I really love Julia Galef's take on this in the book "The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don't". It's not quite humility, but it's close. Instead of trying to win arguments, try to find out what's true. Be humble in what you know and don't know. Every once and a while try to calibrate your confidence. [0]
> Every once and a while try to calibrate your confidence. [0]
How is that hard? Got 100% correct on my 100% guesses. 70% correct on my 60-70% guesses and about 50% on the 50% ones. Don't people do this naturally? It is so easy to know when you are sure, when you know it is probably right and when you have no idea at all.
You've never been sure of something only to find out you weren't correct on it?
I think I generally have a sense of how confident I am and yet I know I sometimes overshoot because I'm overlooking a detail or incorrectly remembering something.
> You've never been sure of something only to find out you weren't correct on it?
A 99.9% confidence statement is still wrong 0.1% of the time. If you make one such a day then you ought to be wrong about it once per three years. I don't see that as a problem, of course I get surprised when it happens since it is rare but there isn't much more to it.
And there are even higher levels than 99.9%, many things you are basically never wrong about so we can't find the error bar.
Edit: I think it is good to compare your confidence in a thing to other things. Are you really as confident in this statement as you are in the layman interpretation of 1 + 1 = 2 (ie if you take 1 apple, add 1 apple now you have 2 apples)? Then you can say 100%. But most things are way below that level.
I appreciate that clarification, and yea, with the link I didn't link that I had to choose 100% confident because I would much prefer what you said at 99% or 99.9% confident. I also like what you said about how it brings a surprise because it may be so rare. Thanks for this!
I'd say the questionnaire cheats a bit though since it picks some known common 0.1% cases where most people has to wrong idea. So making statements about a persons confidence and how it relates to the real world based on such questions isn't good science, rather it seems like the purpose was to make the effect seem greater than it is. So maybe me getting reasonable scores was just that I read a lot of forums and have seen data related to common mistakes people do and therefore didn't get tricked by those questions.
Do you write down your guesses, confidence levels and revisit these when something changes or comes to light? I'm genuinely curious how you keep track of this and how it fits into your day.
EDIT: oh I think I missed that this was specifically referring to the link. I read it as a general comment about calibrating confidence through one's life!
That’s a neat concept for a site. A bit Australia specific for some of the trivia, but that likely doesn’t matter, because you aren’t penalized in any way for getting questions wrong. It’s a way of showing your own bias in your own confidence.
Is there more info about this site and what it’s intended audience and goals are?
Ideologies carve epistemic valleys. Cozy, beautiful places you'll never escape—because why would you try? No evidence from other places ever filters in.
Are you living in a valley? Maybe not. But what makes a valley, and how big can it be?
Are those mountains in the distance?
You can spend your whole life walking through horizons to be sure that, so far, no, you haven't been trapped. Most people just have better things to do.
Most people don't want to be called 'fools' either. Walking through horizons is a risky thing, you may lose your footing any time. But the reward is great, when you return down and can credibly convince the valley people that they are fools to miss out on the beautiful meetings that take place on mountaintops.
These are the "seven capital virtues" which are coupled to the seven deadly sins.
The cardinal virtues are different: there are four Cardinal virtues which come from classical philosophy (Wisdom, Courage, Justice, Moderation) and three theological virtues associated with Christianity (Faith, Hope, Charity). This set of seven is known as the heavenly virtues. These are a pretty good guideline in life, I find.
Yes, if you get high on virtue-signalling in public sphere. But the sins and virtues are first and foremost personal categories to be measured against the person you used to be before now.
I personally try to walk, because that's just what I prefer, but I can see why people don't. You end up far away from everything, without a tribe or much to show for your trouble.
I think this is a promising start! However, it’s a rather abstract argument and might be improved by concrete examples.
One aspect of humility might be to avoid abstract generalizations and stick to shallow observations. For example, instead of arguing that some kinds of architecture are good and other kinds of architecture are terrible, and speculating about why, you could simply say, “this building looks good to me” and “I don’t like how this building looks.”
Or you could say that a particular article seems plausible or implausible to you, rather than saying it’s true or false.
But making universal-sounding claims is an ingrained habit that seems hard to shake.
>Corporates, Business Rivals, Nation-States, and Criminal Organizations alike want to influence their target crowd in one way or another to achieve a diverse set of strategic objectives. And they absolutely do not hesitate to employ the means of Disinformation.
>Be it the denigration of Covid vaccines or promotion of a particular election candidate, we have seen the usage of Disinformation time and time again...
Pretty ironic. Wouldn't business and government want to encourage people to get vaccines? It gives them an enormous amount of leverage over the herd. They'll use disinformation to make vaccines seem safer and more effective than they really are, in order to secure universal compliance from the masses. If you control people's immune systems, you win.
I absolutely appreciate anyone who worked to win against these diseases as well. I think vaccines are an amazing invention by humankind. What I don't appreciate is how modern corporations like Pfizer are working in combination with likes of FDA, spreading misinformation themselves by covering up side effects and by doing so giving a completely wrong impression of what the risk, rewards of this vaccine are as well as leaving anyone vaccine injured behind, gaslighted by the whole society. And I'd still suggest these vaccines at the very least to risk groups. I don't know about other groups, because I can't trust their data.
Source - testimony from a trial participant's mother:
I do not possess the resources to evaluate the veracity of this information. Just like I have with polio, pertussis, shingles, etc, I am going to punt it to FDA/CDC, and worry about things that are in my purview.
I punt a lot of things to a lot of organizations. Luckily I live in a time and place where the civil government organizations are more often than not, well intentioned.
It's difficult for me to say whether and how much they (government and FDA) are in this case motivated by greater good or because of money and greed. It's a very complex and difficult thing to judge.
There's evidence to either side. E.g. covering up all the bad cases will increase vaccine up take. Then again why give it to children if it's possible that for children vaccines may be more harmful than the benefits they give, is it also to just give this safe perception of those vaccines? It doesn't seem like giving vaccines to children would end the pandemic or let people go back to normal lives significantly faster.
Despite you not being able to evaluate the veracity, did you for instance take a look at the speech at least? What would you say your confidence on its veracity is?
It's not in my characteristics to hide information like that. Am I doing society a disservice by sharing this information, working against the "greater good"? Is it good to share this information to increase awareness and let people do more calculated decisions? I don't know.
> Despite you not being able to evaluate the veracity, did you for instance take a look at the speech at least? What would you say your confidence on its veracity is?
No, it would be a waste of time. There is nothing I can glean from someone talking in a YouTube video that would trump decades of reputation of the FDA/CDC.
I drive a car that I have no idea if it will blow up, I drive over bridges that I have no idea if they will fall down, I eat food that might have E. coli on it, I bathe in water that might have Legionnaires and carcinogens, and I take vaccines that doctors tell me to take.
> Am I doing society a disservice by sharing this information, working against the "greater good"? Is it good to share this information to increase awareness and let people do more calculated decisions? I don't know.
Yes, it is a disservice. The USA’s single greatest asset is trust within its society. It is why people want the USD, it is why people trust high end equipment made in the USA, and why we can go about our lives without worrying about bribing cops every time we travel, or not worry about your kids dying in car accident because people follow rules on the road, and why you can eat cold food at a restaurant or drink water not from a bottle of water opened in front of you without worrying about getting sick.
> It's difficult for me to say whether and how much they (government and FDA) are in this case motivated by greater good or because of money and greed. It's a very complex and difficult thing to judge.
Everything can be tainted by money and greed. It is a useless platitude. If you want to maintain consistency in that kind of reasoning, it would be best to go live in the woods and farm your own food.
> I drive a car that I have no idea if it will blow up, I drive over bridges that I have no idea if they will fall down, I eat food that might have E. coli on it, I bathe in water that might have Legionnaires and carcinogens, and I take vaccines that doctors tell me to take.
Sure, and in most cases it works out very well, until some new info about the car comes out, e.g. reports of it frequently exploding, some of the bridges frequently falling down etc. Article coming out by a reputable journal about how safety tests for the car were botched. The car uses some sort of new untested electric battery that wasn't tested for explosions at all.
> Yes, it is a disservice. The USA’s single greatest asset is trust within its society.
For me trust doesn't work like that. If something seems too good to be true, I lose trust. If negative things about something are censored I lose trust. I have trust when both good and bad things are talked about openly, data is transparent and can be validated.
> Everything can be tainted by money and greed. It is a useless platitude. If you want to maintain consistency in that kind of reasoning, it would be best to go live in the woods and farm your own food.
It's not useless. I need to know whether main motivation with vaccines is greater good or it is money. If it's greater good, then yes, maybe I am doing a disservice in my view. If it's money over society, then I'd believe I'm doing the right thing by spreading the information.
>Article coming out by a reputable journal about how safety tests for the car were botched.
Sure, but that has not happened here.
>If something seems too good to be true, I lose trust. If negative things about something are censored I lose trust. I have trust when both good and bad things are talked about openly, data is transparent and can be validated.
Has that happened here? Obviously, transparency is always good, but I do not know about the logistics of throwing up every piece of data from clinical trials. "Seems too good to be true" works sometimes, if the subject is simple enough. Like someone giving away free products or free labor. Does not really work when you need PhDs to understand the subject matter.
> I need to know whether main motivation with vaccines is greater good or it is money.
What does "main motivation" even mean? Everyone does everything with some ratio of money:"greater good". Some people will kill someone else for $1B, and some will not. If you want your society's best people at the cutting edge of medical science, then you better reward them, maybe even comparably to spending their time figuring out how to target you with ads online. But that does not mean they can also not do things for the greater good.
That is why you need various teams of experts double checking each other (for example in this case, various governments and even non government agencies evaluating vaccines). Is it possible the whole system is corrupt a la Hollywood style evil syndicate movie? Maybe. Is living life worth it assuming every situation is like that without considerable evidence? No.
For the record, in case you are curious about my thoughts on the government's response, I was OK with government restrictions if hospitals were being overwhelmed and vaccines were not widely available. After the vaccine had been made widely available, my response would have been to remove all government restrictions and let people get turned away from hospital emergency rooms if they are unvaccinated. I see no problem with vaccine requirements. My parents had vaccine requirements, I had them growing up, and the evidence behind herd immunity and population wide vaccination is readily evident, considering the lack of smallpox and polio today, etc. And the resurgence of measles and whooping cough in areas where people do not vaccinate.
> Does not really work when you need PhDs to understand the subject matter.
You don't need PhD to roughly understand percentages and frequencies of various side effects and risks occurring from trial data. If there's 1% chance of X from a vaccine as opposed to 0.1% chance of X from the virus, you don't need to have PHD to understand what would be a better option for you.
> What does "main motivation" even mean? Everyone does everything with some ratio of money:"greater good". Some people will kill someone else for $1B, and some will not. If you want your society's best people at the cutting edge of medical science, then you better reward them, maybe even comparably to spending their time figuring out how to target you with ads online. But that does not mean they can also not do things for the greater good.
So my question is, are the current vaccines truly good for the society? E.g. are they given to children because of money, or because they are confident of these being safer to children than the virus? They can still be given because of money as well when they are safer in addition, but I guess the main point is - are they willing to overlook the fact that children will get harmed by vaccines more than they would by the virus in order to make money or gain political power?
> That is why you need various teams of experts double checking each other (for example in this case, various governments and even non government agencies evaluating vaccines). Is it possible the whole system is corrupt a la Hollywood style evil syndicate movie? Maybe. Is living life worth it assuming every situation is like that without considerable evidence? No.
And if you check the article you will see that this evaluation was not done properly. Despite complaints of poor practices, unblinding, falsified data, people who made the complaints were fired and FDA did not investigate the complaints.
> For the record, in case you are curious about my thoughts on the government's response, I was OK with government restrictions if hospitals were being overwhelmed and vaccines were not widely available. After the vaccine had been made widely available, my response would have been to remove all government restrictions and let people get turned away from hospital emergency rooms if they are unvaccinated. I see no problem with vaccine requirements.
My personal stance is that based on information I know right now, I do not agree with vaccine mandates for these particular vaccines and I do think taking these vaccines should be a personal choice and no one should be pressured or forced into taking them.
>Is British Medical Journal not a reputable journal?
I have no idea, I am not in this field. The claims may very well may be legitimate, but I do not know what normal clinical trials entail or how much corruption is to be expected.
>You don't need PhD to roughly understand percentages and frequencies of various side effects and risks occurring from trial data. If there's 1% chance of X from a vaccine as opposed to 0.1% chance of X from the virus, you don't need to have PHD to understand what would be a better option for you.
Is it that easy? I imagine when you are dealing with 8B people worldwide, you are dealing with population size and systemic effects, not worrying about individual effects. I do not know for sure, I am not an epidemiologist, but I assume the CDC or whatever orgs have some on staff that know better.
>I guess the main point is - are they willing to overlook the fact that children will get harmed by vaccines more than they would by the virus in order to make money or gain political power?
Who knows? This is an ever present risk in society. As far as I can tell, Moderna and Pfizer and J&J are profiting from this, and I do not see why all the leaders of the government health agencies from US/UK/EU/Canada would be particularly simultaneously invested in it.
>And if you check the article you will see that this evaluation was not done properly. Despite complaints of poor practices, unblinding, falsified data, people who made the complaints were fired and FDA did not investigate the complaints.
These are companies and organizations employing tens of thousands of people. Maybe there is a big cover up happening, maybe there is not. I know from operating businesses and managing people myself that claims can get start getting thrown around willy nilly very quickly. It takes time to gather all the info and analyze the big picture. There are lots of "bombshell" type news items that come out every day about every business "meat producer does this" "farming corp does this" "Apple did this" etc.
All I know is that the results of these organizations have mostly trended in the right direction, so that is what I have to operate with and hope for the best.
>> these organizations have mostly trended in the right direction
[citation needed]
Not sure how many times the government and pharmaceutical companies have to be proven horrifically, detrimentally corrupt before people become concerned enough to push back. For many, the answer is "after it's too late".
The citation is infant mortality rates, and talking to all of my grandparents and their brothers and sisters and how women used to regularly have babies die or have polio or smallpox. And now it is very rare to have any of that happen.
This article has a pretty interesting perspective, and I like the idea of humility as a precursor to being open-minded and engaging in critical thought. The art of debate requires at least someone involved being open to changing their mind.
But I see a couple problems with this article:
1) Psychology and cognitive science, as they currently stand, are mostly guess-work and observations. We don't know enough to make concrete diagnosis or prescribe solutions in such a steadfast manner, unless we're happy with possibly inflicting more damage (which we often do). Intellectualizing distrust by claiming it's because of a lack of humility and the mechanisms of ontological security seems a bit much. Why not approach combatting disinformation by becoming trustworthy?
2) The author conflates conflicting narratives with disinformation. How do they know what's true? Did they figure it out themselves or did they listen to a specific narrative? Why should anyone trust their opinion?
I simultaneously enjoyed the perspective the author brought about humility and felt confused at the certainty with which the author seemed to speak about this perspective. Maybe I've come to place too much emphasis on linguistic qualifications, such as maybe, might, possibly, I'm not sure, etc. Perhaps this theory is more along the lines of that saying about having strong beliefs but held weakly. I suppose I just miss an admission in the essay that says that although the author may strongly believe this, it may also not be true.
How would this work? Your leader tells you that vaccines are bad, you are humble so you trust your leader. Outsiders tells you that your leader is wrong, but you are humble so you don't think much about it, others are smarter than you and have thought this through so surely your leader can't be that wrong, so why not trust him?
Humble people don't value themselves and instead refer to authority. That lets misinformation spread since there will always be a lot of badly informed leaders around. The only way to fix that is to stop being humble, start distrusting your leaders and make your own judgements. But of course that would mean some people make the wrong judgement and will still be wrong, but at least since they made their own judgements they can be reasoned with unlike the humble people who never thought about it properly in the first place.
I am not convinced that there actually are a lot of such people you described. I think the people you meet who are hard to argue with are that way since they just listen to authority and repeats what their authority source told them. A naïve take would be that the person is arrogant and doesn't listen since he trusts himself too much, but in this case the problem is that the person is too humble and listened too much to his leader instead of thinking for himself in this argument.
> A naïve take would be that the person is arrogant and doesn't listen since he trusts himself too much, but in this case the problem is that the person is too humble and listened too much to his leader instead of thinking for himself in this argument.
A naive take would be to give all authority sources the same amount of weight.
No one is capable of knowing everything and making proper judgments. Everyday people have to rely on others’ judgments. You can look for signs that something is off, but for the most part, you will have to trust others. In a well functioning society, most of the time, this will work out in your favor.
I think we need to find a better way for the philosophy behind the scientific method to click.
The entire idea of a "fact" is flawed. We simply have more good evidence for some things than others. Teaching people to critically evaluate and compare the evidence is the trick.
Perhaps studying different perspectives of a politically neutral historic event would help people to understand.
I think what confuses people is that the data isn't the facts either. We derive data from the facts, and use the data to test models.
If you go read an empirical paper, there are plenty of facts there, all in a single section that details the experimental outcome. All the other sections are derived (conclusion, abstract) or invented (methodology).
Except for facts of the subjective experience of sense data, empiricism (including science) doesn’t deal in facts, it deals in contingent conclusions drawn from models adopted to explain the relationships between facts (in the narrow domain admitted previously.)
1.) I have seen people claim their subjective opinions are "fact" just because they expressed them authoritatively and with conviction. It is not rare, it is super frequent.
And it is frequent especially in tech and adjacent communities that frame themselves as rational or scientific.
2.) With history in particular, selecting which facts you use makes massive difference. You can tell technically truth statements, leave out context and end up with a massive lie about what happened. You can switch victim and aggressor, make assholes into heroes and so on.
Same exact effect is in economy and other fields, but with history it is super easily apparent.
"Legitimacy" of possession at a specific moment in time is a lot to read into the comment. Simple possession is sufficient, as it attributes the actions of the actor at that specific moment to the possessor, legitimate or otherwise.
I.e. what this is referring to as "combating disinformation" is just within yourself, by means of adopting humility.
If you have humility (accepting the possibility that you are fallible and wrong), you are less susceptible to be fooled by disinformation that is based on appealing to the naive individual's sense of infallibility.
It does not speak to "combating disinformation" as in actually duking it out against disinformants, and winning, so that the objective quantity of disinformation in the world is diminished.
There, humility won't help you very much. The bad actors can simulate humility. In fact that is one common strategy. Spreaders of misinformation typically claim that they are rational, unbiased and willing to be wrong---in contrast of whatever they speak against.
A common pattern argument used by disiformants, for instance in this recent area of Covid-19 vaccines, is that science is arrogant and self-assured of its own infallibility (in effect, that science lacks humility). A good proportion of the masses is taken in by this, because, why, in fact, the way that the public officials have been behaving does in fact exhibit a lack of humility: they just assert they are right based on what the science is telling them this week, and then tell people what they can and cannot do, or must do.
("Science is arrogant and self-assured, lacking humility" is nothing new; for instance, it's a staple of the creationist argument against evolution.)
People will ignore new information when they've already made up their minds or are too attached to their own reality (pretend sleeping), but can easily change their minds if they accept/are aware of their ignorance (sleeping).
The use of "wake" here also implies an intention to /convince/ the sleepers of something, which doesn't really jibe with the rest of the article for me, where he equates humility with lack of desire for validation, but I think it could be interpreted more passively as well, eg. enlighten.
> .. the individual would never have qualms about subjecting his beliefs or observations to open scrutiny and even discard it entirely in case enough facts and evidence are presented in its disfavor.
The best engineer types I have worked with are highly intelligent, and although they would certainly fight their corner ferociously, they are also capable of recognising when they are wrong - they almost delight in it. Like "ha ha, you got me!"
In my experience humility is the main thing that makes it hard to teach people. "Why is it important that I learn this, I'm not going to change the world? I just want to learn what I need to know to get by.", thought patterns along those lines is so common everywhere, at work, at school etc. People who think they matter are so much easier to teach, and those who go even further and want to change the world often don't need teaching since they learn it on their own.
I don't believe that attitude is humility. To my understanding, humility requires an accurate assessment of one's own capabilities, but not an over exaggeration.
The problem is not what people choose to believe and it does not matter if what people believe is correct or not, until someone want them to do something that they would normally not do, such as support war or inject some substance in the body.
If someone has a very specific agenda and wants people do something specific, such as yes to vaccinate, instead of no to vaccinate, then what people believe becomes a problem.
The one with the specific agenda calls information that does not lead the wished specific action, disinformation and it is willing allocates resources to combat a war against that. This is easier and cheaper if the resources allocated really believe into that specific agenda themselves. Those that control education and have more presence in the media and in the social platforms have better cards.
This is propaganda in the making no matter what is the true direction. The reality is more complex that a simple truth that someone combatting for it can reveal to rest of us by being humble like Buddha. These are techniques used in advertising and politics to manipulate consent.
This misses the point. The issue is that people do not trust governments after two stock market bubbles, quantitative easing scams, insider trading by politicians, CRT and deconstructing children's identities in schools, gain of function lies etc.
I've seen very little attempts at unbiased science. We'll see in the winter in Europe/North America if the vaccine actually works as advertised.
vaccines make up like 1% of this article. i'm not sure what posturing you're aiming for but i it doesn't jive with my read about this topic & this article. the ideas & values being discussed here are at a much more abstract level.
> Those who are not humble have a compulsive need to attach themselves to and protect their ideals and beliefs. However, in doing so, they are ultimately protecting themselves. Once their beliefs are challenged, they mistake it as an attack upon themselves. Their ideas are tightly coupled with their self and its infallibility. Therefore, they become aggressive whenever a fact that runs counter to their beliefs is presented.
This could be the textbook description of the average commenter on HN's threads debating the merits of capitalism.
[0] http://confidence.success-equation.com/