Agreed. There’s no value in spreading this opinion
defilippis
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Your assumptions about the research interest are incorrect (although likely no fault of your own, as I was being vague intentionally). The actual experiment tests different argumentative techniques on certain kinds of positions, depending on the initial level of background support that a position has (contrarian or conventional).
See the comment I made at the top of the thread:
“To be clear: this study is about testing different argumentative techniques on different kinds of positions (conventional vs contrarian). It’s not about the overarching reasons why someone who already subscribes to a contrarian position might have been persuaded by it in the first place.”
You are misinterpreting the purpose of the study, and then accusing me of missing something fundamental that makes you doubt everything about my epistemic value. The actual study involves an experiment in which different sets of arguments are offered for the same contrarian position in a between subjects study of belief change. The truth value is not actually relevant to me — just the kinds of arguments people find compelling, conditional on whether the position is contrarian or conventional.
The problem is that I can’t possibly have the expertise to discern which of the contrarian positions are true, and if I were to try to independently arrive at my own conclusions, I would invariably end up deferring to experts and authorities on the subject, which would, in most cases, be the non-contrarian position. My current simple method for operationalizing contrariness is simply looking at how popular a given belief is, across the relevant social groups you ascribe to.
At the current moment, I’m not interested in having to be the arbiter for deciding what is true for particularly complex topics. (Indeed, the research has nothing to do with this question, as it’s about testing the persuasiveness of ARGUMENTS—contrarian and conventional are just two factors that are varied). Initially, I was interested in only generating contrarian positions that were decidedly untrue (eg vaccines cause autism, or the moon landing was faked), versus more ambiguous contrarian positions, but most of what I’m interested in are the unpopular views that are plausibly compelling — at least on the first hearing.
This is a good example, and it’s one we currently use
Any domain works
Point taken. I’ve edited the main body to limit editorializing. I have a hypothesis, and that hypothesis is rooted in survey data suggesting highly educated people are more likely to entertain beliefs that are inconsistent with majority opinion. I’m not concerned about the truth value of these contrarian positions, just why certain arguments in support of them appear appealing to certain kinds of people (and if that’s experimentally testable).
To be clear: this study is about testing different argumentative techniques on different kinds of positions (conventional vs contrarian). It’s not about the overarching reasons why someone who already subscribes to a contrarian position might have been persuaded by it in the first place.
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Thanks, Christian! I’ve actually been in communication with Spencer and Stefan—they’ve been an immensely helpful resource. We have both stumbled upon a similar, difficult problem. Namely, it’s very rare to be “certain” about the controversial questions (which is the point of the contest). By coincidence, a lot of the questions used in their political bias tests I also came up with for my intervention, but some of the others are actually less straightforwardly verifiable than is let on by the test.
@gwern, I was going through GSS data the other day, but was not quite sure of what you had in mind. There are variables that track political affiliation (e.g. party), and I can find what other variables are strongly predicted by party (e.g. geographical area). Was the idea to just find demographic items that are tightly correlated with partisan affiliation, and brain storm trivia questions based on the demographic characteristics?
This is a good idea. Will work on this now. Thanks! For “Knowledge Desert” questions (non-political questions where only one party will have a strong hunch about), I looked at patterns of co-following activity on Twitter and Reddit. So, for example, people who followed conservative Senators/Representatives on Twitter also tended to follow certain kinds of sports (e.g. baseball and UFC), and certain kinds of restaurants (e.g. Bob Evan’s Steakhouse and Cracker Barrel). Similarly, people who subscribed to /r/TheDonald also followed stereotypically conservative lifestyle sub-reddits. I’ve been having trouble finding a similar proxy for “False Belief” questions (political in content, where both parties have strong hunches that they’re correct).
I identify individuals who don’t currently subscribe to a contrarian belief. I give a random half of them one kind of argument for this position, and the other another kind of argument for the position. I compare belief change in either camp. There are more components to the study, but I’m not interested in defending the research methodology.