> b) "you harbor suspicion [I do - suspicion is common human nature] that climate scientists are cooking the books [I didn't say that - that you interpreted it that way may be worth thinking about]"
I did take metaphorical liberty in how I phrased this, but I don't see this much room, here. You quoted, and responded:
> > I have a bunch of coworkers that think scientists are making up this data and skewing results because their jobs depend on it and they want to continue to get funding. > FWIW, I also happen to harbor this suspicion...
Regardless of what you thought, or suspected, or meant to say, you said you harbor the same suspicion as the poster's coworkers--and the poster said their coworkers think the scientists are making up the data because their jobs depend on it. Where do you see enough daylight--between the initial poster's assertion, your statement, and my "cooking the books" metaphor--to assert that my interpretation is inconsistent with what you said?
> ...I don't understand what you mean by this...
You expressed skepticism (to be clear, as I said previously, I have no intrinsic objection to skepticism) of the scientists and their data, but also separately expressed interest in how we move forward from the misunderstanding. If your skepticism of the scientists and the data is serious, it's not clear to me why you're motivated to figure out how we move forward from the misunderstanding. It seems like one of a few things has to be true:
- Your skepticism of the scientists/data isn't serious. This seems to be undercut by your statement that you "harbor this suspicion" (that the scientists are making up the data and skewing their results because their jobs depend on it). If you suspect they're making up the data, I don't see why you'd be you'd also have genuine interest in moving forward to address conclusions identitariains have drawn from the data/results you suspect are made up/skewed. - Your interest in moving forward isn't serious. This seems to be undercut by your subsequent posts to others and myself.
To close the circle: You baited the trap by agreeing you suspect that the scientists are making up the data and skewing results because their jobs depend on it (I suspect this assertion is ~unfalsifiable in our moment; how would the scientists tarred by this assertion refute it? could you support it in any way that isn't vulnerable to the same assertion? And, to be clear, it would not surprise me if there are some scientists doing this--but this is not what you or the poster you quoted asserted). Your agreement with an unqualified assertion that they're making data up and skewing their results attracted about the same kind of responses I'd expect. You seem open-minded and nuanced, but the bait you left out wasn't.
> I propose, for your consideration, that conflict largely derives from the topic of discussion... the magnitude of how an individual ~"ideologically identifies" with a topic
I'm not sure. The conflict is inevitably shaped by the topic (and there are inevitably some people who care about one topic and not another), but a lot of it feels like on Wednesdays we wear pink and on Thursdays we boycott/buy something the other side loves/hates.
> To me, job #1 is getting more people than just you and me to realize (or even open up to consider) that this is actually the situation, and potentially a non-trivial part of the problem. It seems to be a very unpopular idea.
I don't know enough local/global political-party history to have a sense of whether it's like this always/everywhere, but (similar to not feeling compelled to have opinions) I've wondered for a while if it would help if we cultivated different norms around party identification (i.e., that it's unseemly for anyone who isn't a candidate or party official to "identify" as <party>).
> ...asking them some questions might be a good way to start... why everyone seems to have such a strong "we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas" attitude towards this instance is odd ... something needs to be done
Fair. My own approach has been bending towards some playful socratic prodding over the past several years (I guess this is analogous to "street epistemology"). But I'll admit to feeling ground down by watching peoples beliefs/opinions do the Borg thing if you undermine anything they previously claimed was load-bearing. That's why I've been wondering if cultivating abstract norms/virtues is the real answer (but, of course, many people regularly prove that they're willing to discard abstract virtues for expedience). In a memetic frame, my curiosity is about whether we can cultivate more of an immune system to resist polarizing/gridlocking memes.
I'm extremely glad you did, for reasons revealed below.
> Regardless of what you thought, or suspected, or meant to say, you said you harbor the same suspicion as the poster's coworkers--and the poster said their coworkers think the scientists are making up the data because their jobs depend on it. Where do you see enough daylight--between the initial poster's assertion, your statement, and my "cooking the books" metaphor--to assert that my interpretation is inconsistent with what you said?
Ok, this is extremely interesting, to me.
--- My initial (incorrect) response to that question ---
Well that's easy.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/suspicion
Definition of suspicion
1a : the act or an instance of suspecting something wrong without proof or on slight evidence : mistrust
b : a state of mental uneasiness and uncertainty : doubt
--- My updated (less incorrect) response to that question ---
I got to thinking....here I am talking to a person who is clearly (I suspect) intelligent, articulate, and intellectually honest - not unlike how I imagine myself to be. And yet, we've somehow come to completely opposite conclusions on a matter that is somewhat complicated, but not all that complicated. Being curious about how you came to this misunderstanding (or so I thought!), I reviewed the conversation and came across this previous exchange:
>> I have a bunch of coworkers that think scientists are making up this data and skewing results because their jobs depend on it and they want to continue to get funding.
> (ME): FWIW, I also happen to harbor this suspicion. How might one actually know whether there is an element of truth to it?
Here is where the "contamination of the conversation" (and subsequent misunderstanding, on matters specifically related to this point) occurred, and it is 100% my fault. Due due to lack of disciplined preciseness, my literal words unmistakably convey something I don't actually believe (well, to be completely honest, my mind is open to the possibility, but I internally assign this a very low certainty/likelihood/magnitude score): that scientists are making up this data and skewing results.
I literally said that I am suspicious (consider it possible) that scientists are making up this data and skewing results. So NO WONDER you've been replying to me as if I hold "high level" conspiratorial beliefs, because I said just that!
FWIW, to add some color, my actual beliefs were more accurately communicated in a subsequent comment:
>> Climate science is so unnecessarily controversial at this point, that if any evidence existed that scientists were lying to make more money, business leaders would be touting it at every turn.
> (ME):Sure, and nothing I said directly contradicts this, I am merely pointing out that we do not have evidence either way that it is "wise career advice" to pursue climate change only from a particular angle, or that there might be a kind of "overton window" in play, to some degree. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
> Again, I am not saying this is the case, I am simply saying:
> a) the conclusive, absolute truth on these matters is unknown
> b) a behavior can be observed where climate change advocates seem extremely unwilling to simply acknowledge that some things are unknown
[...that there might be a kind of "overton window" in play, to some degree...] is something that I assign a much higher certainty/likelihood/magnitude score, but (obviously) an espistemic status of [Unknown - Incomplete Data].
If I had an infinite amount of time, I'd go back through the entire conversation thread and try to determine how much of that which I found completely baffling might be explained away by this one mistake - it would be funny if the whole thing might have been one giant misunderstanding due to an unintentional, seemingly minor error on the part of one well-intentioned person - a core idea in my overall theory-in-progress on the underlying causes of societal disharmony and polarization, by the way.
I wonder....is this the first time such a thing has occurred within [HN] > [The Internet] > [Planet Earth] > [The History of Mankind]?
I suspect not. And if not, I then wonder....how often might this sort of thing occur, and with what consequences (if one takes into the consideration the nature of human beings, including current knowledge on how they perceive reality based on (~recursive) interpretation of new input, that is modified based on infinitely complicated mental models of reality built from previously consumed (and interpreted) input)?
But I digress. I think this likely takes care of most of the rest of your comment, except for:
>>...I don't understand what you mean by this...
> You expressed skepticism (to be clear, as I said previously, I have no intrinsic objection to skepticism) of the scientists and their data, but also separately expressed interest in how we move forward from the misunderstanding. If your skepticism of the scientists and the data is serious, it's not clear to me why you're motivated to figure out how we move forward from the misunderstanding.
Ok, this is mostly covered by the above, but not completely: I think this in particular was mostly just plain old no-fault communication error/confusion. I was (imprecisely) referring to one kind of of misunderstanding (that of people interacting on HN, this conversation being one such example, except here we're both acting in good faith), and you took it as another (people "not understanding" (or so it seems), science).
This exchange will easily make the top 5 of my "Most Enlightening Internet Arguments of 2019", so thanks for your persistence.
Two final questions, just for fun:
1. Within this overall ridiculous conversation, do you get any sense of a kind of a ~"general theme, loosely related set of ideas" that drives my curiosity?
2. On a scale of 1 to 10 (10 being highest confidence), how crazy do you think I am?
EDIT: I also just realized I owe at least two people some sort of an apology.
I started trying to answer this directly but I wonder if it's more helpful to go meta here. I haven't tried to check this against past posts to see how parallel it is, but the feeling of trying to answer this sequence (does it happen, how often, and to what effect) reminds me of something I've noticed several times when thinking about questions in your comments (to me and others).
It starts off with a question that seems (to me) to have an obvious answer. I can't figure out, in context, whether to read them as purely rhetorical but tend to give the benefit of the doubt. Then I have trouble charting a course to an answer that feels charitable. The tack-on questions tend to balloon to something quite relevant, but seemingly unanswerable without hubris or a mountain of research that I suspect doesn't exist.
This leads me back around to indecision between taking the whole chain rhetorically and whether it's possible to answer charitably. By the end, I end up a bit frustrated.
On this chain of questions: These things happen all the time (see my earlier amorphous notes on how hard I think both precise thinking and communication are). I can't imagine a meaningful answer about the consequences, but I do agree it's a meaningful exercise for the reader to imagine what the consequences may be.
Whether you're hoping for this kind of conclusion or hoping for an answer that actually tries to imagine the frequency and consequences, I suspect you can wring a little more luck out of your approach by narrowing the scope of some questions (probably by making them more local/personal), factoring some of them out into direct statements, or even adding a disclaimer.
1. I can't pretend to have tried to nail this down up to now. Projecting this hard also makes me uncomfortable, but I guess I can make a post hoc effort.
It seems like you're trying to make sense of the absurdist conflict rituals you see playing out. I think you're trying to call attention to the ritual (and its absurdity) as a means of making sense of it (finding other people who agree, prompting new people trying to do the same, testing ideas, getting opinions). I think you see the ritual turning more on psychology than logic, and want to understand the psychology (and promote understanding of the psychology) to light a path forward.
If this isn't too far off base, I have a few closing thoughts:
- I expressed this before in different terms, but I do feel like you're looking for conscientious objectors in the middle of a battlefield. There's nothing wrong with that. You will find a few of us here. And you'll find a few people who are open to persuasion. But you'll mostly find people who are trained to shoot at anything on the wrong horizon.
- I have a pet theory about how to model people who seem irrational: I suspect most people make approximately rational decisions if you know/understand the inputs (values, perceptions, experience) and how they weight them. This doesn't mean you (or they!) can know all of their inputs, but it does imply a few things that I find more productive/tractable than just perceiving them as irrational agents: a) there's value in trying to imagine what inputs could justify someone's decision/behavior; b) it's humbling to assume you might decide/behave the same way with the same inputs; c) if they are a willing, self-reflective participant, the processes of mutually teasing out and challenging inputs and weightings is less inherently fraught/adversarial/condescending than the process of figuring out why they are irrational/illogical.
2. I regularly ask people in my life for scales, but always with a twist. I might rephrase this like "On a scale from 1 to crazy, how am I?" or "How would you rate me on a scale from tall to crazy?" I do this for fun, but also because I'm very leery of dichotomies (especially ranked dichotomy scales) and what they do to our thinking. I haven't thought of you as crazy.
Could you possibly give an example? Or perhaps you're simply noticing exactly what I'm doing, which is asking obviously rhetorical questions, in order to get someone to think.
Or, if you're referring to "I wonder ... how often might this sort of thing occurs"...
The whole quote:
> I suspect not. And if not, I then wonder....how often might this sort of thing occur, and with what consequences (if one takes into the consideration the nature of human beings, including current knowledge on how they perceive reality based on (~recursive) interpretation of new input, that is modified based on infinitely complicated mental models of reality built from previously consumed (and interpreted) input)?
...where "this sort of thing" = ~"unintentional misspeaking, differences in interpretation of words, unrealized differences in axioms (or unawareness of the existence of axioms, or the human ego), pure erroneous thinking, lying, silly (epistemically unsound) ideas, simple misunderstanding, etc".
What I was getting at is.....of all the things people fight about, how much of it might be a misunderstanding (throughout whatever means), which then sets off a self-reinforcing negative feedback loop of retaliation and revenge. This sort of thing happens between couples all the time, could something similar not also be happening at the societal and global level?
> It seems like you're trying to make sense of the absurdist conflict rituals you see playing out. I think you're trying to call attention to the ritual (and its absurdity) as a means of making sense of it (finding other people who agree, prompting new people trying to do the same, testing ideas, getting opinions). I think you see the ritual turning more on psychology than logic, and want to understand the psychology (and promote understanding of the psychology) to light a path forward.
> If this isn't too far off base
Pretty much bang on.
> But you'll mostly find people who are trained to shoot at anything on the wrong horizon.
Yes, this is basically my overwhelming (95%++) experience. Granted, maybe I'm not going about this perfectly, but on a website with an average IQ as high as HN, surely you'd think you could find someone who's willing and able to defend the things they believe, or someone that might realize they aren't able to?
> b) it's humbling to assume you might decide/behave the same way with the same inputs;
Oh yes, I'm very well aware that I have many similar imperfections.
> c) if they are a willing, self-reflective participant, the processes of mutually teasing out and challenging inputs and weightings is less inherently fraught/adversarial/condescending than the process of figuring out why they are irrational/illogical.
Oh, I don't disagree, but I think there's another way of thinking about it. My goal isn't really achieving rational conversation on the object level, I'm more interested in the general behavior from an abstract perspective, and finding out if a way can (or can not) be found to make people realize it, in realtime. It sounds like a weird idea, and maybe it actually is, but I'm fairly obsessed with it for now.
> I haven't thought of you as crazy.
Well thank you. I'm not so sure I agree, but you seem very reasonable so I'll take your word for it! :)
Thanks for the chat.
>>> (though your pivot from "suspicion" and "bias" to "psychology" and "identity" makes me leery).
>> Suspicion, bias, identity, and a whole schwack of other things, all fall under the domain of psychology.
> For sure. I just mean the act of pivoting and re-framing. It's hard to imagine the contiguous core motive that brought you to say both that you harbor suspicion that climate scientists are cooking the books and that you wonder if psychological misunderstanding is the reason we can't move forward.
A few comments (again, please pardon my writing style):
a) my overall motive is to start a new style of discussing climate change, a different perspective on how to accomplish the goals
b) "you harbor suspicion [I do - suspicion is common human nature] that climate scientists are cooking the books [I didn't say that - that you interpreted it that way may be worth thinking about]"
c) "you wonder if psychological misunderstanding is the reason we can't move forward" - I do. Do you consider this idea silly or controversial?
d) "to say [both] that..." - I'm not seeing a contradiction here. Perhaps you're referring to your perception (not based on my words) that I believe that scientists are(!) cooking the books is inconsistent with my ~claim that others are ~misunderstanding? I hope I've clarified enough here, but am happy to dig deeper if you'd like.
> It seems like you laid out one kind of bait, caught about what I'd expect, and then wished you'd caught something else.
I don't understand what you mean by this, but if you think I'm missing something important, I'd appreciate a reply.
> Sorry--this was probably obfuscated by moving my reply here. My interest is in where (along the scale from actual researchers down to general nonscientists communicating in public fora) people are saying things that rub you the wrong way.
Oh, all over the place. I don't want to overemphasize the importance of my reactions - my point is, be very careful underestimating the importance about rubbing the general public the wrong way, particularly various groupings of people. I assume you know how motivationally powerful group identity and tribalism are. See: https://www.cnn.com/2019/12/18/politics/impeachment-polling-...
>> It appears on any culture war topic
> I think these are pervasive hermeneutic/epistemic problems, though I suppose conflict does highlight them.
This is how I see it too. And I propose, for your consideration, that conflict largely derives from the topic of discussion. I propose that conflict magnitude (and in turn cognitive degradation) is proportional to the magnitude of how an individual ~"ideologically identifies" with a topic. Who knows if there's any truth to this, it's just a theory.
> It certainly seems this way. I don't know how to cash this realization out once people are in the trench, though.
To me, job #1 is getting more people than just you and me to realize (or even open up to consider) that this is actually the situation, and potentially a non-trivial part of the problem. It seems to be a very unpopular idea.
> Maybe it helps to imagine the people who aren't responding, and reflect on how the medium, forum, topic, discussion, subthread, your own post, and the very act of clicking the "reply" button to a long post may all act as filters that skew your sample.
True. When no one will discuss a topic, one inevitably starts to speculate about opinions.
> I'm not sure there's a meaningful direct way to address what skeptics think.
It may sound naive, but asking them some questions might be a good way to start. As it is, everyone is forming opinions based on comically inaccurate proxy models.
As for the reach-ability of the various groups, again, better to not form judgements based on speculation. Mankind has dealt with group disagreements for thousands of years, why everyone seems to have such a strong "we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas" attitude towards this instance is odd. Just more of the same thing we've been discussing I imagine. Nonetheless, something needs to be done about it.
> I guess it's trite (and maybe useless), but I feel like pointing out how thoroughly this dance is structured by the ~invisible idea that average people should have any opinion--let alone one we insist must be founded on cold, hard, rock-solid rational logic--about a mountain of published research (itself built on many vast datasets, quite a few complex models, and projections) that collectively draws on, synthesizes, and spans many disciplines. Perhaps the first reaction is that, well, this is how democracy works. But step back, and realize that this pattern demands epistemic hubris. And I think we get it.
100% agree, particularly the "epistemic hubris" - this is a massive component of this general sub-problem, and we have it in spades, on all sides. So, what to do about it?
Thanks for the fantastic conversation, very much appreciated!