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Comment by paulsutter

10 years ago

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.

  • I don't see how you're replying to my core point, which is that getting "totally convinced" is a function of the intuitive mind, and the intuitive mind will be totally convinced of anything that is consistent.

    Could you help me understand the difference between "totally convincing" and proving? If you are "totally convinced" of something, isn't that a p=1.0?

    Whether the topic is history or pseudohistory, words like "true", "false", "prove" and "disprove" really don't belong. Those words are fine in casual conversation, but they can't be part of the thinking of a serious person.

    • > I don't see how you're replying to my core point, which is that getting "totally convinced" is a function of the intuitive mind, and the intuitive mind will be totally convinced of anything that is consistent.

      Well, I think that was actually his point - that if you're not an expert on a topic and don't have the explicit knowledge to counter your intuition, every relatively consistent set of arguments will sound convincing.

      > Could you help me understand the difference between "totally convincing" and proving? If you are "totally convinced" of something, isn't that a p=1.0?

      No, it's not, and assigning probabilities of 0 and 1 to anything is a very bad idea. See: http://lesswrong.com/lw/mp/0_and_1_are_not_probabilities/.

      Otherwise, exept of pointing out that we have intuitive and explicit parts of reasoning that often oppose one another, I'm not sure what you're getting at.

      > Whether the topic is history or pseudohistory, words like "true", "false", "prove" and "disprove" really don't belong. Those words are fine in casual conversation, but they can't be part of the thinking of a serious person.

      Yes and no. They are shorthands. Unlike maths, in the real world you can't assign absolute true value to anything, but you can still be really, really sure. If I jump out of the fourth-floor window, I will hurt myself. That is true. Arguing that it's not true because you can't be absolutely positively 100% sure is just pointless arguing about words, a failure in communication. C.f. https://xkcd.com/1576/.

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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.