Potential downsides of EA’s epistemic norms (which overall seem great to me)
This is adapted from this comment, and I may develop it into a proper post later. I welcome feedback on whether it’d be worth doing so, as well as feedback more generally.
Epistemic status: During my psychology undergrad, I did a decent amount of reading on topics related to the “continued influence effect” (CIE) of misinformation. My Honours thesis (adapted into this paper) also partially related to these topics. But I’m a bit rusty (my Honours was in 2017, and I haven’t reviewed the literature since then).
This is a quick attempt to summarise some insights from psychological findings on the continued influence effect of misinformation (and related areas) that (speculatively) might suggest downsides to some of EA’s epistemic norms (e.g., just honestly contributing your views/data points to the general pool and trusting people will update on them only to the appropriate degree, or clearly acknowledging counterarguments even when you believe your position is strong).
From memory, this paper reviews research on CIE, and I perceived it to be high-quality and a good intro to the topic.
Information that initially is presumed to be correct, but that is later retracted or corrected, often continues to influence memory and reasoning. This occurs even if the retraction itself is well remembered.The present study investigated whether the continued influence of misinformation can be reduced by explicitly warning people at the outset that they may be misled. A specific warning—giving detailed information about the continued influence effect (CIE)--succeeded in reducing the continued reliance on outdated information but did not eliminate it. A more general warning—reminding people that facts are not always properly checked before information is disseminated—was even less effective. In an additional experiment, a specific warning was combined with the provision of a plausible alternative explanation for the retracted information. This combined manipulation further reduced the CIE but still failed to eliminate it altogether. (emphasis added)
This seems to me to suggest some value in including “epistemic status” messages up front, but that this don’t make it totally “safe” to make posts before having familiarised oneself with the literature and checked one’s claims.
Here’s a couple other seemingly relevant quotes from papers I read back then:
“retractions [of misinformation] are less effective if the misinformation is congruent with a person’s relevant attitudes, in which case the retractions can even backfire [i.e., increase belief in the misinformation].” (source) (see also this source)
“we randomly assigned 320 undergraduate participants to read a news article presenting either claims both for/against an autism-vaccine link [a “false balance”], link claims only, no-link claims only or non-health-related information. Participants who read the balanced article were less certain that vaccines are safe, more likely to believe experts were less certain that vaccines are safe and less likely to have their future children vaccinated. Results suggest that balancing conflicting views of the autism-vaccine controversy may lead readers to erroneously infer the state of expert knowledge regarding vaccine safety and negatively impact vaccine intentions.” (emphasis added) (source)
This seems relevant to norms around “steelmanning” and explaining reasons why one’s own view may be inaccurate. Those overall seem like very good norms to me, especially given EAs typically write about issues where there truly is far less consensus than there is around things like the autism-vaccine “controversy” or climate change. But it does seem those norms could perhaps lead to overweighting of the counterarguments when they’re actually very weak, perhaps especially when communicating to wider publics who might read and consider posts less carefully than self-identifying EAs/rationalists would. But that’s all my own speculative generalisations of the findings on “falsely balanced” coverage.
Potential downsides of EA’s epistemic norms (which overall seem great to me)
This is adapted from this comment, and I may develop it into a proper post later. I welcome feedback on whether it’d be worth doing so, as well as feedback more generally.
Epistemic status: During my psychology undergrad, I did a decent amount of reading on topics related to the “continued influence effect” (CIE) of misinformation. My Honours thesis (adapted into this paper) also partially related to these topics. But I’m a bit rusty (my Honours was in 2017, and I haven’t reviewed the literature since then).
This is a quick attempt to summarise some insights from psychological findings on the continued influence effect of misinformation (and related areas) that (speculatively) might suggest downsides to some of EA’s epistemic norms (e.g., just honestly contributing your views/data points to the general pool and trusting people will update on them only to the appropriate degree, or clearly acknowledging counterarguments even when you believe your position is strong).
From memory, this paper reviews research on CIE, and I perceived it to be high-quality and a good intro to the topic.
From this paper’s abstract:
This seems to me to suggest some value in including “epistemic status” messages up front, but that this don’t make it totally “safe” to make posts before having familiarised oneself with the literature and checked one’s claims.
Here’s a couple other seemingly relevant quotes from papers I read back then:
“retractions [of misinformation] are less effective if the misinformation is congruent with a person’s relevant attitudes, in which case the retractions can even backfire [i.e., increase belief in the misinformation].” (source) (see also this source)
“we randomly assigned 320 undergraduate participants to read a news article presenting either claims both for/against an autism-vaccine link [a “false balance”], link claims only, no-link claims only or non-health-related information. Participants who read the balanced article were less certain that vaccines are safe, more likely to believe experts were less certain that vaccines are safe and less likely to have their future children vaccinated. Results suggest that balancing conflicting views of the autism-vaccine controversy may lead readers to erroneously infer the state of expert knowledge regarding vaccine safety and negatively impact vaccine intentions.” (emphasis added) (source)
This seems relevant to norms around “steelmanning” and explaining reasons why one’s own view may be inaccurate. Those overall seem like very good norms to me, especially given EAs typically write about issues where there truly is far less consensus than there is around things like the autism-vaccine “controversy” or climate change. But it does seem those norms could perhaps lead to overweighting of the counterarguments when they’re actually very weak, perhaps especially when communicating to wider publics who might read and consider posts less carefully than self-identifying EAs/rationalists would. But that’s all my own speculative generalisations of the findings on “falsely balanced” coverage.