There are a lot of Claims of the form, “This study indicates that MBSR leads to Good Thing.” There could be 1,000 studies that indicate MBSR leads to Good Thing, but if there were 1,000,000 total studies and only 1,000 of them indicated that MBSR leads to Good Thing, then that’s actually evidence against the claim that MBSR leads to Good Thing.
The point being that for a true investigation, we’d need to analyze all of the evidence, not just the cherry picked parts of it.
Certainly true. The purpose of epistemic spot checks for books (as I understand it) is to check “is this book even making true claims”, as part of an initial check for “is this book worth my time even slightly?”
(My recollection is that for the some of the previous books elizabeth spot-checked, the answer was “no, not at all”, and figuring that out in a relatively short amount of time is better than launching into a fullscale investigation.)
Ah, now I understand, thanks! I didn’t know what “epistemic spot check” meant, and just kinda assumed that this was a book summary post (which was probably careless on my part).
Yeah—I think it might be good for Epistemic Spot Checks to include a quick summary or link to the canonical explanation.
(also, general policy might be “posts that are an instance of a thing with a somewhat nuanced meaning should probably link to the full explanation of the thing.”)
There are a lot of Claims of the form, “This study indicates that MBSR leads to Good Thing.” There could be 1,000 studies that indicate MBSR leads to Good Thing, but if there were 1,000,000 total studies and only 1,000 of them indicated that MBSR leads to Good Thing, then that’s actually evidence against the claim that MBSR leads to Good Thing.
The point being that for a true investigation, we’d need to analyze all of the evidence, not just the cherry picked parts of it.
Certainly true. The purpose of epistemic spot checks for books (as I understand it) is to check “is this book even making true claims”, as part of an initial check for “is this book worth my time even slightly?”
(My recollection is that for the some of the previous books elizabeth spot-checked, the answer was “no, not at all”, and figuring that out in a relatively short amount of time is better than launching into a fullscale investigation.)
Raemon is correct (and also correct that I should have explicitly described this).
An astonishing number of books cite works that don’t even support their point. Most of these I don’t write up because they fail too quickly to be interesting, but if you want to see what that looks like check out https://acesounderglass.com/2014/12/13/health-at-every-size-roundup/ .
Ah, now I understand, thanks! I didn’t know what “epistemic spot check” meant, and just kinda assumed that this was a book summary post (which was probably careless on my part).
Yeah—I think it might be good for Epistemic Spot Checks to include a quick summary or link to the canonical explanation.
(also, general policy might be “posts that are an instance of a thing with a somewhat nuanced meaning should probably link to the full explanation of the thing.”)
This is a good idea and I will do it next time.