Just kidding. Recht might be even more suspicious of these things than we are. What has statistics ever done for us, really? When was the last time YOU ran a clinical trial after all, huh? HUH? After Ben Chugg defends his life decision to do a PhD in statistics, we talk AI, cults, philosophy, Paul Meehl, and discuss Ben Recht's forthcoming book, The Irrational Decision.

Check out Ben's blog, website, and his story about machine learning.

We discuss

• Ben Recht's theory of blogging
• Why is Berkeley the epicenter of AI doom?
  
• Where the word "robot" came from
• Is Bayesian reasoning responsible for AI doom?
• Paul Meehl and his contributions to science
• Ben Recht's bureaucratic theory of statistics
• What on earth is null hypothesis testing?
• What is the point of statistics?
• "Sweet spots" and "small worlds"
• Does science proceed by Popperian means?
• Can Popper get around the Duhem-Quine problem?
  

Errata

The z-score for the Pfizer trial was 20, not 12!

References

• Argmin, Ben Recht's blog
• David Freedman, UC Berkeley
• Paul Meehl's online course
• Theoretical Risks and Tabular Asterisks: Sir Karl, Sir Ronald, and the Slow Progress of Soft Psychology, Paul Meehl's 1978 paper.
• Clinical versus statistical prediction: A theoretical analysis and a review of the evidence, by Meehl
• On the near impossibility of estimating the returns to advertising
• A Bureaucratic Theory of Statistics by Recht
• The new riddle of induction by Goodman
• Announcing the Irrational Decision
• Patterns, Predictions, and Actions, textbook by Ben Recht and Moritz Hardt

Socials

• Follow us on Twitter at @BeenWrekt, @IncrementsPod, @BennyChugg, @VadenMasrani
• Come join our discord server! DM us on twitter or send us an email to get a supersecret link
• Become a patreon subscriber here. Or give us one-time cash donations to help cover our lack of cash donations here.
• Click dem like buttons on youtube

What's Berkeley's next cult? Send your guess over to incrementspodcast@gmail.com

Special Guest: Ben Recht.

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Hugo Mercier is a research director at the CNRS (Institut Jean Nicod, Paris), where he work with the Evolution and Social Cognition team. Check out his two books: The Enigma of Reason and Not Born Yesterday .

We discuss

• Mercier's thoughts on the cognitive bias literature
• Open vigilance mechanisms
• Criticism of the System 1 vs System 2 dichotomy
• Why Kahneman misinterpreted the bat and the ball thought experiment
• Do flat earthers really believe the earth is flat?
• The Asch conformity experiment
• Preference falsification vs internalization of professed beliefs
• How important is social signaling?
• Trump, MAGA, gullibility, and Tariffs
• How effective are advertisements?
• How effective is propaganda?
• Is social science reforming?

References

• The Enigma of Reason by Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber
• Not Born Yesterday
  
• Our previous episodes on Not Born Yesterday and The Enigma of Reason

Socials

• Follow us on Twitter at @hugoreasoning, @IncrementsPod, @BennyChugg, @VadenMasrani
• Come join our discord server! DM us on twitter or send us an email to get a supersecret link
• Become a patreon subscriber here. Or give us one-time cash donations to help cover our lack of cash donations here.
• Click dem like buttons on youtube

How much system 2 thinking does it take to misunderstand system 1 vs system 2? Tell us at incrementspodcast@gmail.com

Special Guest: Hugo Mercier.

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Check out Rich's website, his book Optionality: How to Survive and Thrive in a Volatile World, and his podcast.

We discuss

• The pros of the rationality and EA communities
• Whether Bayesian epistemology contributes to open-mindedness
• The fact that evidence doesn't speak for itself
• The fact that the world doesn't come bundled as discrete chunks of evidence
• Whether Bayesian epistemology would be "optimal" for Laplace's demon
• The difference between truth and certainty
• Vaden's tone issues and why he gets animated about this subject.

References

• Scott's original piece: In continued defense of non-frequentist probabilities
• Scott Alexander's post about rootclaim
• Our previous episode on Scott's piece: #69 - Contra Scott Alexander on Probability
• Rootclaim
• Ben's blogpost You need a theory for that theory
• Cox's theorem
• Aumann's agreement theorem
• Vaden's blogposts mentioned in the episode:
  • Critical Rationalism and Bayesian Epistemology
  • Proving Too Much

Socials

• Follow us on Twitter at @IncrementsPod, @BennyChugg, @VadenMasrani
• Follow Rich at @MeadowsRichard
• Come join our discord server! DM us on twitter or send us an email to get a supersecret link
• Help us calibrate our credences and get exclusive bonus content by becoming a patreon subscriber here. Or give us one-time cash donations to help cover our lack of cash donations here.
• Click dem like buttons on youtube

What's your favorite theory that is neither true nor useful? Tell us over at incrementspodcast@gmail.com.

Special Guest: Richard Meadows.

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We discuss

• Chapman's concept of nebulosity
• Whether this concept is covered by Popper
• The relationship of nebulosity and the vagueness of language
• The correspondence theory of truth
• If the concept of "problem situation" saves us from Chapman's critique
• Why "conjecture and criticism" isn't everything

References

• The excellent Do Explain podcast. Go listen, right now!
• In the cells of the eggplant, David Chapman
• Chapman's website
• Jake Orthwein on Do Explain, Part I

Chapman Quotes

Reasonableness is not interested in universality. It aims to get practical work done in specific situations. Precise definitions and absolute truths are rarely necessary or helpful for that. Is this thing an eggplant? Depends on what you are trying to do with it. Is there water in the refrigerator? Well, what do you want it for? What counts as baldness, fruit, red, or water depends on your purposes, and on all sorts of details of the situation. Those details are so numerous and various that they can’t all be taken into account ahead of time to make a general formal theory. Any factor might matter in some situation. On the other hand, nearly all are irrelevant in any specific situation, so determining whether the water in an eggplant counts, or if Alain is bald, is usually easy.

• David Chapman, When will you go bald?

Do cow hairs that have come out of the follicle but that are stuck to the cow by friction, sweat, or blood count as part of the cow? How about ones that are on the verge of falling out, but are stuck in the follicle by only the weakest of bonds? The reasonable answer is “Dude! It doesn’t matter!”

• David Chapman, Objects, objectively

We use words as tools to get things done; and to get things done, we improvise, making use of whatever materials are ready to hand. If you want to whack a piece of sheet metal to bend it, and don’t know or care what the “right” tool is (if there even is one), you might take a quick look around the garage, grab a large screwdriver at the “wrong” end, and hit the target with its hard rubber handle. A hand tool may have one or two standard uses; some less common but pretty obvious ones; and unusual, creative ones. But these are not clearly distinct categories of usage.

• David Chapman, The purpose of meaning

Popper Quotes

Observation is always selective. It needs a chosen object, a definite task, an interest, a point of view, a problem. And its description presupposes a descriptive language, with property words; it presupposes similarity and classification, which in their turn presuppose interests, points of view, and problems. ‘A hungry animal’, writes Katz, ‘divides the environment into edible and inedible things. An animal in flight sees roads to escape and hiding places . . . Generally speaking, objects change . . . according to the needs of the animal.’ We may add that objects can be classified, and can become similar or dissimilar, only in this way—by being related to needs and interests. This rule applies not only to animals but also to scientists. For the animal a point of view is provided by its needs, the task of the moment, and its expectations; for the scientist by his theoretical interests, the special problem under investigation, his conjectures and anticipations, and the theories which he accepts as a kind of background: his frame of reference, his "horizon of expectations".

• Conjectures and Refutations p. 61 (italics added)

I believe that there is a limited analogy between this situation and the way we ‘use our terms’ in science. The analogy can be described in this way. In a branch of mathematics in which we operate with signs defined by implicit definition, the fact that these signs have no ‘definite meaning’ does not affect our operating with them, or the precision of our theories. Why is that so? Because we do not overburden the signs. We do not attach a ‘meaning’ to them, beyond that shadow of a meaning that is warranted by our implicit definitions. (And if we attach to them an intuitive meaning, then we are careful to treat this as a private auxiliary device, which must not interfere with the theory.) In this way, we try to keep, as it were, within the ‘penumbra of vagueness’ or of ambiguity, and to avoid touching the problem of the precise limits of this penumbra or range; and it turns out that we can achieve a great deal without discussing the meaning of these signs; for nothing depends on their meaning. In a similar way, I believe, we can operate with these terms whose meaning wehave learned ‘operationally’. We use them, as it were, so that nothing depends upon their meaning, or as little as possible. Our ‘operational definitions’ have the advantage of helping us to shift the problem into a field in which nothing or little depends on words. Clear speaking is speaking in such a way that words do not matter.

• OSE p. 841 (italics in original)

Frege’s opinion is different; for he writes: “A definition of a concept ... must determine unambiguously of any object whether or not it falls under the concept . . . Using a metaphor, we may say: the concept must have a sharp boundary.” But it is clear that for this kind of absolute precision to be demanded of a defined concept, it must first be demanded of the defining concepts, and ultimately of our undefined, or primitive, terms. Yet this is impossible. For either our undefined or primitive terms have a traditional meaning (which is never very precise) or they are introduced by so-called “implicit definitions”—that is, through the way they are used in the context of a theory. This last way of introducing them—if they have to be “introduced”—seems to be the best. But it makes the meaning of the concepts depend on that of the theory, and most theories can be interpreted in more than one way. As a result, implicity defined concepts, and thus all concepts which are defined explicitly with their help, become not merely “vague” but systematically ambiguous. And the various systematically ambiguous interpretations (such as the points and straight lines of projective geometry) may be completely distinct.

• Unending Quest, p. 27 (italics added)

What I do suggest is that it is always undesirable to make an effort to increase precision for its own sake—especially linguistic precision—since this usually leads to loss of clarity, and to a waste of time and effort on preliminaries which often turn out to be useless, because they are bypassed by the real advance of the subject: one should never try to be more precise than the problem situation demands. ... One further result is, quite simply, the realization that the quest for precision, in words or concepts or meanings, is a wild-goose chase. There simply is no such thing as a precise concept (say, in Frege’s sense), though concepts like “price of this kettle” and “thirty pence” are usually precise enough for the problem context in which they are used.

• Unending Quest, p. 22 (italics in original)

Contact us

• Follow us on Twitter at @IncrementsPod, @BennyChugg, @VadenMasrani
• Check us out on youtube at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_4wZzQyoW4s4ZuE4FY9DQQ
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How nebulous is your eggplant? Tell us at incrementspodcast@gmail.com.

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We discuss

• How do you "see" your early memories?
• Vaden corrects the record on a few points
• Rationality grounded in humility versus goal-oriented rationality
• If ends can be decided rationally
• How and if goal-oriented rationality leads to violence
• Working to reduce concrete evils versus working to achieve abstract goods

** Link to chapter **:

• https://sci-hub.ru/https://www.jstor.org/stable/20672078

Quotes

A rationalist, as I use the word, is a man who attempts to reach decisions by argument and perhaps, in certain cases, by compromise, rather than by violence. He is a man who would rather be unsuccessful in convincing another man by argument than successful in crushing him by force, by intimidation and threats, or even by persuasive propaganda.
Pg. 478

I believe that we can avoid violence only in so far as we practise this attitude of reasonableness when dealing with one another in social life; and that any other attitude is likely to produce violence—even a one-sided attempt to deal with others by gentle persuasion, and to convince them by argument and example of those insights we are proud of possessing, and of whose truth we are absolutely certain. We all remember how many religious wars were fought for a religion of love and gentleness; how many bodies were burned alive with the genuinely kind intention of saving souls from the eternal fire of hell. Only if we give up our authoritarian attitude in the realm of opinion, only if we establish the attitude of give and take, of readiness to learn from other people, can we hope to control acts of violence inspired by piety and duty.
Pg. 479

In the latter case political action will be rational only if we first determine the final ends of the political changes which we intend to bring about. It will be rational only relative to certain ideas of what a state ought to be like. Thus it appears that as a preliminary to any rational political action we must first attempt to become as clear as possible about our ultimate political ends; for example the kind of state which we should consider the best; and only afterwards can we begin to determine the means which may best help us to realize this state, or to move slowly towards it, taking it as the aim of a historical process which we may to some extent influence and steer towards the goal selected. Now it is precisely this view which I call Utopianism. Any rational and non-selfish political action, on this view, must be preceded by a determination of our ultimate ends, not merely of intermediate or partial aims which are only steps towards our ultimate end, and which therefore should be considered as means rather than as ends; therefore rational political action must be based upon a more or less clear and detailed description or blueprint of our ideal state, and also upon a plan or blueprint of the historical path that leads towards this goal.
Pg. 481-482

The Utopian method, which chooses an ideal state of society as the aim which all our political actions should serve, is likely to produce violence can be shown thus. Since we cannot determine the ultimate ends of political actions scientifically, or by purely rational methods, differences of opinion concerning what the ideal state should be like cannot always be smoothed out by the method of argument. They will at least partly have the character of religious differences. And there can hardly be tolerance between these different Utopian religions. Utopian aims are designed to serve as a basis for rational political action and discussion, and such action appears to be possible only if the aim is definitely decided upon. Thus the Utopianist must win over, or else crush, his Utopianist competitors who do not share his own Utopian aims and who do not profess his own Utopianist religion.
Pg. 483

Work for the elimination of concrete evils rather than for the realization of abstract goods. Do not aim at establishing happiness by political means. Rather aim at the elimination of concrete miseries. Or, in more practical terms: fight for the elimination of poverty by direct means—for example, by making sure that everybody has a minimum income. Or fight against epidemics and disease by erecting hospitals and schools of medicine. Fight illiteracy as you fight criminality. But do all this by direct means. Choose what you consider the most urgent evil of the society in which you live, and try patiently to convince people that we can get rid of it.
Pg. 485

But do not try to realize these aims indirectly by designing and working for a distant ideal of a society which is wholly good. However deeply you may feel indebted to its inspiring vision, do not think that you are obliged to work for its realization, or that it is your mission to open the eyes of others to its beauty. Do not allow your dreams of a beautiful world to lure you away from the claims of men who suffer here and now. Our fellow men have a claim to our help; no generation must be sacrificed for the sake of future generations, for the sake of an ideal of happiness that may never be realized. In brief, it is my thesis that human misery is the most urgent problem of a rational public policy and that happiness is not such a problem. The attainment of happiness should be left to our private endeavours.
Pg. 485

It is a fact, and not a very strange fact, that it is not so very difficult to reach agreement by discussion on what are the most intolerable evils of our society, and on what are the most urgent social reforms. Such an agreement can be reached much more easily than an agreement concerning some ideal form of social life. For the evils are with us here and now. They can be experienced, and are being experienced every day, by many people who have been and are being made miserable by poverty, unemployment, national oppression, war and disease. Those of us who do not suffer from these miseries meet every day others who can describe them to us. This is what makes the evils concrete. This is why we can get somewhere in arguing about them; why we can profit here from the attitude of reasonableness. We can learn by listening to concrete claims, by patiently trying to assess them as impartially as we can, and by considering ways of meeting them without creating worse evils
Pg. 485

I believe that it is quite true that we can judge the rationality of an action only in relation to some aims or ends. But this does not necessarily mean that the rationality of a political action can be judged only in relation to an _historical end._
Pg. 486

The appeal of Utopianism arises from the failure to realize that we cannot make heaven on earth. What I believe we can do instead is to make life a little less terrible and a little less unjust in each generation. A good deal can be achieved in this way. Much has been achieved in the last hundred years. More could be achieved by our own generation. There are many pressing problems which we might solve, at least partially, such as helping the weak and the sick, and those who suffer under oppression and injustice; stamping out unemployment; equalizing opportunities; and preventing international crime, such as blackmail and war instigated by men like gods, by omnipotent and omniscient leaders. All this we might achieve if only we could give up dreaming about distant ideals and fighting over our Utopian blueprints for a new world and a new man.
Pg. 487

** References **

• EA Forum post showing data on forecasting accuracy across different time horizons: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/hqkyaHLQhzuREcXSX/data-on-forecasting-accuracy-across-different-time-horizons#Calibrations
• Vox article talking about PELTIV's: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23569519/effective-altrusim-sam-bankman-fried-will-macaskill-ea-risk-decentralization-philanthropy

Contact us

• Follow us on Twitter at @IncrementsPod, @BennyChugg, @VadenMasrani
• Check us out on youtube at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_4wZzQyoW4s4ZuE4FY9DQQ
• Come join our discord server! DM us on twitter or send us an email to get a supersecret link

Do you see your sweeping utopian blueprints in first person or third person? Send these blueprints over to incrementspodcast@gmail.com

Image credit: Engin_Akyurt

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We discuss:

• Lulie's recent experience at EA Global
• Bayesianism and how it differs from critical rationalism
• Common arguments in favor of Bayesianism
• Taking Children Seriously
• What it was like for Lulie growing up without going to school
• The Alexander Technique, Internal Family Systems, Gendlin's Focusing, and Belief Reporting

References

• EA Global
• Taking Children Seriously
• Alexander Technique
• Internal Family Systems
• Gendlin Focusing

Social Media Everywhere
Follow Lulie on Twitter @reasonisfun. Follow us at @VadenMasrani, @BennyChugg, @IncrementsPod, or on Youtube.

Report your beliefs and focus your Gendlin's at incrementspodcast@gmail.com.

Special Guest: Lulie Tanett.

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*We discuss *

• Reason as a social phenomenon
• The two roles of reason: To justify our actions, and to evaluate the reasons of others
• Reason as module of inference, and how that contrasts with dual-process theories
• The "intellectualist" vs the "interactionist" approach to reason
• Nassim Taleb's notion of "skin in the game"
• The consequences of reason having evolved in a particular (social) niche
• The marshmallow test and other debunked psychological findings

Quotes:

The interactionist approach, on the other hand, makes two contrasting predictions. In the production of arguments, we should be biased and lazy; in the evaluation of arguments, we should be demanding and objective— demanding so as not to be deceived by poor or fallacious arguments into accepting false ideas, objective so as to be ready to revise our ideas when presented with good reasons why we should.
EoR (pg. 332)

In our interactionist approach, the normal conditions for the use of reasoning are social, and more specifically dialogic. Outside of this environment, there is no guarantee that reasoning acts for the benefits of the reasoner. It might lead to epistemic distortions and poor decisions. This does not mean reasoning is broken, simply that it has been taken out of its normal conditions.
EoR (pg. 247)

References

• Dan Sperber's talk at the Santa Fe Institute
• Image credit: https://www.theguardian.com/culture/charlottehigginsblog/2009/oct/20/classics-barack-obama

Social media everywhere

• Follow us on Twitter at @IncrementsPod, @BennyChugg, @VadenMasrani
• Check us out on youtube at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_4wZzQyoW4s4ZuE4FY9DQQ
• Come join our discord server! DM us on twitter or send us an email to get a supersecret link

Send a reason, any reason, any reason at all, to incrementspodcast@gmail.com.

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