At the end of the article, I evaluate knowledge-claims about virtues in light of these attribution biases, input heuristics and biases, and processing heuristics and biases. Every widely accepted theory of knowledge must reject such knowledge-claims when they are based merely on folk intuitions.
This sounds absurd on its face. If Alfano finds out that someone has a history of cheating and stealing, will he avoid having any business with this person, expecting similar behavior in the future, or will he “reject such knowledge-claims… based merely on folk intuitions”?
Are his claims really so silly, or am I missing something?
If a person’s history is to cheat in business, it might be that the person habitually and easily lies whenever on the phone and he or she can’t see who is on the other end. The person might be solidly in the middle of the bell curve for everything but predilection to dehumanization. (Scholarship FTW.)
Alternatively, the person might have a unique situation, such as being blind, isolated, and requiring a reader to speak out received emails in Stephen-Hawking voice, that is such that anyone would experience dehumanization sufficient to make them cheaters. (I’m not claiming this is the case, just that some of similarly plausible set-ups would cause actions, just as time since judges ate affects sentencing.)
So either virtue ethics breaks down as people’s uniqueness lies in their responses to biases and/or people’s being overwhelmingly, chaotically directed by features of their environments.
Either way, cheaters and thieves are likely to cheat or steal again.
If I can look someone in the face, can usually detect lying. Voice only, can often detect lying. Text only, can sometimes detect lying.
Thus if a person is honest in proportion to the bandwidth, this requires no more psychological explanation than the fact that burglars are apt to burgle at night.
If I can look someone in the face, can usually detect lying. Voice only, can often detect lying. Text only, can sometimes detect lying.
Is that by the same way you can divine people’s true natures?
the Wizards Project tested 20,000 people to come up with 50 who panned out
an aggregation of techniques offered no better than 70% accuracy
people with no instructions did little better than chance in distinguishing lies and truth
But I suppose these results (and the failings of mechanical lie detectors) are just unscientific research, which pale next to the burning truth of your subjective conviction that you “can usually detect lying”.
Does any of that really matter? This is the same person who thinks a passel of cognitive biases doesn’t apply to him and that the whole field is nonsense trumped by unexamined common sense. (Talk about ‘just give up already’.)
This is the sort of desperate dialectics verging on logical rudeness I find really annoying, trying to rescue a baloney claim by any possibility. If you seriously think that, great—go read the papers and tell me and I will be duly surprised if the human lie-detectors are the best calibrated people in that 20,000 group and hence that factoid might apply to the person we are discussing.
That academics who do not want to succeed in doing something tend to be grossly unsuccessful in doing something is weak evidence that it cannot be done.
Some business places have a lot of small high value stuff, easily stolen, and a lot of employees with unmonitored access to that stuff.
Somehow they succeed in selecting (as close to 100% as makes no difference) employees who do not steal.
The evidence that people cannot detect lying resembles the evidence that the scientific method is undefined and impossible.
The existence and practice of certain business places shows that some people are very good at predicting other people’s behavior, even when those people would prefer that they fail to predict that behavior.
That academics who do not want to succeed in doing something tend to be grossly unsuccessful in doing something is weak evidence that it cannot be done.
These academics would be richly rewarded, in and out of academia, for finding human lie detectors and even more so for finding techniques to train people into such things. This is true for all the obvious reasons, and for the more subtle reason that saying ’99.75% of people suck and the ones who don’t think this are self-deluded’ is a negative result and academia punishes negative results.
(Also, bizarre ad hominem with no real world backing. How on earth are you getting upvotes?)
Some business places have a lot of small high value stuff, easily stolen, and a lot of employees with unmonitored access to that stuff. Somehow they succeed in selecting (as close to 100% as makes no difference) employees who do not steal.
‘Shrinkage’ is and remains a problem in retail; the solutions to this have nothing to do with human lie detectors. The solutions involve filtering heavily for people who have demonstrated that they haven’t stolen in the past, summary termination upon theft, technological counter-measures, and elaborate social sanctions. If human lie detectors existed in such quantities or humans were so analyzable, why does do the diamond dealers of NYC resort to such desperate means as dealing as much as possible with their co-ethnics who have decades of reputation and social connections standing hostage for their business dealings?
(Non sequitur; how on earth is this getting upvoted?)
The evidence that people cannot detect lying resembles the evidence that the scientific method is undefined and impossible.
No evidence cited, and what is this juvenile relativism doing here?
The existence and practice of certain business places shows that some people are very good at predicting other people’s behavior, even when those people would prefer that they fail to predict that behavior.
I like how this looks like an argument, yet completely fails to include any information that matters at all. ‘existence and practice’, ‘certain business places’, ‘some people’ - all of these are empty of semantic content.
And even assuming you filled in these statements with something meaningful, so what? The point of the OP was not that predictions cannot be made about humans, the point is that the predictions are not made by a hypothetical ‘character’. Predictions made by situation are quite powerful, and I would expect that many businesses exploit this quite a bit in all sorts of ways, like placement of goods in grocery stores.
These academics would be richly rewarded, in and out of academia, for finding human lie detectors
When a businessman wants to detect liars, he is not going to turn to academia.
The strange inability of academia to detect a propensity to bad behavior, or to acknowledge that anyone else can detect such propensities is based on their horror of “discrimination”
Recall that you could tell the shoe bomber was a terrorist at forty paces, you could tell on sight that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was some kind of criminal and up to no good, and yet the TSA insists on groping the genitals of six year old girls.
Although academics can supposedly scientifically prove it is impossible to detect propensities to behave badly, they are able to do a remarkably good job at detecting the slightest propensity to engage in politically incorrect thoughts.
Shrinkage’ is and remains a problem in retail;
Retail has low value stuff, low wage employees. High value stuff, you hire more carefully, high wage employees, you can hire more carefully.
Retail has shrinkage because they don’t care that much about shrinkage. When they do care about shrinkage, they can and routinely do solve the problem, notwithstanding academics piously saying it cannot be done.
The point is that the predictions are not made by a hypothetical ‘character’.
Yet, oddly, businesses bet on character all the time. That you cannot tell is political correctness that all normal people ridicule, much as they ridicule the TSA.
Alfano says:
This sounds absurd on its face. If Alfano finds out that someone has a history of cheating and stealing, will he avoid having any business with this person, expecting similar behavior in the future, or will he “reject such knowledge-claims… based merely on folk intuitions”?
Are his claims really so silly, or am I missing something?
If a person’s history is to cheat in business, it might be that the person habitually and easily lies whenever on the phone and he or she can’t see who is on the other end. The person might be solidly in the middle of the bell curve for everything but predilection to dehumanization. (Scholarship FTW.)
Alternatively, the person might have a unique situation, such as being blind, isolated, and requiring a reader to speak out received emails in Stephen-Hawking voice, that is such that anyone would experience dehumanization sufficient to make them cheaters. (I’m not claiming this is the case, just that some of similarly plausible set-ups would cause actions, just as time since judges ate affects sentencing.)
So either virtue ethics breaks down as people’s uniqueness lies in their responses to biases and/or people’s being overwhelmingly, chaotically directed by features of their environments.
Either way, cheaters and thieves are likely to cheat or steal again.
If I can look someone in the face, can usually detect lying. Voice only, can often detect lying. Text only, can sometimes detect lying.
Thus if a person is honest in proportion to the bandwidth, this requires no more psychological explanation than the fact that burglars are apt to burgle at night.
Is that by the same way you can divine people’s true natures?
the Wizards Project tested 20,000 people to come up with 50 who panned out
an aggregation of techniques offered no better than 70% accuracy
people with no instructions did little better than chance in distinguishing lies and truth
But I suppose these results (and the failings of mechanical lie detectors) are just unscientific research, which pale next to the burning truth of your subjective conviction that you “can usually detect lying”.
What was the self-assuredness of the 20,000? What was the self-assuredness of the 50?
What was the ability of the top 100, or 1,000, as against the top 50?
Does any of that really matter? This is the same person who thinks a passel of cognitive biases doesn’t apply to him and that the whole field is nonsense trumped by unexamined common sense. (Talk about ‘just give up already’.)
If the top 200 lie-detectors were among the 400 most confident people at the outset, I would think that relevant.
And how likely is that, really?
This is the sort of desperate dialectics verging on logical rudeness I find really annoying, trying to rescue a baloney claim by any possibility. If you seriously think that, great—go read the papers and tell me and I will be duly surprised if the human lie-detectors are the best calibrated people in that 20,000 group and hence that factoid might apply to the person we are discussing.
Seems like homework for the person making the claim, I’m just pointing out it exists.
Nit-pick, they could be the worst calibrated and what I said would hold, provided the others estimated themselves suitably bad at it.
That academics who do not want to succeed in doing something tend to be grossly unsuccessful in doing something is weak evidence that it cannot be done.
Some business places have a lot of small high value stuff, easily stolen, and a lot of employees with unmonitored access to that stuff.
Somehow they succeed in selecting (as close to 100% as makes no difference) employees who do not steal.
The evidence that people cannot detect lying resembles the evidence that the scientific method is undefined and impossible.
The existence and practice of certain business places shows that some people are very good at predicting other people’s behavior, even when those people would prefer that they fail to predict that behavior.
These academics would be richly rewarded, in and out of academia, for finding human lie detectors and even more so for finding techniques to train people into such things. This is true for all the obvious reasons, and for the more subtle reason that saying ’99.75% of people suck and the ones who don’t think this are self-deluded’ is a negative result and academia punishes negative results.
(Also, bizarre ad hominem with no real world backing. How on earth are you getting upvotes?)
‘Shrinkage’ is and remains a problem in retail; the solutions to this have nothing to do with human lie detectors. The solutions involve filtering heavily for people who have demonstrated that they haven’t stolen in the past, summary termination upon theft, technological counter-measures, and elaborate social sanctions. If human lie detectors existed in such quantities or humans were so analyzable, why does do the diamond dealers of NYC resort to such desperate means as dealing as much as possible with their co-ethnics who have decades of reputation and social connections standing hostage for their business dealings?
(Non sequitur; how on earth is this getting upvoted?)
No evidence cited, and what is this juvenile relativism doing here?
I like how this looks like an argument, yet completely fails to include any information that matters at all. ‘existence and practice’, ‘certain business places’, ‘some people’ - all of these are empty of semantic content.
And even assuming you filled in these statements with something meaningful, so what? The point of the OP was not that predictions cannot be made about humans, the point is that the predictions are not made by a hypothetical ‘character’. Predictions made by situation are quite powerful, and I would expect that many businesses exploit this quite a bit in all sorts of ways, like placement of goods in grocery stores.
(Non sequitur again; good grief.)
Better not to go there.
When a businessman wants to detect liars, he is not going to turn to academia.
The strange inability of academia to detect a propensity to bad behavior, or to acknowledge that anyone else can detect such propensities is based on their horror of “discrimination”
Recall that you could tell the shoe bomber was a terrorist at forty paces, you could tell on sight that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was some kind of criminal and up to no good, and yet the TSA insists on groping the genitals of six year old girls.
Although academics can supposedly scientifically prove it is impossible to detect propensities to behave badly, they are able to do a remarkably good job at detecting the slightest propensity to engage in politically incorrect thoughts.
Retail has low value stuff, low wage employees. High value stuff, you hire more carefully, high wage employees, you can hire more carefully.
Retail has shrinkage because they don’t care that much about shrinkage. When they do care about shrinkage, they can and routinely do solve the problem, notwithstanding academics piously saying it cannot be done.
Yet, oddly, businesses bet on character all the time. That you cannot tell is political correctness that all normal people ridicule, much as they ridicule the TSA.