In the spirit of encouraging skepticism and critical thinking, I want to encourage everyone to remember how easy it is to believe false/inaccurate or fraudulent research if you don’t have contextual expertise. Even well-known and well-respected academics like Acemoglu can endorse things without fully digging into the details.
I almost feel obligated to link to the blog post Beware The Man Of One Study (a good reminder to wait for meta analyses and to only update in a “Bayesian” sense) and to the book Science Fictions (excellent for learning about falsehoods in the culture and method of science).
Maybe it’s obvious, but there are lots of situations where believing an incorrect fact is less harmful than learning the incorrect fact too slowly. “Real” bayesians who are maximising EV won’t have this issue, as they’ll be happy to make decisions on the basis of things they think are unlikely to be true.
A more realistic choice is between being the kind of person who doesn’t respond quickly to changes in the world, or being someone who might respond quickly enough but is sometimes (maybe even often) wrong.
In the spirit of encouraging skepticism and critical thinking, I want to encourage everyone to remember how easy it is to believe false/inaccurate or fraudulent research if you don’t have contextual expertise. Even well-known and well-respected academics like Acemoglu can endorse things without fully digging into the details.
I almost feel obligated to link to the blog post Beware The Man Of One Study (a good reminder to wait for meta analyses and to only update in a “Bayesian” sense) and to the book Science Fictions (excellent for learning about falsehoods in the culture and method of science).
Maybe it’s obvious, but there are lots of situations where believing an incorrect fact is less harmful than learning the incorrect fact too slowly. “Real” bayesians who are maximising EV won’t have this issue, as they’ll be happy to make decisions on the basis of things they think are unlikely to be true.
A more realistic choice is between being the kind of person who doesn’t respond quickly to changes in the world, or being someone who might respond quickly enough but is sometimes (maybe even often) wrong.
Not obvious at all, and useful/helpful to share and remind us all of. 🙂