Ego wrote:
When designing a new heuristic, it seems to me the first step is defining the problem. What are the characteristics of someone suffering extreme PIID? Apophenia? Anxiety? Schadenfreude? Not-even-wrong-ness? What else?
There's more than one single problem(*), but I see the primary problem as being a due to a difference in confidence and competence (their relative levels in a given person) and how the internet makes it easy to sabotage entry-level competence with false information.
A person's competence develops roughly like this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreyfus_m ... tage_model Here the "competent" level corresponds roughly to someone who has a bachelor degree or someone with 1000 hours worth of study. The Dreyfus model is just a heuristic but it's supported by multiple other lines of arranging the development of personal insight.
In Western cultures, Dunning-Kruger showed that confidence initially develops faster than competence. IOW, given just a little learning, people quickly come to believe they're smarter than they really are. Overlaying this with the Dreyfus model, the gap between confidence and competence seems to peak around the "advanced beginner" stage. After this stage (moving into competent and proficient), the person begins to realize that they're not as smart as they think they are and confidence drops as competence keep increasing. You can also see this effect described in pop culture, like the SMBC graph (which is essentially just the spread of the famous Dunning Kruger graph) or Alexander Pope's poem. Moving further up, we get the opposite and reach a point where competence>confidence, aka imposter syndrome, that is the dip behind Mt Stupid ... and moving further along, they begin to match up as people develop a realistic assessment not only where they are relative to absolute knowledge but also where they are relative to the knowledge of others.
The internet is basically a boon to the "novice" and the "advanced beginner". It allows anyone to find factoids within minutes ... something that would previously have to be gathered via books or courses. What does this mean? It means we're now surrounded by people whose confidence in their knowledge exceeds their competence.
So what are the characteristics?
The "novice" shows 'no exercise of "discretionary judgment"'. An example. If the person posts a piece of fake news and is told that it's fake and how to run a simple fact-check or go read a book but then proceeds to post another piece of fake news, then that person is a novice. I don't see novices as a big threat as most of them have yet to accumulate a sufficient number of factoids to believe they know more than they do.
The "advanced beginner" on the other hand tends to think in terms of "facts" and lists of facts. You can spot them based on their fascination with facts. "We don't have all the facts". "We don't have the best facts". They lack a framework for organizing their facts and thus treat all facts with equal importance.---But obviously more facts, like 200 facts, are better than a mere 100 facts. In pf-blogging, you can see how bloggers start developing lists of tips and hacks within a few months. The longer the list, the more impressive [to them]. If you try to get them to make connections or explain something, they're going to ignore your argument and respond with a factoid they believe contradicts your entire "skill-set"/understanding, like "But what about Benghazi?". The "advanced beginner" will typically have a handful of favorites here. These favorites are treated as trump cards. You can refute them over and over again only to see them be brought out a few weeks, months, or years later.
Both of these types will to various degrees believe they know more than they actually do. "I have all the facts" (they have 10-20 factoids), "I read all the news" (yes, so you click on all the news stories in your facebook feed"), "I've done my research" (so you spent 5 minutes on google to confirm your initial impression), "I've studied this in detail" (so you've followed a blog for sometime, but did you ever open a book or calculate a single thing yourself?).
What the internet has done is to make factoids easily available to everybody. So now the average person can learn how to change a brake pad or figure out what the gross global product is in under 5 minutes(**). IOW, this has moved most people out of the "ignorance" state and into at least "novice" as well as moving any "novice"-enthusiast into the "advanced beginner" within a few months of blog-reading.
Two things here ...
First, it's easy to believe, especially for someone, say a 25 yo high school graduate, who has essentially no fields of competence to think that there are no deeper levels of learning than mastering google-fu. This is where I see how the population at large could turn into idiots who are only as smart as Siri et al. A corollary of that is that it's easy for these people to believe that nobody else can ever have more insight than the 5-min search level ... because, how would they know of such a level? I'd say even today, unless one has expertise in more than one area, most people seem to fail to appreciate that while they may be experts or proficient in their own fields, they refuse to believe that other people can be experts in other fields (and thanks to the internet, they will have a factoid to "prove" it too). Incredulity fallacies abound here: "I'm a medical doctor and so I'm very smart. I tried to beat the market but failed. Therefore it is impossible (because if a genius like myself can't do it, then nobody can)".
Second, given that the internet is treated as vast collection of factoids, it's easy to spread misinformation. Now, if an "advanced beginner" manages to accumulate a long list of misinformation (say, they spend all day reading anti-vaxxing websites), then that person will essentially have a collection of "negative knowledge". That is, this person now knows less than nothing. This person is effectively painted into a corner now, because it will be impossible to proceed and develop competence and proficiency as it will be very hard to develop a framework that supports the misinformation. You can often spot the "advanced beginner" by their almost total lack of framework (the awareness of which "facts" support and confirm each other is entirely lacking ... in the mind of the advanced beginner, all their facts lead to the same conclusion; there's no nuance) and the resulting inability to assign relative importance to "their facts". A corollary to this (see previous paragraph) is also that lacking such a framework will render it hard to grok that other [competent+] people do indeed have such a framework. Arguments will all become a variety of "We don't know this yet ... but <insert factoid objection>", like your standard donut-fiend who refuses to acknowledge that they're prediabetic because they feel fine and the doctor is just out for their money.
(*) For example, in that Pew report, 14% of people admitted to knowingly forwarding fake news. I didn't see them going into detail about motivations, but I think the crazy uncle who "just likes to blame Obama, haha" for everything, e.g. why his SS payments didn't increase this year, falls under this category. Reality matters less to this type than enjoying a good time bullshitting.
(**) I think at this point in the DIY wave, one could do a lot of damage with a coordinated agnotology campaign spreading DIY misinformation on e.g. how to install plumbing fixtures the wrong way. People with no plumbing experience would go to youtube and copy off something stupid. This amount of damage might then cause a permanent drag on the economy (but a boon to the plumbing industry) as new noobs would continuously try it out and break something before discovering that the video was fake. This is currently where we are with almost all news and some scientific fields. If/when this happens, they will be a big debate on "fake plumbing news" and whether people need to be protected from trying to install sinks without P-traps or some such because they learned from the internet that this would be a way to save five bucks worth of PVC and not hand over money to the home construction centers who are just out to take their money. Maybe there will be some congressional hearings as well
luxagraf wrote:
Curious how often you don't ignore?
I have roughly the same criteria and I'm beginning to get seriously worried about whether I'll be talking about anything beyond the weather five years from now.
So since becoming aware of how skills are learned (the above + other references, various models, etc.) and more importantly not-learned or mis-learned, my first step is generally to try to figure out what level a given person is at; whereas prior to that my initial impulse was the typical "Argh! Somebody is wrong on the internet..." Initially, it was hard to tell, but with practice, I began to notice meta-patterns in people's behavior. For example, people with material scientific training will use the word "fact" in very different ways than others. The way people talk is a very quick way to spot the "fakers" from those who are more solid.
So in light of the above, it depends on what level I'm coming from myself for a given field.
Presuming that I'm competent, proficient or expert-level, I will not ignore novices (at least not the first time), whereas I will studiously avoid debating advanced beginners. This is where the triage enters. Advanced beginners with negative knowledge are lost causes. They need to hit rock bottom to change because it's the only way for them to question their collection of misinformation. Trying to pick apart what they know argument by argument is like herding cats. The rest is where I "lift one corner" and see "if they are willing to lift the other three".
Presuming that I'm a novice or a beginner, I may offer my own limited factoids, but this would be to add to the discussion (I hope), and mostly I will try to just observe.
When it comes to debate, I try to stick to my own level. If I'm an expert, I'll debate other experts. If I'm competent, I'll debate other competents, and so on. In general, though, I find it better to seek out more competence rather than debate if possible.
It used to bother me "when someone was wrong on the internet", but over the past couple of years, I've become much better at maintaining an attitude of live and let die. I've shifted my personal priorities from "trying to convince a single person if they're wrong about something" to "assuming that there are more people like this who are wrong, how do I deal with that, knowing that I can't change anything at a societal level", e.g. instead of focusing on convincing a few persons to become healthy, I focus on what I would do living in a society where many people are unhealthy. Ditto ... instead of trying to make a few people smarter, I focus on how I'd live in a universe where "stupid" is an inherent property of the world. I think it's the same attitude that's promoted in "How I found freedom in an unfree world" but with knowledge instead of freedom.