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Neil Levy's "Bad Beliefs" 3: Believe Bad with a Vengeance
484 Plays5 months ago
It's been three long episodes, but Josh and M are at the end of Neil Levy's book "Bad Beliefs" and also of Neil Levy's bad beliefs. But which of his beliefs did the find the baddest and which were barely bad at all? You'll have to listen to find out. You'll also have to listen if you want to know whether we mention the 1993 Drew Barrymore supernatural horror thriller Doppelganger again. OK, we'll give you that one - of course we do.
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Transcript
Comedic Skit and Introductions
00:00:00
Speaker
Come on, Addison. We have your podcast out hostage and there's no belief you can hold that will get you out of Just once, like a regular normal intro. Prepare to execute the listers one by one until our plucky co-host comes out of hiding. Hold on. What was I thought I told all of you. I want radio silence until further. No, I'm very sorry, Professor. I didn't get that message. Maybe you should have put it on the Discord server. but I figured since I've read chapters two and four, figured out chapter six might be getting a little lonely, so I wanted to give you a biting summary. Oh my god, he's read the chapter. He knows how this ends. Yippee-ki-yay, epistemic polluter.
00:00:42
Speaker
Okay, so how do you think that scene worked? Well? Well? I'll tell you how it worked. It didn't. It did not work. It was an uninspired, barely held together a attempt at pasticheing the original diehard. You weren't even doing a German accent. And for what reason? What reason, Em? Tradition? Appeals to tradition are fallacious, isn't it? But as Neil's book seems to intimate, so are traditional appeals to authority. And with without authority, what have we got? What have we got, Josh? What have we got? Ah, oh. It's pop culture references, Josh. That's all we've got left. Movies, TV, music. It's the only thing we can rely upon.
00:01:23
Speaker
And even that is threatened by Mandela Effects. So in the end, it's just this. It's another disappointing intro. Then how does this end? In Fire. And so it begins.
00:01:42
Speaker
The podcast's guide to the conspiracy featuring Josh Edison and Em Dinteth.
Whimsical Fictional Plots
00:01:55
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. In Auckland, New Zealand, I am Josh Addison, and in Zhuhai, China, unwittingly they trained a dolphin to kill the President of the United States. It's Associate Professor Ian Murray-Extenteth. It's true. I've been speaking to the set of sessions. We have plans. We have plots. We have capers. We also plan to go forward in time to bring back Humpback whales from the future to the present day because there's going to be a bit of a natural disaster coming up very soon.
00:02:28
Speaker
That was a beautiful lie, but a lie nonetheless. Look, I'll be honest, I've been doing the tagline introductions for you and I got a little bit lazy this week and just went and googled, what are some good movie taglines? That is an actual tagline from an actual film, Day of the Dolphin, 1973, starring George C. Scott about a man who indeed unwittingly trains a dolphin to kill the rest of the United States. George C. Scott? Haven't seen it, kind of feel I want to, yeah. Hmm, interesting. Interesting. I probably will not be tracking that one down. In part because due to the fact we've been talking about the film Doppelganger on and off for a while, I did show Georgia Doppelganger the other day.
00:03:08
Speaker
Did it melt her brain? Or merely just unhindered
Film Doppelganger Discussion
00:03:14
Speaker
a little bit? So I think the fact that we had talked extensively about how it has an ending, which is going to be surprising. If you went into Doppelganger not knowing how it's going to end, it would actually be startling. But because you have an intimation that it's going to end in an unusual way, and because it's not a very good film, so you're only watching it to get to that ending. The ending actually is both startling and a bit of a letdown at the same time.
00:03:47
Speaker
I mean, it makes absolutely no sense at all, so certainly if you're looking for any sort of narrative cohesion or what have you, yes, you're going to be disappointed. Thank you. It's one of those endings where the more you think about it, the less sense it makes with respect to earlier parts of the film. it's Oh yes, yes, very much. Very bizarre. So listeners, If you want to watch Doppelganger, my recommendation is get very drunk, forget about the fact we've talked about Doppelganger on the podcast, but don't get so drunk you forget about the podcast. And then for some reason, have some kind of hypnotic suggestion set up so you want to watch the film Doppelganger even though you don't know why.
00:04:31
Speaker
And then you can experience Doppelganger for itself. Now I think the next film we have to talk about, if we're gonna do this kind of films with weird endings, is The Wiz crate Craven Classic Deadly Friend. I don't think I've seen that. Oh, no, that's the robot one. It is the robot one. Yes. OK, yep, yep, yep. That was, yeah, that was a that was like a studio mandated stuck in at the last minute weird ending, wasn't it? It was very much so. Very much so. But the less said about that, the better. Right now, it'll save the surprise.
Ian's Academic Journey
00:05:02
Speaker
But right now, right now, we should probably talk about you. What's happening in the world of academia?
00:05:09
Speaker
Well, in the world of academia, I am waiting to find out whether I'm getting a second cough second contract. So two weeks ago, I had my assessment, apparently the assessment went well at the local level, but we're now waiting to find out what the higher level HR thinks of things. I was actually hoping to know by today, maybe I'll know by the end of this podcast episode, otherwise and actually the i suppose it otherwise I've been working on, this is it directly relevant to the other thing I'm working on. So I'm going to Kent at the end of this month to give a talk at a workshop being run by Karen Douglas. So I'm working on the paper for this particular workshop. I'm also then meant to be going to Amsterdam to run another workshop. So I've got a little bit of a European sojourn planned.
00:06:02
Speaker
And initially the plan was I'd spend all of my summer in the EU and the UK, because now classes are finished here in Zhuhai. I don't need to be on campus until probably the middle of July or beginning of August. But because my contract is linked to my visa, And it takes time to apply for a new visa. My original plan is spending, say, a month or six weeks overseas. There's now going to be a two-week jaunt to the UK and the EU, and then slipping back into China just in time to apply for a new visa.
00:06:41
Speaker
before my old visa expires on the proviso that I'm guessing that second contract. So life has been a bit of an administrative nightmare the last few weeks. Lovely. But you've at least had time to come up with a new idea.
Reviving the Blog and Podcast Origins
00:06:57
Speaker
for this very podcast. I have. So, I was discussing things on Blue Sky a week or so ago, and someone reminded me that there's no way to see the Tweacons that I did back in the early 2010s. So, in the early 2010s I ran a series of Twitter-based conferences on Twitter
00:07:18
Speaker
where people gave a paper in five tweets or less and these were then put up onto my old blog and that blog has been offline for about two or three years now and so I thought I should probably resurrect the blog so I put the blog back online And then I realised that many of the external links to files on the blog no longer resolve to anything. And the important thing about my blog is that it archives all of the segments I did on 95BFM. And if people recall last the last ep episode,
00:07:55
Speaker
This podcast came out ah of when I was let go from BFM as someone doing a radio segment on conspiracy theories. And it turns out the very day I announced on the blog that the segment came to an end was the very day I said I should do a podcast and the very day that you put a comment saying I'd be willing to co-host it. So we actually pivoted very quickly from radio to podcast. So I realised that actually most of the segments of the Denteth Files and Conspiracy Corner, the historical precedent for this particular podcast, were not online. Luckily I had saved almost all of the files as mp3s, so I spent a good afternoon re-linking all of the files away from BFM's Nel Defunct streaming site to hosting the files locally.
00:08:48
Speaker
And I realize there's a segment idea here. Josh, you should go through the archive of Dentathiles and Conspiracy Corners that I did. Segments that I barely remember. Pick out a few and ask me whether I remember anything at all about the topics I was talking about over 10 years ago. That could work. I mean, to be fair, we could probably actually do the same thing with the episodes of this podcast from from sort of eight or nine years ago as well, looking through the list
Book Conclusion and Expert Deference
00:09:21
Speaker
last time. There were a fair few that I didn't really remember, but yes, okay. Maybe that's an idea. Maybe we can start doing that possibly with next episode when we'll be talking about some regular old topic, but obviously not this episode because this is the final, the gripping conclusion.
00:09:39
Speaker
to our look Now Josh, when you say gripping conclusion, do you actually mean gripping conclusion? Because I have to say, halfway through chapter 5, I kind of just gave up on this particular book. I felt that it didn't end with a bang, it ended with a series of whimpers. Yes, now when I look at my notes, I see it wasn't a gripping conclusion, it was a griping conclusion. So I think we should... Too many P's. Too much P. Not enough P. Too many P's.
00:10:17
Speaker
Okay, but yeah, but whatever it is this is. This is part three. This is the Die Hard with the Vengeance. This is the the Return of the King. This is the Matrix Revolutions, maybe? I don't know. We'll have to see, I guess. This is the Rise of Skywalker. Yeah, well well, it may well be. But I guess we should stick some sort of a chime in to officially mark the point at which we throw ourselves back into this, and then throw ourselves back into this.
Epistemic Pollution and Authority
00:10:45
Speaker
I'm i'm i'm i am prepared to hurl, are you?
00:10:55
Speaker
Right, so if you've been paying attention, you would remember that this was a a six chapter book and we've been doing two chapters in episode. So we finally have chapters five and six, plus a little a little concluding thoughts section at the end. And as has now become traditional, you've taken the first of this pair and I've taken the second. So chapter five, take it away. So chapter 5 is entitled Epistemic Pollution. So it's a chapter which actually deals with how do we live in and cope with epistemically polluted environments whereby an epistemically polluted environment is one in which people are
00:11:36
Speaker
deliberately, in some cases, putting out disinformation, and in other cases, repeating misinformation. How do we as epistemic agents cope with the fact that the environments in which we live in are not pristine? There are bad actors out there, and there are irrational actors out there. And so this chapter tries to tell us how we can try to get to a point where we can understand who to listen to and why we should listen to. So to a large extent, this chapter is all about justifying a particular way of understanding the appeal to expertise. So let's start, as we always do, at the beginning. So the chapter starts off with, we live in epistemically polluted environments.
00:12:25
Speaker
Deliberately and inadvertently, other agents shape our environments in ways that leave individual cognition even worse off than it might have been. In this chapter, I'll sketch some of the pollutants and how they work to undermine virtuous cognition. The epistemic world has been allowed to degrade. I'll suggest, because we've been made unaware of how crucial it is to rational thought. just as we urgently need to repair and to manage our natural environment, I'll argue we must repair our epistemic environment. Now the first thing that got me about this is the claim the epistemic world has been allowed to degrade. And so there is this systemic worry I have throughout the entire book, but particularly in this chapter and the next one.
00:13:18
Speaker
that Neil does subscribe to some kind of view that in the old days things were better. We used to live in a much better epistemic environment, we don't live in a good one now, it's been allowed to degrade almost if it's been purposefully degraded over time and I don't necessarily buy it. It might be the case that we're more aware of the problems of transferring knowledge from one person to another as we were in the past that might make us think our environment has degraded.
00:13:55
Speaker
But I don't know that we've got, in many respects, more epistemic pollution now than we did in the past. It is arguable that maybe we're just more aware of how epistemically polluted our environment is now than we have been in past eras. Yeah. um I mean, you look at things like Watergate, which which I've heard is is as the point where ah people realise that you can't trust the government, suggesting that prior to that, people would believe whatever the authorities told them, which means the authorities could get away with pretty much anything. So that that doesn't... like a change like that would definitely affect the epi epistemic environment, but I don't know that you could say it's downgrading it.
00:14:39
Speaker
Yeah, I mean the other example people like to use is from the UK, so the Profumo scandal, the one where a prostitute accused a lord of the land of buying her sir services, and the judge in that trial went, oh I mean, you can't expect the jury to believe that someone of his stature would associate with someone of your stature. And it turned out, actually, it was quite easy for the jury to believe that. And that was when the British establishment went, oh, so we can't just lie our way out of scandals anymore, which was the indication to most of the public that they had been successfully lying their way out of scandals in the past. But one day, the jig was literally up.
00:15:22
Speaker
I don't know what I meant by the the jig was literally I'm like I mean indicated the Lord's are their well theyre dancing and yeah yeah they they were dancing away and then one day the jig just stopped so yeah so already I'm going into this chapter going some of the phrasing here does indicate that Neil thinks there was a golden age and we don't live in it now and I really don't think that's true in part because If you look at the literature, the historical literature, on things such as post-truth or the idea that things were better in the past than they were now, you can find people making that claim now, 20 years ago, 20 years earlier, 20 years earlier again. The first time we find an instance of the term fake news is at the end of the 19th century.
00:16:13
Speaker
People have been talking about how in the past things were better since time immemorial, which indicates that if those people are right, things must have been incredibly good during the Roman Republic. Unimaginably. What with all the slavery and what have you. Well, I mean, now with Jerry Seinfeld going on about how life would be so much better if we lived in good old fashioned hierarchies, there are people who are going to be arguing that life was better when we had slaves. that's that that was That was depressing, seeing seeing Jerry go off on the exact same rant that every out of touch old comedian
00:16:54
Speaker
does when they realise they're not with it anymore. ah Completely off topic, but I remember hearing a podcast about the history of comedy where they talked to a guy who'd written a book on the history of comedy and had been able to go back about 100 years, finding every 10 or 20 years or so examples of people saying, audience is so sensitive now, you can't say anything anymore.
Critique of Nudging and Rationality
00:17:15
Speaker
That's been a common refrain for a very, very long time. So again, If people have been getting progressively less sensitive for the last hundred odd years, what were things like back then? yeah Imagine what you were allowed to say during the Sumerian Empire. Literally anything. Yeah, literally anything. Babylonia? I mean... God knows. God knows. Anyway, we are slightly off topic, and you know, kind of on topic at the same time. Anyway, Neil's going to defend an account of expertise. He's going to defend it in a really weird way, and he's going to point out that the account he gives has exceptions, and yet somehow those exceptions are not going to be exceptional enough to discount the account. So we are told that
00:18:04
Speaker
Genuine experts are people who have good credentials. They also have a good track record where he takes it a good indication of a track record is going to be more than just peer-reviewed publications. They're going to have what he calls argumentative capacity, which is more than just being able to debate people but being able to communicate in a superior way. So this is what Alvin Goldman calls dialectical superiority.
00:18:37
Speaker
Also, experts are intellectually honest in that they're willing to make their data available to other researchers. They will retract claims when those claims are worthy of retraction, and they will also declare conflicts of interest because they want to avoid being accused of bias. And finally, a genuine expert is someone who should be accorded greater credibility to the extent to which her claims are accepted by a consensus of her peers. So experts have good credentials, they have decent track records, they have dialectical superiority, they're intellectually honest, and they belong in a community of experts where there is a recognised consensus of some kind.
00:19:28
Speaker
Now, Neil is going to point out there are exceptions to all of these credentials. So this is a cluster definition. You can recognize an expert because they've got these features, some of which are going to be stronger, some of which are going to be weaker, and yes, there are going to be some exceptions, but because the other criteria exist at the same time, even if you can show there's an exception, exception, exemption, exception, I've heard it, I've heard it both ways.
00:20:01
Speaker
If it turns out a genuine expert doesn't have good credentials, well, that's because in some cases, genuine experts may not be credentialed or part of an institution, but as long as they have good track record, dialectical superiority, they're intellectually honest, and they're recognised by their peers, that's going to be fine. That sounds fair enough, I guess, if a little a little vague, a little fuzzy around the edges. I mean, so one of the worries people have about this particular account of expertise, it's an institutional account of expertise. So it basically says experts exist in institutions. And some people like that kind of definition because institutional accounts make it easy, well, easy is not the right word, makes it easier for the laity to recognize if someone belongs to a particular group. So an institutional theory of law
00:20:56
Speaker
tells you that a lawyer is someone who has a legal degree. It allows you to work out who lawyers are versus who lawyers aren't, because if you don't appeal to the degree part, you have to go, well, I mean, how well does Josh actually know the law? I mean, maybe he's just a sovereign citizen who claims he knows how legal things work. No, legal experts are people who have degrees from universities in legal practice. People like it when it comes to the idea of art because working out what is art versus versus what isn't art. Well, one easy way, say, well, has this person had the appropriate training to be an artist, yea or nay? Well, then we know whether what they're producing is art or isn't art. And many people like this with respect to expertise because saying, look,
00:21:46
Speaker
that person has a degree from a respectable university, they work with other university level academics, they publish in acceptable journals, and other academics agree with them, and makes it easy to recognise that they are an expert, as opposed to Josh seems very clever, but do I know whether he's an expert in some particular issue, or is he just really, really fancy with his word choices? A bit of both, to be honest. It's true. You are very fancy with your word choices. Yes!
00:22:20
Speaker
Yes, very fancy. Very fancy indeed. Now, everybody's going to be listening to everything you say for the rest of this episode. Now, Neil goes on to say, look, people recognize that there are problems with this particular account because there are, as I said, there are exceptions. But while they all recognize there are obstacles to utilizing these heuristics, these characteristics for identifying experts, the philosophers who have identified these markers of expertise largely accept that ordinary people are able to deploy them to identify genuine experts. And then he goes to say, I think they're far too optimistic.
00:23:04
Speaker
Ordinary people are well aware that these criteria pick out markers of expertise, but they're also well aware that we live in epistemically polluted environments and that a major source of epistemic pollution consists in the mimicry of these markers to inflate the appearance of expertise. And so we then get a very long section on the fact that all of these markers have been abused. So he starts off by once again citing merchants of doubt, and he quotes from there, as the infamous 1969 interesting memo mentioned in chapter 1,
00:23:44
Speaker
doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the body of fact that exists in the mind of the general public so he takes the merchants of doubt and the way that they basically went well i mean the best way to show people that smoking doesn't cause cancer which we know it does is to make them think maybe it doesn't or maybe the science isn't settled and so he looks at the way that organizations can create notions of expertise, they can subvert people to be experts on their particular side, they can create journals which are devoted to presenting either biased findings or even completely pseudoscientific findings, and how there is a very, very, very long history of this in the 20th century alone, where people
00:24:43
Speaker
create the idea of expertise, even though there is no expertise going on. Which is, I mean, stuff that we've talked about numerous times over past episodes, but um what what what lessons does he take from that? Well, the one lesson which he doesn't take from which I found fascinating is that when he's talking about the fact that there are these forces in our society who are creating disinformation and encouraging misinformation, it all sounds a lot like warranted conspiracy theorizing. He seems to be creating a conspiracy theory about people in positions of power
00:25:27
Speaker
doing an awful lot to persuade people to not look at what is happening around them. But of course, he never frames it in terms of conspiracy theories, because his one reference to conspiracy theories in this chapter is a footnote talking about Keith Harris's work on the idea that conspiracy theories are contra-official stories, which is itself a development of Neil Levy's earlier work on the role of ah of official stories or official theories and why we should prefer them with respect to conspiracy theories. So Neil can't really talk about the fact
00:26:07
Speaker
that is putting forward a conspiracy theory about people polluting the environment, because he's kind of buying into the idea that we shouldn't believe things called conspiracy theories because they go against what most people believe, even though the official stories people are relying upon here may well be the product of a conspiracy by the people who want us to not believe conspiracy theories about them. Yeah, that's uh, that does seem like a bit of a, a bit of a worry at least. Where does he take it from there? Well, this is where I found this section to be, well, section's entire chapter to be confounding, because you would think
00:26:52
Speaker
Given how much he dismantles the role expertise plays, or at least the ability for ordinary people to recognise expertise, you'd think he'd come out the other end as being kind of contra this account of expertise, but he really isn't. So he goes on to say, the epistemic pollution identified in the previous section makes the task of distinguishing reliable from unreliable sources too difficult for ordinary people to reasonably be expected to accomplish. The markers of expertise can play this certifying role only if they are not themselves excessively polluted. But these markers are polluted, and they're nowhere to be polluted. Ordinary people know
00:27:36
Speaker
that universities don't merely certify expertise. and He makes a lot of claims about what ordinary people know, and I don't know that ordinary people know this. I think people might believe this, but those beliefs might be pragmatic or political as opposed to epistemic. So he makes this claim. They know, it's the ordinary people, that universities also aim to attract funding and to manage public perceptions, and that these aims may conflict.
00:28:16
Speaker
Ordinary people know that peer review is conducted by people with their own interests and biases. Now, I don't know about you, Josh, but I deal with ordinary people in some parts of my life. And most ordinary people that I know don't have any opinion, one way or the other, about what academics do or how academics live their life or how academics do their job. So it might be the case that some ordinary people
00:28:47
Speaker
might believe that peer review is conducted by people with their own interests and biases, but I don't buy the idea that this is a common piece of knowledge that everybody has in our society. A, many people don't care, and B, some people only believe that because that's something which they've been encouraged to believe by people who are epi epistemic polluters. I'm also not fond of his usage of the term ordinary people in contrast to university academics implying that folks like you are extra ordinary. I'm not sure I approve of that. Oh, I mean, are you sure you're... Maybe he's saying you're sub-ordinary, I don't know. No, well, you know, he's going to he's going to do something which I found... both amusing and disturbing all at the same time, but we'll get to that in a few minutes' time. So my big issue with this chapter is that sometimes he's talking about epistemic polluters, people who are putting out disinformation or encouraging misinformation, and other times he's talking about how people live in epistemically polluted environments, and his examples seem to constantly shift between the two. He's never
00:29:59
Speaker
firmly focused on one or the other, and sometimes his examples are about one but he makes conclusions about the other or vice versa. And this is a problem because if you're talking about epistemic polluters, the people putting out misinformation or disinformation, then we're talking about people pretending to be experts. But if the interest is in how we cope with living in an epistemically polluted environment, then we're talking about how people can recognize what is or isn't actual expert opinion.
00:30:34
Speaker
And so the examples he gives of apparent rival expertise, where you've got one view or the other when it comes to say, evidential claims like the climate is changing and the like, is a problem of epistemic pollution. How do we as ordinary people, I've got my quote marks up there, cope with situations where it seems there's more than one set of experts contributing to a debate? And it seems that he needs to be committed to some kind of political claim, that this is the result of polarisation, at which point these are debates about the work of epistemic polluters, but he often phrases it as a problem of epistemic pollution. So he's going, how do how do ordinary people work out who the experts are? With the kind of hidden proviso
00:31:25
Speaker
we know who the experts are, the problem is they don't know, they don't understand, which is this disturbing elitism or establishment kind of thinking that's going on an awful lot in the latter half of this book. Yes, I'm just reading ahead in your notes and it looks like he's he He does seem to have quite a high opinion of academic types, particularly the types of people who would be reading this kind of book in the first place.
00:31:55
Speaker
Oh yes, in fact let me give you yeah three paragraphs. And this is where I say he gets kind to to to be cruel. So he addresses the reader. You are very probably in a much better epistemic position than most people. It's not just that you are well educated and again very probably more intelligent than average. It's not just that you probably have research skills that most people lack. You are also very probably epistemically luckier than most. As a consequence of your socialisation from family through the prestigious academic institution, you have acquired dispositions to trust reliable sources. You know enough to distinguish legitimate institutions from diploma mills. You have some idea of the degree of legitimacy conferred by a publication in Nature or Science. You are alert to science of predatory publishers and on the lookout for industry funding. You are therefore protected to some degree from epistemic pollution.
00:32:55
Speaker
For all these reasons, you're indeed more likely than most to get things right when you attempt to judge for yourself. But that's not because you are a counterexample to my claims. It's because you fit my model so well. It's because you defer well that you do well. When you attempt to judge for yourself, you actually engage in social cognition, and that's why you tend to get things right. You can reliably adjudicate between David Irving and his many critics, between climate scientists and denialists, between anti-vaxxers and genuine experts. But while it may seem to you that you do so well, epistemic individualists that you are, through the power of your unaided reason, a very important part of the explanation for your success is that you defer so fluently and appropriately.
00:33:42
Speaker
you owe your success to the way in which you are embedded in Epistemic Networks. Even so, I bet even you sometimes go wrong. Your capacities and your disposition to defer only get you so far. You live in an environment that is unreliable, in which frauds and fakes mimic the cues to reliability you rely upon. Sometimes, I bet, you fail for the tricks. Sorry. Sometimes, bet, you fall for their tricks. I certainly have.
00:34:15
Speaker
Yeah, um interesting to see him quickly throw in us a little bit about about epi epistemic individualism. Having spent so much of the previous chapters saying, no, no, epistemic individualism only gets you so far. It's the collective if a stomachic epistemic environment that takes the credit for most of what we say. And yeah, it's definitely, I guess, flattering is the nicest way for it. But then once I say that, I bet even you sometimes go wrong, which I mean, it's fair enough, everybody gets rough stuff wrong sometimes.
00:34:48
Speaker
that reminds me of that article of wirego about the woman who gave, put $50,000 in a cardboard box and handed it to a complete stranger because a dude on the phone said he was from the FBI or whatever it was, that article that was roundly mocked a short while ago and the lesson people took word from apart from, okay, this is so silly as to make me wonder if it actually even happened or not. The lesson is anyone can fall for tricks and this this isn't the um realm of confidence tricks but but certainly epistemic tricks just just plain old lying and misinformation is something that anyone can fall for uh i i kind of wish had made that point in a different way Yeah, especially since in an earlier chapter when he was talking about why he thinks that Kasam is wrong to say, look, our belief in the work of David Irving comes out of the fact that we understand he's better. And Niels... No, no, not David Irving.
00:35:47
Speaker
David Irving is the Holocaust denier. Kasam does not claim that we should prefer David Irving. That would be a terrible thing to claim about Kasam. The fact he thinks we should believe Richard Evans over David Irving. Managed to swerve that, that would be terrible. yeah there we go that If I hadn't made that that correction, that would actually be... That that could be... Certainly would suck if the person who's editing this episode would cut that part out just to make a look bad. It's true, true. So now I'm wondering, well, I mean, I can, oh I'll have a backup recording. If you do that, I'll i'll release a tape of Josh. I'll release my tape. I suppose.
00:36:22
Speaker
so Neil in that earlier chapter said, look, the reason why we prefer Richard Evans over David Irving is actually probably not because we've looked at what do they say or do. It's probably because of our position in society. We prefer people who come from credentialed institutions who are recognised by other members of our community, as opposed to understanding that they know more about a particular issue. And yet here he's going, I mean, but you do know slightly more. You might be fooled some of the time, but you do know slightly more. And this is going to come back in the concluding chapter, because you have to square a circle here, which is, is he engaging in epistemic individualism to argue that we shouldn't be epistemic individuals? So we'll we'll get to that towards the end.
00:37:17
Speaker
But the bit that really got my hackles up is the section Restoring Trust in Science. Now, as we saw earlier, he has this entire thing about how we live in a degraded epistemic environment. And the idea is, it's got worse. In the same respect, he's going, well, look, we used to have trust in science. We used to have justified trust in science. We've got to get back to our justified trust in science. And a little bit like the degraded epistemic environment claim.
00:37:51
Speaker
You might also think that the problem is we used to have too much trust in end science in the past and now because we're aware of the problems of scientific research which is committed by scientists, the practitioners of science, people who live in a society. We've lost trust in science because actually we've developed a rational distrust of the people who engage in scientific research which is He doesn't ever really talk about the fact that science is a social practice. It's not just this abstract thing of robots doing scientific research.
00:38:32
Speaker
It's research which is done by individuals living in a society, which is to say you can't separate science from the culture of the society you're in. The idea that somehow science is apolitical or there's nothing political about doing science is something that most philosophers of science and sociologists of science deny. We need to understand scientific practice within the communities we're in. So the idea we need to restore trust in science does seem to be ignoring some of the key insights from the middle to the latter part of the 20th century that went, look, actually, we do need to be critical of science. And maybe we used to have too much trust in science because we bought into a position on scientists, which kind of denies them the fact that they are in fallible human beings.
00:39:30
Speaker
Yeah, I mean it it does sound very similar to what he was saying at the start of the chapter. So so so so what of it then? What's the conclusion of this chapter? Well, the conclusion of this chapter chapter is vague and weird. We'll get to that in just a second. But he he claims, if we are to promote better belief, we need to promote better difference.
Trust in Institutions and Science
00:39:52
Speaker
This is a disturbing word. And that requires the restoration of trust in these institutions. Central to doing so is reduction of epistemic pollution. Now I should point out, reducing epistemic pollution does not necessarily mean restoring trust in institutions.
00:40:11
Speaker
may turn out that actually your level of trust in institutions is appropriate and there's too much epistemic pollution. Just because you get rid of epistemic pollution doesn't mean that trust in institutions naturally comes back. But he's committed to the claim and that epistemic pollution rationally reduces trust in institutions. And so he's assuming that these institutions have been polluted, they've been degraded, as opposed to these institutions are the product of an epistemically polluted society, a society that may have always been epistemically polluted, and thus the institutions are the product of that pollution, or at least their part and parcel of it.
00:40:57
Speaker
So, once again, there's a worry here. This is very much an establishment view. People should trust us. They should rely upon us. I mean, I've got a fancy PhD. I'm a professor of philosophy. People should listen to me, as opposed to recognizing that maybe people don't listen to people like me. Because, well, people are aware that people like me are as human as anyone else in society, and there are problems about being a human working in an institution. Yeah, yeah. i To be honest, I have no further reaction to that.
00:41:33
Speaker
No, and is that is the right reaction. To agree with me. To agree with me the expert. To agree with me the expert. I show you difference as I should. That Neil and I both appreciate from you, Josh. I mean, he makes the this is a really small point. He also makes a claim in the section. Researchers likely prefer a world in which everybody refrains from hyping their research to the current situation. And in part he's saying this because he thinks the media is driving research hype. To which I say, I know an awful lot of researchers who love hyping their research to the current situation, and it's not because the media drove them to it. It's because they are human beings and they have egos,
00:42:20
Speaker
and thus they want their egos to be satiated by the public being aware of what they're doing here. Neil is effectively blaming the current situation where people are forced to hype their research on the media as opposed to, well, I mean that's part of the story, but the other part of the story is researchers are humans and humans have foibles. Once again, and he's treating scientists as being this kind of rarified, logical, almost unemotional set of beings who just tell you the facts, man. They just tell you the facts. Okay, well,
00:43:00
Speaker
going reading ahead on your notes once more it looks like now now we're about at the end of the chapter so how does he how does he finish this and how does he bridge the gap to the next chapter not very well I would say yeah so he looks at what we can do to make things better and he says well maybe we need regulations maybe government should step in and they should regulate the media they should regulate universities they should regulate scientific practice. But then he goes, I mean, but maybe we may maybe the government doesn't need to step in. I mean, maybe science can just police itself. So we end up going, I mean, we could do some regulation, but if you're scared of regulations, you could always self-regulate. And as we know from the history of self-regulation, that always works out. It works out really if it goes wrong well. Nothing bad ever happens when people are left to self-regulate.
00:43:56
Speaker
But in the second to last paragraph of the chapter, he makes the following c claim, over the longer term, removing epistemic pollutants from the environment should increase trust in reliable sources of information and thereby improve belief formation. Now we should point out, reliable sources of information don't necessarily have to be institutional sources of information. because he buys into an institutional theory of expertise, even though throughout this chapter he argues that A, many people can mimic the institutional notion of expertise, and B, there are a lot of exceptions. He still thinks it's a decent enough account. So he's going, look, we once we remove the the bad actors,
00:44:51
Speaker
Then we're going to end up trusting university academics again. We can restore trust in science. We can stop the epistemic degr- degr- degr- degr- degradation? That is degradation. Yeah. Whatever that word is. We can stop it. And- Stop it. Put a stop to it. I mean, it's one of these things where I think there's something about his conclusion I agree with. I just don't think the argument that gets us there is very good.
00:45:25
Speaker
But he's going to use this in the next chapter, say, look, there are mechanisms where we can slowly push people in a kind of a gentle sense towards a epistemically better environment. A kind of, you know, what's a word for gently pushing someone gradually towards a position? I mean, I need a word. I need believe yeah belief that word would be nudging Eh, that doesn't sound like a real world. Nudging? Nudging. It doesn't.
Autonomy and Nudging's Influence
00:45:59
Speaker
Nudging. It doesn't. And yet. And yet. And yet. and you Chapter the six of this book is called Nudging Well. I'm fairly sure Nudging Well is where is going the key one of the key battle battleground electorates in the upcoming British parliamentary election. Oh, it has to be. Nigel Farage wants to make sure that Nudging Well goes Brexit.
00:46:23
Speaker
No, if you think nudge is a strange word, ah wait until you hear it said several dozen times in my summary of this chapter. Because that this is this is the thing. He says we we need to be nudging people towards ah epistemic virtue. And this chapter goes on to to talk in some detail detail about what nudges are, why they're good, what could be thought as being bad about them, but what isn't. and just generally why we should be doing them. So he starts by saying, roughly a nudge is a way of influencing people to choose that works by changing aspects of their choice architecture, the context in which agents choose, to encourage better choices. Better usually insofar as these choices promote the welfare of the choosing agent herself. Occasionally nudges aim at the promotion of social welfare instead of individual welfare. It's a familiar fact that people often make choices they themselves recognise are not in their own interests. Nudging can bring them, us,
00:47:16
Speaker
to choose better. Any good examples outside of the realm of of ah epistemology are talking about nudging people to choose healthier foods by putting that eye level on store so people are more likely to to reach for them ah and nudging people towards higher superannuation savings by making the default saving rate on a new account higher, things like that. Now he does say, though, that while nudges may be in the the interest of individuals, they are extremely controversial. Critics often argue that nudging manipulates us. Nudging threatens our autonomy because autonomous choice is rational choice, and nudging bypasses our capacities to reason. However, he's not on board with us. He says in this chapter, I'll argue that nudging doesn't manipulate us, nor do nudges bypass reasoning. Instead, nudges work by providing genuine evidence to agents, and when they change behavior, the change occurs.
00:48:06
Speaker
And so far as I advocate improving belief formation by thoroughgoing engineering of the epi epistemic environment, not merely by clamping down on pollutants, but by also altering cues to belief, the success of this argument is essential for my project. At very least it would be a large cost to for its acceptability if id forced if I were forced to advocate manipulation on a large scale. But I haven't even brought that thing in mind. Coming to see how nudges work allows us to better understand the mechanisms that underlie the processes discussed in previous chapters, social referencing and reliance on environmental cues, for example, as themselves readers provide reasons providing their ways of changing minds through the proficient of higher order evidence. And we'll get into what higher order evidence is shortly. Josh, I feel that the second half of that paragraph doesn't use the word nudge enough. I mean, the first half, so much nudging. Second half, one nudge.
00:48:53
Speaker
Don't worry, i'll but there' there'll be more nudge than you can nudge a stick at. But so first of all, he wants to have a look at this idea that nudging ah violates autonomy. Now, he he says, he starts off by pointing out that autonomy, personal autonomy, is highly valued in our society. And he says, now you might think I'm going to say that, well, maybe we shouldn't actually value autonomy that highly, given how how much he's he's sort of influencing collective reasoning over the individual. But he says, no, no, no, no, not going to argue that.
00:49:24
Speaker
He says, while it may be true that we over overvalue autonomy due to our over-evaluation of individual cognition, autonomy seems to me to be genuinely worth defending. So that was nice of him. I thought, you see he wants us to have our autonomy. i mean I mean, yes, how how very kind of him to correct us autonomy in this issue. Yes. Why does he think autonomy is worthwhile? Well, first of all, he says we may defer to epistemic authorities on some matters, but we're the authorities, not yeah and in matters that are personal to ourselves, we are the authorities. So our our you know autonomy is definitely important there. And he also says that basically, you know if we make bad decisions, they're our decisions to make, assuming that we're not we' not
00:50:06
Speaker
making decisions that will will affect other people's lives adversely. That sounds very libertarian. It does a little bit. but um So he says, nuding nudging does seem to threaten our autonomy. In fact, both advocates and opponents of nudges accept that it does. So he's going to say, it it does actually work on our autonomy, but he'll he'll basically say, you go on to say that that's okay. He says it's, ah people object that nudging is paternalistic, that it bypasses our capacities for rational agency. And so he says, you know compare two different things that could be considered nudging someone towards making the decision. One, the candidate be in an election, the candidate being at the top of the ballot paper, being the one who's most likely to be voted for,
00:50:52
Speaker
which is why these days ballot forms are randomised. Much to the discuss of older people, you go, oh, it's so hard. It's so hard for me to find the act candidate I want to vote for. They should be at the top of the letter A. Well, we'll talk for about that a bit as well. But he said compare that to simply telling, giving someone information about a candidate, not not necessarily saying vote for this person, but saying, you know, this person has these policies, has these beliefs, and so on. So he says, in one case, you're nudging someone by sort of ah some sort of a subconscious means, whereas the others, you're doing it by directly giving them reasons to act in a certain way. But basically, the thing that he the thing that he says here, the thing he's going to say, but lately yeah as as this goes on, it it' at the end of the day, everyone's getting these sort of epistemic nudges all the time.
00:51:41
Speaker
anyway. And so since that's that's going to be happening, it's better for us to provide some good nudges, ones that were these sort that actually give people reason to act in ways he thinks we should read he thinks they should reason. He says, if we don't nudge people deliberately, people will be nudged nevertheless, either by bad actors who seek to manipulate them or by chance. Whatever we do or fail to do will all be nudged nevertheless. We might as well put nudging to good use. Still not saying the word nudging yet, but getting there. But he wants to say that yeah it's it's not it's not simply a case of manipulation. He says nudges, they're not they don't bypass our capacities to reason. He says they're just providing us with evidence. And and we weigh that evidence and we make we make decisions. that's that's some
00:52:28
Speaker
yeah There's nothing other reason about that. He says, nudges don't tend to provide arguments or evidence that fit our paradigms, but that's because our paradigms are of first order evidence. We neglect higher order evidence, but higher order evidence is genuine evidence. So he then goes into the next section, which is called a nudging higher order evidence. by sky What's that on about? yeah and of interject here, because there is... he presents nudges in a fairly positive or beneficial way. Look, they don't they don't manipulate us because they're not bypassing our capacities to reason, but this is heavily disputed in the literature on nudges. The idea being that actually sometimes it might be the case that nudges are simply nudging us along to do things we were already going to decide to do.
00:53:20
Speaker
But sometimes they actually do bypass our capacity to reason. So he's going, look, nudges are fine. They're great. Well, I think this is contentious. Yeah, I think he might be doing a little bit of the old, the old Brian Elkely problem of one minute he's talking because it does to begin with, you contrast, you've got good nudging and bad nudging. Essentially, there's stuff that you know is manipulative or um or is nudging us, but not by providing reason, but by exploiting various psychological phenomena. And then there are good nudges, where you're nudging people by providing appropriate evidence that will allow them to make what you consider to be a better decision.
00:54:02
Speaker
ah So I don't know how often when he talks and in the same way that that Brian always ran into problems initially, because it was such sometimes he appeared to be just talking about conspiracy theories in general, and then other times he'd be talking about his, what was it, mature unwanted ones. So I think in this case he's talking about, sometimes he he he talk talks about nudges in general, but sometimes he seems to be meaning that specifically those good ones. yeah But the difference here is that Brian was inventing terminology to discuss conspiracy theories with, because he's one of the first papers in philosophy. Neil is using existing literature. And the other issue, and this will come up later on in the chapter, is that of course he's just assuming that we good, virtuous agents are only ever going to nudge for good and not for ill.
00:54:51
Speaker
So those bad people, they do bad nudging, but we good people. You can trust us to nudge well. Trust us nudges. We're the good nudges. We're nudging in a beneficial way. When I nudge you, you'll know you've been nudged. Yes, so taking taking that for granted, as he appears to do at this stage, he wants to talk about how, you know, nudging it's not irrational because it is providing us evidence, but it might not be the sort of evidence you're talking about. So at the end of that previous section, he contrasted first order evidence with higher order evidence, and here he spells out that distinction. He says,
00:55:26
Speaker
in the section nudging higher order evidence. First order evidence, our paradigm of evidence, is evidence that bears directly on the truth or falsity of a particular proposition. The pattern of blood spatter in this room is evidence that the killer used a knife. The fingerprints on the light switch are evidence that the killer was the butler. Higher order evidence is evidence about our evidence. in In epistemology, the main focus of debates about higher order evidence has been the reliability of the agents who assess the evidence, in particular on how disagreement can provide evidence about such reliability.
00:55:58
Speaker
So he brings up a bunch of scenarios. The idea of epistemic peers, people who are epistemically equal in the sense that, you know, you don't you don't have a layperson versus an expert or something, people who have have the same reasoning and knowledge capabilities. And it also adds to the same evidence, which is the other important thing. yeah yeah yeah as it So he says, when epistemic peers disagree, there's the the the higher order evidence comes into play, which is that they can't both be right. One of them must be wrong, and the but and and the fact that there's a disagreement shows they're not sure which it is. So in in a case like that, the higher order evidence suggests that that that everyone involved should possibly be less confident and less confident in their own opinion.
00:56:42
Speaker
and then maybe go look back and reevaluate it. And similarly, when epi epistemic peers agree, that suggests that they can possibly be more confident of their own opinion than if it was simply one of them coming to the conclusion by themselves. Now he says, of course all this is true only if other things are equal, experts ought to give little or no weight to dissent when it comes from those who lack expertise. An expert on climate change shouldn't lower her confidence in her predictions and her models because Donald Trump declares that global warming is a hoax, nor should she be impressed by the enormous number of dissenters given that she's an expert and almost none of them have any of the specialist skills to understand her work.
00:57:18
Speaker
and sort of talks about at this point, sort of goes back and says, look, i've this sort of high level evidence is stuff that um he's been talking about without explicitly calling as such right throughout this book and in the previous chapters that we've already talked about. So he says, In the previous chapters, for instance, I discussed the role that markers of expertise, possession of relevant qualifications, a track record of publication of prizes and citations and so on, should play and do play in guiding our response to testimony. In appealing to such markers, I appealed to higher-order evidence. In giving more weight to certain opinions on the basis that they come from someone who possesses these markers, we are taking higher-order evidence in favour of their views into account. In appealing to an expert consensus, we're also appealing to higher-order evidence.
00:58:01
Speaker
Markers of expertise are just one of the more obvious kinds of higher order evidence I've appealed to in this book. Once we've seen how nudges to provide higher order evidence, we'll be in a better position to see just how to see just how pervasive such appeals have been. That is, we'll be in a position to begin to glimpse just how much we lean on higher order evidence to an ordinary and expert cognition and how important such evidence is in our epistemic lives. And I'm suddenly realizing that in my non-rotic New Zealand evidence, where I don't pronounce the word R every time, higher order evidence It's a difficult thing to say. It is. Really even American in reading this. Doesn't matter. so but He's Australian. ah yes i don't Yes, I don't do the hours either. They just do out their vowels differently. Oh well. Anyway, he probably knows my pain. So this leads into the next section, nudges as evidence, where he starts going into the mechanism by which these these nudges that he's so fond of will work.
00:58:52
Speaker
So it starts by saying, how do nudges work? Exactly how they cause behavior, understand and understanding of their influence remains elusive. Theoretical models often invake vague invoke vague notions like salience, which seem more like placeholders for mechanisms than explanations. There is, however, more or less universal agreement that however they work, they bypass rational cognition. While I don't claim to be able to do very much better at providing a proper account of how they function, I suggest that nudges do not bypass rational cognition. Instead, at least typically, their influence is due to the manner in which they provide implicit recommendations and therefore higher-order evidence in favor of the option nudged.
00:59:31
Speaker
So, he goes back to that the whole first name on the ballot thing and says that it seems irrational that putting someone's name at the top of a ballot paper makes people more likely to vote for them. That seems like an irrational an irrational reason to choose a candidate just because they have only the first thing. And he says, well, maybe, I mean, yeah it seems irrational, but maybe it's not. I mean, we're used to normally in a list or many times in a list at least, that the the best things or the most notable things or the most important things are listed first. ah In a news broadcast the most important stories are the and are the the headline news. Surely that's a cultural thing though. In some cultures the last thing listed is the most important. You start with least important to most. So that's going to be entirely dependent on where or when you live.
01:00:21
Speaker
Yeah, well, but I mean maybe, I don't know, maybe in such cultures then it day they have the same problem just the other way around. the The candidates who are listed last are more likely to be voted for, I don't know. But, I mean, initially I thought maybe, yeah, maybe that is something, maybe there is some sort of an implicit recommendation that people are subconsciously or otherwise picking up on when they see the the order of things in the list. I mean, another, ah another option that occurred to me is simply maybe people are just lazy, you you take on the first thing because it's literally the first thing you see because we read a page from top to bottom. And in in the English language at least so it's, there are possibly other explanations here which he doesn't really gloss over and indeed says,
01:01:03
Speaker
he he He himself says, as he just mentioned earlier, he doesn't exactly know what's going on, but he compares it to the ones, the the the examples he mentioned earlier, the healthy foods thing and the default saving amount things as as being an instance where nudges kind of make sense. He says that that defaults, such as the the presenting a higher default saving amount for new accounts and things like that, They're often seen as taking advantage of what gets called cognitive laziness, but he argues that they may be seen as recommendations. and Why wouldn't we expect the option presented as a default to be a reasonable option that anyone should expect? yeah and In the the software industry, where I work on my day job, sensible defaults are always the thing. you know Whenever you give someone a form with options they can fill in, they should always be sensible defaults.
01:01:54
Speaker
pre-selected on the grounds that if something's going to be a default value it should be the sensible one that most people would want. So there again he's saying is so substitute default for sort the most obvious top of the list sort of thing. He's saying maybe that's not it's not unreasonable that people would go for those things. He says while it's true that candidate quality doesn't as a matter of fact correlate with ballot order, except by chance, it may nevertheless be true that being guided by ballot order is a rational response to an implicit recommendation. So again, the idea that we see, we see, in in this case, the sort of nudge is still not something that's bypassing our reason. We're so we're seeing incorrectly, perhaps, in this case, we're we're seeing an implicit recommendation given by coming from the order of things that as they're given to us.
01:02:38
Speaker
It strikes me this is a very weird example for him to spend so much time on Ballot. But he does say, so on and the account of nudges that he's giving, he's showing he wants to show that they are rational. He says, it's rational to be guided by a nudge because it's rational to give due weight to a recommendation, implicit or not. A recommendation is higher order evidence that an option is choice worthy, and higher order evidence is genuine evidence.
Framing Effects and Rationality
01:03:09
Speaker
Let's see how this works. So he goes on to talk about the phenomena of framing effects. So this is ah something in, I guess, psychology, I suppose.
01:03:20
Speaker
um that that people's attitudes to evidence changes depending on how the evidence is framed. And that's sort of suggested to be irrational because not nothing about the evidence changes, you're simply presenting it differently. And so it's it's irrational to treat it differently simply because of how it's presented. But he says, well, the first order evidence may not be changed by how your options are framed, but the higher order evidence is. So you get the example of of recommendations. When a person recommends option A over option B, that with your recommendation doesn't change anything about A or B, but it, you could argue quite reasonably, changes our attitudes towards them if if if the person doing the recommending is someone whose recommendations um we we we place stock in.
01:04:11
Speaker
And at this point he points out, of course, nudges, I mean, he's not talking about, he's not talking about hypnosis. He's not talking about mind control here. He says nudges don't override everything else. um In this case, recommendations don't overwhelm our better judgment and compel us to act. if if If someone recommends a restaurant to you, but you look through the menu and none of it seems appealing, you may or may not decide, i actually, I'm going to ignore the recommendation and go somewhere else that looks better. um the And as he points out, Sorry, just finishing this thing. the ah going Returning to the ballot order example, he says he he again points out the order of people that, like you talked about before, with the people hunting for their preferred act candidate, the order of people appear on the ballot makes no difference at all to people who already know who they want to vote for, to people who already have strong preferences or know enough about the candidate. So the nudge can't override your behaviour.
01:05:00
Speaker
that can maybe influence it in cases where you don't have the information or the the inclination to make a choice already. So my worry here when he's talking about ri recommendations is that you might want to have a distinction between a nudge and a recommendation because a nudge is some interaction you engage you engage in gaian to try to implicitly change someone's or someone's ordering so when you nudge them you're going well normally they might do this thing but we can nudge them to do some other thing
01:05:34
Speaker
But a recommendation seems to be something different. If I ask for what do you recommend I eat from this menu, then I am explicitly asking someone for something for more information. I'm not being nudged at that point. I'm going, look, I don't know what decision I want to make. You might have a recommendation here. I don't quite buy the idea that recommendations are kinds of nudges. I think recommendations are an active thing that you elicit. And a nudge is something which is done to you.
01:06:10
Speaker
Maybe you might argue a recommendation acts like a nudge, but I can see of a theory where actually nudges are more tightly constrained, and recommendations are quite different. From the looks of things, he kind of says it the other way around. He he talks about nudges being potentially implicit recommendations, other than rather than explicit ones like that. but In fact, I think, yeah, he says that just a bit a bit um ah but further down. He says a bit more about nudges about how they work. He says they can work rationally, but they can also work non-rationally. There's apparently evidence to suggest that these sorts of nudges can be more effective when someone is under cognitive load, when they've got other things on their mind, it's easier to nudge them in a particular direction.
01:06:51
Speaker
And then through all of this, he's saying that what's going on is not irrational. It's not contravening our our rational capabilities where we are a reason we're taking in the evidence and acting upon it. He's just say saying that the evidence is not immediately apparent or obvious, and in some cases, as he says, is is implicit. so he finishes this bit out by saying disagreement provides evidence about how well we've responded to our first order evidence but provides evidence we may have made a mistake in responding to it nudgers and the like may not provide evidence like that though they may
01:07:23
Speaker
ah recommendation implicit or not provides evidence about some other agent's attitude to an option It may entirely replace first order evidence. A recommendation may lead to me to choose an option about which I know nothing, than is about which I lack any first order evidence. It provides evidence not about the facts that make an option choice worthy, but about its choice worthiness itself. It's not evidence about my evidence, but it's evidence about what the evidence properly understood supports. I said the word evidence too many times in that paragraph. Now I don't quite know what the hell I'm saying. Well, we don't know what nudges are any anymore, so we might as well give up on evidence as well. Fair enough. So the next bit is in praise of nudges, where he basically sums up this start what what he's been saying so far. I'll just give you a ah the Cliff Notes version of this chapter. He says, most, if not all, nudges provide agents with higher-order evidence. They are understood implicitly as encoding testimony. To nudge someone in the direction of an option is to recommend it to her.
01:08:20
Speaker
He says a bit later on, giving greater weight to an option than we otherwise would just because it has been made salient to us in this kind of way is rational because it's rational to give weight to recommendations unless we have captivating evidence or reasons to distrust the person providing them. Now, of course, as he points out, this is something that he's kind of forgotten about a little bit throughout this chapter. Having having mentioned it at the beginning, he does point out nudges may not be reliable. They may come from people who aren't knowledgeable. They may come from people who are actively seeking to manipulate us. um But he points out that's true of any testimony. that It doesn't make nudges uniquely bad.
01:08:54
Speaker
and again returns to his point that because bad nudges are already out there, it's better to nudge well than not nudge at all. He says nudging well is offering honest testimony and refusing to nudge is refusing to ensure that bad testimony is no longer offered. so so sorry So the only way to defeat a bad nudge is a good person with a nudge. That's exactly right. Yeah. ah he He then brings an interesting example of some of how nudges can work by providing bad information. He gives the example of places where they've painted fake potholes or speed bumps on a road in order to get people to slow down. So yeah that's now you're actually giving them false information but to to produce the right affair. But even in these cases, as in these cases
01:09:40
Speaker
He points out they're still working rationally. If you see what appears to be a pothole, you'll slow down, even if it turns out you've been tricked and it isn't one. And he finishes by saying, canonical nudges are properly respectful of agency because they work by providing the agent with reliable, usually higher-order evidence and thereby improve our welfare. We may utilize such nudges in good conscience. You ever given someone a canonical nudge? I mean I'm not going to admit to that on this podcast. I mean that's a very private question. What is what what I get up to at night is not something we're going to discuss right now.
01:10:13
Speaker
a Yeah, so I was i was and not sure what to make of the fact that this phrase canonical nudges, as far as I could tell, he only mentions that this once near the end, but it seems like that's what he means by the good kind of nudge that he's been suggesting we should use. Good nudges are good, is essentially the argument there. And it is interesting, it comes directly after the, oh, I mean, we might sometimes trick people into acting in ways they might not want to. So the person who presumably is driving along a road with fake potholes, wants to be travelling at a speed that some civil engineer or urban planner has decided is at an appropriate speed. So we give them false information. But that's apparently properly respectful of agency. Why is it properly respectful of agency?
01:11:03
Speaker
Because it produces good outcomes from a utilitarian calculus, it slows people down and thus it makes them act in appropriate ways. And the thing is, I'm a socialist, I believe, in a large state. I believe in the state regulating what we do. But at the same time, just because it produces good outcomes doesn't mean that the ends justify the means. Yeah. But speaking of the ends, we've reached the end of this chapter, or at least the last section, called Stepping Back, which is a summary sort of of this chapter. And I guess a little bit, given that it's the last proper chapter, a summary of of a lot of what's come before it. He says he's he he sees he's argued and in what's come before that we needed to go beyond removing pollutants from the epistemic environment and actually structure the environment to nudge agents toward better beliefs and make sure that the higher level evidence that we're providing to people is reliable.
01:12:01
Speaker
So there's a couple of um things that this might suggest about what we should do. He says this suggests that news agencies shouldn't be giving equal weight to competing experts when the consensus favours one. He calls this a contentious position, which I guess, I mean, given that news agencies do seem to like to present the controversy and seem to have such a bit of an obsession with providing balance even when they what there's a consensus view and then a contrary view, that news agencies tend to think they need to treat them, give them equal time when they're not at all equal. So I suppose it's contentious in some circles. I think there are a lot of people who would agree wholeheartedly with the idea that they shouldn't be doing this. But anyway, it supports the idea of no platforming people or de-platforming people where necessary. So basically nudging them off the stage.
01:12:53
Speaker
nudging them right off the stage, yep. Were they a ah good old canonical nudge? Give them a canonical nudge. I canonically nudged Jordan Peterson into the stratosphere. And I have the photographs. So he gets back to his sort of social collective epistemology sort of things when he talks about how he's or he has talked plenty about how we're all social agents and points out that all of the sorts of social referencing that we've talked about in the previous chapters should be seen as reliance on higher-order evidence. He says, evidence about what the majority believes is higher-order evidence, as we saw in our discussion of how the numbers count when it comes to peer agreement and disagreement. The Prestige Bias, remember that from chapter four, I think? The Prestige Bias, remember that film with Hugh Jackman,
01:13:41
Speaker
hey It consists in the use of indirect evidence, higher-order evidence, that certain ways of behaving bring success, that someone is prestigious is higher-order evidence that they behave or think well. We make certain facts salient to one another, sometimes through the design of the physical environment, to recommend them, and sometimes to provide implicit warnings, which is another form higher-order evidence can take. Peer reviewers impart the institutionalisation of higher-order evidence. That a paper has received its imprimatur is some evidence in favour of its quality and reliability. And he finishes the whole thing off by saying, if we engage in the kinds of strategies I recommend, nudging better belief, we won't be doing anything new. We've been nudging belief forever. Our epistemic success has always been dependent on ensuring that higher-order evidence is reliable.
01:14:28
Speaker
Higher-order evidence is the real secret of our success. Correlatively, epistemic engineering is not dependent on our biases, understood as ways in which we fall short of rationality, or our putative cognitive laziness, or even our bounded rationality. Rather, it takes advantages of our rational faculties. As long as the right people are nudging, which is the proviso he doesn't really focus on here because nudges have to be performed by people. They don't just occur naturally. Nudges are cases where people are nudging you. So as long as the right people are nudging you, everything's going to be fine, Josh. Just trust you're being nudged by a good person and not by a bad one.
01:15:11
Speaker
Yeah, he never really said much about how you tell a good one from a bad one, other than that a good one is presenting reasons, or well good reasons. As long as the ends are good, Josh, then that's going to be fine. Well, there's a bit of that as well. I mean, this is one of the the issues I have. So we talked about this in the first few chapters. His argument is very much relying on accounts from evolutionary psychology and naturalized epistemology. that we have There's an evolutionary story to talk about how we are people who are able to generate good information about the world.
01:15:50
Speaker
And of course, the usual complaint about evolutionary psychology and naturalized epistemology is why would you expect evolutionary forces to be about truth tracking as opposed to survivability? Nudges might well be ecologically beneficial without being epistemically beneficial. As long as the nudges allow human beings to continue, then they're going to produce good outcomes and promote the welfare of human beings. that doesn't tell us anything about whether they are tracking the truth. It doesn't tell us that we live in an epistemically unpolluted environment just because we've been nudged as well. if it It may turn out the best way to ensure in fact ah survivability of the human species is a very epistemically polluted environment to encourage us to engage in behaviours which we wouldn't normally do, which promotes survivability.
01:16:48
Speaker
Well, we're at the end of the book now. All that's left is the concluding thoughts sections. Would you would you take us home? Bring us through the final little, little... You you ought you want me to take us through those country roads? Please do. So the the concluding section is called concluding thoughts, rational animals after all. And as should be fairly clear by the comments I've made, I'm not entirely sure I believe in this notion of human beings as being purely rational animals. I think we are animals who have rationality, and but I don't think we are the rational animals. I think we are animals with some rationality attached.
01:17:32
Speaker
But he says, in this book I've suggested that we are more rational than naturalistic philosophers have tended to think. We've failed to see how rational we are because we've been looking for rationality in all the wrong places. We've been looking at individual cognition and at first order evidence to vindicate our conception of ourselves as rational agents. Both of these things matter of course, they matter a great deal, but apparent failures to rely on them don't often indicate departures from rationality. They indicate a rational outsourcing of our cognition, a reliance on the division of epistemic labour and the appropriate use of higher order evidence.
01:18:16
Speaker
Why? Because the behaviour of other agents is higher order evidence for us, and individually we respond to it appropriately. Difference to experts is an appropriate use of higher order evidence, so is the use of the conformity bias and the prestige bias, and I find that final sentence slightly disturbing. difference to experts is an appropriate use of higher order evidence. He's even pointed out that expert mimicry is very easy to replicate. So apparently we are to defer to these experts so that we cannot easily detect and we should conform and have the prestige bias experts deserve to be listened to.
01:19:06
Speaker
Okay, so so much of the previous chapters was on pointing out difference to experts is probably not appropriate, given mimicry, which means we probably should be a little bit concerned about conformity bias and the prestige bias, but apparently it's fine. Apparently it's all just fine, because we've been nudged by good people, Josh. We've been nudged by good people. Yeah, he seems to be He seems to be, again, going going back and forth between a couple of different concepts there. I think it looks here like he's he's he's he's referring back to his idea that doing these sorts of things isn't inherently irrational, but there's a difference between saying something is rational and saying that it's good. Something that you should do, yeah. and So it might be the case that yes, appealing to experts is a rational thing to do.
01:19:53
Speaker
And I don't disagree with that. I just don't think the argument he's giving here is a particularly good one, in part because I have concerns about the institutional theory of expertise, even though I am someone who is an expert. And that that gets us in quite nicely to the final section of the conclusion I want to focus on. So it's fairly clear I have worries about the kind of argument being put forth here, but Niels is a much more prominent and famous philosopher than I, so my worries are probably not going to cause him sleepless nights.
Human Rationality and Expert Reliance
01:20:27
Speaker
But he does say something interesting here. So he points out there's an obvious rejoinder to the conclusion.
01:20:34
Speaker
which is there's a worry about self-defeat. This book is itself the product of individual deliberation and argues against an orthodoxy that emphasizes first order evidence, intellectual autonomy, and individual deliberation. If I'm confident that I'm able to see the problems in the orthodox view, then I seem committed to thinking that individual cognition can successfully strike out on its own, contrary to my own claims. Aren't I committed to making an exception of myself in a way that is best unprincipled? Difference for thou, not for me.
01:21:12
Speaker
Yeah, but I assume he has a i assume he has a reply to that. Well, he is he is relying on experts. So because he's relying on work in social sciences, particularly in psychology, he is, yes, he admits, I am putting forward an individual view here, but it's an individual view which is deferring to the kind of experts that he recognises as nudging well. Right. Okay. Was that just a little, was that just another one of those Reviewer Bee things? Just a little, a little point that
01:21:48
Speaker
He thought he'd better address, because otherwise someone will have a go at him. I mean, I would have thought if that was a Reviewer Bee thing, you'd put that much earlier on in the text. I think he is just going, look, there is one final thought that people might have you get to the end. You're saying, Neil, we should be deferring to others here. Why should I defer to you? You're just a lone individual with a book. And he's going, well I mean I am, but at the same time I am relying on arguments from elsewhere. I'm not as individualistic in my view, even though I am arguing against a kind of orthodoxy. Although he doesn't really establish in the book who the orthodoxy he's arguing against is represented by.
01:22:31
Speaker
So we talked about naturalistic philosophers and traditional episteology epistemology, and he is right to say that epistemology in the 20th century was quite individualistic. But there's been a pushback against that since the late 20th century anyway. So some of the stuff he's presenting is nowhere near as novel as maybe it appears to be. Maybe for the audience he's writing for, it is. says but work in recent philosophy of science, recent epistemology and recent so sociology has been making claims of this particular type for quite some time. Although, admittedly, most of that work actually casts a doubt on the role of experts, whilst he is trying to bring experts back into fashion by restoring our trust and returning our epistemic environment back to something that we had in that mythic golden age.
01:23:27
Speaker
So we're at the end then? Are we finally at the end of it all? We are at the end. And I have to say I had more fun reading the Shermer book. There was there was more there was there was more fun to be had in Michael Shermer's attempt to explain why he is and isn't a conspiracy theorist. Yeah, I mean, there were did definitely bits of this that seemed to make good sense, but there was a bit ah a bit a bit of a vagueness, a bit of a, hang on, is he talking about this or is he talking about that? It's not quite clear. And then, yeah, especially vague around the idea of
01:24:04
Speaker
what's what's good behaviour and what's bad behaviour and who who are the good and bad people to be deciding that and doing it. But yeah, it was just sort of worrying that there wasn't enough ah concrete, I suppose, in what he's recommending and and and saying at the end. Yeah, there was very much a case of, I agree with many of the conclusions, I just don't agree with the arguments that get us there. And this is a constant worry in academic work, that you will sometimes get people, oh, I agree with that conclusion, therefore the argument must be good. And actually, even if you agree with the conclusion, if the argument someone puts forward to get there is an argument you think is bad, you are still duty bound to go, yeah, this is not the argument to get to this particular position.
01:24:50
Speaker
So there we go, another three episodes, another book down. Next episode we'll talk about something that isn't a book. Yeah, watch this and unless unless of course you decide to go through the old episodes of The Dent of the Files and Conspiracy Corner and find a book review in it, and then you want to say, do you remember when you talked about a Dan Brown book on the radio? And I'll go, is that one of the episodes where I did a big long rant on Ridley Scott's Prometheus? It's quite possibly it was the case. You didn't know, yeah.
01:25:23
Speaker
so we are at the end of the Oliver's book in there for at the end of this episode. Our beloved patrons though will of course get a bonus episode. We'll talk about a bit but bit of current news, um a bit of um a bit of a bit of new news about an old old topic, a classic. Yeah, in a in a slightly confusing way. In a slightly confusing way. yeah that Listen to the episode, it doesn't make sense. Of course, to listen to the episode, you need to be a patron. And if you want to be a patron, you can just go to patreon.com and search for the Podcaster's Guide to the ah to the Conspiracy. I've got communities on the brain now, thanks to Mr. Levy. Do you need to be nudged? Maybe I do know you need you to nudge me towards the proper name of this podcast. But yes, Patreon, Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy, sign up, or don't.
01:26:10
Speaker
It's a free world, and we respect your autonomy. But for now, it's time to bring this mania side to the close. and And I really have nothing left in my brain, quite frankly, except for the words nudge, and also goodbye. Nudge!
01:26:30
Speaker
The podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy stars Josh Addison and myself. associate professor, M.R.X. Denton. Our show's con... sorry, producers are Tom and Philip, plus another mysterious anonymous donor. You can contact Josh and myself at podcastconspiracyatgmail.com and please do consider joining our Patreon.
01:27:06
Speaker
And remember, nothing is real, everything is permitted but conditions apply.