I started thinking about other very important, general epistemological lessons. Lessons that most human beings have not gotten, which has led to lots of other errors. So here’s one; this probably wouldn’t be a good single sentence to leave to the future (since it requires further explanation), but it’s still one of the most important facts of epistemology: Your priors are too high.
Equivalently, he writes
Almost all beliefs require evidence, and they require a lot of it. Way more than you’re thinking.
One consequence of “your priors are too high” is that your mind is too hard to change.
2. Edward R. Dougherty writes,
Four conditions must be satisfied to have a valid scientific theory: (1) There is a mathematical model expressing the theory. (2) Precise relationships, known as “operational definitions,” are specified between terms in the theory and measurements of corresponding physical events. (3) There are validating data: there is a set of future quantitative predictions derived from the theory and measurements of corresponding physical events. (4) There is a statistical analysis that supports acceptance of the theory, that is, supports the concordance of the predictions with the physical measurements—including the mathematical theory justifying the application of the statistical methods.
The theory must be expressed in mathematics because science involves relations between measurable quantities and mathematics concerns such relations. There must also be precise relationships specified between a theory and corresponding observations; otherwise, the theory would not be rigorously connected to physical phenomena. Third, observations must confirm predictions made from the theory. Lastly, owing to randomness, concordance of theory and observation must be characterized statistically.
…Practically speaking, a leader need not know the mathematical particulars of a theory, but he must understand the validation process: what predictions are derived from the theory and to what extent have those predictions agreed with observations?
This is not to argue that leadership be confined to scientists and engineers, only that education include serious scientific, mathematical, and statistical courses. Certainly, one cannot expect good political leadership from someone ignorant of political philosophy, history, or economics, or from someone lacking the political skill to work productively amid differing opinions. The basic point is that good decision-making in a technical civilization requires fundamental knowledge of scientific epistemology.
…To validate a deterministic model, one can align the model and experiment with various initial states and check to see if predictions and observations agree. There might be some experimental variation, but in principle this can be reduced arbitrarily and slight disagreements ignored.
The situation with stochastic models is completely different. For a single initial condition, there are many destination states and these are described via the model by a probability distribution giving the likelihoods of ending up in different states. An experiment consists of many observation trajectories from a single initial state and the construction of a histogram giving the distribution of the experimental outcomes relative to that state. Validation concerns the degree of agreement between the theoretical, model-derived probability distribution and the data-derived histogram. Acceptance or rejection of the theory depends on some statistical test measuring the agreement between the two curves—and here it should be recognized that there is no universally agreed upon test.
…Confronting the problems of complexity, validation, and model uncertainty, I have previously identified four options for moving ahead: (1) dispense with modeling complex systems that cannot be validated; (2) model complex systems and pretend they are validated; (3) model complex systems, admit that the models are not validated, use them pragmatically where possible, and be extremely cautious when interpreting them; (4) strive to develop a new and perhaps weaker scientific epistemology.14
The first option would entail not dealing with key problems facing humanity, and the second, which seems popular, at least implicitly, is a road to mindless and potentially dangerous tinkering. Option three is risky because it requires operating in the context of scientific ignorance; but used conservatively with serious thought, it may allow us to deal with critical problems. Moreover, option three may facilitate productive thinking in the direction of option four, a new epistemology that maintains a rigorous formal relationship between theory and phenomena.
3. https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/18/coronalinks-5-18-20-when-all-you-have-is-a-hammer-everything-starts-looking-like-a-dance/
Scott:
“I appreciate how much pressure there is on governors to open up churches, but they should be very careful about this, unless churchgoers can promise to stay uncharacteristically silent. I realize how bad it will look to say that golfing and rock concerts and orgies are allowed but churches aren’t. Still, governors should swallow their pride and stand firm.”
I think this depends a great deal on what kind of service you have. I’m used to Catholic services with over 2/3rd empty Pews where nobody besides the priest talks. Eliminate the Sign of Peace, don’t have people sign hymns, and handle Communion differently, and it doesn’t seem to be a high risk event. If still worried, mandate it be done outdoors.
The Super Spreader church events are of a certain type. Here is what that South Korean church looked like, packed like sardines.
https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-SXckQWcWl30/XS2KjdLOwbI/AAAAAAAAAjw/oJpZj5kygek8gIsty5yIv1V6FbyMVIHvwCEwYBhgL/s1600/Shincheonji%2BChurch%2Bof%2BJesus.jpg
Note too that that church ordered people to show up even if sick.
Scott doesn’t like religion, so I don’t think he gets how much this hurts people who are actively involved in a faith. If governors think Casinos can be made safe enough environments, certainly churches can to.
It’s surprising that Michael Huemer would say those things (which I agree with), and still endorse a theory of morality based solely on intuition…
It’s even worse than that.
He is asserting that the intellectualized promotion of certain moral instincts into ethical axioms has logical implications which are at odds with other moral instincts, that is, judgments that certain ordinary, conventional behaviors are normal and morally permissible.
But why should some intuitions get promoted over others which we are supposed to suppress? If we are relying on intuition, how do we justify or why are we bothering with the highly anti-intuitive (for the vast majority of people) exercise of intellectualization into some scheme resembling mathematical pure logic with goals of consistency, completeness, and non-contradiction?
All ethical analysis of sufficient depth necessarily ends up in the same black hole or else that black hole is fraudulently circumvented (either by negligent error or misrepresentation) by using intentionally muddled semantics like “common sense” or “intuition”, which slip beneath the radar of scrutiny by means of rhetorical device (that is, the unobjectionable social consensus which you must go along with because otherwise, what are you, some kind of evil person?) and flexible enough to demonstrate the validity of whatever the proponent of some ethical scheme is trying to prove.
+1000 Philosophers, and especially libertarian philosophers, are overwhelming likely to assume their priors are the correct ones despite the fact that their distaste for intuitions common to most humans — like loyalty to a collective, or differentiated morality based upon relatioship not principle — make them alienated from the experience of the common man. It would be like choosing a food taster who considers that all cooked meat tastes bad and proceed to issue culinary diktats based on that intuition.
I have two unsolicited suggestions concerning your study of political epistemology:
1. Don’t spend much time on schoolmarmish, finger-wagging generalities (don’t be biased, avoid epistemic closure) which are too abstract and usually too obvious to be useful. Huemer’s claim, if true, seems to me to fall in that category. (If I thought it were worth pursuing, one might wonder how he could know that most people don’t understand how much evidence is enough. To put the point in extreme form: if I say that I’m the only one in the world who knows the real criteria of rationality, what conclusion do you draw?)
What’s useful instead: understanding which specific types and sources of knowledge are reliable and which are not (the replication crisis, why Leamer deserves a Nobel).
2. It is a general feature of intellectual life that it is easy to find counterexamples, anomalies, non sequiturs and insufficient evidence, and difficult to produce an affirmative argument that can survive all criticism. Don’t imagine that one can limit oneself to what’s easier and still arrive at important and, so to speak, sectarian conclusions.
One might get the impression while reading certain commentators that they are going to be arguing for Pyrrhonian skepticism about the possibility of justified political beliefs. But of course that is never true. The “knowledge problem” people are all politics junkies who are bursting, if not exploding, with political opinions of their own. I’ll spare you the long-form version of my complaints about this. Let’s say that it’s hard to avoid suspecting that whatever is the basis for their own beliefs (usually left discreetly unspecified) has not been subjected to the same standards of rigorous scrutiny.
So don’t assume that you can indulge in concentrating on the easy part of epistemology (the part about what we don’t know) and still have a lot of beliefs about controversial matters. Or that the only knowledge we are lacking is that required to engage in “top-down planning”.
As Huemer perhaps suggests, all political commentators (including knowledge problem theorists) presume an enormous amount of knowledge. So unless you’re going to end up arguing for skepticism I hope that part of what you will do is explain how you are able to know so much.
In my experience, two intelligent, post-college age people from different backgrounds discussing anything of mutual interest usually fall victim to inferential distance. In other words, they each have ideas that have been developed through a long learning process and that can’t be efficiently communicated to someone whose learning process has been very different. For example, Dr. Kling’s libertarianism would make little sense to an equally intelligent and educated social justice activist, an evangelical Christian, or a Chinese CCP cadre (and vice-versa).
Re #2, theory is what matters, not maths; there is zero mathematics in Darwin’s “On the Origins of Species”; even Coase (1937) has zero mathematics, while Coase (1960) only has some arithemetic.