… As an empricist, I don’t have to understand the logic behind a system; I just take it as it is because I’m not smart enough to understand it. I call it opacity.
(Hat tip to Dave Lull & The Black Swan Report)
Like Karl Popper's Meta-Meta-Rule that requires falsifiability for conjectures, this could be the Meta-Meta-Rule for hedging against the Justificationist Addiction.
To good health,
Brent
Yeah, what he calls opacity, I call 'not taking experts too seriously'. Just like I try not to take my own opinions too seriously. I'm a passionate arguer, but rarely a placard-waver, unless some clear injustice has occurred. I hate the feeling of stamping my feet over some niggle then discovering I was wrong. And when people are just deeply and widely wrong, like our current leaders, placards won't change them, unfortunately.
ReplyDeleteThanks, G!
ReplyDeleteThat's a good m=1 adaptation of the same concept: another example of homoplasy.
Personally, I'd remove the use of 'leaders' in that capacity and instead refer to them as 'people in positions of power' or 'managers' because I have too much respect for real leadership: it's rare; it's important; and, it's something that exists independent of authoritative status.
We need more local leaders who lead by example.
Best,
Brent
I concur. People elected or appointed to leadership positions should act as parents, not as people with power. Parents are people with responsibility. Too often, responsibility to the governed is lost in the mix, or not even brought to the table in the first place.
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of carrying placards. I'm not one for it, either, and the only time I ever carried one was last year after my friend and colleague's car was fire bombed in front of his house by anti-vivisectionists. He's a primate researcher, and primate researchers have been targeted quite heavily lately by animal rights terrorists.
What did the placard say?
ReplyDelete"Pro Test 4 Science"
ReplyDeletehttp://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/the-anosognosics-dilemma-1/?hp
ReplyDeleteI thought of this blog when I read this article.
Enjoy.
Thanks, Anonymous!
ReplyDeleteNassim says:
"Empty-suit problem (or “expert problem”): Some professionals have no differential abilities from the rest of the population, but for some reason, and against their empirical records, are believed to be experts: clinical psychologists, academic economists, risk “experts,” statisticians, political analysts, financial “experts,” military analysts, CEOs, et cetera. They dress up their expertise in beautiful language, jargon, mathematics, and often wear expensive suits." (thx 2 DL)
David Dunning says something similar:
"Well, my specialty is decision-making. How well do people make the decisions they have to make in life? And I became very interested in judgments about the self, simply because, well, people tend to say things, whether it be in everyday life or in the lab, that just couldn’t possibly be true. And I became fascinated with that. Not just that people said these positive things about themselves, but they really, really believed them. Which led to my observation: if you’re incompetent, you can’t know you’re incompetent."
The article also mentions Rumsfeld's "unknown unknowns" that this review links to The Black Swan nicely:
http://richardleyland.com/?p=140
@Aaron & G: Injustice changes the rules of the game; I agree.
Best,
Brent
Interesting that Nassim is looking into medical errors. Emergency Medicine always amazes me because we have to make critical decisions on patients we have no prior knowledge of with incomplete (or at times false data...many patients lie or confabulate). Yet despite this unfriendly environment we make very few mistakes when compared against medicine as a whole.
ReplyDeleteWhat is unique for emergency medicine is we have to rely on opacity in dealing with the 4th quadrant. We rely on our "mojo" and "fly by the seat of our pants" because we understand (because it is forced on us) that more information is not always better, and is frequently confounding to good decision-making.
Thanks, Dr. McGuff.
ReplyDeleteMedicine provides an intriguing texture for studying decision making; and, one where improvements in thinking and judgment can translate into lives saved and improved immensely (good things). From all the hours I have spent wandering about the emergency room doing clinical research, I too have been amazed at the hazy cloud of information that emergency physicians must sort through to diagnose and treat patients. As my mom, a nurse for over thirty years, would say, "You start to pick up on things with experience." She operates well in the 4th Quadrant these days--she picks up on things intuitively--and I am fascinated about how best to train healthcare practitioners to foster these skills. I suspect many aspects of standardized education may_not_do the trick in light of the domain-dependence of this type of mastery.
I know that Nassim's father was an MD/PhD oncologist (who eschewed refined carbohydrates), so perhaps his interest in medicine stems from his father's work to some extent?
Finally, Dave Lull tracked the "unknown unknowns" reference back before Rumsfeld:
The Wikipedia article on the "Unknown unknown" doesn't mention Bernard Lonergan, and I don't remember anyone mentioning him when Rumsfeld referred to the unknown unknown, but I see now that Michael Novak is credited with having ". . . introduced Donald Rumsfeld to Bernard Lonergan's categories of the 'known, known unknown and unknown unknown.'"
http://www.search.com/reference/Michael_Novak
Now, I wonder if Lonergan stumbled upon the notion of unknown unknowns from some other source. It's like tracing the problem of induction backward: these ideas have ancestries too, and epistemocrats must be archaeologists who excavate the historical record for thinkering with these types of things.
Cheers,
Brent