That’s interesting. A colleague of mine raised a similar issue, namely that in a popular science book you don’t necessarily want to complicate things by including countervailing factors. In your terms, you settle for the briefest possible explanation. Diamond’s and Pinker’s books are directed both towards the scientific community and towards the general public, so it’s a bit of a tricky case, but since they are such high-profile scientists and since their books have been so influential, I think it is legitimate to criticize them on this score.
A perhaps more glaring example is this. Man City won Premier League 2012 on goal difference thanks to a 94 minute goal which put them ahead of Man Utd. Afterwards, a Swedish pundit was asked to explain why Man City won the Premier League. This is in a sense absurd, since it’s clear that if a 38-matches league is settled on overtime of the last game, there is very little that distinguishes the two team in terms of quality. But the pundit’s reaction was also absurd: he went on to provide 4-5 reasons for why Man City was better than Man Utd, to which my reaction was, well, if they’re better on so many scores, then why didn’t they finish like 20 points ahead? The “briefest possible explanation” defense doesn’t work here, since it would have been easier just to give one reason, and more adequate given the small difference between the teams, than 4-5. Instead, I believe that he did so because of a deeply felt urge to tell a “story”. I think that the halo effect is at play here. Our system 1 wants to tell one-sided stories where the winning team had all the advantages and the losing team was worse across the board.
Now Diamond and Pinker are obviously better than football pundits, but I don’t think that the examples are fundamentally different. They, too, are most likely to some degree engaging in story-telling.
Sorry for following you around so much (I just read this article since you linked to it in our other discussion)
There are two main points, both of which have largely been said or touched on already in your discussion here:
1) When discussing an event or something “playing out,” we are talking about a cause and effect. Despite the fact that many things in life have many factors, there are always positive causes for things, which may or may not have counteracting factors. When we want to describe an effect of interest, then the simplest way to do it is to list the cause(s).
2) There are several factors (that I’ve thought of off the top of my head) that play into what kinds of points you provide when you are presenting a cause/effect relationship:
The first (which DavidAgain mentioned somewhat already) is whether you are trying to describe something that has happened or something that will happen. When we don’t know what the outcome of something will be, we must exhaustively weigh all of the factors that we know of and their possible interactions in order to come to the best conclusion about the result. (Really there are two variations on this: what action should be taken vs. what will happen given the current state of the world, but the concept holds in each). If, however, something has already happened, it is reasonable to focus on the causes, A) because we know that they ended up “winning” and B) because there may or may not be negating factors involved in the first place.
If I say something along the lines of “I went swimming today because I was hot,” it is not dishonest/biased to refrain from mentioning the fact that I weighed this course of action against several reasons not to do so—the important, primary causation was relayed in the statement and satisfies most people to the extent that they care about the factors involved.
Another factor that might be relevant is how contentious the subject is; even if you are debating something in the past, such as why X happened (or offering a proposal for why X happened), if the conclusion to be drawn is not readily agreed upon then it is prudent to first make sure that all of the relevant facts are presented. On the other hand, if you’re trying to teach/explain why something happened in a non-contentious atmosphere, then it may be reasonable to omit facts that are unimportant to maintain coherency and avoid getting bogged down in clutter that doesn’t matter to the overarching point. Which category Diamond’s book falls under is a bit unclear, but I still am not convinced that it was biased to provide causes without enumerating all of the pros/cons, given that you trust him to the extent that he is telling the truth when we says that the Fertile Crescent was a highly, if not the most advantageous locations for the start of agriculture.
I am on the fence as to whether or not Jared Diamond was slightly biased in this case, but I think it depends on whether you look at his book from the perspective of a comprehensive argument/claim or a proposition of a different mechanism behind how things ended up the way they did which may or may not account for all of history in its complex entirety.
Anyway, I think trying to infer bias based on the presence of pros/cons is a difficult subject. I wouldn’t go claiming someone is biased towards something for only presenting a positive message necessarily, even though this is often the case. Even in the example with the teams coming very close to a tie, the response to “why did they win” may have been correct, in that they had all of those factors in their favor and that those were enough to win (barely). I agree that in this case the guy was biased, but on the other hand they didn’t ask him “what factors were involved and why did they favor Man City (somewhat)?”
That’s about all I’ll say for one response—I have a bad tendency of rambling on when I’ve already made the points that I really wanted to make.
(by the way DavidAgain I loved the way you said the things I was thinking with each consecutive response—I was vicariously participating in the discussion through your comments!)
Firstly, giving reasons for your own choices is something a bit different from explaining events over which you had no control. I’d rather concentrate on the latter cases.
On the other hand, if you’re trying to teach/explain why something happened in a non-contentious atmosphere, then it may be reasonable to omit facts that are unimportant to maintain coherency and avoid getting bogged down in clutter that doesn’t matter to the overarching point.
Sure. I do think that Diamond should have provided pros and cons (and Pinker even more so). However, this discussion has been very useful to me in that I realize that others have different intuitions.
Suppose that there is a convention which says that it’s ok to omit countervailing factors (which I’m not sure there is). In that case, Diamond and Pinker are at least to some extent forgiven—they are merely following a convention. However, then I’d say that the convention should be abandoned, because I, as a reader, do want to get the full picture, and not a cherry-picked selection of factors.
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Even in the example with the teams coming very close to a tie, the response to “why did they win” may have been correct, in that they had all of those factors in their favor and that those were enough to win (barely). I agree that in this case the guy was biased, but on the other hand they didn’t ask him “what factors were involved and why did they favor Man City (somewhat)?”
Sure. The question kind of suggests an answer along these lines—which support the notion that there is a convention according to which we’re expected only to give pro-reasons. But in this case, this is clearly absurd. Why would I want to hear about Man City’s fifth best characteristic (relative to Man U) over Man U’s best characteristic (relative to Man C)?
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Generally, I also think that people have a bias against admitting bias, especially in themselves, but also in others. Philosophers and others have defended the hypothesis that humans are basically rational to absurdity, to my mind, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. (See this excellent post on this, for instance. But the same goes not only for the notion of whether humans are rational in general, but also for whether any particular thought-process was rational or biased. I think that, given what we know about the ubiquity of human biases (as shown in experiments), we should be very open to the possibility that even great books like Diamond’s and Pinker’s are filled with inferences which are not rational but rather due to biases. This goes particularly for inferences and reasonings in messy and inexact fields. I would be very surprised if someone was able to escape to form very general historical theories such as these without falling prey to at least some biases on a major scale.
That’s about all I’ll say for one response—I have a bad tendency of rambling on when I’ve already made the points that I really wanted to make.
Me too—my posts tend to be too long for LW. I think it’s a good idea to try to be a bit shorter and more succinct for both of us.
That’s interesting. A colleague of mine raised a similar issue, namely that in a popular science book you don’t necessarily want to complicate things by including countervailing factors. In your terms, you settle for the briefest possible explanation. Diamond’s and Pinker’s books are directed both towards the scientific community and towards the general public, so it’s a bit of a tricky case, but since they are such high-profile scientists and since their books have been so influential, I think it is legitimate to criticize them on this score.
A perhaps more glaring example is this. Man City won Premier League 2012 on goal difference thanks to a 94 minute goal which put them ahead of Man Utd. Afterwards, a Swedish pundit was asked to explain why Man City won the Premier League. This is in a sense absurd, since it’s clear that if a 38-matches league is settled on overtime of the last game, there is very little that distinguishes the two team in terms of quality. But the pundit’s reaction was also absurd: he went on to provide 4-5 reasons for why Man City was better than Man Utd, to which my reaction was, well, if they’re better on so many scores, then why didn’t they finish like 20 points ahead? The “briefest possible explanation” defense doesn’t work here, since it would have been easier just to give one reason, and more adequate given the small difference between the teams, than 4-5. Instead, I believe that he did so because of a deeply felt urge to tell a “story”. I think that the halo effect is at play here. Our system 1 wants to tell one-sided stories where the winning team had all the advantages and the losing team was worse across the board.
Now Diamond and Pinker are obviously better than football pundits, but I don’t think that the examples are fundamentally different. They, too, are most likely to some degree engaging in story-telling.
Sorry for following you around so much (I just read this article since you linked to it in our other discussion)
There are two main points, both of which have largely been said or touched on already in your discussion here:
1) When discussing an event or something “playing out,” we are talking about a cause and effect. Despite the fact that many things in life have many factors, there are always positive causes for things, which may or may not have counteracting factors. When we want to describe an effect of interest, then the simplest way to do it is to list the cause(s).
2) There are several factors (that I’ve thought of off the top of my head) that play into what kinds of points you provide when you are presenting a cause/effect relationship:
The first (which DavidAgain mentioned somewhat already) is whether you are trying to describe something that has happened or something that will happen. When we don’t know what the outcome of something will be, we must exhaustively weigh all of the factors that we know of and their possible interactions in order to come to the best conclusion about the result. (Really there are two variations on this: what action should be taken vs. what will happen given the current state of the world, but the concept holds in each). If, however, something has already happened, it is reasonable to focus on the causes, A) because we know that they ended up “winning” and B) because there may or may not be negating factors involved in the first place.
If I say something along the lines of “I went swimming today because I was hot,” it is not dishonest/biased to refrain from mentioning the fact that I weighed this course of action against several reasons not to do so—the important, primary causation was relayed in the statement and satisfies most people to the extent that they care about the factors involved.
Another factor that might be relevant is how contentious the subject is; even if you are debating something in the past, such as why X happened (or offering a proposal for why X happened), if the conclusion to be drawn is not readily agreed upon then it is prudent to first make sure that all of the relevant facts are presented. On the other hand, if you’re trying to teach/explain why something happened in a non-contentious atmosphere, then it may be reasonable to omit facts that are unimportant to maintain coherency and avoid getting bogged down in clutter that doesn’t matter to the overarching point. Which category Diamond’s book falls under is a bit unclear, but I still am not convinced that it was biased to provide causes without enumerating all of the pros/cons, given that you trust him to the extent that he is telling the truth when we says that the Fertile Crescent was a highly, if not the most advantageous locations for the start of agriculture.
I am on the fence as to whether or not Jared Diamond was slightly biased in this case, but I think it depends on whether you look at his book from the perspective of a comprehensive argument/claim or a proposition of a different mechanism behind how things ended up the way they did which may or may not account for all of history in its complex entirety.
Anyway, I think trying to infer bias based on the presence of pros/cons is a difficult subject. I wouldn’t go claiming someone is biased towards something for only presenting a positive message necessarily, even though this is often the case. Even in the example with the teams coming very close to a tie, the response to “why did they win” may have been correct, in that they had all of those factors in their favor and that those were enough to win (barely). I agree that in this case the guy was biased, but on the other hand they didn’t ask him “what factors were involved and why did they favor Man City (somewhat)?”
That’s about all I’ll say for one response—I have a bad tendency of rambling on when I’ve already made the points that I really wanted to make.
(by the way DavidAgain I loved the way you said the things I was thinking with each consecutive response—I was vicariously participating in the discussion through your comments!)
Firstly, giving reasons for your own choices is something a bit different from explaining events over which you had no control. I’d rather concentrate on the latter cases.
Sure. I do think that Diamond should have provided pros and cons (and Pinker even more so). However, this discussion has been very useful to me in that I realize that others have different intuitions.
Suppose that there is a convention which says that it’s ok to omit countervailing factors (which I’m not sure there is). In that case, Diamond and Pinker are at least to some extent forgiven—they are merely following a convention. However, then I’d say that the convention should be abandoned, because I, as a reader, do want to get the full picture, and not a cherry-picked selection of factors.
--
Sure. The question kind of suggests an answer along these lines—which support the notion that there is a convention according to which we’re expected only to give pro-reasons. But in this case, this is clearly absurd. Why would I want to hear about Man City’s fifth best characteristic (relative to Man U) over Man U’s best characteristic (relative to Man C)?
--
Generally, I also think that people have a bias against admitting bias, especially in themselves, but also in others. Philosophers and others have defended the hypothesis that humans are basically rational to absurdity, to my mind, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. (See this excellent post on this, for instance. But the same goes not only for the notion of whether humans are rational in general, but also for whether any particular thought-process was rational or biased. I think that, given what we know about the ubiquity of human biases (as shown in experiments), we should be very open to the possibility that even great books like Diamond’s and Pinker’s are filled with inferences which are not rational but rather due to biases. This goes particularly for inferences and reasonings in messy and inexact fields. I would be very surprised if someone was able to escape to form very general historical theories such as these without falling prey to at least some biases on a major scale.
Me too—my posts tend to be too long for LW. I think it’s a good idea to try to be a bit shorter and more succinct for both of us.
Apparently, the outcome of soccer matches between closely matched teams tend to be more unpredictable than matches between closely matched teams in other sports. So yeah, the only accurate answer the pundit could give to “Why did Man City win the final match?” would be along the lines of “On that day, things went right for them.”