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Notes -
When Someone Tells You They're Lying, Believe Them
Some people refuse to admit they're wrong, but there's other clues
Paul Ehrlich became well-known for his 1968 book The Population Bomb, where he made many confidently-stated but spectacularly-wrong predictions about imminent overpopulation causing apocalyptical resource scarcity. As illustration for how far off the mark Ehrlich was, he predicted widespread famines in India at a time when its population was around 500 million people, and he wrote "I don't see how India could possibly feed two hundred million more people by 1980." He happened to have made this claim right before India's Green Revolution in agriculture. Not only is India able to feed a population that tripled to 1.4 billion people, it has long been one of the world's largest agricultural exporter.
Ehrlich is also known for notoriously losing a bet in 1990 to one of my favorite humans ever, the perennial optimist (and business professor) Julian Simon. Bryan Caplan brings up some details to the follow-up that never was:
The first bet was fairly straight-forward: Ehrlich picked 5 commodities (copper, chromium, nickel, tin, & tungsten) and predicted that their price would be higher in 1990 compared to 1980 as the materials become scarcer. Instead of rising, the combined price went down. Ehrlich's decade-spanning obstinance and unparalleled ability to step on rakes make him an irresistible punching bag but despite his perennial wrongness, his responses have ranged from evasion to outright denials:
Some humans possess the unfortunate egotistical and dishonorable habit of refusing to admit error. It's a reflex I personally find utterly baffling, because nothing engenders someone's credibility to me more than their ability to admit error. So if we can't always rely on people to admit a mistake, what else do we have?
What I find so interesting about the second bet in 1995 is how peculiar the proposed conditions were [image link]:
I kept thinking "...so?" as I read these. Why would someone care about the availability of firewood versus the heating and cooking costs in general? Why would someone care about per capita cropland statistics versus the availability of food in general? Many of these are also blatant statistical fuckery, such as monitoring increases in absolute worldwide AIDS deaths during a period of persistent population growth.
Ehrlich is playing a seemingly uncomfortable game of Twister here, but his behavior makes perfect sense if you read intelligence and agency behind his decisions. The only explanation for the indirect, tangential, and collateral measurements is that Ehrlich knows that a direct measurement will not be favorable to his pet theory. He does not believe in truth, but rather believes in belief as the kids say, and he's not willing to jeopardize it.
The acrobatics are the tell here. When Meghan Murphy debates the sex industry, she has to keep the wheels on her goalposts perpetually greased up. Meghan wants to say that everyone who works in the industry has a negative view of it, but the preemptive goalpost shifting she employs is proof she knows that's a lie. The guy claiming there's a dragon in his garage can only preemptively dismiss [thermal imaging/flour/whatever] as a legitimate investigatory tool only because he knows there is no dragon.
It's not perfect but it's often the best we have. Ideally we get people who act honorably and admit mistakes and are willing to falsify their own theories but barring that, just look for the acrobatics. They're the product of intelligent design, not random chance.
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Aella-simping blogspam aside,
While I’m sure this makes Aella Twitter poll takers gasp, it’s important to understand there’s a difference between something being falsifiable and something being testable with the data we have at our disposal. There’s a test you could theoretically run to tell whether porn is bad: a society-wide RCT where people are randomly assigned from birth into the porn society or into the no porn society and then we measure outcomes years later. In contrast there’s probably no observational data at present that would be very useful in answering the question well. (Silly Aella surveys are unhelpful and probably worse than nothing.) That doesn’t mean that Murphy’s belief is any more unfalsifiable than the particle physicist who needs a bigger particle accelerator’s theory is.
That whole exchange just tells me that Murphy has much better intuition than Aella for why causal inference with observational social science data is hard, even if she doesn’t have the language to exactly explain why.
Agreed. I'm always skeptical of people, like Aella, who focus endlessly on what the data is and trying to interpret grand conclusions from statistics, bigger conclusions than one should. There's a reason "lies, damned lies, and statistics" is a saying.
For example, police statistically pull over and ticket more black people. Does this mean that police are racist? No, it just means that black people commit more traffic offenses. Indeed, black people statistically commit more crime in general. (Noticing this is only racist if you come up with racist explanations for this. There's perfectly innocuous explanations you could argue like black people being historically disadvantaged, being in poverty, etc.) People will argue that speed cameras are better because they can't be biased, and then once speed cameras are implemented, will allege that cameras are racist somehow just because they, statistically, ticket more black people.
Most people don't think in terms of data and statistics, and quite frankly, it's not really the best policy to implement something from "well this number is lower" or "this line is going up and to the right". So what if Meghan Murphy is wrong, and, for the sake of argument, a lot of people in the sex industry have a positive view of it (as proven by statistics)? It does not necessarily follow that the sex industry is ethical or positive for society as a whole.
Just so we're on the same page, there's already articles defending Aella's surveys as things you can draw big conclusions from, rather than things that only apply to Aella's audience.
Of the two, I’d much rather follow someone who is looking for data, simply because it’s easy to tap dance away from being wrong if you can simply find reasons to not trust the data. It’s perfectly reasonable to propose an alternative theory, or point out an obvious flaw in the data we have. On the other hand, if you’re completely dismissive of the data in hand, you’ve completely lost the ability to think rationally about the issue because you’ve moved from asking whether something is true based on facts to a piori claims that “of course my claim is right, the data you have is flawed, and if we had (what I get to define as) the real data, it would agree with me.”
Online polls of self-selected people have flaws, obviously. But they are at least an attempt at gathering real facts, and they actually do tend to falsify the claim that “women in the sex industry don’t like it” as it shows women in the sex industries liking their job. To simply dismiss that datapoint completely undermines your credibility because it means that your position is not based in fact, but in conjecture. And if you’re basing your opinion on conjecture devoid of facts, it should be dismissed out of hand.
This is my big thing with alien enthusiasts. They are not interested in facts. You point out that we haven’t found any megastructures, they counter with cloaking devices. You tell them that a lot of the the supposed faster than light devices violate known physics or require exotic matter and energy that we can’t find anywhere in the universe, and they point out that the aliens are millions of years ahead of us. And on it goes, dismissing facts at hand as flawed or explaining them away such that the position isn’t based in fact, and it turns out that we have no data at all or the data we have is flawed in such a way that the evidence pointed away from their desired outcome isn’t a problem. It’s dishonest, and I find it much harder to take a position like that seriously if you’re ignoring facts.
What do we do if all the data we have access to really is horribly flawed?
Agnosticism is always an option
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