It seems like a good opportunity to discuss what the article got right, what it didn’t, how reddit reacted, and how one might better publicize the topic in the future.
Perhaps I’m being too pedantic here, but I dislike this way of framing our potential discussion of the article. The assumption seems to be that we at LW are authorities on cognitive bias, so obviously we couldn’t learn anything from the article, but we could fact-check it. I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty sure Jonah Lehrer knows a lot more than me about psychological research on cognitive bias. When I read one of his pieces, I’m not usually thinking, “Well, let me figure out what he got wrong and what he got right.”
I apologize if I’m reading too much into your post. I guess one of the reasons I’m sensitive to this kind of thing is that there is a kind of collective intellectual arrogance in the LessWrong culture that I find very distasteful, and your phrasing in the post seems like a symptom.
Also, both your links go to the New Yorker article.
I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty sure Jonah Lehrer knows a lot more than me about psychological research on cognitive bias.
He’s a pretty knowledgeable dude, but he has major incentives to overstate research—the incentives which literally just days ago got him a job at The New Yorker, which is a pretty big plum for any journalist. When you read the original papers (I jailbroke the OP paper in question), you find he overstates things.
For example, this paper: the biases were specifically chosen to be resistant to intelligence, and the intelligent performed as well as the stupid—they were just wrong in predicting they’d perform better than the stupid (as they do in every other area of life). This is interesting if you’re trying to formulate an integrated theory of IQ and the two processes, as Stanovich is doing (Stanovich’s 2010 book is very good reading), but does it bear the spin Lehrer is putting on it? No.
I’m pretty distrustful of science reporting in general. I agree that LWers should at least act more humble (so people won’t be averse to correcting them, and they won’t be averse to correcting themselves).
I got the article from reddit, so I guess I’m used to articles about science being inadequate or misrepresentative in a major way. This community has a good number of members who know much more than I do about the topic so I wanted to see what they thought about it. Reading the article is probably sufficient to learn from it, I just wanted a better idea of the quality of the article.
Perhaps I’m being too pedantic here, but I dislike this way of framing our potential discussion of the article. The assumption seems to be that we at LW are authorities on cognitive bias, so obviously we couldn’t learn anything from the article, but we could fact-check it. I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty sure Jonah Lehrer knows a lot more than me about psychological research on cognitive bias. When I read one of his pieces, I’m not usually thinking, “Well, let me figure out what he got wrong and what he got right.”
I apologize if I’m reading too much into your post. I guess one of the reasons I’m sensitive to this kind of thing is that there is a kind of collective intellectual arrogance in the LessWrong culture that I find very distasteful, and your phrasing in the post seems like a symptom.
Also, both your links go to the New Yorker article.
He’s a pretty knowledgeable dude, but he has major incentives to overstate research—the incentives which literally just days ago got him a job at The New Yorker, which is a pretty big plum for any journalist. When you read the original papers (I jailbroke the OP paper in question), you find he overstates things.
For example, this paper: the biases were specifically chosen to be resistant to intelligence, and the intelligent performed as well as the stupid—they were just wrong in predicting they’d perform better than the stupid (as they do in every other area of life). This is interesting if you’re trying to formulate an integrated theory of IQ and the two processes, as Stanovich is doing (Stanovich’s 2010 book is very good reading), but does it bear the spin Lehrer is putting on it? No.
I’m pretty distrustful of science reporting in general. I agree that LWers should at least act more humble (so people won’t be averse to correcting them, and they won’t be averse to correcting themselves).
I got the article from reddit, so I guess I’m used to articles about science being inadequate or misrepresentative in a major way. This community has a good number of members who know much more than I do about the topic so I wanted to see what they thought about it. Reading the article is probably sufficient to learn from it, I just wanted a better idea of the quality of the article.