Eh, I don’t buy it. I think it’s making a locally valid point, and making an IMO reasonable inference that the cause of your phobias is probably not completely disconnected from good inference rules.
Agree that it would be nice to have a section in the post that’s like “OK, but can we find empirical validation of this prediction (which seems reasonably likely based on these premises)?”, but I don’t think that’s necessary for a good post.
I personally hadn’t super considered the important difference between stochastic risks and guaranteed risks and how those would interface with exposure therapy. The point is simple, so as soon as I would have come into more contact with the territory I would have probably noticed it, but I also wouldn’t be surprised if someone had succeeded at making an invalid argument that I would nod along to if I was having a casual conversation about this topic, that makes the error this post is arguing against.
I didn’t start by voicing an alternative narrative because I think the issue of epidemics is important enough to stand on its own.
But let’s write an alternative narrative:
People frequently have thoughts to justify their actions and their emotions. For me, it’s easy to imagine that the causation goes from having a phobia to having thoughts about possible disaster. It’s easy to imagine that people think more about hypotheticals that might happen in situation X than the usually things that happen in situation X when they are never exposed to situation X.
When fear started evolving in mammals or their predecessors, those animals were not capable of having cognitive concepts of low-probability risks. Neither for the freeze/shutdown mechanism that as far as I know are evolutionary older nor for fight/flight/fawn which are newer.
We humans didn’t get a new emotional fear system after using our precortex more. Our precortex wants to make sense of the fears that we have and might produce scenarios like the one described in the OP that we think about, but even if those scenarios are there and even if explicitly thinking about them feels scary, the core cause of the fear might still be in the amygdala.
Do I know whether the narrative I wrote is more or less likely to be true than the one writing the OP? No, I don’t it would need empiric evidence. It’s the kind of empiric evidence that’s either available or the thesis is so wrong that the professionals in the field just reject the thesis without finding it valuable to study it.
When it comes to self-help material on LessWrong, I don’t want people to write about empiric claims for which they have neither empirical evidence from their own life experience nor empirical evidence from published sources.
If these kinds of arguments that the OP is making would be the norm, I would expect it to lead to an adoption of a lot of wrong beliefs because they are convincingly argued but lack empirical backing. Especially, people who themselves don’t have much contact with the territory are likely going to adopt those arguments over something that’s more empirically grounded.
If you generally look at psychology research you find that ideas which can be argued in the strength the OP argued for his thesis often turn out to be wrong when researchers set out to study them. Plenty of research findings don’t replicate. Building stable knowledge in that field is hard.
FWIW, I get a feeling you are getting the basics of psychology reasoning basically backwards. Indeed, I think trying to make locally valid arguments from the basis of assumptions of rationality has a much better track record than macro-scale behavior arguments that rely on empirical data collection.
Overall, I think if you are trying to understand how you and other people think, arguments of the type “here is a very common observation, or straightforward hypothetical, let’s use common sense to figure out what people will do in this situation” perform much better than “here is a counterintuitive result which I have backed up with a bunch of experiments”.
Eh, I don’t buy it. I think it’s making a locally valid point, and making an IMO reasonable inference that the cause of your phobias is probably not completely disconnected from good inference rules.
Agree that it would be nice to have a section in the post that’s like “OK, but can we find empirical validation of this prediction (which seems reasonably likely based on these premises)?”, but I don’t think that’s necessary for a good post.
I personally hadn’t super considered the important difference between stochastic risks and guaranteed risks and how those would interface with exposure therapy. The point is simple, so as soon as I would have come into more contact with the territory I would have probably noticed it, but I also wouldn’t be surprised if someone had succeeded at making an invalid argument that I would nod along to if I was having a casual conversation about this topic, that makes the error this post is arguing against.
I didn’t start by voicing an alternative narrative because I think the issue of epidemics is important enough to stand on its own.
But let’s write an alternative narrative:
People frequently have thoughts to justify their actions and their emotions. For me, it’s easy to imagine that the causation goes from having a phobia to having thoughts about possible disaster. It’s easy to imagine that people think more about hypotheticals that might happen in situation X than the usually things that happen in situation X when they are never exposed to situation X.
When fear started evolving in mammals or their predecessors, those animals were not capable of having cognitive concepts of low-probability risks. Neither for the freeze/shutdown mechanism that as far as I know are evolutionary older nor for fight/flight/fawn which are newer.
We humans didn’t get a new emotional fear system after using our precortex more. Our precortex wants to make sense of the fears that we have and might produce scenarios like the one described in the OP that we think about, but even if those scenarios are there and even if explicitly thinking about them feels scary, the core cause of the fear might still be in the amygdala.
Do I know whether the narrative I wrote is more or less likely to be true than the one writing the OP? No, I don’t it would need empiric evidence. It’s the kind of empiric evidence that’s either available or the thesis is so wrong that the professionals in the field just reject the thesis without finding it valuable to study it.
When it comes to self-help material on LessWrong, I don’t want people to write about empiric claims for which they have neither empirical evidence from their own life experience nor empirical evidence from published sources.
If these kinds of arguments that the OP is making would be the norm, I would expect it to lead to an adoption of a lot of wrong beliefs because they are convincingly argued but lack empirical backing. Especially, people who themselves don’t have much contact with the territory are likely going to adopt those arguments over something that’s more empirically grounded.
If you generally look at psychology research you find that ideas which can be argued in the strength the OP argued for his thesis often turn out to be wrong when researchers set out to study them. Plenty of research findings don’t replicate. Building stable knowledge in that field is hard.
FWIW, I get a feeling you are getting the basics of psychology reasoning basically backwards. Indeed, I think trying to make locally valid arguments from the basis of assumptions of rationality has a much better track record than macro-scale behavior arguments that rely on empirical data collection.
Overall, I think if you are trying to understand how you and other people think, arguments of the type “here is a very common observation, or straightforward hypothetical, let’s use common sense to figure out what people will do in this situation” perform much better than “here is a counterintuitive result which I have backed up with a bunch of experiments”.
what