FWIW, I think there's a good chance banning the fundamental attribution error would have no good effects.
I think people mostly do it without realizing it's what they're doing. I suspect that when we notice we're doing it, we usually stop it.
And the human tendency to defensiveness probably means that if someone else tells us "you're doing this," we'll come up with all sorts of plausible reasons why we're not.
Keep in mind, too, that while fundamental attribution error is not a valid reasoning form and thus not legitimate for use in proofs, it is not guaranteed to yield wrong results. Even if you could ban it effectively, it might not actually change much, as there's always more than one way to skin a cat. People are masters of finding ways to believe what we want to believe.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27581414
I misspoke above, the conversation was much broader, encompassing not just fundamental attribution errors, but ~all errors and imperfections.
> FWIW, I think there's a good chance banning the fundamental attribution error would have no good effects.
It's possible, but it's also possible that it could have good effects - or, sometimes good effects, sometimes none, like most any other of the guidelines.
> And the human tendency to defensiveness probably means that if someone else tells us "you're doing this," we'll come up with all sorts of plausible reasons why we're not.
No doubt about it - once again, you could say the same thing about the other guidelines. My thinking is: just as the existing guidelines can be used as justification for punishment when broken, and set ~aspirations for behavior, is it possible that the list may not be perfect? Might certain other guidelines (or functionality) make HN even better? Dang's claim is that it is not possible, but this is a prediction of the future, and the future is unknown (or so people say, but only sometimes).
This is surely an argument for dropping the whole guidelines then?
Anyway I agree that attribution error should be unacceptable, the real issue is that it's very hard to point out when someone is making this particular mistake vs. other kinds of mistakes.
If one is considering it using logic rather than heuristics, yes.
Full conversation is here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27581414
Another funny/ironic part....one of my suggestions was:
> Some sort "cultural mode" for threads of certain kinds, which might include things like "epistemic strictness". So for example, for culture war (politics) threads, it might be interesting to set Epistemic Strictness = High, meaning certain common behaviors would be forbidden, such as asserting imaginary beliefs as facts (mind reading, future reading, etc).
So when dang wholesale dismisses the idea that improvements can be made (essentially, a claim that HN as it is today is 100% optimal), if this claim was made in a thread with "Epistemic Strictness = High", his comment would have violated: Mind Reading, Future Reading, and Omniscience (which I forgot to include in my comment). I simply cannot see how (well, actually, I know exactly how it is done) one could believe that literally disallowing certain types of comments would have zero effect, especially considering (as you say) that we already have guidelines.
Generally speaking, I find it utterly bizarre how resistant people are to the idea that we distinguish between reality and (certain types of) fantasy in our discussions.
What an incredibly weird exercise in mind-reading you're doing there. Really, an extraordinary mis-extrapolation from his actual statements in that thread. The irony, it burns.
> You don't think HN users are capable of realizing when they are engaged in mind/future reading, even if it was an explicit rule? You surely know the userbase better than me, but this seems unlikely.
> If you want nothing to change, so be it, but the idea that functionality changes cannot have an effect is very frustrating.
dang:
> Correct. Not only HN users but humans in general—I just don't think we work that way. The way we work is that we have our preference on X and then we propagate that preference through every edge in our mental graph of associations from X.
> One can imagine a user saying something like "Although I personally am against nuclear power, since this is the 'optimism' thread it isn't the best place for my counterarguments so I'll post them in the 'pessimism' thread instead". However, such people are somewhere between vanishingly rare and unicorns. Statistically they may as well not exist.
I can see how you might (correctly) take exception with a strict interpretation of "wholesale" in my comment, but is it not true that he is asserting at the very least that people cannot stop engaging in mind/future reading, and that functionality changes cannot have an effect (as well as other things if you read the discussion)?
And as for mind reading: how is it that dang has obtained accurate knowledge about the maximum potential of many thousands of people, in the future, under conditions that have not been tried?