Philosophy professors fail on basic philosophy problems

If a moral theory can't be proved correct in itself, what use is it? Given that theories are tested against intition, and that no theory has been shown to be completely satisfactory, it makes sense to use intuition directly.

Moral theories predict feelings, mathemathical theories predict different things. Moral philosophy assumes you already know genocide is wrong and it tries to figure out how your subconscious generates this feeling: http://lesswrong.com/lw/m8y/dissolving_philosophy/

Being able to detect a bias and actually being able to circumvent it are two different skills.

Realize what's occurring here, though. It's not that individual philosophers are being asked the question both ways and are answering differently in each case. That would be an egregious error that one would hope philosophical training would allay. What's actually happening is that when philosophers are presented with the "save" formulation (but not the "die" formulation) they react differently than when they are presented with the "die" formulation (but not the "save" formulation). This is an error, but also an extremely insidious error, and one that is hard to correct for. I mean, I'm perfectly aware of the error, I know I wouldn't give conflicting responses if presented with both options, but I am also reasonably confident that I would in fact make the error if presented with just one option. My responses in that case would quite probably be different than in the counterfactual where I was only provided with the other option. In each case, if you subsequently presented me with the second framing, I would immediately recognize that I ought to give the same answer as I gave for the first framing, but what that answer is would, I anticipate, be impacted by the initial framing.

I have no idea how to avoid that sort of error, beyond basing my answers on some artificially created algorithm rather than my moral judgment. I mean, I could, when presented with the "save" formulation, think to myself "What would I say in the 'die' formulation?" before coming up with a response, but that procedure is still susceptible to framing effects. The answer I come up with might not be the same as what I would have said if presented with the "die" formulation in the first place.

Very possibly. But I'm saying this seems more likely to happen with the Trolley Problem than with most philosophical questions, and even many disputed moral questions. It's not a question of "endorsing unpopular moral views" in some abstract sense, but the social message that even a smart human being might take from the statement in an ordinary conversation.

No need. Order effects are one of the biases tested on YourMorals.org: http://lesswrong.com/lw/lt3/poll_lesswrong_group_on_yourmoralsorg_2015/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/8lk/poll_lesswrong_group_on_yourmoralsorg/

You need to do some tweaking of your faith in experts. Experts tend to be effective in fields where they get immediate and tight feedback about whether they're right or wrong. Physics has this, philosophy does not. You should put significantly LESS faith in experts from fields where they don't have this tight feedback loop.

This assumption comes from expecting an expert to know the basics of their field.

I wouldn't characterize the failure in this case as reflecting a lack of knowledge. What you have here is evidence that philosophers are just as prone to bias as non-philosophers at a similar educational level, even when the tests for bias involve examples they're familiar with. In what sense is this a failure to "know the basics of their field"?

A trained physicist's intuition is rather different from "human intuition" on physics problems, so that's unlikely.

A relevantly similar test might involve checking whether physicists are just as prone as non-physicists to, say, the anchoring effect, when asked to estimate (without explicit calculation) some physical quantity. I'm not so sure that a trained physicist would be any less susceptible to the effect, although they might be better in general at estimating the quantity.

Take, for instance, evidence showing that medical doctors are just as susceptible to framing effects in medical treatment contexts as non-specialists. Does that indicate that doctors lack knowledge about the basics of their fields?

I think what this study suggests is that philosophical training is no more effective at de-biasing humans (at least for these particular biases) than a non-philosophical education. People have made claims to the contrary, and this is a useful corrective to that. The study doesn't show that philosophers are unaware of the basics of their field, or that philosophical training has nothing to offer in terms of expertise or problem-solving.

This assumption comes from expecting an expert to know the basics of their field.

There quite a difference between knowing basic on system II level and being able to apply it on system I.

A trained physicist's intuition is rather different from "human intuition" on physics problems, so that's unlikely.

So if you were to poll physicists about, say, string theory vs. quantum loop gravity, or about the interpretations of quantum mechanics, do you think there would be no order or framing effects? That would be quite surprising to me.

Is every philosopher supposed to be a moral philosopher?

Edit: Just noticed study contains this (which I missed in the OP):

Nor were order effects any smaller for the minority of philosopher participants reporting expertise on the very issues under investigation.

...which is pretty disconcerting. However asking people to determine for themselves whether they're experts in a particular problem area doesn't strike me as particularly hygienic.

There are four elephant in the room issues surrounding ratiinality.

1 [Rationality is more than one thing];

2 Biases are almost impossible to overcome;

3 Confirmation bias is adaptive to group discussion

4 If biases are so harmful, why don't they get selected out?

If biases are so harmful, why don't they get selected out?

We have good reason to believe that many biases are the results of cognitive shortcuts designed to speed up decisions making, but not in all cases. Mercier and Speaker's Argumentative Theory of Rationality suggests that confirmation bias is an adaptation to arguing things out in groups: that's why people adopt a single point of view, and stick to it in the face of almost all opposition. You don't get good quality discussion from a bunch if people saying There are Arguments on Both Sides,

"Mercier and Sperber argue that, when you look at research that studies people in the appropriate settings, we turn out to be in fact quite good at reasoning when we are in the process of arguing; specifically, we demonstrate skill at producing arguments and at evaluating others' arguments. M&S also plead for the "rehabilitation" of confirmation bias as playing an adaptive, useful role in the production of arguments in favor of an intuitively preferred view."

Societies have systems and structures in place for ameliorating and leveraging confirmation bias. For instance, replication and off crosschecking in science ameliorate the tendency of research groups succumb to bias. Adversarial legal processes and party politics leverage the tendency, in ordered get good arguments made for both sides of a question. Values such as speaking ones mind (as opposed to agreeing with leaders), offering and accepting criticism also support rationality.

Now, teaching rationality, in the sense of learning to personally overcome bias has a problem in that it may not be possible to do fully, and it has a further problem in that it may not be a good idea. Teaching someone to overcome confirmation bias in a sense , to see two or more sides to the story, is, in a sense, teaching them to internalise the process of argument, to be solo rationalists. And while society perhaps needs some people like these, it perhaps also doesn't need many. Forms of solo rationality training have existed for a long time, eg philosophy, but they are do most suit a lot of people's preferences, and not a lot of people can succeed at them, since they are cognitively difficult

If you plug solo ration Ists into systems designed for the standard human, you are likely to get an impedance mismatch, not improved rationality. If you wanted to increase overall rationality by increasing average rationality, assuming that is feasible in the first place, you would have to redesign systems. But you could probably increase overall rationality by improving systems anyway...we live in a world where medicine, lf all things, isnt routinely based on good quality evidence

Yep.

So three people independently posted the same thing to LW: first as a comment in some thread, then as a top-level comment in the open thread, and finally as a post in Discussion :-)

All of these are plausibly true of art departments at universities as well. (The first two are a bit iffy.)

Take a field that requires a PhD to work in, purports to do research, has multiple journals with peer-reviewed publications, runs multiple conferences...

Let me remind you of the Feynman's description:

I think the educational and psychological studies I mentioned are examples of what I would like to call cargo cult science. In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head to headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas--he's the controller--and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they're missing something essential, because the planes don't land.

As to

would you characterize a field like that as art or science?

Neither. I would call it mental masturbation.

And the other issue is that overcoming those biases is regarded as all but impossible by experts in the field of cognitive bias.....but I guess that "philosophers imperfect rationalists, along with everybody else" isnt such a punchy headline,

But if you were to test physicists on an unsolved physics problem, would you detect no framing effects? This seems not obvious to me.