rational. Take your drug addict. The flexibility to rearrange his whole worldview likely increased his fitness significantly. Now he has a support network and community, not to mention the help with addition.
To put it differently: While joining rationalist tribe may confer more fitness than joining the irriationalist tribe, the best fitness is having flexibility to adapt to any tribe you can and not be alone.
If I was a strident atheist and my life was saved by a Christian fundamentalist, it seems plausible to me that I would subsequently be less prejudiced against such people and less concerned about the areas in which I thought they were incorrect. But not that I would believe whatever they do.
Now, you may feel that's a ridiculous belief. But your belief it's ridiculous comes mostly from your own intuitions about the trustworthiness of institutions, perhaps some personal experience or intuited cost/benefit ratios, etc. It's not something that can be portably summed up in a neat box labelled "facts".
Yes, that's a false belief of this tribe that is directly contributing to their mortality
> and thus being in the vaxx-all-the-time camp could also literally kill people
No, because that belief does not conform with reality.
> Now, you may feel that's a ridiculous belief.
It is.
> It's not something that can be portably summed up in a neat box labelled "facts".
It can be. For reasonable definitions of a word 'fact'.
Thing is, responses exactly like yours were being posted all last year to try and dismiss the lab leak hypothesis. It was a crazy fringe conspiracy theory that only people not grounded in reality could believe ... right up until the moment it suddenly wasn't anymore. At which point the deniers were forced to accept that it had never been a crazy belief, in fact it had been the most obvious and logical belief all along given that a novel coronavirus emerging right next to a lab studying coronaviruses is staggeringly unlikely to be a coincidence. Actually, the crazy thing had been the over-abundance of trust in scientists.
How certain I am about anything has no bearing on whether it is true or not. What I said is true regardless of what anyone believes (me included). Reality comes first and is what it is. Beliefs follow (in case of people who follow the evidence) or they don't (in case of people who are choosing to ignore the evidence or believe liars or clueless but confident).
> but can't sum up why in any kind of coherent or legible package for other people
I didn't attempt it. I have done that it the past, but since then I learned that there are plenty of coherent legible packages and other people still don't care.
> It's just this big ball of interlocking faiths and trusts in authority that cause you to say that.
Sure, exactly the same thing that causes me to exit my apartment through the door, not my window on the third floor.
Again, what I believe and why, doesn't influence truthfulness of anything. I may only do the best I can to try to believe only truthful things.
> but this is little different to a religious person asserting that unbelievers are wrong; why, well because you've got to have faith, obviously
not really, if you are correct
If I say 'addition of real numbers is commutative' it's not a religious statement. And if you say it's not, no matter how much proof you demand from me, and how little I provide you'd still be wrong and I'll be right even if only because I trusted the right authority and you trusted the false one.
> Thing is, responses exactly like yours were being posted all last year to try and dismiss the lab leak hypothesis.
The responses will get increasingly dismissive as the people who are correct run out of ideas how to provide arguments that unconvinced people will be willing to honestly engage with. I won't pay for a ticket on Jeff Bezos rocket to show you that Earth is round, because if I did you'll conclude that windows were screens displaying computer graphics, and you've been drugged to feel weightless and start listing indisputable evidence of all that, where indisputable here means, you won't be willing to discuss it in detail.
> lab leak hypothesis ... crazy fringe conspiracy theory ... right up until the moment it suddenly wasn't anymore
I'm sorry to inform you, but it still is. No new evidence was discovered. The fact that more people started to believe it and repeat it doesn't point to any additional truthfulness despite what you might feel (due to mere exposure effect).
> staggeringly unlikely to be a coincidence.
Very improbable things happen all the time. Because there's a lot of very improbable things that could potentially happen. Unlikely is infinitely far from impossible.
> Actually, the crazy thing had been the over-abundance of trust in scientists.
Seriously? Do you think some other group has better idea on what reality is? How did they get it? Scientist are literally the people who dedicated their lives to learning tools that let you tell truth from falsehood. You statement sounds like, we should listen less to music made or played by musicians.
Or do you think we shouldn't trust people at all? But we ourselves, are people too. To operate in reality you need to seek knowledge about it from best sources available. And if you have trouble determining the best sources, you should look for sources that will help you to determine what the best sources are.
"Seriously? Do you think some other group has better idea on what reality is? How did they get it?"
Often, a really good disagreement when studied turns out to be a disagreement on the exact definitions of words.
When I said "over-abundance of trust in scientists", I was using the word scientist as it's normally used by governments and media, to mean primarily academic modellers, public health officials and so on. The people that are in control and get presented to us as "The Science". It doesn't mean (in this context) literally all working scientists and it definitely doesn't mean "people who use the scientific method to study a question".
So does some other group have a better idea on what reality is? Sure, in my view, absolutely. However that group is difficult to precisely define because it isn't affiliated with any particular institution. It's the mishmash of people who are studying the data using logically and statistically rigorous approaches, and writing up their findings online, mostly to be found in a collection of Substack blogs these days, but also elsewhere. This group of people has no institutional credibility because they're not united under any particular institution and a few of them choose to or have to use pseudonyms, but they do have a lot of methodological credibility, because they're actually following the rules of logic, reason and indeed, science. Whereas many of the presented scientists turn out not to be, on close inspection. They are "The Scientists" but not scientists. No surprise that many of the people disagreeing with them actually do have scientific training or employment, just from different fields.
In the end then we agree that at some point you have to trust other people, and no, I'm not arguing for some kind of dystopian trust-free world. It wouldn't work indeed. But in this case we have a big problem: a group of people calling themselves scientists, people who society allows to use the title, but who objectively are not following the scientific method. Their results are consequently poor (the scientific method isn't perfect but it's a heck of a lot better than nothing!) but people refuse to accept it because they over-generalize and assume all scientists are viewable as a single blog with a uniform level of trustworthiness. If our institutions functioned well that would be the case, but they don't, so we're back to having to evaluate trust on a one-by-one basis. Very problematic.
Not to mention other tools they don't have access to like ability to conduct work that requires multi-year effort of teams of people or necessitates the use of top of the line equipment.
Personally I prefer to listen to what scientists with large budgets and a lot to loose if what they are saying turns out to be crap.
Pseudonymous rouge loner that has nothing to loose doesn't instill in me great faith about his capabilities, honesty of his process and his findings.
Whole modern antivax movement spawned from misplaced belief in one such loners scientist.
Unfortunately, peer review is pretty worthless. I've read a lot of papers that passed through peer review yet had basic errors in the first page, in one case, one was saying something false about public statistics in the very first sentence! If you don't trust particular fields then peer review isn't a very convincing upgrade because it's bad scientists reviewing other bad scientists.
I'm not sure who you mean by "one such loner scientist" - do you mean Wakefield? He was peer reviewed and it took years for his paper to be retracted! That's the sort of problem I mean.
For COVID stuff, for better or worse the arguments are mostly about data and everyone is working off the same datasets. So you don't need fancy equipment. A computer is sufficient.
I find the pseudonymous person to in some ways have more to lose. One thing that you realize very quickly reading bad COVID papers is that the people who write them never suffer any consequences. It doesn't matter if the predictions are wrong, or if the scientific method is violated, or even if they just flatly lie in the text itself. It seems universities will let their academics get away with almost anything. Look at Ferguson for a good example of that. The man has made an entire career out of being always wrong and nobody in Imperial College London seems to care. The non-affiliated researchers on the other hand are trying to build an audience, some are selling their analysis to readers. They know they can lose that income stream if they screw up. Plus the open comments sections works wonders - they are effectively being peer reviewed in real time by far larger numbers of people than there are in the academic process. I've seen mistakes caught that way a few times now and it usually leads to a quick admission and apology, something I never saw coming from academics even in the rare cases their paper was retracted.
Maybe that's because I have much trouble picturing who exactly do you have in mind. I don't know about any major thing solved by unaffiliated scientist. Sure, there are some of the not well regarded discovered some pretty important thing. But they still were operating in the same environment, and once they proven their case sufficiently were embraced by that environment.
> Some of those people do publish peer reviewed papers.
Some? And that's supposed to make them more trustworthy for me than scientists that other scientists trust?
> Unfortunately, peer review is pretty worthless.
As all tools by themselves are. That's why we have the scientific community and that's why you can make a career of mastering all the tools of science. Reputation among colleges has some value as a tool too.
> do you mean Wakefield?
I mean exactly him.
> He was peer reviewed and it took years for his paper to be retracted!
Yes. It takes time. It took even more years of solid journalistic investigation to show how much of a fraud he was. Meanwhile no other better source stepped forward to provide us with better insight on that case. And many "citizen scientists" did their own "research" and found much confirmation for Wakefield claims which they happily pronounced to vulnerable people.
> For COVID stuff, for better or worse the arguments are mostly about data and everyone is working off the same datasets. So you don't need fancy equipment. A computer is sufficient.
Not quite, because data is just the base level, from data you need to extract information, from that knowledge and from that insight. At the level between data and knowledge you need to have a pretty solid understanding of context of given field, like virology or epidemiology or immunology, because without it, from that data, you'll be able to create only mistakes and confusion.
> The man has made an entire career out of being always wrong and nobody in Imperial College London seems to care.
Sure, scientists usually don't spend their careers debunking others that are clearly wrong. They are usually more focused on developing the ideas of the ones who are right, because that's better use of their time. There are ton of garbage science around. That makes me even less confident about things that are not even science.
> The non-affiliated researchers on the other hand are trying to build an audience, some are selling their analysis to readers.
That's a horrible argument. Truth doesn't sell. Lies sell best. Also lies are somewhat resilient and still sell very well in the presence of information debunking them.
> I've seen mistakes caught that way a few times now and it usually leads to a quick admission and apology
I've seen way more doubling down on the lie or mistake than apologies. Apologies usually come from real scientists that have internet thing on the side while having usual fulfilling scientific careers.
> something I never saw coming from academics even in the rare cases their paper was retracted.
That's because retracted papers usually don't come from people who made honest mistake. They come from over liars, who wouldn't apologize or even admit if someone caught their hand while they are stealing. While random person (or non-afiliated scientist) on the internet is more often just misguided and/or incompetent.
Your argument, or world view, is that you can determine what's true by looking at who scientists trust and the peer reviews of these scientists. I've just named a man who is by universal academic consensus a scientist, but who - as you're aware - produces garbage science without any pushback. In fact, as far as epidemiology is concerned, ICL are the bees knees. One of their worst most obviously garbage papers has over 1300 citations!
And so your answer is that scientists don't spend time rebutting it (and never have) because it's so obviously bad they don't need to? Why do they keep citing it then? Where are the initial takedowns that established so strongly this guy was a fraud that scientists don't feel a need to write any more, and why do no governments seem to be aware of this?
Put another way, how can you determine which scientists are doing good work vs bad if all the available evidence, like citation counts, suggests they don't care and confuse bad work for good all the time? Remember that scientists are always "selling", which is why they complain about the grant application process so much. They are selling interesting claims to governments, not exactly known for being discerning buyers.
"It took even more years of solid journalistic investigation to show how much of a fraud he was."
Yes, it was hard work. Do you think current mainstream journalism is solid? I don't. The average science journalist would apparently rather die than argue with a scientist about anything, let alone allege fraud. They see their job as amplifying 'expert' voices, not investigating them.
But such journalism does exist and can be found outside of the large media institutions. You just have to look for it. Here's a small selection:
https://dailysceptic.org/ - news and analysis from the UK, they often do reviews of scientific papers and find flaws in them. For example this review of a paper by Ferguson's group:
https://dailysceptic.org/2021/08/24/examining-the-latest-pap...
All the content on this site is free and there are no ads. Mostly donation driven with lots of user submitted articles. Many readers and guest article writers have an academic, scientific, engineering or data analysis background.
https://eugyppius.substack.com/ - a mix of data analysis, fact checks and political analysis. Some paywalled content but not much.
https://bartram.substack.com/ - very deep analysis of the UK data (which is the best quality in the world) by a pseudonymous "former academic and senior UK government scientist".
https://alexberenson.substack.com/ - a former NYT investigative reporter who did a science beat in the past. He has a more US-centric approach, and mixes data analysis with links to other news stories and various journalistic hot takes. He's a regular writer rather than someone with a data background, but he still does a decent enough job and the comments section usually picks up pretty fast when there's a risk of statistical mis-analysis.
https://boriquagato.substack.com/ - a weird one but has some good articles: lots of data analysis mixed with populist "rise up" style political exhortions and amusing cat pictures. Very different to anything you'll find in a newspaper but there's still lots of thought provoking data here.
https://greenwald.substack.com/ - this is mostly analysis of media coverage rather than scientific papers e.g. https://outsidevoices.substack.com/p/the-nyts-partisan-tale-... but it can be useful for fact checking. This is one where some content is paywalled.
So now you'll go through and find reasons why you don't like these sources, or don't find them credible enough. Fine, but I don't find outlets like the BBC or NYT or Nature credible because there were too many times they published things that were clearly untrue and agenda-driven, then ignored all feedback about it.
Anti-vaxxers would be spreading disease, sure. Although it would lower their survival rates, they also affect the survival rates of the out-group by spreading it to vulnerable folks. So being stupid doesn’t affect them exclusively.
Next, once you’ve become an anti-vaxxer and burned bridges with sane people there’s no turning back. At that point becoming “rational” and accepting vaccines is the irrational choice because you lose your only community, and you are all alone. Like I said, loneliness kills.
This is moot because the psychological pain of admitting they’re wrong is too much anyway. So they’ll stick to the group. But my only contention is that post-bridge burning, the rational thing to do is to stick to the community that will care for you.
While I'd never call myself agreeable, as I really enjoy argument as a means of engaging communication and establishing bonds with others. I have found this lack of rationality to be a widely spread defect and when reduced is as simple as you describe: I've never been steadfast in even my deepest held beliefs, I often question them myself and look for ways to validate their merit when given the opportunity. Whether that be engage with people who hold opposing views, or simply analyze them to exhaustion on my own.
This philosophical outview is what I felt the Sciences would laud as it is the crux of what Scientific model which relies on and tries to achieve via the highy touted peer reviewed model wherein experiments are meant to be replicated and derive their credibility on these criteria: instead after my experience in undergrad in the life sciences and then having spent time in graduate level courses (not enrolled) and befriending two professors I soon realized it's really a petty, tribal, and often passive aggressive environment where it's less about merit of your experiments results and more about 'who knows you' and 'who they know.' On top of that, most experiments are never replicated and when they are they seldom get the same results.
I'm not sure which dismays me more, but either way, we need to get past this and I fear social media's optimization models has entrenched this defect deeper into the Human psyche than anyone will ever admit. I think it's less about evolving and more about halting the regression of base feelings and reactions in the Human Condition to be honest.
Also the most hardcore rational science people will do things based on feeling in their everyday lives. If you feel like drinking 5 beers on a Wednesday, that might not be the most rational thing to do, but knock yourself out. Where we as a society however need to be rational, is when it comes to the fate of populations (e.g. during a pandemic) or the entire planet (e.g. climate change).
The need for rationality changes with the scale of the problem and whether we are dealing with individual topics or collective ones.
If we really needed it like we need air, more action would be taken to move towards better circumstances.
I'd argue that it's not "really needed" for most people - almost no one alive today will experience the worst possible outcomes of climate change. Many of those who disregard epidemiological safety also won't experience the worst personal outcomes for themselves. Thus, they're free to disregard these, or even oppose them entirely, regardless of how far their arguments or feelings are detached from what would be best for the next generations and probably even believe that they're right in doing so.
People's ability to ignore anything that they don't like is easy to overlook.
I do agree with the actual point that you're making, though. We need more rationality in life.
Yet, at the same time, we're all just human and it's easy to have similar shortcomings ourselves, because if we spent all of our days worrying about every minuscule thing, we'd never get anything done (of course, that doesn't excuse the behavior, i'm merely pointing out this human cognitive limitation).
For example, i got some cheap running shoes for running in the evenings in my countryside home. The only factor that mattered to me when i got them, was that they'd be cheap enough for me to be able to throw them away once they get worn. Of course, the price point essentially meant that i'm probably supporting businesses in countries where the working conditions are oftentimes very poor, as well as ones where the human rights situation has problems in some cases. I don't doubt that the way my phone was made was all that different, nor were the circumstances surrounding it. Similarly, i support unethical corporations whenever i pick up a box of cereal at the store, or when i buy a cocoa drink that i want to enjoy. I'm also contributing to the furthering of unsustainable farming practices almost whenever i buy meat at the store, as opposed to sourcing it locally (e.g. smaller farms or hunting).
Of course, the impact of many of those is lower than the aforementioned things, yet the principle of the human mind being fallible is the same. So i think we should all remain self critical and watch out for things like that when we can.
Tribes with a misguided person at the top used to get decimated pretty quickly. But hey, now "we live in a society"