Uncertainty is an unavoidable aspect of the human condition.
So in the very first sentence, the authors’ have revealed a low opinion of humans. They think humans have a condition, although they don’t explain what it is, only that uncertainty is part of it.
Um, I think you are possibly taking a poetic remark too seriously. If they had said “uncertainty is part of everyday life” would you have objected?
So inference and judgement are governed by heuristics, genetic in origin (though this is just implied and the authors do nothing to address it).
Heuristics are not necessarily genetic. They can be learned. I see nothing in their paper that implies that they were genetic, and having read a fair amount of what both T & K wrote, there’s no indication that I saw that they strongly thought that any of these heuristics were genetic.
It’s not that humans come up with explanations and solve problems, it’s not that we are universal knowledge creators, it’s that we use heuristics handed down to us from our genes and we must be alerted to biases in them in order to correct them, otherwise we make systematic errors. So, again, a low opinion of humans. And we don’t do induction—as Popper and others such as Deutsch have explained, induction is impossible, it’s not a way we reason.
Ok. This confuses me. Let’s says that humans use genetic heuristics, how is that a low opinion? Moreover, how does that prevent us from being universal knowledge creators? You also seem to be confused about whether or not something is a good epistemology being related to whether or not a given entity uses it. Whether humans use induction and whether induction is a good epistemological approach are distinct questions.
This seems close to, if anything, Christian apologists saying how if humans don’t have souls then everything is meaningless. Do you see the connection here? Just because humans have flaws doesn’t make humans terrible things. We’ve split the atom. We’ve gone to the Moon. We understand the subtle behavior of the prime numbers. We can look back billions of years in time to the birth of the universe. How does thinking we have flaws mean one has a low opinion of humans?
I’m curious, when a psychologist finds a new form of optical illusion, do you discount it in the same way? Does caring about that or looking for those constitute a low opinion of humans?
Our problems, of course, were constructed to elicit conjunction errors, and they do not provide an unbiased estimate of the prevalence of these errors.
So they admit bias
That’s a tortured reading of the sentence. The point is that they wanted to see if humans engaged in conjunction errors. So they constructed situations where, if humans were using the representativeness heuristic or similar systems the errors would be likely to show up. This is, from the perspective of Popper in LScD, a good experimental protocol, since if it didn’t happen, it would be a serious blow to the idea that humans use a representativeness heuristic to estimate likelyhood. They aren’t admitting “bias”- their point is that since their experimental constructions were designed to maximize the opportunity for a representativeness heuristic to show up, they aren’t a good estimate for how likely these errors are to occur in the wild.
Yes. It is based on inductivist assumptions about how people think, as the quote above illustrates. They disregard the importance of explanations and they think humans do probabilistic reasoning using in-born heuristics and that these are universal.
So it seems to me that you are essentially saying that you disagree with their experimental evidence on philosophical grounds. If your evidence disagrees with your philosophy the solution is not to deny the evidence.
Do you agree with his claim that “”Probability estimate” is a technical term which we can’t expect people to know? Do you agree with his implicit claim that this should apply even to highly educated people who work as foreign policy experts?
Do you think foreign policy experts use probabilities rather than explanations?
In some contexts, yes. For example, foreign policy experts working with economists or financial institutions sometimes will make probability estimates for them to work with. But let’s say they never do. How is that at all relevant to the questions at hand? Do you really think that the idea of estimating a probability is so strange and technical that highly educated individuals shouldn’t be expected to be able to understand what is being asked of them? And yet you think that Tversky had a low opinion of humans? Moreover, even if they did have trouble understanding what was meant, do you expect that would cause all the apparent bias to go by sheer coincidence just as one would expect given the conjunction fallacy?
You can read “human condition” as a poetic remark, but choosing a phrase such as that to open a scientific paper is imprecise and vague and that they chose this phrase reveals something of the authors’ bias I think.
No, Tversky and Kahneman have not specifically said here whether the heuristics in question are genetic or not. Don’t you think that’s odd? They’re just saying we do reasoning using heuristics, but not explaining anything. Yet explanations are important; from these everything else follows.
That they think the heuristics are genetic is an inference and googling around I see that researchers in this field talk about “evolved mental behaviour” so I think the inference is correct. It means that some ideas we hold can’t be changed, only worked around, and that these ideas are part of us even though we did not voluntarily take them onboard. So we involuntarily hold unchangeable ideas that we may or may not agree with and that may be false. It’s leading towards the idea we are not autonomous agents in the world, not fully human. The idea that we are universal knowledge creators means that all our our ideas can be changed and improved on. If there are flaws in our ideas, we discard them once the flaws are discovered.
With regard to induction, epistemology tells us that it is impossible, therefore no creature can use it. Yes, I disagree with the experimental evidence on philosophical grounds; the philosophy is saying the evidence is wrong, that the researchers made mistakes. curi has given some theories about the mistakes the researchers made, so it does indeed seem as though the evidence is wrong.
I have no problem with the idea that probabilities help solve problems. Probabilities arise as predictions of theories, so are important. But probability has nothing to do with the uncertainty of theories, which can’t be quantified, and no role in epistemology whatsoever. It’s taking an objective physical concept and applying it in a domain it doesn’t belong. I could go on, but you mention LSD, so I presume you know some of these ideas right? Have you read Conjectures and Refutations or Deutsch?
Well said. And btw about “human condition” at first I thought you might be overreacting to the phrase, from your previous comments here, but I found your email very convincing and I think you have it right. I think “poetic remark” is a terrible excuse—it’s merely a generic denial that they meant what they said. With the implicit claim that: this is unrepresentative, and they were right the rest of the time. The apologist doesn’t argue this claim, or even state it plainly; it’s just the subtext.
How you explain how their work pushes in the direction of denying we’re fully human, via attacking our autonomy (and free will, I’d add) is nice.
One thing I disagree with is the presumption that an LScD reader would know what you mean. You’re so much more advanced than just the content of LScD. You can’t expect someone to fill in the blanks just from that.
Um, I think you are possibly taking a poetic remark too seriously. If they had said “uncertainty is part of everyday life” would you have objected?
Heuristics are not necessarily genetic. They can be learned. I see nothing in their paper that implies that they were genetic, and having read a fair amount of what both T & K wrote, there’s no indication that I saw that they strongly thought that any of these heuristics were genetic.
Ok. This confuses me. Let’s says that humans use genetic heuristics, how is that a low opinion? Moreover, how does that prevent us from being universal knowledge creators? You also seem to be confused about whether or not something is a good epistemology being related to whether or not a given entity uses it. Whether humans use induction and whether induction is a good epistemological approach are distinct questions.
This seems close to, if anything, Christian apologists saying how if humans don’t have souls then everything is meaningless. Do you see the connection here? Just because humans have flaws doesn’t make humans terrible things. We’ve split the atom. We’ve gone to the Moon. We understand the subtle behavior of the prime numbers. We can look back billions of years in time to the birth of the universe. How does thinking we have flaws mean one has a low opinion of humans?
I’m curious, when a psychologist finds a new form of optical illusion, do you discount it in the same way? Does caring about that or looking for those constitute a low opinion of humans?
That’s a tortured reading of the sentence. The point is that they wanted to see if humans engaged in conjunction errors. So they constructed situations where, if humans were using the representativeness heuristic or similar systems the errors would be likely to show up. This is, from the perspective of Popper in LScD, a good experimental protocol, since if it didn’t happen, it would be a serious blow to the idea that humans use a representativeness heuristic to estimate likelyhood. They aren’t admitting “bias”- their point is that since their experimental constructions were designed to maximize the opportunity for a representativeness heuristic to show up, they aren’t a good estimate for how likely these errors are to occur in the wild.
So it seems to me that you are essentially saying that you disagree with their experimental evidence on philosophical grounds. If your evidence disagrees with your philosophy the solution is not to deny the evidence.
In some contexts, yes. For example, foreign policy experts working with economists or financial institutions sometimes will make probability estimates for them to work with. But let’s say they never do. How is that at all relevant to the questions at hand? Do you really think that the idea of estimating a probability is so strange and technical that highly educated individuals shouldn’t be expected to be able to understand what is being asked of them? And yet you think that Tversky had a low opinion of humans? Moreover, even if they did have trouble understanding what was meant, do you expect that would cause all the apparent bias to go by sheer coincidence just as one would expect given the conjunction fallacy?
You can read “human condition” as a poetic remark, but choosing a phrase such as that to open a scientific paper is imprecise and vague and that they chose this phrase reveals something of the authors’ bias I think.
No, Tversky and Kahneman have not specifically said here whether the heuristics in question are genetic or not. Don’t you think that’s odd? They’re just saying we do reasoning using heuristics, but not explaining anything. Yet explanations are important; from these everything else follows.
That they think the heuristics are genetic is an inference and googling around I see that researchers in this field talk about “evolved mental behaviour” so I think the inference is correct. It means that some ideas we hold can’t be changed, only worked around, and that these ideas are part of us even though we did not voluntarily take them onboard. So we involuntarily hold unchangeable ideas that we may or may not agree with and that may be false. It’s leading towards the idea we are not autonomous agents in the world, not fully human. The idea that we are universal knowledge creators means that all our our ideas can be changed and improved on. If there are flaws in our ideas, we discard them once the flaws are discovered.
With regard to induction, epistemology tells us that it is impossible, therefore no creature can use it. Yes, I disagree with the experimental evidence on philosophical grounds; the philosophy is saying the evidence is wrong, that the researchers made mistakes. curi has given some theories about the mistakes the researchers made, so it does indeed seem as though the evidence is wrong.
I have no problem with the idea that probabilities help solve problems. Probabilities arise as predictions of theories, so are important. But probability has nothing to do with the uncertainty of theories, which can’t be quantified, and no role in epistemology whatsoever. It’s taking an objective physical concept and applying it in a domain it doesn’t belong. I could go on, but you mention LSD, so I presume you know some of these ideas right? Have you read Conjectures and Refutations or Deutsch?
Well said. And btw about “human condition” at first I thought you might be overreacting to the phrase, from your previous comments here, but I found your email very convincing and I think you have it right. I think “poetic remark” is a terrible excuse—it’s merely a generic denial that they meant what they said. With the implicit claim that: this is unrepresentative, and they were right the rest of the time. The apologist doesn’t argue this claim, or even state it plainly; it’s just the subtext.
How you explain how their work pushes in the direction of denying we’re fully human, via attacking our autonomy (and free will, I’d add) is nice.
One thing I disagree with is the presumption that an LScD reader would know what you mean. You’re so much more advanced than just the content of LScD. You can’t expect someone to fill in the blanks just from that.