[HN Gopher] What Everyone Knows
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What Everyone Knows
Author : birriel
Score : 42 points
Date : 2022-06-12 16:34 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (kk.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (kk.org)
| colinsane wrote:
| > Is there a way to arrive at a proto-consensus fast -- without
| leaving out the real contingent that everything we know is wrong?
|
| possibly some form of prediction market? explicitly reward (give
| more power to) individuals who are repeatedly correct about the
| future, and over time such people gain more influence and the
| overall predictions become more reliable.
|
| there have been small-scale prediction markets throughout covid
| ("what will be the daily case count on 1 August 2022 as reported
| by CDC?"). that naive approach has some obvious conflict of
| interest/opportunity for exploitation. but it sounds worthwhile
| for someone to explore how quickly the various prediction markets
| have converged throughout their relatively short history, to see
| if there's anything there.
| staz wrote:
| > Everyone knows how many letters in the alphabet
|
| I would expect everyone to know that they is more than one
| alphabet and that they each don't have the same number of letter
| ...
| throwamon wrote:
| Yeah, but I bet most (western?) people don't know the slightly
| less obvious concept that not all _writing systems_ are
| alphabets.
| bckr wrote:
| this is another post that I wish went beyond the idea it is
| proposing and gave some researched stances on that idea, like who
| was more right at the beginning of covid and how they are
| different from people who were less right
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Ouch, I think nobody will like the answer to this.
|
| It's just my impression, obviously, because I haven't done any
| formal research on this, but looks like the actual experts know
| how much they know and how much they don't know, and were quite
| fine since the start.
|
| Also, every single channel that turns their opinions into
| advice or policy is noisy by an absurd level. So much that what
| experts think isn't even relevant to predict their results.
| narag wrote:
| I remember most predictions (by "real" experts, at least the
| ones I paid attention to) were right except one: it will take
| two years to create a useful vaccine. It was more like six
| months.
|
| Actually I don't remember who they were, I got the impression
| that there _was_ a consensus, unlike what happened with
| politicians.
| someweirdperson wrote:
| And then there's things that everyone knows and that are wrong.
| Like famous movie quotes. "I am your father, Luke". Known as the
| Mandela effect [1].
|
| A fast-mode consensus has a high probability to create lasting
| wrong "truths", that will be difficult to dispell later.
|
| The proper way would be to attach probabilities to information,
| but that would be too much for most readers, and impossible to do
| for most normal jounalists.
|
| We're doomed in any case.
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_memory#Mandela_Effect
| colinsane wrote:
| > The proper way would be to attach probabilities to
| information, but that would be too much for most readers, and
| impossible to do for most normal jounalists.
|
| some scientific reporting takes the approach of defining
| certain words to represent confidence (probability) ranges: "we
| are _weakly_ confident"... " _moderately_ confident"... etc.
| they often explicitly define the range, too. that's the case
| e.g. in IPCC reports, which is technical material that way more
| people i know than normal read.
|
| i don't think qualifiers like "weakly"/"strongly" get in the
| way, but they do show just how uncertain most effects actually
| are. people don't always share information out of altruism.
| frequently, information is shared in an attempt to persuade.
| and so there's selective pressure for writing which makes a
| situation seem more black/white.
|
| if you want quality communication at scale i'm not sure if your
| bigger priority would be introducing probabilities, or rather
| aligning everyone using the communication channel to value
| truth. Wikipedia does a far better job at presenting good
| information than most of the press, despite lacking
| probabilities.
| someweirdperson wrote:
| > i don't think qualifiers like "weakly"/"strongly" get in
| the way, but they do show just how uncertain most effects
| actually are.
|
| "Most" seems to caused by selection bias.
|
| There is new areas where knowlegde has to be established
| first. Theories can be created, and experiments defined to
| confirm or reject them. But it takes time. That's the realm
| of fast tracking results the original article is about. The
| temporary results will be replaced later. Covid is such a
| case (even if ethics may get in the way of some experiments).
| "Most" of science is like this.
|
| Then there's areas that cannot be verified by experiment.
| Probabilities are useful there, too, even more so, because
| they will persist long-term, even if there is consensus. Main
| examples are climate (no control group of earths to conduct
| experiments on) and cosmology (no control group of
| universes).
| h2odragon wrote:
| > Is there a way to arrive at a proto-consensus fast
|
| Yes, you use your individual judgement and go with that; updating
| as you can.
|
| "consensus" here is an appeal to avoid individual responsibility.
| Embrace the possibility of being wrong (or right) on your own.
|
| In the wider civilization context; a society that unites behind
| one approach to a problem is more likely to fail big than to
| succeed big. "A free society pulls all kinds of different
| directions," as Pterry put it. Often the best solutions are only
| recognized after some crazy shit is tried, but they are
| recognized as best in part _because_ the crazy shit was tried.
| k__ wrote:
| When I see TV interviews with the average citizen, I'm not sure
| if there's anything everyone knows.
| Barrera wrote:
| > Most of "what everyone knows" is true. Most of our knowledge as
| modern human beings is shared with many others. Everyone knows
| the capital of France is Paris, and it is true. Everyone knows
| how many letters in the alphabet, the color of stop lights, the
| shape of a rainbow. What everyone knows is usually correct.
| However, sometimes what everyone knows is wrong. Everyone knew
| humans could not fly, or build 100 stories into the air, or run a
| company renting out your extra bedroom. Turns out what everyone
| knows is sometimes wrong. But it is very hard to tell the
| difference.
|
| The affirmative examples are all _conventions_. We know them to
| be true because it 's within our power to make it so just by
| agreeing with each other.
|
| The negative examples are not conventions. They are about what
| will happen in the future.
|
| So it's not just "sometimes what everyone knows it wrong." More
| like, on topics involving observation, deduction, or prediction
| what everyone "knows" is more likely to be wrong than right. The
| history of science provides ample evidence. Those claiming that
| "the science is settled" are trying to manipulate the public.
| zaik wrote:
| > Those claiming that "the science is settled" are trying to
| manipulate the public.
|
| This line of reasoning is also popular among flat earthers,
| perpetual motion machine builders and climate change deniers.
| hammock wrote:
| >This line of reasoning is also popular among flat earthers
|
| Yes, has been for centuries!
| RobertRoberts wrote:
| Religious tyrants, crusaders and all sorts of dictatorial
| rulers down through history used this exact same logic. How
| are current leaders any different using the same reasoning
| and language?
| andrepd wrote:
| Because you _can_ question science (and people do, that 's
| how science progresses!), you just can't do it arbitrarily
| / out of your ass.
| swatcoder wrote:
| It also stands out to me that the negative examples are
| ahistorical.
|
| Even into modern times, plenty of people did indeed believe
| that flight was possible through spiritual practice or
| mechanical means, had no intuition about maximum construction
| heights at all, and well.. personally operated boarding houses
| across the world and throughout history.
|
| I think the article is trying to make an argument that's worth
| attempting, but is relying on some examples that don't help it
| do so.
| karmakaze wrote:
| Thanks for saying. I couldn't even read the complete article
| based on the lack of consistency as I don't know what rules of
| logic apply given the examples. I did skim further and see
| something about a project at Google and another bad example
| COVID.
|
| The main point that's off isn't that we haven't built good
| communications for consensus but rather the dominant
| information flows we've built actively diverge from concensus.
| lisper wrote:
| > Those claiming that "the science is settled" are trying to
| manipulate the public.
|
| No, they aren't.
|
| Settled != correct. But what most crackpots fail to take into
| account is that if you want to challenge the scientific status
| quo you need an actual _argument_ , i.e. you need propose a
| _better_ alternative to the current-best explanation, one that
| either accounts for data that the current-best explanation does
| not, or one that has fewer free parameters. You can 't just
| say, "Science has gotten it wrong in the past so it probably
| has got it wrong now, and therefore you should pay attention to
| my crackpot theory." The status quo is the result of a lot of
| hard work. It may not be right, but you have to at the very
| least understand how it became the status quo before you can
| seriously challenge it.
| blfr wrote:
| The point about providing a better alternative and not just
| poking holes is very good and I actually agree with you but
| still, the people saying "the science is settled" are almost
| always trying to manipulate the public. In fact, I cannot
| recall hearing someone saying that when they weren't trying
| to manipulate the public.
| aynsof wrote:
| This isn't what I saw happening during the pandemic.
|
| The (to use your word) 'crackpots' were proposing alternative
| solutions like Ivermectin and Chloroquine. The people who
| were shouting 'believe science' were trying to silence the
| debate.
|
| I offer no opinion on either of those two alternatives, I
| merely point out that 'believe' isn't the verb that goes with
| 'science'.
| xorcist wrote:
| The crackpot spectrum was unusually broad during the
| pandemic, far from the realm of vaccine deniers and flat
| earthers.
|
| One professor of virology from a world renowned institution
| was soft banned on twitter behind some sort of click-though
| warning for pointing to public data about what we knew at
| the time that closing schools would lead to. Apparently
| because it fed into some bizarre American debate which was
| going on at the time.
|
| Another is a professor of immunology that was heavily
| criticized for explaining why and how thoroughly a vaccine
| must be tested before mass vaccinations can occur, even if
| every day it can be deployed will save lives and labelled a
| "vaccine skeptic". Which is more than one kind of weird. Of
| course, the vaccine was tested exactly as described, and
| came out even better than most had expected.
|
| But that makes it more than clear that many people who
| demands us to "follow science" more often than not could
| not be bothered to actually find out what science has to
| say. It is the new "think of the children". Science exists
| on its own merits, and we should be careful when the mob
| demands otherwise.
| andrepd wrote:
| It's very sad that some people were keen to lump the
| denialists, antimaskers, or the Chloroquine people, with
| valid concerns about lockdowns or school closures.
| [deleted]
| andrepd wrote:
| Why would a person untrained in science declare that
| Chloroquine is a cure to covid? That is a definition of
| crackpot: you are not offering an explanation or a
| minimally reasonable argument, you're just contradicting
| current scientific knowledge for the sake of it.
| _dain_ wrote:
| >Everyone knows how many letters in the alphabet
|
| Is e a separate letter to e? What about n to n? ae to ae? Is q
| a different letter to Q? Or _m_ and m?
| cromulent wrote:
| I smiled at this when I read it also - I knew for a fact
| there were 26. Until I moved to another country. I think it
| kind of helps make Kevin's point though.
| andrepd wrote:
| Here "the alphabet" is assumed to mean the English alphabet.
| booleandilemma wrote:
| The article reminds me of one of Clarke's Three Laws:
| When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something
| is possible, they are almost certainly right. When they state
| that something is impossible, they are very probably wrong.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws
| derevaunseraun wrote:
| > Artificial intelligence is a very fast-moving frontier and what
| (and who) to believe about it is hard for a non-expert to decide.
| Crypto is another example of a big field that seems to contain
| conflicting experts. _For the lay public it is very hard to know
| who to believe._
|
| The "lay public" doesn't care in the first place. They don't have
| the time to read various studies and journals to compare
| conflicting points of view. What they do have time for is news
| media, and a whole lot of it
|
| > But sometimes experts are wrong. And very often, there'll be
| another expert who has a different, even contrary, professional
| opinion on the same subject. So non-experts are left having to
| decide which expert we want to believe.
|
| The non-experts aren't concerned with who to believe, they're
| concerned about what should be done. Believing something is true
| != thinking something should be done (ref Hume's is-ought
| problem).
|
| I'm convinced that the author of this isn't complaining that the
| public has read various conflicting scientific studies and is
| unable to make a decision, they're complaining because the public
| is split on _what should be done_ , which is the real source of
| disagreement
|
| What should be done is a moral question that's independent of the
| results of any single experiment. To propose that a group of
| experts "decide" what's moral for the rest of society would be
| analogous to establishing a public religion
| kissgyorgy wrote:
| Coronavirus research was not "fast science" at all, there have
| been ongoing research for decades about coronaviruses before the
| pandemic hit.
| hammock wrote:
| What did it say?
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