The poverty of psychology, again

Part of this is insecurity and the need for surety. If you want to believe or think you already know how the world works and prefer it that way, you may close yourself off from it and no longer see or seek discrepancies and discount them when brought to your attention. Part of this is goals. If you see change and seek change, you will want to know what works and how to do what you need to for the results you want. If you don’t want change, you may avoid facing having to and reject anything until forced to.

“… no longer see or seek discrepancies and discount them when brought to your attention.”

Absolutely ! In order to respond to evidence, you have to actually see evidence. So the number of people responsible for actually producing evidence is always quite small – virtually everything we all think we know, we’ve gotten from the testimony of others and not in any way from our own efforts.

Go thou and consider ‘conspiracy theories’ (eg we didn’t actually land on the moon) – what’s their dynamic ? Is that a ‘social group’ that somehow polices or enforces conformism, or is it a bunch of folks that more or less independently come to believe the same stuff ?

As to people in a ‘social group’, so far as I can see, there is a very considerable range in the beliefs that people supposedly “share” – just ask all the people in the social group of ‘Trump voters’. It has been found that, for example, that people who voluntarily participate in a survey (of attitudes, beliefs, whatever) will provide a set of responses to the survey questions. But if they are then asked to explain their response, many people change their answers. In short, they didn’t actually believe what they thought, or at least averred, that they believe.

So just how similar are the beliefs of ‘social groups’ and/or just how ‘groupish’ are the people who apparently hold similar beliefs.

A big problem with much of psychology and psychiatry is that the unit of analysis is the individual human being. (E.g. Psychiatric diagnoses are diagnoses of an individual person) Whereas there is a good case to be made that many of the issues these disciplines concern themselves with are to do with how groups, rather than individuals, behave .

On the other hand, if you’re going to do sociology of science – which is where your post seems to be heading – you need to look at what communities of scientists actually do, not just what they (with some assistance from Karl Popper) would like people to think they do.

Susan’s observation fits my very flimsy anecdotal evidence based on personal observation of people in the last election. A major reason people don’t relinquish their false beliefs when they regard those beliefs as collectively held is that to do so would threaten the cohesiveness of the group or would render one an outsider in the group. Agreement is the price of group membership.

Political beliefs are tightly bound up with people’s identities and their sense of security. So this is probably why they are especially reluctant to change theose beliefs. They don’t want to become outsiders. The more threatening the situation–e.g., if an external enemy is perceived– the more people seem to cling to beliefs essential to cohesion. It’s almost a test of loyalty in a bizarre way to cling to the belief in the face of contrary evidence–because then you can prove that the group is more significant to you than anything else, including truth.

One thing I wonder about your question is whether your standard is rational persuasion. The easiest way to change beliefs in small groups is to convince the person everyone considers a leader, the person whom most in the group believe they should be loyal to. Once that person gives permission for a change in belief, then the other members of the group will often go along. But, like Susan said, social dynamics count here much more than personal transformation.

Conspiracy theories are strange in that they are both very individualist and people can be slightly proud of having cracked some mystery with them–but then they can become collective, and sometimes a source for group cohesion. The cohesion there can sometimes just be a bunch of other people confirm your view, and this gives you a faith in those people. So there, the belief comes first and the faith afterwards.

People are surprisingly willing to believe what they see as to their advantage in the face of contrary evidence. A huge number of our beliefs are probably what we want to be true or what would be advantageous to us if it were true. If you poke holes in people’s beliefs by raising contrary evidence, they will be very annoyed with you. The more undeniable the evidence, the more annoyed they tend to get.

The articles referred to in the OP don’t exist to explain mysteries to in groups, but as a vehicle for hippy punching.

Scientists do have remarkably powerful tools for addressing scientific problems. Even speaking as a scientist, however, it’s not clear to me that they are any better as a group at solving political problems. Or that they are any less subject to group think or confirmation bias outside of their professional expertise.

What Ozma said, plus: we completely underestimate the social cost of leaving a closed, extreme group: when Browder, for instance, finally left the Communist Party after the Stalin revelations, he found that he literally knew no one who would speak to him. This is why so many ex-communists gravitated quickly to right wing extreme groups where they could experience the same insider vs. outsider clan. Isolation is more terrifying than avoiding truth.

you need to look at what communities of scientists actually do, not just what they (with some assistance from Karl Popper) would like people to think they do

Ah, so Feyerabend, then?

A subject near and dear to my heart. I take this as a good starting point, as well:

“Once we look at things this way, it’s obvious that not all social groups are the same, Scientists have a social process for dealing with evidence, which differs from that of (to pick a group with almost zero overlap) Republicans. Obviously, scientists collectively are much better at correcting false beliefs than Republicans, even though, as individuals, both scientists and Republicans exhibit forms of motivated reasoning such as confirmation bias.”

But rather than ask the question “How do social groups maintain, or correct, false beliefs in the face of contrary evidence?” I would look at it the other way around: Is there some way we can imitate the way science works and create social institutions in other realms that function better than our existing ones?

You might imagine, for example, that the internet could evolve into a system harnessing the collective efforts of volunteers to evaluate evidence and arguments relevant to any concerned citizen. As you may have noticed, what we actually have at present is isolated bubbles infested with shills and trolls and fanatics, but it’s not clear that it *has* to be that way.

You can come at this from various directions: look at existing customs and think about ways they could be modified (“What if we had a web site with membership restricted on the basis of ____ and moderated according to principles ___ where people are asked to work on projects like ____.”); or you could look at the customs of science and think about what you might want to imitate, and so on.

Kim Stanley Robinson makes the point that science looks very much like a functional anarchy, founded on utopian ideals of cooperative exchange, openness and tranparency. He makes the point that scientists do not appear to have the degree of obsession with material gain our modern conservative friends take as a given of “human nature”.

But then it strikes me that scientific processes are relatively slow, and something like them would have trouble competiting with the rapid fire of distortions we see during election season.

A good case study would be the macroeconomics profession and the persistence of the notion that that issuance of a floating fiat currency must be exactly matched by taxation plus borrowing.

It was orange. Everyone knows it was orange.

In this context, what’s a “false belief”?

I had the odd experience of reading this thread backward from the end, not seeing the OP; for a few moments I thought it derived from reflections on the Ada Palmer books, and I dreamed I might be swimming upstream toward some revelation about how the Scientific Revolution had given the Enlightenment its name and characteristic confidence in the conceits of skepticism and contempt for faith’s even more cloying conceits.

As I contemplated whether it would ever make sense to prefer the expertise of a student of society over that of a student of algae (per SusanC), it occurred to me spelunking Plato’s Cave cannot be made social without attendant difficulty: we have to argue, don’t we?

The standard of scientific proof seems contradictory: if the business of science is the establishment of shared understanding based on objective measurement, isn’t belief not so much contradicted as made redundant by the success of the process of a scientific inquiry? Why have any belief at all, after?

From the OP:

“*How do social groups maintain, or correct, false beliefs in the face of contrary evidence ?

Under what circumstances do people break with false beliefs held by other members of their social group? If this happens, does it involve a break with the social group or the emergence of a dissident subgroup?

Once we look at things this way, it’s obvious that not all social groups are the same, Scientists have a social process for dealing with evidence, which differs from that of (to pick a group with almost zero overlap) Republicans. ….

The question of how the members of groups change their beliefs seems like an obvious topic for study by social psychologists. And perhaps it is, but if so, their work has had no impact on the asocial psychologists I’ve seen talking about it.”

I think you’re making 2 separate inquiries here John Quiggin.

First you are looking into how societies and individuals change beliefs, which is a neutral non-normative sort of inquiry. By which I mean that you aren’t interested in normatively differentiating between good or bad changes in beliefs, but only in identifying changes, good or bad, and identifying *how* change occurs.

Second, your inquiry becomes normative to look into how societies and individuals change beliefs to reach scientifically correct or objectively correct, morally just or right etc beliefs.

You would have to look at normative psychology to look into the 2nd category, some psychological research is non-normative and would only answer the first question.

The second part also has different elements — scientific or objective truth is different from morally just or right beliefs.

To be honest I think the first area is a matter of education and training.

I studied history as my undergraduate major, so from that I learnt ways of evaluating evidence and seeking the objective truth or facts about events and people etc.

Some of the evaluative techniques are similar to scientific techniques, so I can use them for evaluating scientific arguments to a degree, although I don’t understand science at the detailed level necessary to undertake scientific work myself.

When it comes to beliefs about what is morally right or just though, we don’t think of that as being a matter of education and training — we think everyone has the ability and right to make these decisions themselves.

Republicans don’t necessarily have training in weighing evidence objectively, whereas scientists do.

But scientists can be value neutral, where politicians or members of political parties are expected to hold values dear to them in their decision making.

Science does not eliminate the need for belief. As a scientist, or a rational thinker (self-defined of course), I can know things in my field. I am equipped to check out the basis for other people’s statements, in my field.

But as to other people’s fields, I can not know things in the same way. However, I believe that respected authorities in other fields have reached their conclusions in the same way as I have, that is, by rational means (again, alas, self defined), and therefore, I can accept them, because of belief.

Not only the Emperor’s claims. If, objectively speaking, a principal outcome of the Enlightenment was the assertion that every individual should be the arbiter of his/her own destiny, then weren’t we, ultimately, all destined to be hoist on the Emperor’s petard? Wasn’t that, in fact, what everyone from Kierkegaard to Marx was on about — the notion that the Enlightenment had, in some very tangible, if not precisely specifiable way, turned out to be something of a bamboozle?

Bruce,
I’m with Paul Davis on this – he has it exactly right.

“Scientists have a social process for dealing with evidence, which differs from that of (to pick a group with almost zero overlap) Republicans. Obviously, scientists collectively are much better at correcting false beliefs than Republicans, even though, as individuals, both scientists and Republicans exhibit forms of motivated reasoning such as confirmation bias.”

This is a quote that is true, but also a lot less true than commonly thought. You come from economics, and are talking about psychology–two fields where the trappings of science (and their reach as arbiters of facts in the political arena)far outstrip their actual practice. Studying why untruths persist against evidence could be confined to those areas and would still be fruitful. You have sort of started thatbproject with zombie economics.

Oops, the blockquote should end after the first paragraph, which is Paul’s. The rest is mine.

I wrote a couple posts that I thought would be uncontroversial, in which I said that one can accept genetic influences on intelligence AND reject racist pseudoscience of the Bell Curve variety. It ended up being controversial because I pointed out that IQ has significant predictive validity for academic outcomes, even while I acknowledge that our definition of intelligence is socially constructed. I was surprised to find that tons of people objected to IQ entirely, even though I was explicitly rejecting any connection to race. And the claim was always the same: IQ has been “debunked,” that the scientific consensus is that IQ measures nothing and that it’s been rejected by the experts. But surveys of the experts find quite literally the opposite: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289608000305

When I asked people to actually check out this kind of research literature, every study was identified as pseudoscience and fringey, no matter what the prominence of the journals or how established and mainstream the researchers were. The very concept of scientific opinion was slippery: when I said “experts in the field say X,” they’d challenge those experts; when I’d point to lit reviews and surveys that showed broad consensus within the field, they’d say “that entire field is flawed!” The idea that they could simply disagree with a field’s consensus seemed to be an impossible conclusion to reach; they had to constantly morph their understanding of how scientific agreement happened to protect the idea that the consensus backed them up.

Freddie deBoer @ 37

IQ is such a rich example of what can go wrong when scientific methods or styles connect with ideologies and methods of social control that I would not know where to begin.

Freddie have you ever heard of Engels-IQ? Basically measure your IQ and then add on 5 point if you’re me. That is also decently predictive for a tonne of stuff yet I think people would be pissed off if its use became widespread.

The tendency to cling to false beliefs in the face of contrary evidence extends beyond beliefs with obvious political or ideological significance and beyond beliefs characteristic of or endorsed by or shared with definite social groups.

There are instances in which victims of confidence tricksters refuse to accept the evidence that they have been scammed and persevere in believing the lies told by the scammers, sometimes even to the extent of allowing themselves to be scammed again. There are extreme cases of people duped by advance fee frauds who have travelled to Nigeria in pursuit of the bait which they still believe exists and then been held for ransom or even murdered outright for whatever valuables they have on them (thus dying rather than admit they were wrong).

Aficionados of logical and mathematical puzzles encounter with some of them a phenomenon where people who have committed to the wrong answer refuse to accept the right answer when shown to them. The famous puzzle based on the couplet ‘Brothers and sisters have I none, but this man’s father is my father’s son’ can be relied on to elicit two different answers, and the adherents of the wrong answer show similar persistence to adherents of the right answer in defending their solution and rejecting the other one. (In this case I know from my own experience that it is possible, with diligence and care, to persuade people to switch from the wrong answer to the right one, but it’s not easy.)

Recently I saw a presentation on the Youtube channel Veritasium of four puzzles. One of them I was familiar with and knew the answer to; but I also foresaw that some people would give a wrong answer to that puzzle which they would subsequently defend in the face of proof they were wrong, and that’s just what’s happened in the comments on the follow-up video a week later that gave the answers.

The general reason people adhere to false beliefs in the face of evidence to the contrary is that it is distressing to admit error, but perhaps the reason nobody has mentioned this so far is that it’s too obvious?

It just occurs to me that if people are not aware of Kathryn Schulz’s book “On being wrong”, they probably should be. She explores the sources and consequences of error and the psychological aspects of how we handle our own errors/erroneous beliefs. It is popular science rather than original research but is probably one of the best recent summaries of work in this area. There’s also a TED talk based on the book.

Bill Murray,
what do you mean by “intelligence”? Some people I know regard it, as nothing more than the ability to do well of intelligence tests, since otherwise it’s meaning is very vague. I would be interested to know what you think.

” so much as IQ doesn’t represent anything except an ability to do well on IQ tests, which leads to the conclusion that an ability to do well on IQ tests, correlates with the ability to do well on other tests. ”

But that is not true. IQ is broadly predictive of all manner of life outcomes that are not tests – not just academics like graduation rates and GPA but also likelihood that you’ll get and hold a job, how long you’ll live, whether or not you’ll get divorced…. I’m not making this stuff up. It’s in fact very easy to find in the research record.

Freddie, what do you think of James Flynn’s research. I doubt I’m as widely read on this research as you are, but I’ve always found his arguments about how performance on the IQ test is more of a social phenomenon very persuasive. Which isn’t to say that the IQ test doesn’t measure a real thing (it clearly does), but that maybe it’s measuring something that is a mixture of biological, social and cultural factors.

Freddie deBoer

I am not willing to fully endorse the point JQ has made, because I am suspicious of the arrogance that says, in effect, my views are scientifically true and my opponents are wrong, stupid and ignorant (and should submit to science and truth and my view).

In our hierarchical society, ordinary people often have as their political task checking Power and Power will invoke as legitimating, the authority of science. I am somewhat sympathetic with people who find themselves defending their views, interests and personal autonomy, attempting to defend themselves against an overweening technocracy possibly fronting dubious interests, bereft themselves of the approved scientific concepts, frameworks and vocabulary to make their case, cast in a morality play as bloody-minded luddites.

In my view, the original Luddites had legitimate economic and social grievances. That’s one point.

The anti-vaxxers are a bête noire for JQ on this issue. Of course, repeating now disproven claims about autism isn’t a healthy politics. But, I see why people might want to press back against the burgeoning number of vaccines required by the state and question the rationales. It would be nice if the rebel critics were more scientifically literate; it would be nice, too, if official authority were a bit more scientifically literate and transparent in their reasoning. Every proposed vaccine is not, in fact, a scientific no-brainer. There are costs and risks and alternative strategies might be considered. Unfortunately, only underfunded state agencies and over-funded for-profit corporations can afford to do the science, and that’s a system ripe for corruption. Asking people to offer up their children on some bureaucrat’s say-so is not democracy.

The science of vaccines and the related statistical measures of their risks and effectiveness are genuinely sophisticated science. I might criticize the official advocates and enforcers of vaccination for hunkering down behind an oversimplified assertion of scientific authority, but they do have good science available to them and they are up against anti-vaxxers who, in their frustration with the exercise of official authority, have embraced unreasoning passions. Not a good political dynamic.

Here’s something I ran across today, which seems like an interesting look at another political context where these issues of authority and science and people’s lives play out.
http://www.ecowatch.com/sacred-cod-fishery-collapse-2357635999.html

RE: IQ

I do not think the science is anywhere near the sophistication evident in the case of vaccines (or the cod fishery). “broadly predictive” cannot bear much weight, especially not in the context of a political contest over schemes of social control, premised on ideological meanings projected onto “broadly predictive”.

If you are going to measure something with tests, you ought to be able to say what it is you are measuring. Or your research with the tests ought to aim to get to a place where you can figure out what you are measuring. Instead, decade after decade, the field self-selects its members for being foolish enough to be mesmerized by a mysterious “g” emanating like a ghostly signal from the cloud of noise generated by the tests.

“broadly predictive” can just be lying with statistics, if the scheme of social control is using the test to attribute properties to a decidedly not-broad individual. Then, it is just another sad case of mistaking the median for the message (to paraphrase Steven Jay Gould).

If we are going to use science well in political struggles, we cannot embrace an unthinking denial, but neither can we abandon critical reason — science should lead to the application of more sophisticated critical reason. I doubt IQ testing will survive much application of critical reason. Science will not, and should not, advance us to a non-political utopia of neoliberal technocrats, so let’s not imagine that is possible.

engels @52 Yes, this is actually true. But in the public mind prediction is falsificationism. Yes every indication is that the Mont Pelerin philosophy of science has completely triumphed. Therefore successful prediction must be science. If you can’t predict, then it’s not science. CT and its commentariat know how useful this misconception is for dismissing Marxism (as Popper designed it,) therefore it will not die. Like the auteur theory, everyone will deny believing it, then promptly return to discussing everything as if falsificationism were simply true.

Yes, the ability of IQ tests to identify acculturation means it can predict academic success in a school system that aims at reproducing class relations. And class position will correlate with all sorts of life outcomes. Nonetheless, the identification of this correlation with “intelligence” and the presumption that these individual differences are causative is not scientific because you can call this a prediction, Popper notwithstanding.

Science gets things wrong because trial and error is the way we learn new things. However, science recognizes that our first, second, and third tries at truth are apt to be wrong, and attempts to compensate for this tendency.

One of the ways it does this is to insist that theories be predictive: true cause-and-effect relationships should be predictive. If not, they are probably not real. Science cannot prove what is real, but it can try to eliminate what is not.

Because people will believe anything. That’s one of the things I’ve learned over my lifetime which was the hardest to accept.

The IQ discussion on this thread offers an interesting case study for how debates about the scientific status of something can fail (and I guess often do). People with negative attitudes about IQ testing doubtlessly sometimes overstate their case. But on the other hand, “IQ has been debunked” may in no way be in contradiction to “IQ has been found predictive of [insert list of desirable life outcomes]”. Some use “debunked” to mean that IQ isn’t necessarily stable across a lifetime and can a score be improved by studying / practicing for the test, which just means it’s not an intrinsic property of an individual’s cognitive capacities. And the latter is how many fans of IQ testing, explicitly or not, conceptualize it.

And for those who don’t, those who just bang on about IQ’s predictive value of [somethingorother], I can fully agree with them and yet be strictly opposed to using IQ for, say, sorting children into academic tracks, or ranking job candidates by order of preference. And since the former is just my opinion that no one in any position of power has an interest in, while the latter may have repercussions in real life, that makes me an “anti” even though I harbor no doubt in any of the reliable scientific results that have been listed.

As for bruce wilder, while I wasn’t with him on Popper I’m with him on vaccines, to a considerable degree. A few months back I read in a German paper (a serious one, probably Die Zeit) an interview with several medical doctors, family physicians, who all only agreed to be interviewed under the promise of anonymity. The topic was vaccination, and they said they feared to be branded as anti-vaxx. Now this fear may well be overblown — I rather think it was! Nonetheless, it was a much richer and much more nuanced discussion of vaccines. Of course, there was no anti-vaccine attitude in what any of them said. What they did do was highlighting some vaccines as particularly critical for public health, while others were described as having little efficacy. For some vaccines, they described a fall-off of the usefulness of a second or third dose between ages X and Y, for example. There was information about various techniques, some obsolete, some not, and how they impacted risk and benefit associated with particular vaccines. And of course they went a little deeper into how flu vaccines are different, and much less efficient overall, than others. Now there was nothing in the slightest unscientific about the conversation. Indeed, it was the stuff I expect from a knowledgeable scientist who’s a specialist in their field. All fields have nuances. But if (hopefully misguided) distrust in the possibility of free and open science communication is preventing us from getting such communication, we have some work to do.

(I don’t understand that cod example, though. The article looks pretty much standard-issue for many natural resource, and specifically fisheries, management topics to me.)

John Quiggin @ 58

So now we’ve come to the point where we must define success, no? To validate your point, I’m assuming you’d want to define it rather narrowly, but I also think that the skeptics would have good reason to reject the kind of narrow definition you’d need, not only because of what it would necessarily omit, but also because it is so often deployed, as Bruce Wilder says, as a tool, or worse, a weapon, in the hands who have less than scholarly motives for wanting authority over what they’ve identified as socially important definitions.

Abstractions, even the most benign and seemingly well-intentioned abstractions, are fundamentally problematic not only in science, but in all areas of thought. That’s why, I think, they’re almost always the real basis of argument, and why they’ve so tormented several generations of linguistic philosophers. In this case, though, all that needs be said is that H.D. Thoreau’s definition of success and Donald Trump’s are quite different, and that, historically, each has had its legions of defenders.

Obviously I should have said ‘almost never’ publicly comment on vaccination, in my previous comment!

Val

The only things I say, very cautiously, sometimes, are about the possible ‘epidemics’ of infectious diseases we are all supposed to be scared of nowadays – viz that the evidence suggests that such ‘epidemics’ are occurring only in very poor or disadvantaged countries or communities, and that there are commercial interests involved in the proposals that we need more and more vaccines against such possible epidemics.

Which proposals are those?

Conor O/Brien @ 68

A welcome clarification, thanks. I’d be the last person to deny that modeling is useful, but as we’ve recently seen in the Sturm und Drang surrounding the modern theory and practice of economics, leaving modeling in the custody of people with questionable agendas, or — if we succumb to the pessimistic view — any exogenous agendas at all, can be a bit like handing out dynamite and blasting caps to 10 year-olds.

This is a shame, because what is modeling anyway but an attempt to make a plausible and demonstrably useful story out of the discrete bits of causal relationship that our natural curiosity uncovers? Discipline this storytelling by providing it with a regulatory framework which encourages iteration, cumulation, and the rejection of bits that don’t fit any currently plausible narrative, and you have science. Unfortunately, because it has been disciplined, IS a discipline, science can trade on its quasi-unimpeachable reputation in a way that, these days, neither religion nor rhetoric can convincingly manage. If we don’t acknowledge the kind of mischief that can arise under such circumstances, we’ll undoubtedly deserve what, sooner or later, will be coming our way.

“For those who are proficient in abstractions and modeling, they are a powerful tool. But they are not real, even if they are pervasive. For those who have to daily deal with a harsh reality, it’s possible that they are not ignoring reality, but ignoring models that are not real.”

The rhetoric of the real (or “the real”), like the rhetoric of the logical fallacy, or the rhetoric of truth (“truth”), runs up against the propensity of human beings to believe (JimV: “people will believe anything”).

That’s one reason why I think it might be useful analytically to detach “belief” from verification and to admit that what we believe is at best orthogonal to an appreciation of what’s real. True belief, like a Hollywood True Storyâ„¢, is just another form of fiction.

Fiction can be entertaining, informative, inspiring, and a lot of other useful things, to the individual and to the society. When we believe a fiction, it is at base a wilful act, perhaps a commitment, but reality does not ask our consent or conform to our wishes. Our relationship with reality is a one-sided negotiation with and among ourselves — reality is neither counterparty nor intermediary in these negotiations — where we trade our wilful beliefs for knowledge of mechanisms, of how things work.

There’s a deep division of labor involved and the economics of scientific knowledge are problematic in a number of respects. One of the problem areas that I was trying to draw attention to above was the extent to which scientific knowledge gets distributed as a public good in the form of rules for cooperative behavior. Rules are big economizers of information. The rule says what signal to pay attention to and how to respond to that signal. A rule isn’t a general invocation to do good on the basis of global awareness; people are instructed to behave in a certain way that does not make much sense on the basis of purely local knowledge. (Here: “let this community college grad stick this needle in your child’s arm. We are only here to help.”) Rules only make sense, I might note, in an uncertain world, where we know some things, but not everything, and what we do know does not neatly circumscribe what we don’t know: we expect to learn and we have reason to fear black swans that may teach us more than we really wanted to learn.

Paradoxically, or maybe this is an instance of irony — paradoxical irony? — now I’m confusing myself — anyway, rules compose a kind of fictional reality, a virtual reality, a prescriptively simplified pretend world where, in accordance with the rules, one acts in almost ritualized ways in response to stylized “facts” aka information in the form of supposedly sufficient statistics. These rules are formulated, prescribed and enforced by hierarchically organized authority.

I expect everyone knows that the virtual reality prescribed is fictional, but pretty much everyone believes in it actively or at least passively in order to participate in social cooperation on the basis of that virtual reality. Most people most of the time do not think critically about it; in fact, most people most of the time are not intellectually equipped or in a position to be well-informed enough to evaluate whether the institutionalized virtual reality ought to be reformed. Or, to phrase it differently, to evaluate whether the public good provided is of sufficient quality and quantity for purpose. And, frankly, some people, by temperament or for other reasons, will be cheating (at the bottom of the hierarchy) or leaching parasitically (at the top). People can be way more invested in the system as cheaters than are the compliant. As a couple of commenters have noted, even to raise issues regarding the necessarily uncertain and contingent scientific foundation for the rules — the overall system architecture — may seem to call the legitimacy of the whole fiction into question in ways that may de-stabilize the vital social cooperation — it becomes scary.

It seems to me that is the political context when the issues raised by the OP arise. There’s a regulatory authority prescribing rules for social cooperation based on scientific information and things have evolved under that regime to a point where people are questioning the integrity and validity of the authority and its rules.

Vaccination and the cod fishery are both instances where we know, thanks to science, that we are playing a game of uncertainty against the universe, trying to control, in the one case potentially epidemic disease and the other the natural abundance of a wild food source. To do so, authority, with considerable uncertainty as to consequences, has to formulate rules of behavior and then persuade people to follow those rules at some cost to themselves. And, the regime created has to be reformed and renewed (– or demolished; another scary thought) after a while, because things evolve — things always evolve.

JD @ 67
There are vaccines in development for a wide range of diseases including Zika, Ebola and many more. It costs a great deal.
The flu vaccines are the most controversial, as I think Chris “merian” mentioned. Here’s an interesting article http://www.afr.com/lifestyle/health/mens-health/does-having-a-flu-vaccine-every-year-do-you-any-good-20160321-gnns97

you can see an example of commercial interest there

Influenza has a low basic reproduction number – usually estimated at between 1.3 and 1.5 I think – which means that the vaccine doesn’t have to be very effective to significantly hinder spread of the disease. With a basic reproduction number of 1.5 you need to get effective immunity in 1/3 of the population to stop the spread – 2/3 of the population for a vaccine with 50% efficacy. He real required number is probably somewhere in between if you can preferentially target high risk groups and it reduces symptom severity. It’s worth remembering that influenza is an extremely dangerous disease and during epidemic season it is a major source of blockages in the health system.

Just because vaccine efficacy is low doesn’t mean it isn’t useful. Effficacy of circumcision in preventing hiv transmission is estimated to be about 65% but the low basic reproduction number of HIV makes it a highly effective intervention. It’s. It a good idea to just assume that big pharma is pushing these low efficacy vaccines for no reason exceptnprofits. (Also, when talking about the reason big pharma is in the market it might be good to consider their intervention in the death penalty debate. For all their flaws, pharma companies do want to improve health).

@ 74
I wasn’t intending to comment on whether it’s a good use of resources or not, just to say that it costs a lot and decisions about resources in public health do have to be made – what is the best use of resources? Usually there is more than one possible response and usually in public health a range of responses will be adopted, of which developing a vaccine may be one.

I was just responding to JD’s question there but my main point is a bit different. For example, when you have diseases that particularly affect people who, say, are poor, malnourished and living in unhygienic conditions in close proximity to animals, there are different responses you can take, and developing a vaccine is one, though not necessarily the only one.

One difference between developing a vaccine and, say, measures to alleviate poverty and improve nutrition and living conditions is that the first is a commercial proposition while the others aren’t. Vaccines are commodities that can be sold.

Where things could get really murky is if people start saying things like ‘this disease has a very high death rate, therefore we need mass immunisation’, when in fact the death rate is high in the conditions I’ve described but may not be in others.

That’s where it could even be in a company’s commercial interest to provide free or cheap vaccine to poor countries, if wealthy countries then buy mass stocks for their populations.

Let me be quite clear, I am not accusing any company of anything, just trying to point out to you some of the possible complexities here.

I think this Tweet illustrates the problem with how we talk about IQ rather well: that general levels of understanding science, through education and outreach, are at levels low enough that, I think, a majority of citizens of rich western countries things this kind of visualization is a legitimate, if inconvenient, use that reflects some sort of relevant piece of scientific truth: https://twitter.com/DecentGuyZac/status/855790379487985664 .

I simply feel compelled to point out that, for both John Quiggin and the commenters, there is a clear and obvious difference between how much they’re willing to listen to the (again) overwhelming consensus in the fields of behavioral genetics and developmental psychology compared to the consensus in other fields. And there’s just such breezy talk here dismissing what is arguably the most consistently and durably replicated findings in the history of psychology. “Oh, well society rewards people who can take tests well so of course societal rewards accrue to people who score well on IQ tests” is a response that has been addressed over and over again in the research literature. The following are not credible arguments:

1. This has been debunked!

Debunked how? By who? Where are you citations? I can post links to not just survey instruments like the above but to large literature reviews by people like Flynn, Plomin, or Turkheimer. You can’t just say “this has been debunked” and then not engage in the actual research.

2. This has bad social consequences!

No, misreading the data and making bad political arguments based on that misreading has bad social consequences. If we can’t talk about these things openly, then that’s what happens – the bad people dominate the conversation. That’s not a good idea.

3. This field’s evidentiary standards are not up to those of medicine, so I can dismiss its findings.

That’s not how this works. All fields have their own evidentiary standards which are related to the types of evidence and the level of analysis. And, again, within the relevant field, the vast majority of credible researchers believe that IQ is significantly (not solely! not exclusively! no one is arguing that!) genetically influenced.

I wish you guys would excavate why there’s this divide between how you read and interact with research here differently than you do with other kinds of research. Yes, I understand: there’s a lot of shitty people who use IQ to argue shitty things. But, again, this is why we have to engage with it – to make the conversation better by not allowing it to be dominated by bad people.

Yes, I’ve read it before. A single blog post does not, for me, outweigh hundreds of articles by established researchers at some of the most prestigious institutions in the world. And again: the fact that I am supposed to take that as dispositive is simply not in keeping with how any of you would treat research controversies of other kinds. I mean, there are lots of dissenting voices for science that is accepted as true by people around here, right? So why does this resource supposedly outweigh everything else? Obviously, because you are predisposed to its conclusions.

And I say this all in the context of a supremely naive liberal narrative about science. Yesterday there were mass demonstrations founded on the idea that liberals Believe In Science, that they simply go where the research literature points them, and that conservatives don’t. And this is a case where the effort to avoid arriving at a particular conclusion – that genetics explains a substantial portion of the variation between individuals in their observed academic and cognitive quantitative indicators – massively exceeds that found in other fields.

Val
It seems to me that there is an important difference between ‘It’s possible that there could be proposals to develop more and more vaccines which are driven by commercial interests when they’re not the preferable publich health response’ and ‘It’s actually the case that there are proposals to develop more and more vaccines which are driven by commercial interests when they’re not the preferable publich health response’; and it seemed to me previously that you were asserting the second of these, whereas it now seems to me that you’re only defending the first.

J-D
I have read about cases that I think are very questionable, but I don’t have time to find all the details. I think swine flu may be a case in point but would have to search for the literature.

Re faustusnotes’ comments about herd immunity above – I think that’s more relevant where there is a long lasting immunity. It has to be more questionable in the case of flu viruses which keep changing surely? Another public health response to the issue in the case of flu is telling people to stay home when they feel sick, wash their hands frequently and cover their nose and mouth when they sneeze – even avoid public places in the case of an epidemic. I don’t think anyone is actually trying to get herd immunity to flu are they?

Faustusnotes
Actually six of the academics on the panel have received some funding or travel grants from pharma according to the conflict of interest doc.

Recent research, which I heard about at the public health conference in 2015, suggests it doesn’t make any difference how ‘open and transparent’ people are about conflict of interest – in fact as I remember they said authors who declare interests may have slightly more bias than those who don’t (presumably because they ‘feel’ more honest or something). I might try to chase this up sometime if I can.

Under a lot of time pressure because I’m due to complete in June! Shouldn’t even be doing this!

Val the technical advisory group on immunization advice on influenza dems to suggest that the purpose of the program is not building herd immunity but protecting vulnerable people, I think you’re right about that. Probably they did a cost benefit analysis and decided it isn’t worth the whole hog for exactly the reasons you suggest. But if that’s the case doesn’t it undermine your narrative? If immunization was driven by pharmaceutical interests they would be pushing for herd immunity? Which would be a big annual dividend for sanofi and gsk (the companies supplying the vax this year).

Interesting points about conflict of interest declarations. But I don’t think there is a better way is there? If vaccine research was not funded by pharmaceutical companies a lot wouldn’t happen.

re: Freddie deBoer #81.

Well, the evidentiary standards in medicine aren’t all that great either sometimes. And I don’t even mind stuff being published that falls short – that’s always been the case.

More importantly, though, you chastise the “commenters on this thread” for failing to accept well-established science but then fail yourself to clearly state what this science is. Instead, you come up with hand-wavy stuff like putting up what appears to be a foil (?) in the form of: “Oh, well society rewards people who can take tests well so of course societal rewards accrue to people who score well on IQ tests”. I echo J-D in asking what you mean by this “has been addressed over and over again in the research literature”. What exactly are we expected to accept other than “IQ is predictive of [insert some measure of social success here]”, which I certainly do, but don’t find particularly interesting or relevant for any practical use of IQ.

Instead, you come up with hand-wavy stuff like putting up what appears to be a foil (?) in the form of: “Oh, well society rewards people who can take tests well so of course societal rewards accrue to people who score well on IQ tests”.

That wasn’t just invented out of thin air. It’s a reasonable paraphrase of John Quiggin’s comment here, apart from the fact that John Quiggin’s comment doesn’t use the inexplicably coined neologism ‘societal’, which it is never reasonable to use.

But going back over the discussion to see how much I can figure out of what Freddie de Boer’s point is supposed to be, I notice this: IQ is broadly predictive of all manner of life outcomes that are not tests … whether or not you’ll get divorced.

Is that really a confirmed research finding? It’s hard for me to figure how that’s supposed to be explained on any theory of IQ, which makes me wonder whether any theory of it is reliable.

J-D you can find the divorce relationship in The Bell Curve, a fine work of scholarship if ever there was one. Apparently the people in the top 5% of IQ had a lower divorce risk than those in the bottom 75%. That may seem like an arbitrary set of divisions to you, which would be because it is.

Val, I also think that public health research and development should be publicly funded. Sadly, it’s not all so. And until it is I don’t know what the solution to conflicts of interest might be.

It has been several years since I read Dr. Shalizi’s post on “g”, but it came to mind instantly when this subject arose. It demonstrates mathematically that “g” is unsound – that it can’t be logically and uniquely inferred as a real quantity from the evidence. It can’t be refuted by lots of researchers continuing to write papers based in the assumption that “g” exists. It can only be refuted by a mathematician finding some flaw in the math and publishing a rebuttal. I don’t know of any such, and for myself, was convinced the math was sound. I suppose one could say, well it hasn’t been proven to exist by the data but I will believe in it by intuition.

I think Einstein was a lot smarter than myself and that Trump is stupider, and that IQ test measurements would agree with that assessment. So I do think IQ tests give some measure of relative problem-solving-thinking ability (perhaps because I was brought up to think that). However I think the measurement is a rough one with a lot of variation. My personal benchmark for that was reading that Feynman’s IQ was 125 (whereas I would have guessed upwards of 170). Of course there are lots of different tests, but I assumed the number I saw for Feynman (I think in James Gleick’s “Genius”) was from a standard test. The one I had in high school was a one-on-one session with a professional tester who asked me to repeat series of words and numbers forward and backwards and to determine how to obtain exactly x quarts of water using a water source and three bottles of different capacities, pouring from one to another, timed with a stop watch.

Also on a personal note, I think both intelligence and its rough measurement by IQ tests varies with age. I think I have lost at least 15 points of IQ – so I find the term useful for making such statements, at least; and for comparing myself to Trump, although I must consider that a case where worldly success does not correlate with IQ. No doubt Trump considers himself more successful than Einstein or Feynman.