It does seem like a misjudgment, cuz the point of “my friends are sucked into a charismatic cult leader” doesn’t necessarily have a lot to do with object level conclusions? It’s about framing, the way attention is directed. An example of what I mean is “believing true things is hard and evolution’s spaghetti code is unusually bad at it” is a frame (a characterization of an open problem), and you don’t just throw it away when you say “this particular study was very credulously believed because no one had tried replicating it by the time thinking fast and slow was published, but you should’ve smelled/predicted something was wrong back then”. If you’re worried about overconfidence or overdeferrence amongs your friend group, it’s pretty unrealistic for them to just take the wrong outputs at face value—people correcting someone’s mistakes is just the peer review process working as intended! If you really want to be concerned about this, you should show us that “if you’re starting from correcting his object level mistake, then you’re not being maximally efficient or clear in your own pursuit of answers”. I think that would work!
Apparently some old school news anchor, like 1950s of some kind, said “we don’t tell people what to think. we tell them what to think about”. This seems obviously to me to be the true source of fraught cult leader stuff, if there is any!!!
It does seem like a misjudgment, cuz the point of “my friends are sucked into a charismatic cult leader” doesn’t necessarily have a lot to do with object level conclusions? It’s about framing, the way attention is directed. An example of what I mean is “believing true things is hard and evolution’s spaghetti code is unusually bad at it” is a frame (a characterization of an open problem), and you don’t just throw it away when you say “this particular study was very credulously believed because no one had tried replicating it by the time thinking fast and slow was published, but you should’ve smelled/predicted something was wrong back then”. If you’re worried about overconfidence or overdeferrence amongs your friend group, it’s pretty unrealistic for them to just take the wrong outputs at face value—people correcting someone’s mistakes is just the peer review process working as intended! If you really want to be concerned about this, you should show us that “if you’re starting from correcting his object level mistake, then you’re not being maximally efficient or clear in your own pursuit of answers”. I think that would work!
Apparently some old school news anchor, like 1950s of some kind, said “we don’t tell people what to think. we tell them what to think about”. This seems obviously to me to be the true source of fraught cult leader stuff, if there is any!!!