Thanks, this is useful. We may compare with policy debates. The reason any individual’s arguments in a policy debate might either be that they are biased or that they are intentionally only putting forward arguments that support their position for strategic reasons. It could be argued that there is a convention to the effect that this is allowable, particularly in e.g. political debates.
Similarly, the reason why a multiple factor explanation is one-sided might either be bias or that the author intentionally leaves out mechanism playing in the other direction for strategic reasons. (Thanks for reminding me of this!) In your opinion, there is a convention to the effect that this is allowable. I’m a bit more unsure about this, but it is always hard to establish what the implicit conventions regulating various sort of behaviour are, particularly complex and abstract sorts of behaviour as this. Also, if there is such a convention, it could be argued that it arose precisely because people are normally confirmation biased, which has led them to regularly give these sorts of one-sided explanations, which in turn made this a convention.
I do not know whether Diamond is biased or if he is doing this intentionally, but would guess at the former. I think, firstly, that he should be much clearer over what he is doing. If he only wants to list mechanisms playing in the one direction, they should explicitly say so.
But I also think it is unreasonable to only list mechanisms playing in the one direction, especially when there are stronger mechanisms playing in the other direction. Learning about those other mechanisms is clearly very useful for the reader wanting to get a grasp of why the agricultural revolution first occurred in the Fertile Crescent.
Our intuitions are a bit muddled here, I think, because it is so hard to obtain reliable knowledge concerning why the agricultural revolution occurred in the Fertile Crescent. Let us therefore instead look at an example where we do have somewhat better knowledge: climate change. When explaining why the climate has got hotter, it would be unreasonable, at least in a serious scientific context, not to mention mechanisms that have forced the climate to grow colder than it otherwise would have, such as global dimming. Indeed, the Wikipedia article on global warming does mention global dimming. Mentioning this factor is very important not the least because it tells us that the mechanisms warming the Earth are stronger than we would have had reason to believe if there hadn’t been any counteracting factors.
One important upshot of this is that the notion of an “explanation” can be a bit misleading here. We need to be very clear over what it is that we want to explain. It is true that people sometimes do understand “Why did Athens beat Sparta?” as a call to list all factors that played to Athens advantage, and none that played to Sparta’s advantage. But under normal circumstances, that is not what we should be interested in.
The downside is that given our psychology as it is, I suspect we think about things better when people are creating hypotheses and arguing for/against them rather than contesting the detail of a list of possible factors with no clear conclusion.
I think that you could come with a clear conclusion even if you mention counteracting forces. Indeed, I think that Diamond’s theory is basically right and that he could show that these counteracting forces were clearly too weak to overcome the Fertile Crescent’s geographical advantages (though this is just a hunch—I’m not an expert on that issue and only interested in this as an example of the methodological problem under discussion).
Cheers for the thoughtful response! I think your global warming argument is subtly different: people don’t want to just explain why temparatures rose at a certain point in the past (which would be the equivalent of Diamond’s argument). They want to understand whether we should expect temparatures to rise in the future.
The question here is not ‘Why did Athens beat Sparta’, but closer to ‘as Corinthians watching the arms race, should we expect Athens or Sparta to win next time’. In this case, we definitely want to know both sides, even if Athens has won all of the conflicts we’ve seen: for instance if all the other conflicts they won with ships and this is a landlocked struggle for some reason, that would change our conclusions.
What stands out here is that this sort of balanced account is what you want as soon as you expect your beliefs to ‘pay rent’. A historical explanation which simply explains what series of events led to a certain event isn’t necessarily particularly useful, even if it’s true.
So for instance, a historian might seek to show that the First World War was caused by the shooting of Franz Ferdinand or that it inevitably followed from the alliance system of the early twentieth century. These explanations wouldn’t necessarily ask ‘what other things might cause world wars?’ or ‘what things were going on that might have stopped this world war?’ unless they were directly relevant. And because of that, the primary purpose is to establish once particular incident of causation, not to draw general lessons that shooting archdukes is a Bad Idea or that all world wars are caused by the fallacious belief that having two huge blocs would deter each other..
On the other hand, historians might argue that more general economic/social laws apply through history: that slave cultures are at a significant advantage/disadvantage in war, that wars tend to lead to greater/lesser power for the previously downtrodden, that feudal systems tend to turn into democratic systems or whatever. For those cases the aspiration is to have some predictive power, and so both sides are needed.
That is another interesting idea. You’re right that we’re more interested in prediction and in general laws in the climate change case. Generally, I am all for identifying general historical/social laws and don’t think that we should just describe particular events.
But even someone who wants to describe particular events should, in my view, include both pro- and contra-factors. This is clearest if we suppose that the Fertile Crescent had an extremely large geographical disadvantage, say re-occuring draughts which would kill most farmers but which hunter-gatherers would survive since they are more mobile. Say that this was also generally known among readers of Diamond’s book. In that case, his explanation wouldn’t feel sufficient if he hadn’t mentioned this fact, and shown that the counteracting geographical factors nevertheles are stronger, and I’m sure that he would have done so.
As a matter of fact, there is no such very strong and well-known factor. Hence Diamond can get away with not including any contra-factor. However, the fact that these factors are weaker and not as well-known as the imagined draught factor does not mean that the same logic doesn’t apply. The fact that they aren’t well-known seems to me to be irrelevant: then it’s Diamond’s duty to tell us about them. The fact that they are weaker makes the omission a bit less glaring, but they should still be included if they are stronger than some of the pro-mechanisms that Diamond does mention.
I guess I have the intuition that it is not very honest to fail to present contra-mechanisms that are stronger than some of the pro-mechanisms. But you don’t share that intuition?
I think my intuition depends on the context, to be honest: and I don’t have Diamond’s book to hand (don’t think I own it, though I read it a few years ago).
I think it’s clear that the briefest possible explanation of why a specific event happened is the key positive causes. Then you have the option of including two other sorts of things
Why the countervailing factors didn’t stop it
Why similar things did not happen at other times/places in similar conditions
Say you’re explaining why a country elected a particular political party. You would most naturally talk about the positives: ‘polls showed they were trusted on issues X and Y’. You’d mostly talk about overcoming negatives where there was a important change in that area—people previously didn’t like them because they associated them with policy Z, but the new leader convinced many voters that this was a thing of the past’. It wouldn’t be as relevant in a short summary to say ‘they probably lost some votes because of issues A and B’ or ‘while another party in a different country is trusted on the same issues, they lost an election six months later—the difference is due to C and D’
There’s a difference here with policy debates, because they are saying what we should do, rather than trying to trace the line of what led to a particular thing that happened. Personally, I’d be much happier giving a one-sided account that said ‘political position X is widely supported because of the following factors’ than a one-sided account that said ‘political position X SHOULD BE widely supported because of the following factors’, even if the following detail was identical.
A lot of this might be quite parochial and based on various academic/journalistic/professional traditions, though. I’m trying to wrap my head round the underlying point about facts causing their evidence but this not applying to policy debates/moral positions/multiple factor explanations. I think I basically agree that multiple factor explanations are analagous to policy debates in this regard, but I’m trying to unpack some examples on the moral front to see if I agree there...
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.
Thanks, this is useful. We may compare with policy debates. The reason any individual’s arguments in a policy debate might either be that they are biased or that they are intentionally only putting forward arguments that support their position for strategic reasons. It could be argued that there is a convention to the effect that this is allowable, particularly in e.g. political debates.
Similarly, the reason why a multiple factor explanation is one-sided might either be bias or that the author intentionally leaves out mechanism playing in the other direction for strategic reasons. (Thanks for reminding me of this!) In your opinion, there is a convention to the effect that this is allowable. I’m a bit more unsure about this, but it is always hard to establish what the implicit conventions regulating various sort of behaviour are, particularly complex and abstract sorts of behaviour as this. Also, if there is such a convention, it could be argued that it arose precisely because people are normally confirmation biased, which has led them to regularly give these sorts of one-sided explanations, which in turn made this a convention.
I do not know whether Diamond is biased or if he is doing this intentionally, but would guess at the former. I think, firstly, that he should be much clearer over what he is doing. If he only wants to list mechanisms playing in the one direction, they should explicitly say so.
But I also think it is unreasonable to only list mechanisms playing in the one direction, especially when there are stronger mechanisms playing in the other direction. Learning about those other mechanisms is clearly very useful for the reader wanting to get a grasp of why the agricultural revolution first occurred in the Fertile Crescent.
Our intuitions are a bit muddled here, I think, because it is so hard to obtain reliable knowledge concerning why the agricultural revolution occurred in the Fertile Crescent. Let us therefore instead look at an example where we do have somewhat better knowledge: climate change. When explaining why the climate has got hotter, it would be unreasonable, at least in a serious scientific context, not to mention mechanisms that have forced the climate to grow colder than it otherwise would have, such as global dimming. Indeed, the Wikipedia article on global warming does mention global dimming. Mentioning this factor is very important not the least because it tells us that the mechanisms warming the Earth are stronger than we would have had reason to believe if there hadn’t been any counteracting factors.
One important upshot of this is that the notion of an “explanation” can be a bit misleading here. We need to be very clear over what it is that we want to explain. It is true that people sometimes do understand “Why did Athens beat Sparta?” as a call to list all factors that played to Athens advantage, and none that played to Sparta’s advantage. But under normal circumstances, that is not what we should be interested in.
I think that you could come with a clear conclusion even if you mention counteracting forces. Indeed, I think that Diamond’s theory is basically right and that he could show that these counteracting forces were clearly too weak to overcome the Fertile Crescent’s geographical advantages (though this is just a hunch—I’m not an expert on that issue and only interested in this as an example of the methodological problem under discussion).
Cheers for the thoughtful response! I think your global warming argument is subtly different: people don’t want to just explain why temparatures rose at a certain point in the past (which would be the equivalent of Diamond’s argument). They want to understand whether we should expect temparatures to rise in the future.
The question here is not ‘Why did Athens beat Sparta’, but closer to ‘as Corinthians watching the arms race, should we expect Athens or Sparta to win next time’. In this case, we definitely want to know both sides, even if Athens has won all of the conflicts we’ve seen: for instance if all the other conflicts they won with ships and this is a landlocked struggle for some reason, that would change our conclusions.
What stands out here is that this sort of balanced account is what you want as soon as you expect your beliefs to ‘pay rent’. A historical explanation which simply explains what series of events led to a certain event isn’t necessarily particularly useful, even if it’s true.
So for instance, a historian might seek to show that the First World War was caused by the shooting of Franz Ferdinand or that it inevitably followed from the alliance system of the early twentieth century. These explanations wouldn’t necessarily ask ‘what other things might cause world wars?’ or ‘what things were going on that might have stopped this world war?’ unless they were directly relevant. And because of that, the primary purpose is to establish once particular incident of causation, not to draw general lessons that shooting archdukes is a Bad Idea or that all world wars are caused by the fallacious belief that having two huge blocs would deter each other..
On the other hand, historians might argue that more general economic/social laws apply through history: that slave cultures are at a significant advantage/disadvantage in war, that wars tend to lead to greater/lesser power for the previously downtrodden, that feudal systems tend to turn into democratic systems or whatever. For those cases the aspiration is to have some predictive power, and so both sides are needed.
That is another interesting idea. You’re right that we’re more interested in prediction and in general laws in the climate change case. Generally, I am all for identifying general historical/social laws and don’t think that we should just describe particular events.
But even someone who wants to describe particular events should, in my view, include both pro- and contra-factors. This is clearest if we suppose that the Fertile Crescent had an extremely large geographical disadvantage, say re-occuring draughts which would kill most farmers but which hunter-gatherers would survive since they are more mobile. Say that this was also generally known among readers of Diamond’s book. In that case, his explanation wouldn’t feel sufficient if he hadn’t mentioned this fact, and shown that the counteracting geographical factors nevertheles are stronger, and I’m sure that he would have done so.
As a matter of fact, there is no such very strong and well-known factor. Hence Diamond can get away with not including any contra-factor. However, the fact that these factors are weaker and not as well-known as the imagined draught factor does not mean that the same logic doesn’t apply. The fact that they aren’t well-known seems to me to be irrelevant: then it’s Diamond’s duty to tell us about them. The fact that they are weaker makes the omission a bit less glaring, but they should still be included if they are stronger than some of the pro-mechanisms that Diamond does mention.
I guess I have the intuition that it is not very honest to fail to present contra-mechanisms that are stronger than some of the pro-mechanisms. But you don’t share that intuition?
I think my intuition depends on the context, to be honest: and I don’t have Diamond’s book to hand (don’t think I own it, though I read it a few years ago).
I think it’s clear that the briefest possible explanation of why a specific event happened is the key positive causes. Then you have the option of including two other sorts of things
Why the countervailing factors didn’t stop it
Why similar things did not happen at other times/places in similar conditions
Say you’re explaining why a country elected a particular political party. You would most naturally talk about the positives: ‘polls showed they were trusted on issues X and Y’. You’d mostly talk about overcoming negatives where there was a important change in that area—people previously didn’t like them because they associated them with policy Z, but the new leader convinced many voters that this was a thing of the past’. It wouldn’t be as relevant in a short summary to say ‘they probably lost some votes because of issues A and B’ or ‘while another party in a different country is trusted on the same issues, they lost an election six months later—the difference is due to C and D’
There’s a difference here with policy debates, because they are saying what we should do, rather than trying to trace the line of what led to a particular thing that happened. Personally, I’d be much happier giving a one-sided account that said ‘political position X is widely supported because of the following factors’ than a one-sided account that said ‘political position X SHOULD BE widely supported because of the following factors’, even if the following detail was identical.
A lot of this might be quite parochial and based on various academic/journalistic/professional traditions, though. I’m trying to wrap my head round the underlying point about facts causing their evidence but this not applying to policy debates/moral positions/multiple factor explanations. I think I basically agree that multiple factor explanations are analagous to policy debates in this regard, but I’m trying to unpack some examples on the moral front to see if I agree there...
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.
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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.
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.”