Very Short Notes on Honest Disagreement.

By Hanson and Cowen. I failed to record who linked it to me.


It seems to me that it is far from being verified that coming to agreement is as easy as Aumann 76 and the follow up studies indicated. Did they really include everything that is relevant to coming to agreement? How do you know?

By contrast, reversing this single assumption, assuming agreement is a lot harder than we realize, handily fits most of the data.

God and Authority vs. Epistemology. Coincidence?

Does God exist?
Has no right answer. Question is Not Even Wrong.

Does [x] have authority?
Has no right answer. Question is Not Even Wrong.


I suspect, no, not a coincidence.


I should check to make sure what I think I think about authority is what I actually think about it.

An authority is someone I should obey. A physical authority commands my actions. An intellectual authority commands my thoughts.

In reality, even if I should obey them, the reason is not authority. A physical 'authority' commands my actions through either through physical coercion or because I promised them something in a contractual exchange. An intellectual 'authority' is only an authority if they have the right arguments, and thus I follow the argument, not the authority.


I should also mention that the reason I suspect they're not a coincidence is because the logical structures feel the same. They feel not-even-wrong in the same way. But I have no explicit words to explain how or why.

On Seeing the Non-Distinction Between Science and Art

I figured out a better way to put this.


One day I decided to properly settle a question. I'd found one of my critical assumptions, and I was going to bloody damn well question it proper.

And yeah, I got the usual mess of contradictory bullshit. It was something like 30% what I thought, 30% the opposite of that, 20% some third thing, and 20% unadulterated mess.

Thing is, I don't have to try to take a representative sample of my assumptions. I can test them exhaustively. So I did. I still habitually look for new assumptions to add to the pile.

Yes, a lot of them are a mess. Some of them aren't. I also have a class of things which are so obviously right that nobody thinks to question them, even once they think of questioning things.

I have a computer in front of me. To the left is a cup. They're on a table. I have hands. The hands have skin. You're looking at words. Reading them, in fact. You're looking at a display. (Did that make you look away?)

In fact, this subjectively different category is some 99.1% or something of things I know. (After writing this I found an example of the differences between men and women in this category, available on request.) They're not assumptions or beliefs or conclusions, just observations. Objectively, I couldn't at first see any difference, as they're still bits stored in neurons, but it certainly feels different. And people act differently about it. And the information seems to relate differently to evidence and doubt.

So I checked. And they are different.

I am questioning the idea I have a computer in front of me. Why stop there? Why not question whether I'm questioning?
Doesn't that seem bizarre and stupid? Because it is. Hopefully the contradiction is clear - if I can't question, then I wouldn't think to question whether I'm questioning.

There's a layer of 100% certainty at the bottom. Near it, in fact most things in absolute terms, have negligible uncertainty. Only actual insane people get them wrong. If you doubt whether you ate food in the last year...yup. Bonkers. Such people tend to remove themselves from the discussion. By dying of starvation, for example.


The interesting thing about this is that certainty can be transmitted upwards. Some of the class of assumptions that aren't a mess can be absorbed by the observation class. Moreover, having checked every assumption I can get my hands on, these assumptions follow patterns. Some of these patterns are found in the messier assumptions.

For example, the opposition on the not-messy assumptions tend to contradict themselves, often within sentences or paragraphs. But let me do the opposites first.

One of the spurious examples is the 'Aristotle believed it' pattern. It isn't too useful generatively and is of negative use in the cases where Aristotle was wrong.

Having a lot of people agree is not one of these patterns. Yes, it is common among observation-class beliefs. However, that's getting the causation backwards. The primary cause of a belief never being questioned at all is that literally no one disagrees, and so it never occurs to anyone a difference of opinion is possible. One cause having no one disagree, in turn, is that everyone is right. (I have hands. They have skin.) This is not the only cause.

However, what if everyone believes morality exists, because it does? What would that look like? Ditto free will? Ditto the soul? Well, if so, then anyone explaining how they don't exist should contradict themselves, especially if they go into details. What else?

Goal: Debate by Stating All Evidence

To quote myself, "If you can think of a way to be more convincing by presenting evidence against the desired conclusion, please let me know. I'm the only one I can safely say is impressed by such acts." Though, naturally, writing that un-convinced me of it. I can think of several examples of the "It's true that, but..." construction. There's still some problems with how it's carried out but I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.

It made me realize something else, too. If being balanced is good, why not take the limit? Why not supercharge it?

New Goal: debate by stating all the relevant evidence I know, for, against, and confusing, about the dispute in question. Completely ignore time/length constraints and convenience. See what happens.


(What I'm posting later today also helped, as I made conscious and explicit what I think happens when I examine an assumption and really try to settle it. Specifically how the evidence is distributed across conclusions.)

Pondering Confirmation Bias

Defeating confirmation bias is straightforward. At first, I needed a little acting skill, but I found it generally useful to be able to choose beliefs rather than have them forced on me. I can choose the rational choice if I want to be rational, but I don't have to.

There's a reflex response to having a belief, and it is rationalizing it. A key point is that the rationalization process is generally honest, it doesn't just invent fantasy reasons. But, since it is for justifying decisions rhetorically, not rationally, it doesn't bother with the other side, which is useless for its purposes. (If you can think of a way to be more convincing by presenting evidence against the desired conclusion, please let me know. I'm the only one I can safely say is impressed by such acts.)

But nothing prevents using the reflex on two opposing beliefs. Or three, for that matter. By pretending to honestly adopt the opposing view, I get the best opposing rationalizations I can muster, and then I can compare them.

The fact I don't have to adopt either belief makes this even easier. My subconscious fears convincing me of things it thinks are wrong, and will balk at providing rationalizations it thinks are dangerous. Changing my belief-adoption process made almost none of them dangerous. (They still come tagged as suspicious, though.)


The method doesn't have to stop at simply defeating confirmation bias, however. It can be used to fully explore another perspective - to go beyond the objections presented, and possibly learn something.

I suppose for my next trick I need to learn to hold two perspectives in mind at once. As of now, to fully explore multiple perspectives on an article, I'd have to read it multiple times.

Climate Epistemology

Verdict: unambiguous fail. (Via.)

I've been assuming that the CO₂ greenhouse effect is about preventing energy from escaping into space. But, as I find myself repeating, no radiation in CO₂'s absorption band is escaping to space already. It is saturated. (Backup link.) Please note this is from Wikipedia. If there's any bias, it is in the other direction. (The bias is pretty funny, check out the picture's caption on the greenhouse gas page.)

I thought, surely they've performed this simple verification of the physics. I must be missing something. Nope.

"The serious skeptical scientists have always agreed with the government climate scientists about the direct effect of CO₂."

Right, but we're not talking escaping to space, though, yeah? It's just taking energy that was absorbed higher up and absorbing it lower down?

"The climate models predict that when the surface of the earth warms, less heat is radiated from the earth into space (on a weekly or monthly time scale)."

Haha, nope.

Now. To make sure I don't perform the same mistake: I've never seen a climate article talking about how climate change is cooling regions of the upper atmosphere. Have you? Please pass it along, if so.

"A major study has linked the changes in temperature on the earth's surface with the changes in the outgoing radiation."

Outgoing radiation cannot change due to increasing CO₂. Especially not in the infrared band. It literally took me less than ten minutes of research to discover this. On La Wik, I emphasize. Apparently, nobody else has thought to check.

You cannot expect me to believe these guys are taking climate research seriously when they fail these basic, basic checks. (What other simple tests have they failed to carry out, that I haven't thought of because I don't have a thorough survey?)

Conclusion: I don't believe in climate scientists, let alone specific climate science papers.

On Ironing Out the Difference Between Art and Science

Two short stories. I made them up, but they're almost certainly not fictional.



Auto engineer goes to his boss, explains that the reason the new car prototype didn't reach new peaks of efficiency is not his fault. His materials weren't good enough, the technology isn't there yet, whatever. The boss buys it.

A doctor goes to his boss, explains that the reason his patient died was that the patient was special. It was a harder case than the one the other doctor had, that, while superficially similar, lived. The boss buys it.



The problem, of course, is that the engineer next door isn't working on a special car. If they get their efficiency up, it becomes hard or impossible for engineer #1 to continue to sell their excuses.

We often say engineering is objective and a science, while medicine is much softer and more of an art.

I think I now understand the actual causal difference - it is in unmistakable facts. Human brain, even untrained brains, have a certain baseline of epistemic reliability. Certain facts and relations it cannot be fooled about. In medicine, there is no direct connection between these facts and the situations on the ground.

You can verify the unmistakable facts with the engineering example. The boss buying it is implausible. Similarly, when you go to make coffee, your coffee grounds are where you think you left them. If someone tries to argue that you don't know where your coffee is while the stuff's in your hand, it just makes you think - and viscerally feel - that they're crazy. The car engineer isn't quite as clear-cut, but it is close enough.



As for the direct connection, that is the idea I'm suggesting should be verified. By understanding the cause of a field being arty, it should be possible to fix the problem and make it sciency.

A list of unmistakable facts - anti-biases or anti-fallacies, if you will - would be helpful, but probably not necessary. The extant categories of 'objective' and 'subjective' fields seem reliable enough to me.


Thinking about it in specific, concrete terms should also bestow a better sense of how and when it is easy to be fooled.

Poverty Was on My Mind

I found I wanted to claim that the weak are weak due to oppression. Unfortunately, I had previously claimed that the weak are weak simply because they are. To resolve this, I looked into the details. Lucky for me, in both cases I was thinking about poverty.

Do I think that poverty is caused by the individual, or by their environment? I wonder if I have any other contradictions?


I think even in the freest society there would still be poverty. I also think that there's a lot more poverty now than the minimum. (Optimistically, there would be about half. Pessimistically, one-tenth or less. There's even a tiny possibility that poverty would be an entirely different thing.)

Specifically, I'm sympathetic to the conservative bootstrap theory of poverty. The bum probably could get a job. At the same time, I can't help but notice that the government does many things which hinder the working classes, and they're hardly a lone gun in this arena.

Looking more closely resolved my belief into an objection not to the oppression theory of poverty, but rather to the implicit causation model. The weak are not weak because they're poor. They're poor because they're weak.

The lotto forms a wonderful natural experiment - what happens if you give the weak a lot of money? Do they becomes strong, or do they stay weak?
The universal failure of welfare programs is easier seen this way too. If they're implemented in good faith, they're attempting to reallocate status, not money per se. I discover that giving money away doesn't lower anyone's status.

You can verify the weakness theory of poverty by looking at the kind of stock returns elected officials achieve.


There's probably some level of irredeemable poor. Which is sad, but simply not solvable. Our society tries to lie to them, but I haven't noticed many getting taken in.

For the rest, strength cannot be redistributed. However, I could run interference against interfering busybodies. One of the primary busybodies are other poor. All normal conditions become norms - in a slum, poverty is a norm and anyone violating it risks tribal retribution. Of course this retribution can only be achieved coercively. There's also the 100% effective marginal tax rates.

I have little doubt there are other, subtler forms of keeping the weak in their place.

If the status/envy line of inquiry isn't corrupt, then it follows that the bulk of the populace overall like poverty. It puts someone lower than them on the ladder. They may want to relieve the worst symptoms, but poverty itself? Hardly. Also a second reason the poor hate anyone getting un-poor.

This sentiment will manifest in institution features that entrench poverty, rather than combat it, as it would appear. For example, I understand the Church would take orphans off the street to be trained as clergy. Only, I also understand that clergy took vows of poverty...


Strength cannot be redistributed, but I can see few hard limits on who can decide to develop strength, once everyone else is prevented from ganging up on them. The poor are not oppressively prevented from using their powers, they're prevented from developing them in the first place.