A scientific attitude is of great importance, but we must recognize that science has absolutely nothing to do with the ‘consensus of the authorities.’ You are less likely to do the wrong thing if you believe that ‘the authorities are always wrong,’ because then you will begin to question their assumptions, evaluate their evidence, and examine their reasoning.
Well, yeah, if an authority says that the Hubble constant is 68 km/s/Mpc and you interpret that in such a way that if the Hubble constant is 67 km/s/Mpc or 69 km/s/Mpc the authority is wrong, then you’d better assume the authority is wrong—though that’s not a very informative assumption and anyway in the real world authorities often make claims more vague (i.e. whose negation is less vague) than that.
Well, sure, you have a relatively high opinion of authority. But even a vague claim needs the expert to be significantly better than chance to be promoted to your attention.
(And, well, this guy isn’t a physicist. He’s involved in medicine. There’s less likely to be clear-cut experimental proof the expert can simply point out in order to overcome your prior. Instead, you get a huge, enormous pile of famouscases where The Experts Screwed Up.)
Instead, you get a huge, enormous pile of famous cases where The Experts Screwed Up.
But there also are many many cases where the experts didn’t screw up, which are less famous for obvious reasons. Believing doctors are always wrong sounds kind of extreme to me; sometimes they are right. (Otherwise, how comes life expectancy has increased so much in the past century?)
Is this reverse stupidity? It’s a demonstrably false statement, but I think it’s a useful heuristic to compensate for a bias we are prone to, allowing you to then collect evidence and evaluate the situation rationally. It might help overcome the also demonstrably false ‘prior belief’ that the authorities are always correct, which prevents people from ever expending energy to confirm or question them.
You are less likely to do the wrong thing if you believe that ‘the authorities are always wrong,’
Guess I’d better start driving without a seatbelt, smoking cigarettes, drinking while pregnant, avoiding healthy food and exercise, having unprotected sex with strangers …
He’s not literally saying to believe this, but to consider this idea to enable you to then look at the evidence yourself.
The problem is so many people hold a ‘prior’ that the authorities are always right, it becomes possible for wrong ideas to become entrenched, and never seriously reinvestigated.
Nobody got the Nobel Price in medicine for showing that smoking causes cancer because of the way the authorities dealt with the issue at the time that discovery was made.
The current policy of requiring warning labels on cigarettes doesn’t seem to be very evidence based and might cause more harm that it’s useful.
avoiding healthy food
That’s beginning the question. Different people have different opinion of what’s healthy and when you read a bit on LW you will find that plenty of people agree with the official canon.
exercise
That’s also a pretty broad category.
Instead of doing your three times 30 of jogging per day and sitting in front of your computer it might be better to get a walking desk and damage your ankles by jogging.
It’s not quite clear that the current philosophy of what exercise is supposed to be is optimal.
You’re missing the point. “Authorities are always wrong” is not only demonstrably false (I could have listed a dozen other examples), it practically invites the reader to think that reversed stupidity is intelligence. We follow the wisdom of the majority because we don’t have the cognitive capacity to reason through every problem as if it were new, and by doing what the majority does in scenarios where we’re not domain experts, we’re at least guaranteed a “not-terrible” outcome, even if it’s sub-optimal.
You’re missing the point. “Authorities are always wrong” is not only demonstrably false (I could have listed a dozen other examples), it practically invites the reader to think that reversed stupidity is intelligence.
I think you are heavily misreading the intent of the quote, if that’s what you take from it.
The quote basically teaches the kind of relationship that Feynman had with authority. Don’t believe in it just because they say so, but demand evidence and follow where the evidence leads you.
Feynman might have benefited from brushing his teeth more frequently but he still left the legacy he did because of his relationship to authority.
My interpretation is that this quote is aimed at people who do have the cognitive capacity to reason through specific problems that are important to them, but are failing to do so because they put too much trust in authorities.
I googled Ray Peat, and he is someone with rather definite views about nutrition and biochemistry. Can I go against his advice in the other quote to read a lot of technical stuff, and ask those on LW who have done so, to say how they judge his ideas?
His ideas are all based on the Association-Induction hypothesis, which is a little known and iconoclastic theory of cell biology… however it seems to have a strong experimental basis.
His writing seemed crazy to me at first (almost like schizophrenic word salad, despite having graduate level training in biology), but I’ve spent much of the last year studying the papers he cites… and I cannot find any mistakes in his reasoning yet. It’s seeming more and more reasonable, but I think it’s better to use his writings to find new ideas about basic biology, rather than just follow his health recommendations without understanding them.
I’m planning a post on the Association-Induction hypothesis. It’s status is very similar to that of timeless physics: it’s largely ignored and unknown however it is researched seriously by a small number of academics.
-Dr. Ray Peat
Reverse stupidity is not intelligence.
It’s not reversed stupidity. It’s an antiprediction.
… which does not make it correct, of course.
Well, yeah, if an authority says that the Hubble constant is 68 km/s/Mpc and you interpret that in such a way that if the Hubble constant is 67 km/s/Mpc or 69 km/s/Mpc the authority is wrong, then you’d better assume the authority is wrong—though that’s not a very informative assumption and anyway in the real world authorities often make claims more vague (i.e. whose negation is less vague) than that.
Well, sure, you have a relatively high opinion of authority. But even a vague claim needs the expert to be significantly better than chance to be promoted to your attention.
(And, well, this guy isn’t a physicist. He’s involved in medicine. There’s less likely to be clear-cut experimental proof the expert can simply point out in order to overcome your prior. Instead, you get a huge, enormous pile of famous cases where The Experts Screwed Up.)
But there also are many many cases where the experts didn’t screw up, which are less famous for obvious reasons. Believing doctors are always wrong sounds kind of extreme to me; sometimes they are right. (Otherwise, how comes life expectancy has increased so much in the past century?)
Is this reverse stupidity? It’s a demonstrably false statement, but I think it’s a useful heuristic to compensate for a bias we are prone to, allowing you to then collect evidence and evaluate the situation rationally. It might help overcome the also demonstrably false ‘prior belief’ that the authorities are always correct, which prevents people from ever expending energy to confirm or question them.
Guess I’d better start driving without a seatbelt, smoking cigarettes, drinking while pregnant, avoiding healthy food and exercise, having unprotected sex with strangers …
He’s not literally saying to believe this, but to consider this idea to enable you to then look at the evidence yourself.
The problem is so many people hold a ‘prior’ that the authorities are always right, it becomes possible for wrong ideas to become entrenched, and never seriously reinvestigated.
Nobody got the Nobel Price in medicine for showing that smoking causes cancer because of the way the authorities dealt with the issue at the time that discovery was made.
The current policy of requiring warning labels on cigarettes doesn’t seem to be very evidence based and might cause more harm that it’s useful.
That’s beginning the question. Different people have different opinion of what’s healthy and when you read a bit on LW you will find that plenty of people agree with the official canon.
That’s also a pretty broad category.
Instead of doing your three times 30 of jogging per day and sitting in front of your computer it might be better to get a walking desk and damage your ankles by jogging.
It’s not quite clear that the current philosophy of what exercise is supposed to be is optimal.
You’re missing the point. “Authorities are always wrong” is not only demonstrably false (I could have listed a dozen other examples), it practically invites the reader to think that reversed stupidity is intelligence. We follow the wisdom of the majority because we don’t have the cognitive capacity to reason through every problem as if it were new, and by doing what the majority does in scenarios where we’re not domain experts, we’re at least guaranteed a “not-terrible” outcome, even if it’s sub-optimal.
I think you are heavily misreading the intent of the quote, if that’s what you take from it.
The quote basically teaches the kind of relationship that Feynman had with authority. Don’t believe in it just because they say so, but demand evidence and follow where the evidence leads you.
Feynman might have benefited from brushing his teeth more frequently but he still left the legacy he did because of his relationship to authority.
Saying “always wrong” is too strong if that was the intent of the quote. It would be a better quote if the author said “could be wrong”.
Fair enough, I disagree with it less now that I’ve read it through again.
My interpretation is that this quote is aimed at people who do have the cognitive capacity to reason through specific problems that are important to them, but are failing to do so because they put too much trust in authorities.
I suspect you meant to type something else. :-)
He is not wrong!
Corrected.
I googled Ray Peat, and he is someone with rather definite views about nutrition and biochemistry. Can I go against his advice in the other quote to read a lot of technical stuff, and ask those on LW who have done so, to say how they judge his ideas?
His ideas are all based on the Association-Induction hypothesis, which is a little known and iconoclastic theory of cell biology… however it seems to have a strong experimental basis.
His writing seemed crazy to me at first (almost like schizophrenic word salad, despite having graduate level training in biology), but I’ve spent much of the last year studying the papers he cites… and I cannot find any mistakes in his reasoning yet. It’s seeming more and more reasonable, but I think it’s better to use his writings to find new ideas about basic biology, rather than just follow his health recommendations without understanding them.
I’m planning a post on the Association-Induction hypothesis. It’s status is very similar to that of timeless physics: it’s largely ignored and unknown however it is researched seriously by a small number of academics.