World War II seems to have some possible examples. Many Jews who didn’t think about escaping until it was too late, because it was too horrible to believe. Neville Chamberlain thinking he could appease the war away. Possibly Stalin’s reaction to Hitler’s invasion:
Accounts by Nikita Khrushchev and Anastas Mikoyan claim that, after the invasion, Stalin retreated to his dacha in despair for several days and did not participate in leadership decisions.[145] However, some documentary evidence of orders given by Stalin contradicts these accounts, leading some historians to speculate that Khrushchev’s account is inaccurate.
Hitler’s delusions of a German victory toward the end of the war. The Japanese holdouts.
These are the first things I thought of, anyway, although it now occurs to me that comparing your audience to Hitler would have some rhetorical drawbacks.
I remember someone claimed that many Jews put off making plans to leave Germany because they had pianos, and pianos are hard to move. Basically the piano created an Ugh Field around the idea of moving.
Well aware of the Hitler fallacy, it’s quite common among (us) Jews. “Someone said Y X” is still a shitty standard of evidence to begin with. Considering that people are not emotionally neutral to Jews in general hearsay is even worse. In this case the undercurrent of meaning is quite possibly “greedy Jews woud rather die than part with their pianos”. I suspect that Daniel is too refined of a person to catch that; it’s still not epistemically hygienic.
“Someone said Y X” is still a shitty standard of evidence to begin with. [...] it’s still not epistemically hygienic.
Most people just say “Y X”. Explicitly saying “Someone said Y X” is relatively good epistemic hygiene, because it communicates something about the evidence for the claim, not just the claim itself.
Agreed, it’s better than “Y X”, but still relatively worthless, especially when someone is looking for quotable examples for an article. Repeating stories like this is sum negative since it adds social proof to things of very low probability. This is what I meant by hygiene.
I think we have to be careful to avoid hindsight bias when thinking of examples of this. For example, it is quite possible that Jews who chose not to leave Nazi Germany before Kristalnacht were in fact acting perfectly rationally. Certainly Weinberg makes a reasonable case that they were acting rationally in this essay (and yes, I realise that he has plenty of reasons to try to justify himself, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s possible he made a sensible decision).
I don’t disagree at all. Also, the millions of Jews in areas subject to Nazi control had an enormous variety of differing constraints and circumstances.
No matter what, in order to find an unambiguous example of “motivated skepticism with grave consequences” from history (rather than in the context of an academic experiment), Luke is going to have to do his homework. First, the rational course of action has to be demonstrably certain. As you correctly point out, hindsight bias is a real problem. Second, Luke has to show that the actor not only behaved irrationally, but specifically suffered from “motivated skepticism,” rather than some other form of irrationality.
You would need a control group of other people at the time who made the ‘correct’ decision due to lack of a certain bias to indicate the bias was present.
I seem to recall that Japanese soldiers were especially trained to fight to the bitter end because failure against the Americans was the worst thing imaginable, etc. Can anyone point me to decent historical documentation of this, if this is indeed what happened?
Many of them committed suicide rather than be taken prisoner or surrender there are many articles and such on the war in the pacific theatre and almost all of them mention that. Although the ones with veterans interviews would be most helpful.
World War II seems to have some possible examples. Many Jews who didn’t think about escaping until it was too late, because it was too horrible to believe. Neville Chamberlain thinking he could appease the war away. Possibly Stalin’s reaction to Hitler’s invasion:
Hitler’s delusions of a German victory toward the end of the war. The Japanese holdouts.
These are the first things I thought of, anyway, although it now occurs to me that comparing your audience to Hitler would have some rhetorical drawbacks.
Upvoted for comedy.
I remember someone claimed that many Jews put off making plans to leave Germany because they had pianos, and pianos are hard to move. Basically the piano created an Ugh Field around the idea of moving.
I wonder if piano prices and costs of owning vs renting are therefore related...
“someone claimed Jews X” is pretty much the standard of evidence the Germans used (I know you don’t mean it this way of course)
And if Hitler did it it must be bad! (On the subject of ‘standard of evidence’...)
Well aware of the Hitler fallacy, it’s quite common among (us) Jews. “Someone said Y X” is still a shitty standard of evidence to begin with. Considering that people are not emotionally neutral to Jews in general hearsay is even worse. In this case the undercurrent of meaning is quite possibly “greedy Jews woud rather die than part with their pianos”. I suspect that Daniel is too refined of a person to catch that; it’s still not epistemically hygienic.
Most people just say “Y X”. Explicitly saying “Someone said Y X” is relatively good epistemic hygiene, because it communicates something about the evidence for the claim, not just the claim itself.
Agreed, it’s better than “Y X”, but still relatively worthless, especially when someone is looking for quotable examples for an article. Repeating stories like this is sum negative since it adds social proof to things of very low probability. This is what I meant by hygiene.
I think we have to be careful to avoid hindsight bias when thinking of examples of this. For example, it is quite possible that Jews who chose not to leave Nazi Germany before Kristalnacht were in fact acting perfectly rationally. Certainly Weinberg makes a reasonable case that they were acting rationally in this essay (and yes, I realise that he has plenty of reasons to try to justify himself, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s possible he made a sensible decision).
I don’t disagree at all. Also, the millions of Jews in areas subject to Nazi control had an enormous variety of differing constraints and circumstances.
No matter what, in order to find an unambiguous example of “motivated skepticism with grave consequences” from history (rather than in the context of an academic experiment), Luke is going to have to do his homework. First, the rational course of action has to be demonstrably certain. As you correctly point out, hindsight bias is a real problem. Second, Luke has to show that the actor not only behaved irrationally, but specifically suffered from “motivated skepticism,” rather than some other form of irrationality.
You would need a control group of other people at the time who made the ‘correct’ decision due to lack of a certain bias to indicate the bias was present.
I seem to recall that Japanese soldiers were especially trained to fight to the bitter end because failure against the Americans was the worst thing imaginable, etc. Can anyone point me to decent historical documentation of this, if this is indeed what happened?
Many of them committed suicide rather than be taken prisoner or surrender there are many articles and such on the war in the pacific theatre and almost all of them mention that. Although the ones with veterans interviews would be most helpful.
I’ve read—and this may be pure anecdote—that false claims about how the American forces were treating prisoners of war may have contributed to that.
I guess the value system can be more important here. They had an order and they did what they were ordered.
Look at http://history1900s.about.com/od/worldwarii/a/soldiersurr_2.htm—the soldier surrendered immediately after receiving the order to do so read by his cmmander, but ignored all evidence of Japanese defeat before that.