Comment by paulsutter
10 years ago
> given that at least some of those arguments are wrong and all seemed practically proven, I am obviously just gullible
Not gullible, he just needs to read Kahneman's "Thinking Fast and Slow".
The intuitive mind is unable to distinguish between consistency and truth. That is, a consistent story will always seem "proven" to the intuitive mind.
"Seeming practically proven" means little. You need to use the more logical part of your mind to crosscheck it.
I'd be very surprised if he hasn't read Kahneman. And even if he has, knowing about cognitive biases is a completely different skill than avoiding them. It's basically why the Center for Applied Rationality exists.
Well if he read it, he certainly didn't understand it.
> When I was young I used to read pseudohistory books; Immanuel Velikovsky's Ages in Chaos is a good example of the best this genre has to offer. I read it and it seemed so obviously correct, so perfect,
This guy believes in PROVING PSEUDOHISTORY. It's hard to understand what that even means, but let's look at specifics:
"Noah's Flood couldn't as a cultural memory...
- of the fall of Atlantis
- of a change in the Earth's orbit
- of a lost Ice Age civilization or
- of megatsunamis from a meteor strike."
A generous person could give these a 1% chance of being right. Maybe a 5% chance if you had a very convincing argument.
A gullible person might give one a 30% chance of being true.
But it is utter nonsense to assign 100% probability to any of these (that's what proof means, it means 100% likely). These just aren't provable matters.
Circling back to Kahneman, it really seems that he's getting persuaded by intuitive arguments, and the book "Thinking Fast and Slow" really dives into how this happens.
> This guy believes in PROVING PSEUDOHISTORY. It's hard to understand what that even means, but let's look at specifics
No, he does not. He only said that a good book proving pseudohistory sounds totally convincing to a history layman like him, and so does a book disproving the previous book. Since he can't tell what is false from what is true without huge amount of effort into studying history (no one has time to study everything in that amount of detail), he concludes that his only solution to stay sane is to ignore both arguments and stay with the general science consensus.
> But it is utter nonsense to assign 100% probability to any of these (that's what proof means, it means 100% likely). These just aren't provable matters.
That's your implication, nowhere written in the text. The guy hangs out in rationalists circles, he knows better than to assign P=1.0 to stuff. I know because I read quite a lot of his articles.
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Poor form to base such scathing criticism on the author's admission of weak thinking as a youth.
Speaking of probabilities, I would bet at 6:1 odds that the author would find nothing new in your comments.
You underestimate the author significantly. Read it again, but this time asssume the author is extremely smart and wise and is truthfully relating experiences. Then draw conclusions about what this tells you about the general trustworthiness of 'arguments'.
He is now a practicing outpatient psychiatrist, so I suspect he is somewhat familiar with Kahneman.