In my last post I wrote about how amateurs aren't magically going to make the media good. Better, sure, but that's not much of a standard, is it? If your goal is to be a little better than newspaper average, then you're not aiming very high. And most amateurs aren't, so that's what we get.

But I wasn't really out to get the amateurs. First you have to bring the amateurs down to earth, because there are all these wild ideas spread by missionaries of amateur media that once you let the amateurs in everything will somehow straighten itself out. This emphasis on amateurs as the solution distracts us from aiming for the real goal, quality.

And quality really has nothing to do with amateurs or professionals or one way or another of spreading information. Doesn't even have anything to do with media. What we have is a general problem, and now that the limitations on speech (legal or structural) aren't important any more, we can turn our full attention to that problem.

The problem is this: Most opinions we have are just guesses.

Some are more than that. If you believe everything is made out of tiny things called atoms, there's a solid basis for that. The basis is not so much that you happen to be right, (you might just have made a lucky guess), but that the idea reaches you through a reliable system, science. But most of the opinions we have don't reach us through a reliable system. They just reach us, and seem sane enough, so we invite them in and send them along to others, like chain letters.

This seems like an obvious thing to say. Of course we don't base all our views on science. How could we? But let's stop for a moment and think about what that means, what it means to have an opinion that is not supported by science.

Here's a history of science: First there were these smart people who looked at the world and thought about how it might work. They used logic and observation to build large, elegant descriptions of reality. They then wrote those descriptions down, and that was that. If people liked these theories, if they found them logical and appealing, they believed in them and promoted them. And if sometimes those theories didn't seem to fit with observation, then they thought maybe there was something wrong with the observation, so they didn't press the issue. The beauty and appeal of the theory took precedence.

This way of doing things didn't work. Logic failed. Sitting by yourself and thinking about the world failed. We had a lot of time to make it work, but it barely got us anywhere at all. So a new approach was invented, which was that you observe, then make a guess about how the world works, a hypothesis, then you test that guess, and you let others test it as well, and maybe you need to make a few more rounds of guesses and tests, and eventually you might end up with a theory that describes reality in an approximate way. Logic gets your theory going, but only tests tell us if your right.

This did work, and today we sit here and write on computers. Not because of logic, but because someone had the bright idea to test their guesses.

Unfortunately, this way of doing things is very difficult. You need to be able to isolate the thing you're observing from the things you aren't observing. You need to be able to do your experiments several times under similar conditions. You need to be able to change the conditions so you can see what effect that has on what you're observing. You need to describe the experiment so that others can recreate it elsewhere, so they can be sure that you weren't cheating or made a mistake.

Physicists and astronomists were the first to adopt this method, others came later. A century after Newton's theory of gravity, doctors were still mostly just guessing about the nature of disease. They weren't yet able to apply the scientific method to their field like later medical researchers would, so they were stuck with thinking about how things ought logically to work.

In many areas we still are. Science is not something we adopted once 400 years ago, we have embraced it gradually, and we're still learning how to apply it to some of the more difficult but also interesting problems we know of. The challenge today is complexity: systems made out of large numbers of entities that interact with each other, like the mind, or society. The more a system is complex, the more difficult it is to use science to understand it, or even to get an idea of what it is that we don't know. Try testing a political theory, or running the same social experiment twice.

Many people think of science as "simple theories about the world", and are afraid of extending its influence. It's true that the fields that first adopted the scientific method ended up with relatively simple theories, but that's only because simple systems were the easiest to analyze. Later, scientists tried to create simple theories for complex systems as well, and that failed, sometimes spectacularly. Psychology, economics and social theory are full of examples of simplistic approaches like this. Societies are complex systems, they need theories that take complexity into account. Our ability to form such theories is recent and undeveloped. True science is not "blind faith in simple explanations", it's "whatever I need to do to describe reality", and when reality is complex, so must the science be.

Unfortunately, we don't have that science of complex systems yet. What we have is a beginning, and a grasp of what the problem is. But until science finds it solid footing, the rest of us are stuck with using pre-science to understand the world we live in. And that should concern us. Because whenever we have been able to extend science into a new field of study, that field has been radically transformed. The pre-science worldview goes from doctrine to mild embarassment. We should expect the same to happen again.

Trying to think logically about the world is appealing because it seems reasonable. It is an approach that is very good at fooling people. This isn't very difficult, because people aren't as smart as they think they are. One trap we fall into is confirmation bias: Paying attention to facts that confirm our beliefs, while ignoring facts that don't. Another trap is to see patterns where there aren't any. Pattern recognition is part of what makes us intelligent in the first place, but it's also deeply flawed. Randomness simply looks meaningful to us.

These traps and others conspire to make us confident in our wild guesses. Our guesses are confidence tricksters, using our own arrogance to trap us. Being smart and "logical" is no defense, it just makes you embrace the wild guess that eventually tricks you all the more firmly. Being smart is a false security, like believing you have your own personal force field -- and then crossing the street on red.

Logic without testable hypothesises is little more effective than superstition. It doesn't work. We're not that smart. Before they adopted science, the fields of physics and medicine were just guesses made in an authoritative way. People believed in those guesses, because that's what people do with believable ideas, and they had opinions about them, because that's what people do when they hear things. Actual truth didn't enter into it.

People are opinion machines. If you feed information in on one side, opinions come out the other. The quality of the input isn't that important to us. If you feed a person a whole bunch of ideas, a whole bunch of opinions come out, even if only a few of those ideas were true. We just can't help having opinions. Our brains are designed that way, and being correct is only a secondary goal, quickly sacrificed if it would prevent us from having an opinion.

"But I'm smarter than that!" No, you're not. The only way to get reliable opinions out of an opinion machine is to use reliable input. And the only source of reliable input we know of is science. Testable hypothesises, repeatedly confirmed, in controlled experiments. If there's no science, there'll be plenty of opinions anyway, they just won't be reliable. They'll be elegantly stated opinions, believable opinions, opinions supported by authority, anecdote, reason, and gut feeling. We'll see our opinions confirmed everywhere around us, and we'll believe in them wholeheartedly, and despise those who don't, and even fight them if we must. Because that's what opinion machines like to do.

But they're still no better than guesses.

This can be hard to accept, because science plays such an important role in our culture's self-image. Our world is built on science and reason, and so we suspect that all that science must somehow rub off a little, make our non-sciences at least better than guesses. But that's just another confidence trick. It's true that many unscientific fields of knowledge have a scientific core, and that the sciences limit the space non-sciences have to be wrong in, but when we break it down into parts there are really only two kinds of knowledge out there: Knowledge that is based on science, and knowledge that just seemed like a good idea to someone.

The enormity of this problem, once we grasp it, is enough to make anyone despair. We've been taught to be skeptical, which is good, but that makes us believe that we are skeptical, which makes us self-confident and vulnerable to believable guesses. The level of suspicion and refusal to form opinions we would need to avoid this problem is superhuman. We can't do it. But we can try to adopt a more suspicious attitude towards information that reaches us from unreliable sources.

Anything you hear from the media is obviously suspect, (and yes that includes blogs). So are all the facts and opinions you hear from people you know. Remember that we're opinion machines, we can't help forming opinions. Information goes in, opinions come out, like meat through the grinder.

Political ideologies are extremely suspect, because the forces of deception and self-deception are so strong there. Ideologies are collections of ideas that have been randomly grouped together into camps, where peer pressure, lust for power, echo chambers and pure holy righteousness combine to turn people into partisan foot soldiers. Ideological battles are fought over competitive prestige, not correctness. They're no place to look for any kind of truth.

Big Theories about Culture, History and Civilization are highly suspect, because they rely on false patterns. There's a certain kind of writer who think they've been gifted with a kind of cultural clairvoyance. They think they can look at that enormous blob of randomness that is history, and detect trends and forces that were somehow present at all times and can be summed up in simple moral lessons for our time. I'm not saying there aren't lessons in history, only that they're hard to find, and that acting like history is your own personal spiritual realm is not the way to do it.

Popular science is suspect when it's entertaining, anecdotal and not written by scientists. Many popular science books depend on anecdotes to make their points. Anecdotes (like stories), are good at making you believe in an idea, but they're poor at explaining why you ought to. When you read a book like that there's really no way for you to know if it's true, but you see it so clearly illustrated before you you'll think it is anyway. Science is the opposite of telling anecdotes, and though science writing doesn't have to be dull it's a good idea to feel suspicious when you also feel entertained.

The same goes for popular history. There are no entertaining stories in the real world, just people, events and confusion. Even history as a science is limited by its inability to turn back the clock, but this only becomes a problem if research is done without humility or respect for the complexity of the problem. Much of history is permanently unknowable, but then again much isn't.

Economics is tough to decide. There's a lot of smart research being done into the economy as a complex system. On the other hand, the economical ideas we usually hear are often corrupted by politics and financial mysticism. Social theories have the same problem: Smart research on one hand, research that doesn't look for shortcuts but makes a serious attempt to describe reality, and on the other hand politics and mysticism.

I shouldn't have to mention that predictions about our future are beyond suspect, they're worthless, but somehow people keep forgetting. Apocalyptic predictions are doubly worthless, because we so obviously find them appealing. To quote myself:

Humans have a natural weakness for predictions of doom. We don't find these predictions pleasant, but they're exciting, titillating, like the details of a murder case. No prophet of doom has ever bored an audience. We should always be on guard for predictions of the future that happen to be very exciting. Why, we should ask, of all the dull futures imaginable, did someone choose to predict an exciting one? Why, of all the predictions that have been made, are the exciting ones the most likely to be remembered and repeated? This is not a proof of anything, it just means we should be on our guard. If a prediction goes "and then this could happen, and then this could happen, and then this could happen, which would be extremely bad", and you find yourself thinking "yes I can see the chain of events very clearly", that's red alert. Forget chains of events. Think millions of paths hidden in the fog.

Our final goal should be to have fewer opinions. Resist the temptation to have beliefs that you can't base on anything solid. Stop having opinions simply because you can. Again, we aren't built to do this, but there are steps we can take to better appreciate our own limits.

Try to get an understanding of what it means that so much of reality is complex. Not complex like for instance quantum physics, (which is just mind-boggling), but complex like the weather, unpredictable. Worse: The weather is a complex system made out of small and simple air molecules. Society is a complex system made out of people that are themselves complex systems. If great patterns stand out to you in a system like that, they could well be imaginary.

Get to know the many flaws of human reason. Cognitive psychology has made many disturbing discoveries about how we make decisions and form opinions, discoveries that destroy the illusion of perfect rational thinking. The brain is like a text editor that failed to save your document but pretends that everything is fine. Don't trust it.

Remember that anything that makes you more confident could be a trap. Confidence in beliefs is like the confidence of a drunken driver, unwarrented and dangerous. You're an opinion machine, as are everyone around you. The right question is often not "how do I know if this opinion is correct", but "why are there so many opinions out there in the first place?" Opinions expand to fill the space available to them. It's up to you to limit that space by admitting that a lot of things are, at the moment, unknowable.

If there is no science, there is no knowledge, just clever guesses. I know, I know, your ideology is very rational, and it's better than the other one, and it's supported by a number of carefully selected anecdotes and facts. But if you can't test it in a controlled experiment, it's probably just a clever guess.

Complex systems are not yet well understood. One day, perhaps, they will be, but until then the best we have to offer is suspicion, humility, and an awareness of the galactic magnitude of our ignorance.

Interesting post, I've always been thinking along these lines myself: Dare to say "I don't know". However, there are times when we have to make a decision - where even doing nothing is in fact a choice - we must simply act on the best bona fide beliefs we have. The article you cited in Edge doesn't address this - it just takes the other extreme viewpoint that hindsight is worthless. In my view, even imperfect information is valuable - we just need to be able to change our viewpoints like we change socks, not growing to love them. Summing up, there are two ways to go wrong with information: Either avoiding all conclusions, or jumping to a conclusion and sticking to it. Rather, we should have a fluent, atomic belief system like the modular system for politics which you described earlier.

This touches on a similar theme...

I don't know what's going on in France. Does anyone have an opinion? If so, please share it with me.

Thanks,

Your friend Totoro

OEK: However, there are times when we have to make a decision - where even doing nothing is in fact a choice - we must simply act on the best bona fide beliefs we have.

Yes, we need rule of thumbs, heuristics that aren't perfect but fast and good enough. The problem is when you make up an opinion on the spot .. and then find reasons to stick to it afterwards. And it's not like we're in any danger of becoming too little opinionated, so afraid of guessing we can't accomplish anything. It's not in us, so the smartest thing we can do is to aim towards fewer guesses, fewer opinions, because it's probably very difficult to overdo that.

Totoro: Does anyone have an opinion?

No. ;)

Thanks for the post. I've been accused of being "without an opinion" many times because I won't say anything about an issue where I suspect my input information is flawed or incomplete...it's nice to read an article that doesn't insist that to have an opinion is a worthwhile goal in-and-of-itself.

Since your comment form won't allow me to post my site, I'm doing it here, since I wrote a little on this: www.stackablebards[dot typepad dot com]

Nice post. Thank you for writing these very important essays.
In order to agree with you, I had to change my definition of logic from something concrete: a math discipline with rules that let you deduce knowledge about new statements (from knowledge about other statements); what you call logic in your post i'd usually refer to as guesses, intuitive guesses. (The way I define logic, it's essentially never wrong. Perhaps it's popular to use the term "logic" in the way you do.)

A central theme of "The Meaning Of It All," a very nice little book by the late Richard Feynman, is uncertainty, a core value in science. Science, then, precludes fundamentalism. (Science fundamentalists, for instance, should check their science.)
source

t: The way I define logic, it's essentially never wrong. Perhaps it's popular to use the term "logic" in the way you do.

Perhaps "rational thinking" is a better word for what I mean, I just want to make clear that there is no way to think your way to how the world operates, only to guesses that later experiments may confirm.

There's nothing wrong with logic in your sense, but we have a bad track record with applying that (or what we think is logic) to the real world. We start out with the wrong premises, we think there's an obvious "logical" connection when there isn't, and we're unable to recognize when we have too little data to conclude anything. That's why we need to place experiments above logic, and warn people against relying on what they think of as logic to understand the world.

And you're right that uncertainty is part of science. Good science is often to say "we don't know this yet", or "we won't know this ever", or "we only know this to this degree of approximation", or "this is a good theory, but there are others too", or "this is just one experiment, it doesn't provide conclusive evidence".

Bjorn,

T is right about logic. Logic is in fact a tool of science as is math. Logic allows you to prove that a certain conclusion is a valid deduction from a given set of premises.

It shows the flaws in reasoning of the "all cats have 4 legs" "this animal has 4 legs" therefore "this animal is a cat" BZZZZT, wrong! variety.

The problems / arguments come in when you discuss the premises. GIGO works here as everywhere else.

Unfortunately science cannot answer all questions. Science, as you say, involves experiments to test theories. Some theories, especially those involving humans can't be tested via a controlled experiment. So, the next step is to test the predictive nature of the theory.

If your theory predicts that given the current state of the world, A will happen, and then A doesn't happen. That's an indication that your theory might be at least incomplete, but, it's not a controlled experiment.

The realm of the unknowable is the realm of faith.

Very interesting post. I am in overall agreement with most of it, though I tend to think that you to some extent fall victim to your own weapon (perhaps it was inevitable).

"If there is no science, there is no knowledge, just clever guesses."

This is a pretty science-biased opinion, methinks. It depends on your conception of knowledge, of course. But it seems fairly obvious that a lot of our day-to-day knowledge is independent of science.

You seem to contrast this safe, scientific knowledge with "ideology". But doesn't science play a different role from ideology? (I am here thinking of political ideologies and the like) I am pretty much in agreement with your statements when it comes to predicting and controlling our environment. Experimental testing seems to be the way to go, doesn't it? But when it comes to political ideologies, I think that there often is an underlying difference that falls outside of science's domain. Ideologies don't only differ in their answers to "How can we best achieve our goals?" they also differ in their answers to "What should our goals be?" And I don't see how you are supposed to get beyond "mere opinion" with respect to that latter question. How would we investigate into the scientifically true answer to what our goals should be? That just isn't possible.

There are convincing arguments for saying that social sciences cannot be only "descriptions of reality". They are after all describing something that they are a part of. And the descriptions are apt to change what they are describing. No theory of cloud formation will change how clouds behave. A sociological theory can. Such theories can be self-fulfilling. Students of economy are rational egoists to a greater extent than the average population (There's a recent study on this, not sure about a link, though I could try to find it) Would communism have happened without Marx' theories?

Deep down I also think that the view of science as the only discoverer of true knowledge, while other intellectual endeavours produce mere opinion, is deeply flawed, but I won't go there now.

Jonas: It depends on your conception of knowledge, of course. But it seems fairly obvious that a lot of our day-to-day knowledge is independent of science.

Yes, there's a lot of what we call knowledge that isn't based on science. The problem is how do you know it's true? Even science won't tell you that, but testable predictions at least give us solid ground to stand on. Nothing else does. Logic, as AlanC writes, works if the premises are true, and when it comes to statements about reality we need science to discover those premises. Can't deduce them (from what?), can't assume them, so we have to build a testable model that appears to describe the reality we observe.

But when it comes to political ideologies, I think that there often is an underlying difference that falls outside of science's domain.

There's a difference of goal, as you say, but it doesn't necessarily play a large role. At least it depends on how deep you're looking for justification. The right believes strongly in individual freedom, and the left in economic equality, and there are ways to phrase these beliefs as ultimate goals. Some people do. But when you ask others why they have these goals I think many will agree about the basic goal, "a good society for just about everyone", they just disagree about how it's best to achieve that goal.

When the right argues against minimum wage laws, it argues that minimum wage increases unemployment and thus is bad for all of us, not that "we believe in individual freedom and we don't care how many people have to suffer because of that". The right believes their politics make society better. When the left argues against unrestricted markets, it argues that these only benefit the richest, and thus make society worse for most of us, not "we know this would make most people richer but we just can't accept any increase in inequality". The left believes their politics make society better.

The goals are slightly different, but the perception of reality is even more different. If the right and left only disagreed about goals, most political debates would be meaningless. "Yes I agree that communism would make society perfect for everyone, but that just isn't very important to me. Individual freedom is all that matters." Maybe an objectivist would argue like that, but most wouldn't. Their disagreement is largely one of reality. Communism either does or doesn't create a good society for most of us, and in the end that's what matters. So there's a lot for science here to investigate. Anything that has to do with descriptions of reality is the realm of science, or, until science claims it, the realm of pure guesswork.

There are convincing arguments for saying that social sciences cannot be only "descriptions of reality". They are after all describing something that they are a part of.

That just makes the task a lot more difficult. It doesn't mean there aren't true and false statements about how societies work. A simple statement that doesn't take into account its own effect on the system it describes is a false statement. A better statement would have to be based on an understanding of the complex dynamics of social systems .. which we don't really have. Which is why the social sciences are so weak. That should motivate us to improve them, not lower our standards for what a "science" is.

Thanks for the response.

"Yes, there's a lot of what we call knowledge that isn't based on science. The problem is how do you know it's true? Even science won't tell you that, but testable predictions at least give us solid ground to stand on. Nothing else does. "

I just don't think it's entirely appropriate to restrict knowledge like that. I know that Norway has a new government, that Nick Cave has written a book, that my father is 49 years old. Science presumably has little to say about these things, still I like to think that I know them, and that they are not "mere opinion", "not about reality" or something like that.

"The goals are slightly different, but the perception of reality is even more different. "

At first I thought I could agree with this, but after thinking about it I am not quite sure.
Of course, everyone has the same goal in "making society better". That was not what I meant by goals though. If I ask you how you want your life to be, and you answer "good", I would say that you haven't really answered my question. Because you haven't told me what you think a good life is. Same goes for a "good", "great" or even "perfect" society.

You might of course argue that if science could figure out a way for us to achieve all our goals for society simultaneously, there wouldn't be a problem. But it seems very likely (to me, at least) that this won't happen in my lifetime. And when it comes to priorities, the difference in goals seems very real and important to me. Do we want a booming economy or a clean environment? Do we want our rural districts to be inhabited, or do we want to support developing nations? Do we want to keep our Christian cultural heritage untouched, or do we want to encourage a melting-pot style cultural environment? How should our society be with respect to sexuality? Abortion? What is the proper punishment for different types of crimes? How should society respond to "unfortunate behavior" (alchohol, cigarettes, drug abuse, unhealthy eating, co2 release, etc)

(of course these are simple-minded dichotomies, only meant as an illustration)

Given that we must prioritize, I don't see how science can decide these questions for us.

"That just makes the task a lot more difficult. It doesn't mean there aren't true and false statements about how societies work. A simple statement that doesn't take into account its own effect on the system it describes is a false statement. A better statement would have to be based on an understanding of the complex dynamics of social systems .. "

Ok, here is sort of what I have in mind. Do you think science will ever be able to predict the stock market? Because I cannot imagine how it could. As soon as these results became public, they would no longer apply.

Jonas: I know that Norway has a new government, that Nick Cave has written a book, that my father is 49 years old. Science presumably has little to say about these things

Don't think of science as people in white labcoats. Science is a method, a way of forming hypothesises and testing them. You believe these things because you have a model of the world that tells you the information you've received is reliable, and that isn't really science. But if you wanted to, you could test your beliefs using the scientific method. How might we know which parties control the government? We could ask them, and if they disagree, ask them to prove it by excersising their control. How might we know whether Nick Cave has written a book? We could ask him, and the publisher, and if there's no disagreement we would have cause to believe it. And you could check your father's age by asking to see his birth certificate.

This would essentially be science. Define a hypothesis and test it. There's no absolute proof of anything here, just a handy and effective tool for digging your way through uncertainty.

Of course, everyone has the same goal in "making society better". That was not what I meant by goals though. If I ask you how you want your life to be, and you answer "good", I would say that you haven't really answered my question. Because you haven't told me what you think a good life is.

I don't really know what a good life is, and neither do most of us. Our beliefs about this are vague, and often even false, but they're still real and powerful. And their vagueness makes it possible for us to switch between supposedly incompatible ideologies. "I thought socialism would lead to a good society for everyone, but now I realize that capitalism does." Has the person who says this really changed goals? Or has the goal always been the same, a vagueish sort of goodness, flexible enough to be adapted to whatever reality one perceives?

Only philosophers try to give strict definitions to ideas like "a good society for everyone". Most of us just go by a gut feeling of what is good, a gut feeling that is similar enough among people in our culture that our political debates tend to be about the nature of reality, not our choice of moral axioms.

You might of course argue that if science could figure out a way for us to achieve all our goals for society simultaneously, there wouldn't be a problem.

I don't think it can. But it's the only tool that has any chance of doing the job.

Do we want a booming economy or a clean environment?

Both, and that's why people who prioritize the economy argue that this will benefit the environment in the long term, (growth will lead to innovation which will make our polluting technologies obsolete), while those who prioritize the environment argue that a poor environment will harm the economy in the long term, (won't be much growth if the climate collapses). So we're left with a disagreement about reality.

Still, there are basic goals involved here, and even more with your other examples. And yet the debates we have about these issues usually involve reality, not goals. Supporters of agricultural protectionism argue that free trade is bad for developing countries. Nationalists argue that multiculturalism will break society apart, social conservatives that liberalism will. In the American debate on gay marriage, people on both sides use Scandinavia to prove their point - that gay marriage will destroy/save marriage. If fundamental goals are so important, why do all these debates focus so heavily on the nature of reality? Because our fundamental goals are fuzzy, at least the fundamental goals of the people they're trying to convince, the vast non-ideological majority.

Given that we must prioritize, I don't see how science can decide these questions for us.

Science can tell us what our options are, and what their outcomes will be. It can tell us how reality can work, and then it's up to us to decide how we want it to work. This would be a huge improvement over today.

Do you think science will ever be able to predict the stock market?

No, but it may be able to understand the dynamics that underlie it. There's a lot of fascinating work being done in this area, with approaches from physics and mathematics being used to analyze market dynamics. I'm intrigued by a field called econophysics, described in Philip Ball's book Critical Mass. I'm not in any way qualified to evaluate this, but the idea is that a lot of the central ideas of financial theory don't fit reality. Economists assume rationality and meaning where there's clearly no such thing. To understand stock markets we need to focus on complex dynamics (self-reference, emergent behavior) and psychology (herd behavior, irrationality). Nassim Taleb touches on some of the same issues in Fooled by Randomness, and at the moment I'm reading one of the books he refers to, Robert Schiller's Irrational Exuberance.

Whether these people are on the right track or not, they've acknowledged the scope of the problem, and at least they've made a beginning. So I think it's possible that we will understand how the stock market works at a fundamental level. We'll never be able to predict, but we might get an idea of the risks involved and the role of various factors. And that too would be an improvement.

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