Complex problems and the rush to judgement

Reasonable People #49: Resisting the idea that the solution is obvious, while committing to good processes for getting there

Some things you work out, others you have to find out.

Let me explain: there are two fundamental types of problems in the world.

Some you can solve right now - through analysis or insight you can jump to the end and get the solution. Think of the maths problems you might have done in school. A rock launched from position P at angle A with force F. Take the starting conditions, and the equations which govern the motion of the rock and you can work out where it will be at time T, or how far it will travel before it hits the ground.

Other problems are of a fundamentally different sort. It isn’t that you can’t solve them right now, it is that they cannot be analysed in a way which reveals the end point without also analysing the all the intermediate steps. Think of a chess board, mid game. Is White in a good position? About to win? About to lose? You have all the information - the initial conditions of the pieces and the rules of the game - but there is no analytic procedure which will tell you the outcome. Yes, partly because the opponent has a choice of moves, but not just this. Chess is one of those formally complex systems which cannot be reduced do a simpler form. To find out the true value of a position you just have to play through the possible alternatives.

If you did a lot of maths at school you are used to being given problems of the first type, and when you see a problem you want to find the analytic solution. It’s a good instinct, since analytic solutions are efficient. As long as you have the right method you can quickly reach an exact answer.

Lots of being smart is working out when you’re looking at a solvable problem. Or working out a way to make the problem you are looking at approximate a solvable problem, and then solving that. There are no prizes, and very little popularity, in giving up too early on the instinct to find a quick solution and declaring “we’re going to have to do this the hard way”.

The instinct to solve is frustrated when you come up against an instance of the second class of problems, the class where there aren’t short cuts. It isn’t that you stopped being smart, it’s just you’re now smart in the wrong tools for this job.

Science, dudes

Thanks to whoever recommended the Conspirituality podcast (“Dismantling New Age cults, wellness grifters, and conspiracy-mad yogis.”). The Conspirituality guys really put in the work - over 180 episodes and going strong. I guess this points to the overabundance of material.

I dove in at episode #176 Russell Brand’s Man Stans, which looks at how the online man-o-sphere - which seems to resonate at the same frequency as a range of alt-right, conspiracy theory and wellness gurus/grifters - responded to the accusations that Russell Brand is serial sex offender.

Aside from the main topic of the episode, I was struck by co-host Julian Walker’s comments on the style of thinking deployed by Brand’s defenders:

Once you've crossed over that really signifiant epistemic line, [to reject mainstream narratives] whether it is about paranormal phenomenon … or alternative medicine … then how you interact with the world can be radically impacted when it comes to questions of facts and evidence. … one very strong downside to this style of belief is that it tends to be both anti-psychological and anti-political… Why? Because it has built in circular metaphysical and conspiratorial explanations that are actually thought terminating cliches as defaults against anything which might be threatening. These protect against anything which goes against these core articles of faith and in fact my sense is that this protection is part of way the belief system is so appealing in the first place.

(this is edited by me, see a fuller transcription below, or listen for yourself)

He goes on to characterise this belief style as totalising (everything happens for a reason) and narcissistic (everything is about me). On this second point, the show quotes a successful alt-media influencer who has mused out loud that the Israel-Hamas war may have been orchestrated to disrupt the growing alignment of the contrarian /conspiratorial alt-media. Think how self-centered you have to be to believe that that the conflict exists just to give you and your potential allies something to disagree about!

Back to this idea of “crossing a line” when you choose to reject orthodoxy. Another way of putting this is that we all have a kind of epistemic immune system, which protects us against pathological beliefs. Rejecting mainstream narratives is a move which lets you keep an isolated belief which may be in contradiction, but only at the cost of rendering you vulnerable to a bunch of other stuff, not just ontological commitments, like believing in UFOs, but other boatloads of bullshit, some of which is cover for abuse and exploitation.

I should say at this point that the podcasts hosts are criticising the new age from the inside. (Julian Walker’s podcast bio list him as “a bodyworker and the ecstatic dance DJ/facilitator for his Dance Tribe events.”). The vehemence is not against alternative beliefs, but the co-option by ideologues, grifters and abusers (what they describe at one point as the “the meditation industrial complex”)

The idea of an epistemic immune system reminds me of the riposte to the idea that there are “lies, damn lies, and statistics”: It may be easy to lie with statistics, but it is even easier to lie without statistics.

Orthodoxy isn’t always right, but you don’t increase your odds by believing everything orthodoxy rejects.

In the ignominious ranks of cranks and conspiracy theorists, there is a healthy representation of people who you’d think should know better - those with the scientific background that should let them weigh evidence appropriately.

Linus Pauling was a two time Nobel prize winner, called “one of the greatest scientists of all time” by New Scientist, who did fundamental work in chemistry and biochemistry but then turned to advocating for very high doses of Vitamin C as a cancer treatment (both before and after the evidence came in that completely discredited the idea).

The independence of thought that helps you make scientific breakthroughs in one area, also helps you be dramatically wrong in other areas. Newton’s laws of motion are towering achievement, Newton’s commitment to alchemy less so, but Newton was committed to both.

Transient diversity

Paul Smaldino has a paper on the value to collective problem solving of “transient diversity”. The idea is that it is actively harmful to have everyone harmonised in how they think as quickly as possible. Rather, individuals failing to agree, or epistemic sub-communities forming which go off in their own directions, is a general principle which can support longer term truth-discovery.

I am not saying that the “just asking questions” / conspiracy theory types of this world are playing a valuable role in increasing transient diversity. I *am* saying that rushing to judgement is bad - and the rush to judgement, observable within both orthodox and contrarian communities is an unhealthy sign. Sometimes, like with the pandemic, you really do need to decide on what you believe now, but other issues you can hold your beliefs with a certain lightness, and doing so might be good for the epistemic immune system of the community.

The easy way and the hard way

There’s an apocryphal introduction to algebra which begins with the advice that there is an easy way to learn algebra, and a hard way, and the easy way doesn’t work.

This is the problem: when is someone who questions orthodoxy a genius, and when are they are crank? It seems like even genius’s can’t tell the difference, so what hope do the rest of us have. When are you getting Newton’s alchemy, and when are you getting his physics?

In the long run, people who reject orthodoxy - even for crankish reasons - might do some collective good. History let’s us drop the bad ideas and keep the good ones, but this isn’t a decision rule which helps you rule out ideas in the here and now. Sometimes the orthodoxy is wrong and the contrarians are right.

The urge to solve makes us look for quick decision rules - this idea is “obviously false because” hot takes. But the more I see the litany of errors which makes up the history of orthodox positions in science or history, the less I’m satisfied with these declarations. Smart people love being smart and declaring things obviously false or obviously correct. For complex problems, maybe we’d benefit from more attention to healthy processes - robust experiments, accountable institutions, benign incentives for journalists, etc - and less on rushing to judgement.

So many collective knowledge problems are complex problems which can’t be solved analytically - you just have to go through all the steps. That means, in terms of knowledge communities, investigating, weighing evidence and argument and counter-argument. Doing it the hard way.

It means humility in the face of uncertainty, and prioritising healthy processes for discussion, knowledge transmission and discovery, rather than trying to rule too soon on what’s definitely right or wrong.

Conspirituality #176: Longer transcript

This is from about 14 minutes in

One of my arguments about why so many spiritual people are susceptible to conspiracism, [is] if you really want to believe that paranormal phenomenon are real - for example - despite there being no strong evidence at all, then there are always the nuclear options that either say it is being suppressed by mainstream science - that’s why there's no evidence for it - or that all of science itself is really a kind of religious fundamentalism that denies the nature of reality. It turns out that you can use jargon from postmodern philosophy certain branches of theology and despite science being corrupted you can still, y'know, grab some mangeld concepts from quantum physics to form a pseudointellectual argument for false beliefs, in fact Russel Brand does exactly this all the time!

Once you've crossed over that really signifiant epistemic line, whether it is about paranormal phenomenon (what ever people's various options might be experientially), or alternative medicine and i would add other supernatural prophetic metaphysical explanations purposes or claims about reality then how you interact with the world can be radically impacted when it comes to questions of facts and evidence. So of course, I should say and pre-empt you a bit here Matthew, that how consistent and coherent and people's beliefs are varies from person to person. They might have a compartment for certain kinds of spiritual beliefs that doesn't bleed over into how they think about investigative journalism, but i argue that one very strong downside to this style of belief is that it tends to be both anti-psychological and anti-political, - this is the old spiritual bypass saw but with some elaboration. Why? Because it has built in circular metaphysical and conspiratorial explanations that are actually thought terminating cliches as defaults against anything which might be threatening. These protect against anything which goes against these core articles of faith and in fact my sense is that this protection is part of way the belief system is so appealing in the first place.

Shout out to Parlatype which I used to transcribe the audio (and, yes, I will work out a way to use AI to avoid doing this manually in future)

References

Smaldino, P. E., Moser, C. J., Velilla, A. P., & Werling, M. (2022, October 20). Maintaining transient diversity is a general principle for improving collective problem solving. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/ykrv5

Conspirtuality podcast: conspirituality.net. Episode #176: Russell Brand’s Man Stans

PODCAST: Conspiracy Theory: What they’re not telling you

I’d recommend all episodes, but you, dear RP reader, may particularly enjoy the episode on Conspiracy Theories. I think they really nail what is so alluring about Conspiracy Theories, why they are so much more than just theories about conspiracies, containing an essence that has some core features (manichaeism, grandiosity, weirdly consoling) but combined with something essentially protean, so that conspiracy theories can never be falsified, and can be applied to any and every event.

Link: Conspiracy Theory: What they’re not telling you

A glimpse of the coming pollution of the commons by AI generated text?

Fullfact: Google snippets falsely claimed eating glass has health benefits

As David Coney puts it, a worrying example of the generative AI → web content → search results pipeline.

Counterpoint: AI assisted Bing search confirms existence of Australia

“Fact-checking” fact checkers: A data-driven approach

Good news, high agreement between different fact checkers :

This study examined four fact checkers (Snopes, PolitiFact, Logically, and the Australian Associated Press FactCheck) using a data-driven approach. First, we scraped 22,349 fact-checking articles from Snopes and PolitiFact and compared their results and agreement on verdicts. Generally, the two fact checkers agreed with each other, with only one conflicting verdict among 749 matching claims after adjusting minor rating differences. Next, we assessed 1,820 fact-checking articles from Logically and the Australian Associated Press FactCheck and highlighted the differences in their fact-checking behaviors. Major events like the COVID-19 pandemic and the presidential election drove increased the frequency of fact-checking, with notable variations in ratings and authors across fact checkers.

Misinformaton Review: “Fact-checking” fact checkers: A data-driven approach

And finally…

Credit: unknown

Comments? Feedback? Ideas for 21st century Alchemy projects? I am tom@idiolect.org.uk and on Mastodon at @tomstafford@mastodon.online

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