An analogous case is the current flap over gender issues.Executives and legislators have declared that "there are only two genders," and that all the attempts to explain things such as gender dysphoria are just "woke dementia" masquerading in the form of serious medicall and psychological knowledge.
The first thing to be noted is that the media has, as it all to often done, miscommunicated about scientific matters by, e.g., saying that "science proves such-and-so" when in fact science deliberately rules out proving anything. The reason is that you may have a large body of confirming evidence, but when you turn the next corner a contrary case shows the claim isn't true. "All swans are white" was seemed to be true until the first explorer brought back news from Australia of black swans. That's why philosophy of science people still frequently refer to black swans. With regard to gender, the mass media have frequently taken it as a "safe" term to use instead of using that terribly nasty word "sex."
Until sometime around 1950, "gender" was a term that was used solely in grammatical and language discissions. In German, what is the gender of a pencil? It depends on whether grammatically it is sppoken of as a he or a she, much as in English ships are traditionally ccalled "she."
John Money of Johns Hopkins University began his study of what is going on when someone declare that despite having male genitalia, the individual feels that the genitalia are inappropriate. Such an individual is spoken of, since Money's innovation, as having male sex but female gender. Then the question becomes, "How in hell is this sipposed to be explained?"
People have been working on this general problem for about a century, and they have been working on it as scientists, which can mean scientific papers that oppose each other, followed by more research, followed by eliminating some conclusions that turned out not to be as well-founded as the investigator supposed. People do not remember it, but the discoverer of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuru_(disease) was treated with extreme contempt in some circles (not a proper scientist at all), but in the end won out and received a Nobel Prize in Medicine. The same fighting occurs all the time if you are editing something on Wikipedia. All of which is to say that it's very unlikely that thousands of people who have worked in the field just decided to fabricate a plausible "urban myth" to fob off on the people. Instead, as I understand it, a huge amount of research has been done, the research findings have been tried against each other, amd a consensus position has emerged regarding the general nature of the phenomena. (Details are still being hashed out and might change some aspects of that consensus.)
The consensus of a field of specialists who have made it their life's work has emerged, and anybody who choses to go beyond the mass media can find it just by checking with Google Scholar. (Lots of that stuff is behind a pay wall, but you can get at least one of these consensus reports in the first couple of pages of https://pure.knaw.nl/ws/portalfiles/portal/5305590/FunctNeurol09Swaab.pdf
Studies that trace out fetal development also point to possible explanations for autism, homosexuality, etc. It turns out that genitalia develop in the first half of gestation, and many brain structures are laid out in the second half of gestation and are subject to all kinds of interferences from uterine environmental factors.
Certain politicians may not even know that this research exists. To them the matter is simple. If you have a penis and testicals you are a male and you must behave in what I the leader declare is the proper masculine way.If you don't, we will come after you. The same treatment should handle individuals with female genitalia. You will behave like Ricky Nelson's TV mom, or you are in for it.
Somehow, both of these comments landed me on SBF, but this reminds me of this old thread about how figuring anything out almost has to be a messy collective effort, by people who are willing to stumble forward together. That nothing gets done by an isolated genius, because even well-intentioned people will eventually become to enamored with their own ideas to see anything else:
t follows that the bigger & more complex the systems you're reasoning about, and the farther out into the future your reasoning extends, the more likely you are to be wrong, & not just wrong, but wrong in ways that flatter your priors & identity. I always feel like this fundamental fact gets underplayed in discussions of [effective altruism] or various other "rationalist" communities. The tendency to bullshit oneself is basically ... undefeated. It gets everyone eventually, even the most self-disciplined of thinkers.
--
If we humans overcome this at all, it is not through individuals Reasoning Harder or learning lists of common logical fallacies or whatever. If we achieve reason at all (which is rarely), we do so *socially*, together, as communities of inquiry. We grope toward reason & truth together, knowing that no individual is free of various epistemic weaknesses, but perhaps together, reviewing one another's work, pressing & challenging one another, adhering to shared epistemic standards, we can stumble a little closer.
That's what science is, insofar at it works -- not some isolated genius thinking really hard, but a *structured community of inquiry* that collectively zigs & zags its way in the right direction. Any one of us will almost certainly succumb to self-BSing. Together? Sometimes not.
…
In other words, thanks to our epistemic limitations, a "dumb" heuristic that just says "when in doubt, be decent" will probably generate more long-term utility than a bunch of fancy math-like expected-value calculations. We want *resilient* ethics, not *optimized* ethics.
(Also, as an aside, one of the reasons I took Chinese at Wake was because I couldn't for the life of me ever remember the gender of words in French, and I wanted a language that didn't do that.)
I agree that often times data is used to create a sense of authority where none rightly exists. I will go a bit farther to say that it often is used to create the illusion that a particular decision is the only plausible one. People use it to claim they have no agency over a policy or a decision when in fact they are swimming in it.
I do think in most of the cases where data is being used to create such a false sense of objectivity, the practitioner is rarely attempting to actively deceive the audience. The are either taking shortcuts to serve some greater point or they are pulling a Medawar. "Its author can be excused of dishonesty only on the grounds that before deceiving others he has taken great pains to deceive himself."
But data humans also deliver synthetic truths, and in many cases we can undertake activities that can check the underlying veracity of some of our claims. We can look for testimony from primary sources, we can do external validation. We can use statistical distributions to see if your synthetic metrics are producing stochastic variations or whether they can be attributed to some consistent cause. We can run a damn experiment.
I am not sure that the law has any such tools to ground itself in something other than motivated reasoning. Or I am not sure they are any good. I will leave that discussion to others.
It is true that there is to some degree, opinion all the way down in the data. You can't be perfectly objective. But I think that the implicit inference that we should despair of the idea that some opinions are more objective than others is a rhetorical conceit we would not accept if we were not already feeling catastrophic about the subject. We would not accept an argument that a heuristic is no good just by knowing it can't seperate cases perfectly.
(I also feel it is worth pointing out that pessimism also tends to lend an argument a deceptive feeling of objectivity in much the same way that meaningless enumeration can.)
I don't think I disagree with this. I don't think data is worthless (nor is the law). In some instances, data isn't opinions all the way down; there are certainly cases where data *is* an abstract representation of some natural quality. Even in cases when it's not, people can, as you said, run experiments, or use different sources, from ask questions from different angles, and so on. I think it's fair to say those are both ways in which the legal analogy breaks down, save asking for a second and third and fourth appeal (which still doesn't really work, since we just go with what the last person said, rather than trying judge them together like we might with analysis).
Moreover, even if it were all opinion, it's still better than nothing, and some opinions are more defensible than others. "Analytic" truths or rules are better than Calvinball.
Still, I think we overweight these rules, and in particular, the people who use them. And that latter point is my bigger gripe.
With the law, take the abortion issue. If we were to ask people what they think of SB8, we'd correctly assume that most people's position is rooted in what they personally think of abortion. But if they suddenly toss in some legal citations, that preference goes somewhere from being a secondary concern to entirely off-limits, an ad hominem attack in which the person accusing them of having an opinion is the biased one.
Data is similar. If you don't use it, you're a shill; if you do, and someone disagrees with you, they're the shill. Even in cases when everyone's trying their best, that's a big problem. It invalidates some arguments (and people who aren't skilled in those arguments) on their face, and validates others. The issue here isn't that people will always abuse it, though some will. It's that it incorrectly sorts arguments and people. It also perpetuates itself by partly undermining this idea: "Its author can be excused of dishonesty only on the grounds that before deceiving others he has taken great pains to deceive himself." The more society elevates your arguments, the fewer pains you actually have to go to deceive yourself. As analysts or judges, you get shoddy when you get smug.
Nate Silver's too easy of an example here, but he really checks all the boxes. Things like his primary forecasting is junk science; he has no particular expertise in anything to do with covid. But because he tacks numbers onto his opinions, it's treated as much more than punditry. And he's convinced himself he's the only one who's seeing things clearly because he's the numbers guy, and unless you're also a numbers guy, you shouldn't be taken seriously.
Now, most of us aren't that conceited. But shades of that attitude are pretty prevalent in analytics.
maybe it's unrepresentative, but whenever I see Nate Silver's name trending on twitter it is 1000 people screaming at him, so there are probably better examples.
True. But, if telling actual epidemiologists they're hacks for 18 months in the middle of a global pandemic is what it takes for a data analyst to fly too close to the sun, we're getting an awful lot of leeway.
An analogous case is the current flap over gender issues.Executives and legislators have declared that "there are only two genders," and that all the attempts to explain things such as gender dysphoria are just "woke dementia" masquerading in the form of serious medicall and psychological knowledge.
The first thing to be noted is that the media has, as it all to often done, miscommunicated about scientific matters by, e.g., saying that "science proves such-and-so" when in fact science deliberately rules out proving anything. The reason is that you may have a large body of confirming evidence, but when you turn the next corner a contrary case shows the claim isn't true. "All swans are white" was seemed to be true until the first explorer brought back news from Australia of black swans. That's why philosophy of science people still frequently refer to black swans. With regard to gender, the mass media have frequently taken it as a "safe" term to use instead of using that terribly nasty word "sex."
Until sometime around 1950, "gender" was a term that was used solely in grammatical and language discissions. In German, what is the gender of a pencil? It depends on whether grammatically it is sppoken of as a he or a she, much as in English ships are traditionally ccalled "she."
John Money of Johns Hopkins University began his study of what is going on when someone declare that despite having male genitalia, the individual feels that the genitalia are inappropriate. Such an individual is spoken of, since Money's innovation, as having male sex but female gender. Then the question becomes, "How in hell is this sipposed to be explained?"
People have been working on this general problem for about a century, and they have been working on it as scientists, which can mean scientific papers that oppose each other, followed by more research, followed by eliminating some conclusions that turned out not to be as well-founded as the investigator supposed. People do not remember it, but the discoverer of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuru_(disease) was treated with extreme contempt in some circles (not a proper scientist at all), but in the end won out and received a Nobel Prize in Medicine. The same fighting occurs all the time if you are editing something on Wikipedia. All of which is to say that it's very unlikely that thousands of people who have worked in the field just decided to fabricate a plausible "urban myth" to fob off on the people. Instead, as I understand it, a huge amount of research has been done, the research findings have been tried against each other, amd a consensus position has emerged regarding the general nature of the phenomena. (Details are still being hashed out and might change some aspects of that consensus.)
The consensus of a field of specialists who have made it their life's work has emerged, and anybody who choses to go beyond the mass media can find it just by checking with Google Scholar. (Lots of that stuff is behind a pay wall, but you can get at least one of these consensus reports in the first couple of pages of https://pure.knaw.nl/ws/portalfiles/portal/5305590/FunctNeurol09Swaab.pdf
Studies that trace out fetal development also point to possible explanations for autism, homosexuality, etc. It turns out that genitalia develop in the first half of gestation, and many brain structures are laid out in the second half of gestation and are subject to all kinds of interferences from uterine environmental factors.
Certain politicians may not even know that this research exists. To them the matter is simple. If you have a penis and testicals you are a male and you must behave in what I the leader declare is the proper masculine way.If you don't, we will come after you. The same treatment should handle individuals with female genitalia. You will behave like Ricky Nelson's TV mom, or you are in for it.
Somehow, both of these comments landed me on SBF, but this reminds me of this old thread about how figuring anything out almost has to be a messy collective effort, by people who are willing to stumble forward together. That nothing gets done by an isolated genius, because even well-intentioned people will eventually become to enamored with their own ideas to see anything else:
t follows that the bigger & more complex the systems you're reasoning about, and the farther out into the future your reasoning extends, the more likely you are to be wrong, & not just wrong, but wrong in ways that flatter your priors & identity. I always feel like this fundamental fact gets underplayed in discussions of [effective altruism] or various other "rationalist" communities. The tendency to bullshit oneself is basically ... undefeated. It gets everyone eventually, even the most self-disciplined of thinkers.
--
If we humans overcome this at all, it is not through individuals Reasoning Harder or learning lists of common logical fallacies or whatever. If we achieve reason at all (which is rarely), we do so *socially*, together, as communities of inquiry. We grope toward reason & truth together, knowing that no individual is free of various epistemic weaknesses, but perhaps together, reviewing one another's work, pressing & challenging one another, adhering to shared epistemic standards, we can stumble a little closer.
That's what science is, insofar at it works -- not some isolated genius thinking really hard, but a *structured community of inquiry* that collectively zigs & zags its way in the right direction. Any one of us will almost certainly succumb to self-BSing. Together? Sometimes not.
…
In other words, thanks to our epistemic limitations, a "dumb" heuristic that just says "when in doubt, be decent" will probably generate more long-term utility than a bunch of fancy math-like expected-value calculations. We want *resilient* ethics, not *optimized* ethics.
https://x.com/drvolts/status/1594462688096419841
--
(Also, as an aside, one of the reasons I took Chinese at Wake was because I couldn't for the life of me ever remember the gender of words in French, and I wanted a language that didn't do that.)
I agree that often times data is used to create a sense of authority where none rightly exists. I will go a bit farther to say that it often is used to create the illusion that a particular decision is the only plausible one. People use it to claim they have no agency over a policy or a decision when in fact they are swimming in it.
I do think in most of the cases where data is being used to create such a false sense of objectivity, the practitioner is rarely attempting to actively deceive the audience. The are either taking shortcuts to serve some greater point or they are pulling a Medawar. "Its author can be excused of dishonesty only on the grounds that before deceiving others he has taken great pains to deceive himself."
But we data folk do have tools that help us to keep from fooling ourselves. I think the piece focuses on cases where the truths under consideration are more "analytic" in the very old sense of the word. https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780195396577/obo-9780195396577-0044.xml
But data humans also deliver synthetic truths, and in many cases we can undertake activities that can check the underlying veracity of some of our claims. We can look for testimony from primary sources, we can do external validation. We can use statistical distributions to see if your synthetic metrics are producing stochastic variations or whether they can be attributed to some consistent cause. We can run a damn experiment.
I am not sure that the law has any such tools to ground itself in something other than motivated reasoning. Or I am not sure they are any good. I will leave that discussion to others.
It is true that there is to some degree, opinion all the way down in the data. You can't be perfectly objective. But I think that the implicit inference that we should despair of the idea that some opinions are more objective than others is a rhetorical conceit we would not accept if we were not already feeling catastrophic about the subject. We would not accept an argument that a heuristic is no good just by knowing it can't seperate cases perfectly.
(I also feel it is worth pointing out that pessimism also tends to lend an argument a deceptive feeling of objectivity in much the same way that meaningless enumeration can.)
I don't think I disagree with this. I don't think data is worthless (nor is the law). In some instances, data isn't opinions all the way down; there are certainly cases where data *is* an abstract representation of some natural quality. Even in cases when it's not, people can, as you said, run experiments, or use different sources, from ask questions from different angles, and so on. I think it's fair to say those are both ways in which the legal analogy breaks down, save asking for a second and third and fourth appeal (which still doesn't really work, since we just go with what the last person said, rather than trying judge them together like we might with analysis).
Moreover, even if it were all opinion, it's still better than nothing, and some opinions are more defensible than others. "Analytic" truths or rules are better than Calvinball.
Still, I think we overweight these rules, and in particular, the people who use them. And that latter point is my bigger gripe.
With the law, take the abortion issue. If we were to ask people what they think of SB8, we'd correctly assume that most people's position is rooted in what they personally think of abortion. But if they suddenly toss in some legal citations, that preference goes somewhere from being a secondary concern to entirely off-limits, an ad hominem attack in which the person accusing them of having an opinion is the biased one.
Data is similar. If you don't use it, you're a shill; if you do, and someone disagrees with you, they're the shill. Even in cases when everyone's trying their best, that's a big problem. It invalidates some arguments (and people who aren't skilled in those arguments) on their face, and validates others. The issue here isn't that people will always abuse it, though some will. It's that it incorrectly sorts arguments and people. It also perpetuates itself by partly undermining this idea: "Its author can be excused of dishonesty only on the grounds that before deceiving others he has taken great pains to deceive himself." The more society elevates your arguments, the fewer pains you actually have to go to deceive yourself. As analysts or judges, you get shoddy when you get smug.
Nate Silver's too easy of an example here, but he really checks all the boxes. Things like his primary forecasting is junk science; he has no particular expertise in anything to do with covid. But because he tacks numbers onto his opinions, it's treated as much more than punditry. And he's convinced himself he's the only one who's seeing things clearly because he's the numbers guy, and unless you're also a numbers guy, you shouldn't be taken seriously.
Now, most of us aren't that conceited. But shades of that attitude are pretty prevalent in analytics.
maybe it's unrepresentative, but whenever I see Nate Silver's name trending on twitter it is 1000 people screaming at him, so there are probably better examples.
True. But, if telling actual epidemiologists they're hacks for 18 months in the middle of a global pandemic is what it takes for a data analyst to fly too close to the sun, we're getting an awful lot of leeway.
This is the first post where I think I have beef. I don't disagree with the overall point but I do think it is incomplete in a way that is important.