Scott, that is a correct point, but that important warning works both ways in many controversies about scientific findings on issues that people think they know about from personal experience. Human intelligence research, when discussed among laymen, is particularly an area in which people make strong claims on the basis of "it's obvious that" or "everyone knows" when the strong claims are neither obvious nor things that everyone knows.
The way to reality-check someone's impression of how the world works is to gather more data. In human intelligence research, James R. Flynn (a co-author of the paper under review here) has enjoyed particular success in making claims that run against the "everyone knows" bias of individual differences psychologists, and then being backed up by other psychologistics (and getting published in the top journals in psychology) when data are found to back him up.
Here is what Arthur Jensen said about Flynn quite a few years ago, and he hasn't retracted this statment: "Now and then I am asked . . . who, in my opinion, are the most respectable critics of my position on the race-IQ issue? The name James R. Flynn is by far the first that comes to mind." Modgil, Sohan & Modgil, Celia (Eds.) (1987) Arthur Jensen: Concensus and Controversy New York: Falmer. Here's what Charles Murray (all right, neither a psychologist nor a geneticist, but, as the review points out, an author who has written about these issues) says in his back cover blurb for Flynn's book What Is Intelligence?: "This book is a gold mine of pointers to interesting work, much of which was new to me. All of us who wrestle with the extraordinarily difficult questions about intelligence that Flynn discusses are in his debt." As N. J. Mackintosh writes about the data Flynn found in his book IQ and Human Intelligence: "the data are surprising, demolish some long-cherished beliefs, and raise a number of other interesting issues along the way." Flynn has earned the respect and praise of any honest researcher who takes time to read the primary source literature. Robert Sternberg, Ian Deary, Stephen Pinker, Stephen Ceci, Sir Michael Rutter, and plenty of other eminent psychologists recommend Flynn's research.
A mental test, perhaps, to determine if something truly is "obvious": if the fact is reversed, and you can come up with a reasonable sounding explanation for the reverse, then the original fact is not obvious.
In other words, only consider something obvious if you could not explain the opposite.
Another good rule of thumb is that if you're ever in a position where you feel the need to assert that something is "obvious", it probably isn't.
All too often people try to end a debate by asserting that some point (from which their position inevitably follows) is "obvious". If it were obvious, they likely wouldn't be having the debate in the first place. It's much more likely that someone disagrees with the foundation of an argument than that they agree with the premises but are too stupid to see their consequences.
A mental test, perhaps, to determine if something truly is "obvious": if the fact is reversed, and you can come up with a reasonable sounding explanation for the reverse, then the original fact is not obvious.
This experiment has been tried, by a scientist who presented the exact opposite of various findings to undergraduates, who were readily able to invent rationales for the counterfactual statements, as reported in "A Sociologist’s Apology" (as posted on the website for the book Everything Is Obvious: *Once You Know the Answer).
Eliezer Yudkowsky cites the same experiment in the essay I linked, which was my motivation for bringing it up. I'm not proposing an experiment, however, but a mental tool for people who are trying to be honestly rational. And my motivation for why this tool will work is that experiment.
Of course, using this mental tool requires that you are honest with yourself when you try to explain the counterfactual statement.
Not sure if you were trying to imply something different, but that result would suggest that the students don't have adequate basis for claiming that things in those fields are "obvious" (or of their own confidence levels), not that the community of scientists in those fields lack adequate epistemic basis.
I'm sorry if I ended implying I was using hindsight, I meant to claim that this was obvious to me in advance. I'm pretty sure its even in my comment history where we were discussing someone's claim that IQ wasn't a real thing even though it was a heritable thing, and I asserted that "there isn't just one heritability of IQ" or words very close to that.
At the risk of being rude: I don't believe you. It's just too hard for us to disassociate current knowledge from our intuition. I do believe that your prior statements are in support of the one in question, but I do not believe that those statements make this one obvious. (That is, I don't believe you when you say your prior statements would clearly imply the current one.)
Except I think the author would point out that there isn't just _one_ heritability for things like height because height would be much more heritable in environments where everyone has adequate nutrition as opposed to in environments where nutrition was a matter of luck, for instance.
Rereading the blog post I was referring to, I'm not as certain that the author would actually agree with me here, but at the time I thought the point was so obvious that anybody who thought about it would agree.
Very interesting point, but I'd argue it has different implications to different fields of study. In physics, for example, if ten years from now it turned out that the existence of Higgs boson, in hindsight, was an "obvious" part of a wonderfully intuitive theory, most physicists would be elated and consider it a proof of the strength of their theory. Arguably a different story in social science.
I'm not sure that analogy works because the Higgs boson was not a surprise. It was predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics. I also worry that you're abusing the word "obvious."
