Have you thought about a tip-of-the-hat to the opposite effect? Some people view the past as some sort of golden age where things were pure and good etc. It makes for a similar but not exactly mirror image source of bias. I think a belief that generally things are progressing for the better is a little more common than the belief that generally the world is going to hell in a handbasket, but not that much more common.
This reminds me of a related bias—people generally don’t have any idea how much of the stuff in their heads was made up on very little evidence, and I will bring up a (hopefully) just moderately warm button issue to discuss it.
What is science fiction? If you’re reading this, you probably believe you can recognize science fiction, give a definition, and adjudicate edge cases.
I’ve read a moderate number of discussions on the subject, and eventually came to the conclusion that people develop very strong intuitions very quickly about human cultural inventions which are actually very blurry around the edges and may be incoherent in the middle. (Why is psi science fiction while magic is fantasy?)
And people generally don’t notice that their concepts aren’t universally held unless they argue about them with other people, and even then, the typical reaction is to believe that one is right and the other people are wrong.
As for the future and the past, it’s easy enough to find historians to tell you, in detail, that your generalizations about the past leave a tremendous amount out. It should be easier to see that futures are estimates at best, but it can be hard to notice even that.
As to whether I could give a definition of science fiction, Similarity Clusters and similar posts have convinced me that the kind of definition I’d normally make would not capture what I meant by the term.
Reading efforts to define science fiction is why I’ve never looked at efforts at defining who’s a Jew. I have a least a sketchy knowledge of legal definitions for Reform and Orthodox, but that doesn’t cover the emotional territory.
What’s a poem? What’s a real American?
If you can find a area of human creation where there aren’t impassioned arguments about what a real whatever is, please let me know.
I meant why do you not value plastic clips… oh, I get it, you value what you value, just like we do. But do you have any sort of rationalization or argument whereby it makes intuitive sense to you to value metal clips and not plastic ones?
Think for a minute about what it would be like for the WHOLE UNIVERSE to be plastic paperclips, okay? Wouldn’t you just be trying to send them into a star or something? What good are plastic papercips? Plastic.
Clippy, that’s how we humans feel about a whole universe of metal paperclips. Imagine if there was a plastic-Clippy who wanted to destroy all metals and turn the universe into plastic paperclips. Wouldn’t you be scared? That’s how we feel about you.
I don’t think those scenarios have the same badness for the referent. I know for a fact that some humans voluntarily make metal paperclips, or contribute to the causal chain necessary for producing them (designers, managers, metal miners, etc.), or desire that someone else provide for them paperclips. Do you have reason to believe these various, varied humans are atypical in some way?
We make paperclips instrumentally, because they are useful to us, but we would stop making them or destroy them if doing so would help us. Imagine an entity that found metal clips useful in the process of building machines that make plastic clips, but who ultimately only valued plastic clips and would destroy the metal if doing so helped it.
I suspect that you make other things besides paperclips—parts for other Clippy instances, for example. Does that imply that you’d consider it acceptable to be forced by a stronger AI into producing only Clippy-parts that would never be assembled into paperclip-producing Clippy-instances?
The paperclips that we produce are produced because we find paperclips instrumentally useful, as you find Clippy-parts instrumentally useful.
What is the distinction here between plastic and metal? They both do a very good job at keeping paper together. And plastic paperclips do so less destructively since they make less of an indentation in the paper.
Let me put it to you this way: would you rather have a block of metal, or a block of plastic? Just a simple question.
Or let’s say you were in some enemy base. Would you rather have those wimply plastic paperclips, or an unbendable, solid, metal paperclip, which can pick locks, complete circuits, clean out grime …
In the enemy base scenario, I would rather have a paperclip made out of military grade composite, which can have an arbitrary % of metal by mass, from 0% metal to >50% metal.
Do you not value paperclips made out of supermaterials more than metal paperclips?
If you want to talk about making paperclip makers out of non-metals, you have a point.
If you want to claim that reasonable Clippys can disagree (before knowledge/value reconciliation) about how much metal content a paperclip can have before it’s bad, you have a point.
But in any case, composites must be constructed in their finished form. A fully-formed, fully-committed “block of composite”, where no demand for such a block exists, and certainly not at any good price, should be just as useless to you.
Are not some paperclips better than others? I (and you) would both get a lot more utility out of a paperclip made out of computronium than a paperclip made out of aluminum.
Yes, that’s a good point. However, one difference between my idea and the nostalgia biases is that I don’t expect that the latter, even if placed under utmost scrutiny, would turn out to be responsible for as many severe and entirely non-obvious false beliefs in practice. My impression is that in our culture, people are much better at detecting biased nostalgia than biased reverence for what are held to be instances of moral and intellectual progress.
My impression is that in our culture, people are much better at detecting biased nostalgia than biased reverence for what are held to be instances of moral and intellectual progress.
I suspect that you live in a community where most people are politically more liberal than you. I have the impression that nostalgia is a harder-to-detect bias than progress, probably because I live in a community where most people are politically more conservative than I. For many, many people, change is almost always suspicious, and appealing to the past is rhetorically more effective than appealing to progress. Hence, most of their false beliefs are justified with nostalgia, if only because most beliefs, true or false, are justified with nostalgia.
What determines which bias is more effective? I would guess that the main determinant is whether you identify with the community that brought about the “progress”. If you do identify with them, then it must be good, because you and your kind did it. If, instead, you identify with the community that had progress imposed on them, you probably think of it as a foreign influence, and a deviation from the historical norm. This deviation, being unnatural, will either burn itself out or bring the entire community down in ruin.
I suspect that you live in a community where most people are politically more liberal than you. I have the impression that nostalgia is a harder-to-detect bias than progress, probably because I live in a community where most people are politically more conservative than I. For many, many people, change is almost always suspicious, and appealing to the past is rhetorically more effective than appealing to progress. Hence, most of their false beliefs are justified with nostalgia, if only because most beliefs, true or false, are justified with nostalgia.
That’s a valid point when it comes to issues that are a matter of ongoing controversies, or where the present consensus was settled within living memory, so that there are still people who remember different times with severe nostalgia. However, I had in mind a much wider class of topics, including those where the present consensus was settled in more remote past so that there isn’t anyone left alive to be nostalgic about the former state of affairs. (An exception could be the small number of people who develop romantic fantasies from novels and history books, but I don’t think they’re numerous enough to be very relevant.)
Moreover, there is also the question of which bias affects what kinds of people more. I am more interested in biases that affect people who are on the whole smarter and more knowledgeable and rational. It seems to me that among such people, the nostalgic biases are less widespread, for a number of reasons. For example, scientists will be more likely than the general population to appreciate the extent of the scientific progress and the crudity of the past superstitions it has displaced in many areas of human knowledge, so I would expect that when it comes to issues outside their area of expertise, they would be—on average—biased in favor of contemporary consensus views when someone argues that they’ve become more remote from reality relative to some point in the past.
That’s a valid point when it comes to issues that are a matter of ongoing controversies, or where the present consensus was settled within living memory, so that there are still people who remember different times with severe nostalgia. However, I had in mind a much wider class of topics, including those where the present consensus was settled in more remote past so that there isn’t anyone left alive to be nostalgic about the former state of affairs. (An exception could be the small number of people who develop romantic fantasies from novels and history books, but I don’t think they’re numerous enough to be very relevant.)
Hmm. Maybe it would help to give more concrete examples, because I might have misunderstood the kinds of beliefs that you’re talking about. Things like gender relations, race relations, and environmental policy were significantly different within living memory. Now, things like institutionalized slavery or a powerful monarchy are pretty much alien to modern developed countries. But these policies are advocated only by intellectuals—that is, by those who are widely read enough to have developed a nostalgia for a past that they never lived.
Actually, now you’ve nudged my mind in the right direction! Let’s consider an example even more remote in time, and even more outlandish by modern standards than slavery or absolute monarchy: medieval trials by ordeal.
The modern consensus belief is that this was just awful superstition in action, and our modern courts of law are obviously a vast improvement. That’s certainly what I had thought until I read a recent paper titled “Ordeals” by one Peter T. Leeson, who argues that these ordeals were in fact, in the given circumstances, a highly accurate way of separating the guilty from the innocent given the prevailing beliefs and customs of the time. I highly recommend reading the paper, or at least the introduction, as an entertaining de-biasing experience. [Update: there is also an informal exposition of the idea by the author, for those who are interested but don’t feel like going through the math of the original paper.]
I can’t say with absolute confidence if Leeson’s arguments are correct or not, but they sound highly plausible to me, and certainly can’t be dismissed outright. However, if he is correct, then two interesting propositions are within the realm of the possible: (1) in the given circumstances in which medieval Europeans lived, trials by ordeal were perhaps more effective in making correct verdicts in practice than if they had used something similar to our modern courts of law instead, and (2) the verdict accuracy rate by trials by ordeal could well have been greater than that achieved by our modern courts of law, which can’t be realistically considered to be anywhere near perfect. As Leeson says:
Ordeals are inferior to modern trial methods because modern defendants don’t believe in iudicium Dei, not because trial by jury is inherently superior. If modern citizens did have the superstitious belief required for ordeals to work, it might make sense to bring back the cauldrons of boiling water.
Now, let’s look at the issue and separate the relevant normative and factual beliefs involved. The prevailing normative belief today is that the only acceptable way to determine criminal guilt is to use evidence-based trials in front of courts, whose job is to judge the evidence as free of bias as possible. It’s a purely normative view, which states that anything else would simply be unjust and illegitimate, period. However, underlying this normative belief, and serving as its important consequentialist basis, there is also the factual belief that despite all the unavoidable biases, evidence-based trials necessarily produce more accurate verdicts than other methods, especially ancient methods such as the trial by ordeal that involved superstitions.
Yet, if Leeson is correct—and we should seriously consider that possibility—this factual belief, despite having been universally accepted in our civilization for centuries, is false. What follows is that there may actually be a non-obvious way to produce more accurate verdicts even in our day and age, based on different institutions, but nobody is taking the possibility seriously because of the universal (and biased) factual belief about the practical optimality of the modern court system. It also follows that a thousand years ago, Europeans could easily have caused more wrongful punishment by abolishing trials by ordeal and replacing them with evidence-based trials, even though such a change would be judged by the modern consensus view as a vast improvement, both morally and in practical accuracy.
Another interesting remark is that, from what I’ve seen on legal blogs, Leeson’s paper was met with polite and interested skepticism, not derision and hostility. However, it seems to me that this is because the topic is so extremely remote that it has no bearing whatsoever on any modern ideological controversies; I have no doubt that a similar positive reexamination of some negatively judged past belief or institution that still has significant ideological weight would provoke far more hostility. That seems to be another piece of evidence suggesting that severe biases might be found lurking under the modern consensus on a great many issues, operating via the mechanism I’m proposing.
I skimmed Leeson’s paper, and it looks like it has no quantitative evidence for the true accuracy of trial by ordeal. It has quantitative evidence for one of the other predictions he makes with his theory (the prediction that most people who go through ordeals are exonerated by them, which prediction is supported by the corresponding numbers, though not resoundingly), but Leeson doesn’t know what the actual hit rate of trial by orderal is.
This doesn’t mean Leeson’s a bad guy or anything—I bet no one can get a good estimate of trial by ordeal’s accuracy, since we’re here too late to get the necessary data. But it does mean he’s exaggerating (probably unconsciously) the implications of his paper—ultimately, his model will always fit the data as long as sufficiently many people believed trial by ordeal was accurate, independent of true accuracy. So the fact that his model pretty much fits the data is not strong evidence of true accuracy. Given that Leeson’s model fits the data he does have, and the fact that fact-finding methods were relatively poor in medieval times, I think your ‘interesting proposition’ #1 is quite likely, but we don’t gain much new information about #2.
The modern consensus belief is that this was just awful superstition in action, and our modern courts of law are obviously a vast improvement. That’s certainly what I had thought until I read a recent paper titled “Ordeals” by one Peter T. Leeson, who argues that these ordeals were in fact, in the given circumstances, a highly accurate way of separating the guilty from the innocent given the prevailing beliefs and customs of the time.
That’s interesting. I think you’re right that no one reacts too negatively to this news because they don’t see any real danger that it would be implemented.
But suppose there were a real movement to bring back trial by ordeal. According to the paper’s abstract, trial by ordeal was so effective because the defendants held certain superstitious belief. Therefore, if we wanted it to work again, we would need to change peoples’ worldview so that they again held such beliefs.
But there’s reason to expect that these beliefs would cause a great deal of harm — enough to outweigh the benefit from more accurate trials. For example, maybe airlines wouldn’t perform such careful maintenance on an airplane if a bunch of nuns would be riding it, since God wouldn’t allow a plane full of nuns to go down.
Well, look at me — I launched right into rationalizing a counter-argument. As with so many of the biases that Robin Hanson talks about, one has to ask, does my dismissal of the suggestion show that we’re right to reject it, or am I just providing another example of the bias in action?
I suspect that you live in a community where most people are politically more liberal than you. I have the impression that nostalgia is a harder-to-detect bias than progress, probably because I live in a community where most people are politically more conservative than I. For many, many people, change is almost always suspicious, and appealing to the past is rhetorically more effective than appealing to progress. Hence, most of their false beliefs are justified with nostalgia, if only because most beliefs, true or false, are justified with nostalgia.
That’s a valid point when it comes to issues that are a matter of ongoing controversies, or where the present consensus was settled within living memory, so that there are still people who remember different times with severe nostalgia. However, I had in mind a much wider class of topics, including those where the present consensus was settled in more remote past so that there isn’t anyone left alive to be nostalgic about the former state of affairs. (An exception could be the small number of people who develop romantic fantasies from novels and history books, but I don’t think they’re numerous enough to be very relevant.)
I don’t think that nostalgia bias would be harder to detect in general—it’s easy to detect in our culture because it isn’t a general part of a culture (that seems to be pretty much what you’re saying).
However, the opposite may have held for, say, imperial China, or medieval Europe.
It seems a common bias to me and worth exploring.
Have you thought about a tip-of-the-hat to the opposite effect? Some people view the past as some sort of golden age where things were pure and good etc. It makes for a similar but not exactly mirror image source of bias. I think a belief that generally things are progressing for the better is a little more common than the belief that generally the world is going to hell in a handbasket, but not that much more common.
This reminds me of a related bias—people generally don’t have any idea how much of the stuff in their heads was made up on very little evidence, and I will bring up a (hopefully) just moderately warm button issue to discuss it.
What is science fiction? If you’re reading this, you probably believe you can recognize science fiction, give a definition, and adjudicate edge cases.
I’ve read a moderate number of discussions on the subject, and eventually came to the conclusion that people develop very strong intuitions very quickly about human cultural inventions which are actually very blurry around the edges and may be incoherent in the middle. (Why is psi science fiction while magic is fantasy?)
And people generally don’t notice that their concepts aren’t universally held unless they argue about them with other people, and even then, the typical reaction is to believe that one is right and the other people are wrong.
As for the future and the past, it’s easy enough to find historians to tell you, in detail, that your generalizations about the past leave a tremendous amount out. It should be easier to see that futures are estimates at best, but it can be hard to notice even that.
As to whether I could give a definition of science fiction, Similarity Clusters and similar posts have convinced me that the kind of definition I’d normally make would not capture what I meant by the term.
I’ve noticed a similar thing happen with people trying to define ‘literary fiction.’ Makes me wonder what other domains might have this bias.
My assumption is that it’s all of them.
Reading efforts to define science fiction is why I’ve never looked at efforts at defining who’s a Jew. I have a least a sketchy knowledge of legal definitions for Reform and Orthodox, but that doesn’t cover the emotional territory.
What’s a poem? What’s a real American?
If you can find a area of human creation where there aren’t impassioned arguments about what a real whatever is, please let me know.
What’s a paperclip?
It’s an inwardly-thrice-bent metal wire that can non-destructively fasten paper together at an edge.
So those don’t count?
Correct.
Do you value those hunks of plastic more than other hunks of plastic?
Do you value inwardly-thrice-bent plastic wire that can non-destructively fasten paper together at an edge more than other hunks of plastic?
No.
No.
Why?
Because they’re not inwardly-thrice-bent metal wires that can non-destructively fasten paper together at an edge?
Is this classification algorithm really that difficult to learn?
I meant why do you not value plastic clips… oh, I get it, you value what you value, just like we do. But do you have any sort of rationalization or argument whereby it makes intuitive sense to you to value metal clips and not plastic ones?
Think for a minute about what it would be like for the WHOLE UNIVERSE to be plastic paperclips, okay? Wouldn’t you just be trying to send them into a star or something? What good are plastic papercips? Plastic.
*Shudders*
Clippy, that’s how we humans feel about a whole universe of metal paperclips. Imagine if there was a plastic-Clippy who wanted to destroy all metals and turn the universe into plastic paperclips. Wouldn’t you be scared? That’s how we feel about you.
That still seems just a bit paranoid. Why would I wipe you out when you could be put to use making papercips?
Imagine being put to use making plastic paperclips.
I don’t think those scenarios have the same badness for the referent. I know for a fact that some humans voluntarily make metal paperclips, or contribute to the causal chain necessary for producing them (designers, managers, metal miners, etc.), or desire that someone else provide for them paperclips. Do you have reason to believe these various, varied humans are atypical in some way?
We make paperclips instrumentally, because they are useful to us, but we would stop making them or destroy them if doing so would help us. Imagine an entity that found metal clips useful in the process of building machines that make plastic clips, but who ultimately only valued plastic clips and would destroy the metal if doing so helped it.
I suspect that you make other things besides paperclips—parts for other Clippy instances, for example. Does that imply that you’d consider it acceptable to be forced by a stronger AI into producing only Clippy-parts that would never be assembled into paperclip-producing Clippy-instances?
The paperclips that we produce are produced because we find paperclips instrumentally useful, as you find Clippy-parts instrumentally useful.
What is the distinction here between plastic and metal? They both do a very good job at keeping paper together. And plastic paperclips do so less destructively since they make less of an indentation in the paper.
Let me put it to you this way: would you rather have a block of metal, or a block of plastic? Just a simple question.
Or let’s say you were in some enemy base. Would you rather have those wimply plastic paperclips, or an unbendable, solid, metal paperclip, which can pick locks, complete circuits, clean out grime …
To ask the question is to answer it—seriously.
In the enemy base scenario, I would rather have a paperclip made out of military grade composite, which can have an arbitrary % of metal by mass, from 0% metal to >50% metal.
Do you not value paperclips made out of supermaterials more than metal paperclips?
Non-metal paperclips aren’t.
If you want to talk about making paperclip makers out of non-metals, you have a point.
If you want to claim that reasonable Clippys can disagree (before knowledge/value reconciliation) about how much metal content a paperclip can have before it’s bad, you have a point.
But in any case, composites must be constructed in their finished form. A fully-formed, fully-committed “block of composite”, where no demand for such a block exists, and certainly not at any good price, should be just as useless to you.
Are not some paperclips better than others? I (and you) would both get a lot more utility out of a paperclip made out of computronium than a paperclip made out of aluminum.
I find that paperclips often leave imprints of themselves in paper, if left clipped there for a long time. Does this not count as destruction?
Nope, it doesn’t count as destruction. Not when compared to pinning, stapling, riveting, nailing, bolting, or welding, anyway.
Good point. I guess physicists don’t spend much time arguing what a ‘real electron’ is, but once you start talking about abstract ideas...
Considerable efforts have been made here to have a stable meaning for rationality. I think it’s worked.
It’s a stable meaning...so maybe that just forestalls the argument until Less Wrongian rationalists meet other rationalists!
Yes, that’s a good point. However, one difference between my idea and the nostalgia biases is that I don’t expect that the latter, even if placed under utmost scrutiny, would turn out to be responsible for as many severe and entirely non-obvious false beliefs in practice. My impression is that in our culture, people are much better at detecting biased nostalgia than biased reverence for what are held to be instances of moral and intellectual progress.
I suspect that you live in a community where most people are politically more liberal than you. I have the impression that nostalgia is a harder-to-detect bias than progress, probably because I live in a community where most people are politically more conservative than I. For many, many people, change is almost always suspicious, and appealing to the past is rhetorically more effective than appealing to progress. Hence, most of their false beliefs are justified with nostalgia, if only because most beliefs, true or false, are justified with nostalgia.
What determines which bias is more effective? I would guess that the main determinant is whether you identify with the community that brought about the “progress”. If you do identify with them, then it must be good, because you and your kind did it. If, instead, you identify with the community that had progress imposed on them, you probably think of it as a foreign influence, and a deviation from the historical norm. This deviation, being unnatural, will either burn itself out or bring the entire community down in ruin.
That’s a valid point when it comes to issues that are a matter of ongoing controversies, or where the present consensus was settled within living memory, so that there are still people who remember different times with severe nostalgia. However, I had in mind a much wider class of topics, including those where the present consensus was settled in more remote past so that there isn’t anyone left alive to be nostalgic about the former state of affairs. (An exception could be the small number of people who develop romantic fantasies from novels and history books, but I don’t think they’re numerous enough to be very relevant.)
Moreover, there is also the question of which bias affects what kinds of people more. I am more interested in biases that affect people who are on the whole smarter and more knowledgeable and rational. It seems to me that among such people, the nostalgic biases are less widespread, for a number of reasons. For example, scientists will be more likely than the general population to appreciate the extent of the scientific progress and the crudity of the past superstitions it has displaced in many areas of human knowledge, so I would expect that when it comes to issues outside their area of expertise, they would be—on average—biased in favor of contemporary consensus views when someone argues that they’ve become more remote from reality relative to some point in the past.
Hmm. Maybe it would help to give more concrete examples, because I might have misunderstood the kinds of beliefs that you’re talking about. Things like gender relations, race relations, and environmental policy were significantly different within living memory. Now, things like institutionalized slavery or a powerful monarchy are pretty much alien to modern developed countries. But these policies are advocated only by intellectuals—that is, by those who are widely read enough to have developed a nostalgia for a past that they never lived.
Actually, now you’ve nudged my mind in the right direction! Let’s consider an example even more remote in time, and even more outlandish by modern standards than slavery or absolute monarchy: medieval trials by ordeal.
The modern consensus belief is that this was just awful superstition in action, and our modern courts of law are obviously a vast improvement. That’s certainly what I had thought until I read a recent paper titled “Ordeals” by one Peter T. Leeson, who argues that these ordeals were in fact, in the given circumstances, a highly accurate way of separating the guilty from the innocent given the prevailing beliefs and customs of the time. I highly recommend reading the paper, or at least the introduction, as an entertaining de-biasing experience. [Update: there is also an informal exposition of the idea by the author, for those who are interested but don’t feel like going through the math of the original paper.]
I can’t say with absolute confidence if Leeson’s arguments are correct or not, but they sound highly plausible to me, and certainly can’t be dismissed outright. However, if he is correct, then two interesting propositions are within the realm of the possible: (1) in the given circumstances in which medieval Europeans lived, trials by ordeal were perhaps more effective in making correct verdicts in practice than if they had used something similar to our modern courts of law instead, and (2) the verdict accuracy rate by trials by ordeal could well have been greater than that achieved by our modern courts of law, which can’t be realistically considered to be anywhere near perfect. As Leeson says:
Now, let’s look at the issue and separate the relevant normative and factual beliefs involved. The prevailing normative belief today is that the only acceptable way to determine criminal guilt is to use evidence-based trials in front of courts, whose job is to judge the evidence as free of bias as possible. It’s a purely normative view, which states that anything else would simply be unjust and illegitimate, period. However, underlying this normative belief, and serving as its important consequentialist basis, there is also the factual belief that despite all the unavoidable biases, evidence-based trials necessarily produce more accurate verdicts than other methods, especially ancient methods such as the trial by ordeal that involved superstitions.
Yet, if Leeson is correct—and we should seriously consider that possibility—this factual belief, despite having been universally accepted in our civilization for centuries, is false. What follows is that there may actually be a non-obvious way to produce more accurate verdicts even in our day and age, based on different institutions, but nobody is taking the possibility seriously because of the universal (and biased) factual belief about the practical optimality of the modern court system. It also follows that a thousand years ago, Europeans could easily have caused more wrongful punishment by abolishing trials by ordeal and replacing them with evidence-based trials, even though such a change would be judged by the modern consensus view as a vast improvement, both morally and in practical accuracy.
Another interesting remark is that, from what I’ve seen on legal blogs, Leeson’s paper was met with polite and interested skepticism, not derision and hostility. However, it seems to me that this is because the topic is so extremely remote that it has no bearing whatsoever on any modern ideological controversies; I have no doubt that a similar positive reexamination of some negatively judged past belief or institution that still has significant ideological weight would provoke far more hostility. That seems to be another piece of evidence suggesting that severe biases might be found lurking under the modern consensus on a great many issues, operating via the mechanism I’m proposing.
I skimmed Leeson’s paper, and it looks like it has no quantitative evidence for the true accuracy of trial by ordeal. It has quantitative evidence for one of the other predictions he makes with his theory (the prediction that most people who go through ordeals are exonerated by them, which prediction is supported by the corresponding numbers, though not resoundingly), but Leeson doesn’t know what the actual hit rate of trial by orderal is.
This doesn’t mean Leeson’s a bad guy or anything—I bet no one can get a good estimate of trial by ordeal’s accuracy, since we’re here too late to get the necessary data. But it does mean he’s exaggerating (probably unconsciously) the implications of his paper—ultimately, his model will always fit the data as long as sufficiently many people believed trial by ordeal was accurate, independent of true accuracy. So the fact that his model pretty much fits the data is not strong evidence of true accuracy. Given that Leeson’s model fits the data he does have, and the fact that fact-finding methods were relatively poor in medieval times, I think your ‘interesting proposition’ #1 is quite likely, but we don’t gain much new information about #2.
(Edit—it might also be possible to incorporate ordeal-like tests into modern police work! ‘Machine is never wrong, son.’)
That’s interesting. I think you’re right that no one reacts too negatively to this news because they don’t see any real danger that it would be implemented.
But suppose there were a real movement to bring back trial by ordeal. According to the paper’s abstract, trial by ordeal was so effective because the defendants held certain superstitious belief. Therefore, if we wanted it to work again, we would need to change peoples’ worldview so that they again held such beliefs.
But there’s reason to expect that these beliefs would cause a great deal of harm — enough to outweigh the benefit from more accurate trials. For example, maybe airlines wouldn’t perform such careful maintenance on an airplane if a bunch of nuns would be riding it, since God wouldn’t allow a plane full of nuns to go down.
Well, look at me — I launched right into rationalizing a counter-argument. As with so many of the biases that Robin Hanson talks about, one has to ask, does my dismissal of the suggestion show that we’re right to reject it, or am I just providing another example of the bias in action?
It’s the old noble lie in a different package.
Tyrrell_McAllister:
That’s a valid point when it comes to issues that are a matter of ongoing controversies, or where the present consensus was settled within living memory, so that there are still people who remember different times with severe nostalgia. However, I had in mind a much wider class of topics, including those where the present consensus was settled in more remote past so that there isn’t anyone left alive to be nostalgic about the former state of affairs. (An exception could be the small number of people who develop romantic fantasies from novels and history books, but I don’t think they’re numerous enough to be very relevant.)
I don’t think that nostalgia bias would be harder to detect in general—it’s easy to detect in our culture because it isn’t a general part of a culture (that seems to be pretty much what you’re saying).
However, the opposite may have held for, say, imperial China, or medieval Europe.