How to teach to magical thinkers?

“A topologist is someone who can't tell the difference between his ass and a hole in the ground.”

The scientific method is a cultural construct

and

I think the real fallacy is saying that the scientific method is just as good as any other method at finding truth.

Are these statements as independent as they seem? It is my impression that "... and all cultural constructs are equally valid" is at least connotatively associated with the notion of a "cultural construct".

It looks like the problem might be that saying "X is a cultural construct" gets read as "X is just a cultural construct and as such has no value outside of it's cultural boundaries".

There is more to a thing than how it came to be.

If your definition of "truth" is such that any method is as good as any other of finding it, then the scientific method really is no better than anything else at finding it. Of course most of the "truths" won't bear much resemblance to what you'd get if you only used the scientific method.

Scientific method should not be blamed, it is the people who created them should be questioned. We all know people who have invented iPhones and bombs have followed a specific method.

The techniques of the scientific method are universally valid; they're not contingent on a specific culture. If civilization was wiped today and we had to start from scratch, we would discover the same methods to ascertain natural laws and apply them to our purposes.

Different scientific communities have different methods. The scientific method as practiced by physicists isn't the same method we use in computer systems research and it isn't the same method they use in medical research. And this isn't because these different fields have different deviations from the One True Method -- it's because different subjects require different methods to prevent error.

• In computer systems and physics, data is typically collected by machines. We therefore aren't worried about observer bias or placebo effects, and we don't usually worry about blinding things from experimenters.
• With computer systems, everything is reasonably deterministic and so statistical error isn't a major concern. Also, any effect that's big enough to be interesting is likely to be far larger than statistical noise -- it's not an interesting paper unless you got a factor of two improvement or something like that.
• In physics, it's routine to circulate preprints before a peer-reviewed paper. This doesn't happen much in computer science.
• In physics and CS, a purely theoretical argument without data can be taken seriously, and often people will trust theory more than experiment. My impression is that people don't have nearly the same sort of confidence in theory in biological or social science.

I think talking about The scientific method is mostly an oversimplification. I don't hear professional scientists using that category when talking amongst themselves about their work. I hear much more about the particular publication and review norms of individual fields.

Science is tailored to counteract human cognitive biases. Aliens might or might not have the same biases. AIs wouldn't need science.

For example, science says you make the hypothesis, then you run the test. You're supposed to make a prediction, not explain why something happened in retrospect. This is to prevent hindsight bias and rationalization from changing what we think is a consequence of our hypotheses. But the One True Way does not throw out evidence because humans are too weak to use it.

The techniques of the scientific method are universally valid

What do you mean with those techniques if you would have to taboo "scientific method"?

I'd start on the positive topics of the truth being out there and what you must do to discover it.

Yeah, I thought about it, but then my personal ontology does not rely on the concept of objective truth, so I've been reluctant to suggest it. It is easy to imagine that postulating objective truth would likely devolve into a discussion of logical positivism and its issues, which is not what the OP wants.

I had sort of forgotten that "bias" could be taste in music or differential human outcomes based on "biased" treatment. Noticing that collision was helpful to me.

Also, I think there is an interesting quirk in the LW/local usage of the term "bias" and its general stance towards epistemology. The local culture is really really into "overcoming biases" with a zeal and cultural functionality that has echoes in the Christian doctrine of Original Sin.

(Not that this is bad! Assuming that people are in cognitive error by default because of biases is useful for getting people to actually listen with some measure of generosity to inferentially distant third parties and teachers and so on. Also, the "biases" framing powers a pretty good sales pitch for learning about meta-cognition because loss aversion is a known bias that people who need meta-cognitive training probably have. Given knowledge of loss aversion, you should naively expect people who need a rationality upgrade to be about three times more interested in avoiding cognitive downsides as compared to their enthusiasm for cognitive upgrades. The very name of the website "less wrong" is great marketing from this perspective :-P)

In any case, in academic psychology it is generally acknowledged that "biases" and "heuristics" are in some sense equivalent. Specifically, both processes involve leaping from hints to conclusions with locally inadequate justification. When this happens in a way that can be retrospectively determined to be incorrect, it gets negative valence and we call it a "bias". When it comes out well so that it seems like a dandy cognitive labor saving device, it gets positive valence and we call it a "heuristic".

The key insight is that heuristics are heuristics only in limited domains, and no technique that we call a heuristic can be profitably deployed outside it's appropriate context. When someone attempts to deploy a heuristic in a completely generic way, they transport it outside of the context it was tuned for and it becomes a bias. In the meantime, there are distinct techniques that are neither biases nor heuristics, but they generally take much longer to compute, or require more data gathering than busy people with busy competitors have time for.

Cialdini's book Influence has a bunch of great examples of contextually dependent cognitive shortcuts. If you lived in a small social context that had been self contained, poorly mixed, and functional for a long period of time in the past, it would be a pretty great life heuristic to trust and copy people who were benevolent towards you, similar to you, but slightly higher status. Doing the same "trust and copy" routine with people you see on TV, people on random street corners, or with professional modern/urban sales people who have read Cialdini is much less advisable. The heuristic becomes a bias because the social context has changed.

The issue of context and generalization can get really deep, and (so far as I'm aware) is not a solved subject with a widely recognized popular solution. An entry point into substantive literature on what is sometimes called "the foundations of inference" is Wolpert and Macready's "no free lunch theorem" and thematically associated mathematical work having to do with compression and sorting.

A deep (and admittedly somewhat hand-wavy) conclusion that falls out of this work is that for inference or evolution or thinking to ever find any sort of "purchase", there must be substantial structural and/or energetic redundancy in the local "reality". Otherwise it would be be pointless and/or impossible to progressively accumulate things like: (1) knowledge worth remembering or (2) adaptations worth having or (3) heuristics of seemingly generic utility. If physics was pure chaos and noise, there would be no life, no brains, and no point for those brains to be concerned with such abstruse concepts as epistemology in the first place.

This loops back around to the OP's classification of some people as "magical thinkers". Many humans do not seem to feel in their bones that they exist within a logically consistent mesh of redundantly patterned causation. They seem to model the world as being mostly chaos, with some moderately powerful agent(s) that approve or disapprove of various rituals being followed. I think what the OP is asking for is a way to convey "the feeling of existing within a logically consistent mesh of redundantly patterned causation such that various inference techniques are justified" to arbitrary humans via a few thousand words, but (tragically?) at the present time I do not know how to do it.

Yeah, I figured 'errors' would be a prime candidate for replacing 'bias'. Almost anything else that made any sense at all would be better.

Not just magical thinkers. I heard Massimo Pigliucci making the same "this isn't definitive and therefore it tells us nothing" argument on the most recent Rationally Speaking podcast.

Compartmentalization is a problem with everything. I expect it to be smaller with games than with lecturing.

Yeah, somehow you also need to train them to not do that, and I have no ideas along those lines.

proper thinking

Oog, I cringed when I read this. This kind of language is very hostile.

Yes. Thank for the note, in future I'm going to spell it out while on LW.

Why should the attempt to draw that line convince anyone who doesn't care about the scientific project in the first place?

I think that most people have an intuitive understanding that there are some things that are objectively true and some things that are objectively false, at least in terms of the physical universe around us. Few people would disagree with a statement like that. If they don't agree with that right away, give them some concrete examples; is the statement "If I'm standing on Earth and I drop a rock, it generally falls" more or less true then the statement "If I'm standing on Earth and I drop a rock, it generally flies into the sky".

Most people will concede that the first statement is more true then the second statement, and you can work from there to a general principal.

Basically, you have to understand why people accept certain ideas. In the case of cultural relativism, the reason people accept it is because a lot of cultural and social behaviors and beliefs are in fact very relative, and have more to do with how someone was raised then with any sort of objective reality. If a person fails to understand that, then they're likely to end up like the characters in the Dr. Seuss book "The Butter Battle Book" who end up fighting a war over the question of which side of the bread you should butter.

Very often when a person has a general heuristic or way of thinking, there was originally a good reason for it; the person just made the mistake of applying that heuristic to situations where it doesn't work. The way to deal with that isn't to tell them the heuristic is wrong, because then they'll think of all the times when it seems right to use it and dismiss you; it's to try to draw a line to separate situations where the heuristic is useful and situations where it's not.

If you can give people a way clear idea that they can become more happy by getting rid of their irrational beliefs

Eh. Maybe. I tend to find that people are instinctively paranoid about that line of approach, though, since "you'll be happier if you believe X" is a line of attack usually taken by religions, cults, and other hostile memes. And, of course, most people don't think that their beliefs are irrational.