Comment by ordu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ordu | Hacker News Reader

According to the article rationality started to decline at ~2000, and about at the same time psychology came short of a rejection of all the prior research due to deficiencies in a methodology. Maybe it is not a decline of a rationality, but an better understanding of a real value of a scientific result?

Also at 2001 Judea Pearl published "Causality: Models, Reasoning and Inference", which gives mathematical tools to track causes and effects. This book is full of "beliefs". Less so then the previous book of the same author ("Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems"), but nevertheless.

I believe, that the use of word "believe" or "feel" is not a sign of rejecting rationality. In this case it is about accepting the idea that we do not know the absolute truth and inviting others to challenge our beliefs. It fits nicely with ideas of Pearl's causality which states that it is impossible to reason about causes while sticking strictly to objectivity. So I feel it differently: it is not people became less rational, it is the rationality itself became less objective.

> According to the article rationality started to decline at ~2000

From the article:

What precisely caused the observed reversal of the long-term trend around 1980 remains perhaps even more difficult to pinpoint.

Eyeballing the chart, "rationality words" peaked somewhere there.

Yes, you are right. I concentrated on another graph, that shows the use of "intuition" words starts to grow closer to 2000. But it fits perfectly to a narrative of "The Book of Why" of Judea Pearl. He tells the history of statistics, and around 1980 there was growing frustration with logic and statistics. AI researchers was unable to build AI on a basis of formal logic (pattern matching, expert systems). So various probabilistic logics were spawned (fuzzy logic, bayesian analysis) they were trying to merge formal logic and statistics into a single framework. But it was not enough because it didn't allow to speak about causes and effect. And formal tools to deal with causality were developed in 1990s. Exactly when the "rational" word use declined and the "intuition" word use grown.

We see in graphs how people stopped using "rational" words (because they saw that they didn't work?), and closer to 2000 they've learned a new vocabulary. Correlation between the history of statistics and this graphs is just perfect. Though it is just a correlation and moreover it is a hindsight correlation, not a good reason to be overexcited and to propose a causal explanation.

1979 is the year Baudrillard published Simulacra & Simulation (a sort of obsession for me) and became the philosophical superstar of postmodernism, documenting a great cultural sea change towards a more cynical, superficial, often delusional worldview that pervaded the 1980's and echoes today. He was more inflammatory than objective/rational himself, however.

>In this case it is about accepting the idea that we do not know the absolute truth and inviting others to challenge our beliefs.

Empirically, does it seem we're in more open times where we're more "inviting others to challenge our beliefs"?

I think it is more that established facts have been shown to be only true within limits. Newton has been correct enough for centuries, but now we know more. So we hedge our bets.

I suspect the issue is the separation of academia and the mainstream discourse.

In academia, these days, you can probably question anything and everything - revisionism is rampant in all sorts of areas.

In the mainstream, though, that is not necessarily the case.

Is it "revisionism" if we find that previous conclusions were just plain wrong?

The degree of wrongness is often overstated, because nobody will get promoted for admitting that the subject matter cannot be improved on.

The first thought that comes to mind for me is the study of psychoactive drugs. I think its pertinent because of the relation to psychological and behavioral research. Cannabis was demonized for quite some time and people were producing research that backed up those claims, but most of that research was done extremely poorly, the best example of which is where monkeys were essentially suffocated with cannabis smoke (lack of oxygen kills neurons) and then they claimed that cannabis was the cause. There is a ton of research along these lines, especially when it comes to drugs of abuse. Most of the research that gets funded is specifically looking for downsides because that's the line that the regulatory agencies depend on and it produces crap like this.

The degree of wrongness is quite intense in some fields of research, at least the perception of the body of work is so skewed and biased by not only what gets funded, but by the studies that are just plain wrong and people need to be aware of that.

>In academia, these days, you can probably question anything and everything

I don't think so. It seems more like you are encouraged to question a specific set of beliefs but simultaneously heavily discouraged to question a different specific set.

Do you want to be more specific?

You can't even mention the things you can't criticize without getting an earful of why not being able to criticize them is making our society better and then suffering a withering attack on your moral character.

In other words, the sacred cows cannot even be named.

Phrenology for example, most other veiled excuses for one person to feel superior over another. Stuff like ZPE is not taken seriously either and if you do, you are mocked. There are hundreds of such examples, which to my mind are ridiculed for good reasons.

I think perhaps there was just a greater general acceptance of the output of academia in the past, if the so called models or 'scientific process' were followed.

Now it is much easier to come across the material, opinions and research that challenges the previous academic output.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com